Some residents in the Beaches-East York community were shocked this week when what they describe as an anti-Semitic newsletter landed in their mailboxes.

Your Ward News, a low-budget local publication, has been operating in the area for at least a year and a half, and has stirred controversy before with its bizarre diatribes against the “Marxist occupation” of Canada and its promotion of an unregistered political organization called the New Constitution Party of Canada.

But an issue mailed out this week has prompted outrage, thanks to a trio of Jewish caricatures splashed across its front page. One illustration depicts a Canada Post worker wearing traditional Orthodox Jewish headgear, his face contorted in anger and his eyes beaming red. A bagel falls from his hand as he spits and yells about the Holocaust. The other two caricatures depict lawyers, one wearing a yarmulke, with cartoonishly big noses.

Your Ward News publisher Leroy St. Germaine is adamant that his publication, which he claims has a circulation of about 50,000 copies, is not anti-Semitic.

“It’s not ‘politically correct,’ is the word for it,” he said in an interview. He asserted that the caricatures were intended to be humorous and were not meant to denigrate Jews as a group. “I thought it was funny as hell,” he said.

Vanessa Hendry wasn’t laughing. She found a copy in her mailbox Thursday, and had to hide it when her 6-year-old daughter asked her if the caricatures were real. “I can’t believe that something like that, in 2015, can show up at my doorstep,” Hendry said. “I don’t want it, I don’t want to see it.”

Bernie Farber, former CEO of the Canadian Jewish Congress and longtime human rights advocate, believes the images “are classic anti-Semitic tropes.”

“This is a clear attempt at a hateful representation of Jews,” he said.

According to the newsletter’s accompanying text, the caricatures are a reference to a dispute in March when, according to the Toronto Sun, a Jewish Canada Post worker objected to having to deliver Your Ward News. The postal agency eventually decided the paper did not meet the standard for “non-mailable matter” however, and determined its employees were obliged to carry them. (According to a Canada Post spokesperson, the agency reviewed this month’s issue and made the same determination.)

Legal experts are divided about whether the caricatures could constitute hate speech. According to Richard Moon, a law professor at the University of Windsor, a successful prosecution would have to prove that the offending speech incited hatred against an identifiable group, and that the incitement was either deliberate or reckless.

On those grounds, Moon believes that it might be possible to build a “credible case” against the newsletter’s creators, particularly because the newsletter contains language about Zionist conspiracies.

“When you look at it in the context of language like the ‘ZioMarxist’ conspiracy and all of the other stuff that it’s embedded in … those are barely even code words,” he said. “Those are the kind of words that they use to go along with the vilification of groups.”

But David Butt, a Toronto criminal lawyer who focuses on free speech issues, said Canadian law has deliberately set the bar for proving hate speech extremely high. “You can count on the fingers of your hand the number of hate speech prosecutions there have actually been,” he said.

While Butt called the images “unreservedly offensive,” he said that because they reference the dispute with the Canada Post worker they could be interpreted as “commenting on a public event” rather than on Jews as a group. In the eyes of the law, “that tends to defuse the hatred message.”

In an email, James Sears, the newsletter’s editor-in-chief and founder of the New Constitution Party, described the message the cover was meant to convey: The Canada Post employee who reportedly complained, he wrote, “is getting special treatment because people consider Jewishness special. For the unions to mass-mobilize the way they are for this postie [sic], is highly unusual. I am NOT going to bend over and take it from them.”

Asked whether the newsletter was a neo-Nazi publication, Sears wrote: “[N]either I nor the publication are ‘neo-Nazi’ ... NOT THAT THERE'S ANYTHING WRONG WITH THAT! Some of the nicest people I have ever met are Nazis, but we are not. Any mention of Nazis is merely to prove a point.”

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For Patrick Clohessy, a social worker and Beach resident, the newsletter’s latest issue is merely the tip of a very disturbing iceberg. He has been monitoring Your Ward News for months and says it has shown a “clear pattern” of xenophobia and racism, including endorsements of neo-Nazi candidates in the last round of Ontario municipal elections. Along with other concerned residents, he’s trying to organize pushback against the publishers by raising awareness about the paper’s content and urging its advertisers to pull out.

Len Rudner, director of community relations and outreach for the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, said he would need to confer with his organization before deciding whether to pursue any action against the newsletter. But he’s wary that doing so could merely give its publishers a bigger platform for their message. Sometimes the right thing to do, he said, “is to let people wallow in the obscurity that they so richly deserve.”