Hyman Gewirtz, who migrated from Belce, Poland to Canada in 1912, had little idea that some 50 years later, a son of his would become mayor of the big cosmopolitan city of Toronto, according to a story in the Canadian Jewish News of December 13, 1963. A tailor, Gewirtz settled in the Euclid and Dundas…
The life of Joseph (J.B.) Salsberg, humanist, labour leader, political activist, politician, newspaper columnist and a man who dedicated his life to Yiddishkeit and the advancement of social justice, was remembered and honoured recently on his 10th yahrzeit (anniversary of his death). More than 300 people gathered October 28 (2008) at Bialik Hebrew Day School,…
The following article, which appeared in the Toronto Star of December 8, 1906, highlights the fact that Toronto Jews did indeed get involved in municipal politics, even in the relatively early period of their citizenship in our free and democratic Canada. In an interview with the Star, aldermanic candidate J. S. Granatstein presented his views…
Note: this piece was written in response to the so-called “falsified passports affair” of 1997, when Israel was lambasted for falsifying Canadian passports as a means of assisting in its war on Muslim fundamentalist terror. * * * HORATIO: I am much disturbed and aggrieved, Plutonius, at the extent of the trickery and deception practised…
Ruth Wisse, the noted author and professor of Yiddish literature, told a large gathering at the Leah Posluns Theatre during the 16th annual Jewish Book Fair that she was greatly influenced in her salad days by a circle of New York liberal intellectuals that included Lionel Trilling, Irving Howe, Harold Rosenberg as well as “my…
Eighty years ago this summer, in June 1931, New York publisher Covici Friede announced that A Jew in Love, a new novel by Ben Hecht (1894-1964), had been banned in Canada and in bookstores in Boston and other American cities. Anyone who opened the book — the front page of which described the Jewish protagonist…
In his recent book While Canada Slept: How We Lost Our Place in the World, Ottawa writer Andrew Cohen examines what he calls “our three D’s” (defense, diplomacy, development), presents irrefutable evidence of our declining influence and reputation in these spheres, and suggests that it’s time for us to regain some of this lost ground.…
Born in Belarussia, and later a resident of St. Petersburg, Odessa, Kovno and Riga, Simon Dubnow (1860-1941) published his first essay about the Jews of Russia in 1880, and understood at a relatively early age that the subject would always be of particular significance for him. He wrote in his diary in 1892, “My life’s…
“I write to entertain, I don’t write to preach,” said Eric Rill on a recent visit to Toronto, during a publicity tour (2004) for his latest book, The Innocent Traitor (Georgetown Publications). A former top executive in the hotel industry originally from Montreal, Rill’s first novel, Pinnacle of Deceit, a political thriller, was a surprise…
Ever since Poe, the detective has figured as a major archetypal hero in modern fiction. Literary detectives have emerged in so many personas and guises that there are now more than a minyan’s worth of Jewish gumshoes in the bookshops, ranging from Howard Engel’s Benny Cooperman to Harry Kemerman’s Rabbi David Small. (An internet search…
