Barbara Kay

Kay's paternal grandparents and four of their children, emigrated from Poland to Canada in 1917.

They settled near a synagogue congregation of immigrants from Poland where they found a supportive Jewish immigrant community.

Her grandfather bought and sold "junk from a horse-drawn cart" to Yiddish-speaking customers, and although the family was poor and Zaide never learned English, they never felt "isolated or despised".

Although only one of Kay's father's siblings went to university, all of them "ended up solidly in the middle class. Barbara Kay's cousins, including the girls, were "university educated" and had successful, prosperous careers. One of Kay's sisters is Canadian public administrator Anne Golden.

Barbara Kay and her sisters grew up in Forest Hill Village, Toronto, a "posh" neighbourhood.

They went to the public preparatory schools, then Forest Hill Collegiate Institute (FHCI).

While Kay wrote that her generation did not experience anti-Semitism, according to the Globe and Mail, the Oakdale Golf & Country Club in North York, Toronto, where Kay spent her leisure hours as a youth, was established by "Jews who had been blackballed by the Rosedale Golf Club".

Barbara Kay (born 1943) is a columnist for the Canadian newspaper National Post.

She also writes a weekly column for The Post Millennial and a monthly column for Epoch Times.

Kay was born in 1943 to an "intensely patriotic" American mother from Detroit, Michigan, and a Canadian father from Toronto.

While Kay acknowledges that the feminism of the 1960s had "worthy ideals" of empowering women, she wrote in 2004 that the feminist movement had been "hijacked by special interest groups nursing extreme-grievance agendas".

"Angry lesbians" and "man-haters" renounced heterosexuality, "traditional marriage, and parental influence over children".

"Radical Marxist/feminists" dominated Women's Studies on campus".

Writing for the National Post, Kay offered the opinion that honour killing is not strictly a Muslim phenomenon and that it is enabled by factors including sexism, dowries and a lack of a dependable legal system.

Nevertheless, Kay says that the murders are a Muslim phenomenon in the West, where 95% of honour killings are perpetrated by "Muslim fathers and brothers or their proxies".

Kay warns that females do not dissent as one might expect either: The women may describe victims of honour killing as having needed punishment.

She received a Master of Arts from McGill University in 1966 and subsequently taught literature at Concordia University and several CEGEPs.

Kay is married to Ronny Kay.

They have two children including journalist Jonathan Kay.

Kay began her journalism career as a book reviewer.

Kay is on the advisory board of the Canadian Institute for Jewish Research (CIJR), a pro-Israel think tank established in 1988.

During the 1990s, she joined the board and writing staff of the revived Cité libre.

Afterward, Kay branched out into writing op/eds for the National Post before becoming a columnist in 2003.

Kay has also published articles in The Post Millennial, Pajama, The Walrus, Canadian Jewish News (CJNews), and Epoch Times.

In 2004, Canadian historian Irving Abella, who co-authored None Is Too Many: Canada and the Jews of Europe 1933-1948 wrote that the clubs—like the Rosedale Golf Club—were the "last bastions of restriction".

Kay studied at the University of Toronto where she earned an undergraduate degree in English literature.

In 2007, faced with an increase in anti-Semitism, anti-Israelism and anti-Zionism on university campuses, CIJR launched the Student Israel-Advocacy Seminars Program.

Kay wrote that the Israeli Apartheid Week, an American import, was part of a larger movement growing in anticipation of the May 14, 2008 60th anniversary of Israel's founding.

Kay was on the Board of Governors of the conservative student newspaper The Prince Arthur Herald, which published from 2011 until 2019, and is on the Canadian Institute for Jewish Research's advisory board.

Kay held a residency on CBC's Because News for nineteen months from 2016 to 2017 as a "token" and only conservative on a panel of liberals.

She was removed from the panel allegedly because of "her views on the misappropriation of Indigenous cultures."

Barbara Kay joined Ezra Levant's conservative online media channel Rebel News, in February 2017, as its Montreal correspondent.

Kay announced on Twitter on August 15, 2017 that she would end her "freelance relationship with Rebel Media. She stated her respect for Ezra Levant and Faith Goldy, but felt that the Rebel Media "brand" had been "tarnished" by several contributors who did not reflect the views of mainstream conservatives like herself.

In a 2017 article, "Kay vs Kay", mother and son, Jonathan Kay, explore generational differences in their relationship to Judaism.

To Barbara Kay, by 2017 anti-Zionism was "rooted in anti-Semitism".

She describes those "who are aligned with the hard left" as "anti-Zionist and supportive of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions(BDS) movement", with the worst of these "confined to university campuses."

To her this is a "serious concern globally".

She was dismayed that a German court "found that the Muslim firebombers of a synagogue in Wuppertal were not guilty of a hate crime because they had been motivated by anti-Zionism and events in the Middle East."

Jonathan Kay, wrote that "Barbara is stuck in a time warp and seems to think we still live in the era when Svend Robinson, Antonia Zerbisias and Naomi Klein are still loud and influential voices in the arena of Canadian foreign policy...The idea that Canada's intelligentsia is a seething mass of anti-Zionist agitation is about 15 years out of date...the issue of Zionism has so totally consumed Jewish advocacy groups in the West, that it has created what is, in effect, a spiritual faith unto itself, complete with its own forms of excommunication, liturgy and revealed truth."

Kay briefly left the National Post in 2020, citing increased editorial scrutiny of her columns, but returned a few months later.