Published Thursday, July 29, 2021 7:04PM EDT A Toronto man says he became the target of an assault and anti-Semitic slurs while he was out walking his dog on Wednesday. Sam Brody says he was walking his dog at around 9 a.m. near his midtown home when a man approached him. “As we passed him, he stopped and body checked me into the fence here. I fell down to the ground.” The 29-year-old man believes he was targeted because he was wearing a Jewish skullcap. “This brazen assault comes amid an unprecedented surge of physical attacks on Canadian Jews,” B nai Brith Canada writes in a statement. “A recent assault on a Jewish man near his home in broad daylight is just the latest in a disturbing trend of attacks on Jews stemming from anti-Israel sentiment.