Situated on a dramatic windswept cliff overlooking Vancouver’s Georgia Strait and the snow-capped peaks of the Coast Mountains, the University of British Columbia’s Museum of Anthropology pays homage to the art of the Northwest Coast First Nations in several important and pioneering ways. The museum, which opened in 1976, was designed by internationally renowned Canadian…
Manchester re-invents itself for post-industrial age
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With factories, warehouses, train stations and other relics of the past strewn about central Manchester like so many children’s toys, the city where the industrial revolution began has been quietly adapting to the post-industrial age. The place that J.B. Priestley once described as “an Amazonian jungle of blackened brick” has cleaned up its image in…
Please don’t eat the insects at Montreal’s Insectarium
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Insect chop suey, sauteed crickets, and pizzas slices loaded with mealworms were among the hors d’oeuvres served recently at a cocktail party at the Insectarium, a Montreal museum devoted to insects. As a master chef fried locusts in a wok, guests sampled cricket-stuffed mushrooms and acras, a Caribbean pasta dish liberally sprinkled with mealworms. For…
The Falsified Passports Affair: a classical dialogue
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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…
Aland Islands: peaceful Baltic outpost
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One of the first and most persuasive successes of the League of Nations, the international political body that prefigured the United Nations, was the resolution of the so-called Aland (pronounced “Oh-land”) Islands Question in 1921. This archipelago of about 10,000 islands, only 6,500 of which are large enough to have been named, is usually represented…
Wartime anti-semitic Iron Guard active in Ontario
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“Look at Judah’s claws, deeply penetrating my body! Look how my blood is running, look how the Jews are drinking it!” These are lyrics to a song. They were excerpted from a songbook found at Romanian Camp, a 50-acre compound in Flamborough, Ontario, outside Hamilton, where a group of sympathizers of the Iron Guard —…
Travel: My Cairo Diary
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Note: Written in the height of the Mubarak years, long before his overthrow during the so-called Arab Spring of 2011. Bartering is a way of life in this bustling, dirty, exotic city of 15 million people. From the moment you arrive, you will be beseeched and cajoled to buy perfume, eat a shishkebab, hire a…
Hungary’s secret Jewish collection
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Dr. Gabriel Bar-Shaked, an expert on Hungarian Jewry for Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, is convinced that a massive trove of documents on the Jews of the Austro-Hungarian Empire lies hidden in a state archives in Budapest, and he’s determined to gain access to it. So vast is the collection, Dr. Bar-Shaked asserts, that it would…
Singer’s literary legacy appraised at his centenary
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In the early 1920s, a young man who proofread copy for a Yiddish literary magazine in Warsaw asked the editor to consider publishing a short story he’d written. After due consideration, the editor said he found the story greatly flawed, but would publish it anyhow. And what was wrong with it? the brash novice wanted…
Aerial view of Toronto, 1910
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This aerial photograph of Toronto was taken in 1910, when the science of flight was in its infancy. Note that the pilot is visible in the early biplane, which took off from the Aviation Park in Weston. The photo was obviously taken from a second plane, flying nearby. This poor reproduction doesn’t reveal much of…
