From Avotaynu, 2018 Peddlers All: Stories of the First Ashkenazi Jewish Settlers in Barbados, edited by Simon Kreindler. Trade paperback, softcover, 450 pages. US $35. Published privately in 2017 by the author; iamsimonkreindler @gmail.com The British colonized the Caribbean island of Barbados in 1627, and the first Jewish settlers arrived the following year. In 1654,…
Book Review: An American Experience: Adeline Moses Loeb (1876-1953) and Her Early American Jewish Ancestors. Contributors are John L. Loeb, Jr., Kathy L. Plotkin, Margaret Loeb Kempner and Judith E. Endelman, with an introduction by Eli N. Evans. Hardcover, large format, full colour, 350 pages, plus large genealogical poster in back pocket. Published by the…
Book Review: The Jewish Oil Magnates of Galicia (McGill-Queen’s) This 522-page hardcover volume combines two books in one. First, there is Valerie Schatzker’s non-fiction scholarly history from 1853 to 1945 of the almost-forgotten East Galician Jews who became early “wildcatters” and oil barons in one of the world’s first petroleum industries, concentrated in the region…
Irving Howe (1920-1993), the New York intellectual who was a zealous socialist all of his life, received what he called his fifteen minutes of fame from a remarkable scholarly achievement that seemed a world apart from his leftist political convictions. His book, World Of Our Fathers, which was published in 1976, became a national bestseller…
From the Toronto Star, Jan. 15, 1915 Esther Greenberg, a seven-year-old child, was shot by a stray bullet from a rifle practice in Kent Public School on Dufferin Street in Toronto and died the next day. Fifteen targets had been placed in as many public schools around Toronto to aid local army cadets in target…
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◊ From the Canadian Jewish News, March 2020 As Jews throughout history have been all too aware, tragedy, whether large or small, is never all that distant from the everyday realm of human affairs. This sad chain of events took place in Prague in 1693 and 1694. The central figure was a twelve-year-old boy named…
Toronto Marriages, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s & 1980s (all denominations) (limited database from public sources) Note: Fill in a minimum of 3 characters for either the groom’s OR the bride’s surname. A maximum of 12 results will be returned. (Add extra characters in either searchbox to narrow down your search.) Please let us know if your…
A Rosenberg by Any Other Name: A History of Jewish Name Changing in America, by Kirsten Fermaglich, New York University Press, 2018. Although Jewish name-changing was widespread throughout the United States and Canada throughout much of the 20th century, no one has studied this interesting phenomenon at book length until now. The author, Kirsten…
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…
