From The City Magazine (Toronto Star), 1978 Nat Taylor emits a throaty laugh and his eyes twinkle when he is asked about his latest venture, a mammoth, 18-theatre cinema complex now under construction in the Eaton Centre. When completed in January, the complex will boast three times as many screens as any other Toronto movie…
From The National Post, 2000 Dr. Reuven Yosef, one of Israel’s best-known ornithologists, has won a $25,000 (US) enterprise award from the Rolex Watch Company for transforming a garbage dump into a bird sanctuary outside the burgeoning tourist resort of Eilat on Israel’s 11-km-long strip of Red Sea coast. Born in India, Yosef came to…
From the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 2001 Canadian Jews are calling on their government to tighten its borders with the United States following unconfirmed reports that some of the terrorists involved in the terror attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon may have entered the United States from Canada. Jewish officials long have been…
Review of The Man Who Made the Movies: The Meteoric Rise and Tragic Fall of William Fox, by Vanda Krefft Theda Bara (nicknamed ‘The Vamp’), one of Fox’s biggest stars, in a lavish 1917 production of Cleopatra. No known copy of the film survives. From the Canadian Jewish News, 2019 Although his surname appears in…
From Avotaynu, 2020 Book Review: A Dictionary of Jewish Surnames from Italy, France and “Portuguese” Communities, by Alexander Beider. Like a Napoleon of names, Alexander Beider has been sweeping methodically across the Jewish diaspora seeking to apply a rigid scientific methodology to the naturally-occurring phenomenon of Jewish surnames. Beider has devoted more than three decades…
Remember Jody Wilson-Raybould? She’s the former Trudeauvian Minister of Justice and Attorney-General who — incredible as it sounds — insisted upon telling the truth, a course that must have seemed all but inconceivable to the PM and his appointed viziers. In her 2021 memoir, Indian In The Cabinet, Wilson-Raybould, an Indigenous Canadian who uses the…
From the Canadian Jewish News, 1995 ◊ Note: This article is being republished this week as a reminder of the eternal evil nature of “Amalek,” as represented during the days of WW2 by the Nazis, and in today’s world by the Hamas terrorist group. It was, finally, the melody of a Hebrew song that brought…
From the Canadian Jewish News, February 2015 In late 1947 and early 1948, representatives of the Canadian garment industry organized what became known as the Tailor Project, a plan to select more than 2,200 skilled tailors from the Displaced Person camps of Europe and give them jobs and housing in Canada. The Tailor Project had…
A windowless, doorless chamber, set high up into the wall of an antiquated synagogue and accessible only by ladder, is not normally the sort of place to which a traveller dreams of arriving. However, it was precisely such a room that Solomon Schechter, a Cambridge professor of Talmudic literature, was determined to reach when he…
