Toronto city councilors are set to debate a recommendation this week from the City Hall heritage department to designate the former Standard Theatre at Dundas and Spadina — a once-thriving Yiddish theatre that later became the Victory movie house and burlesque palace — as a heritage site worthy of limited protection. Since its last incarnation…
Obit: Harry Rasky, Film Pioneer (2007)
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Known for his award-winning cinematic portraits of such iconic artists as Marc Chagall, Tennessee Williams, Leonard Cohen, Henry Moore, Yousuf Karsh, Arthur Miller and George Bernard Shaw, Toronto-based documentary filmmaker Harry Rasky has died in Toronto at age 78. A co-founder of the news-documentary department of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Rasky made more than 50…
On the Road with Rabbi Steinsaltz
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“Let my people know” is the chief motto of Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz, one of the pre-eminent “talmud hakhums” of our generation and the subject of this engaging book by Arthur Kurzweil. Widely regarded as a genius, Steinsaltz has penned dozens of books in which he attempts to bring the fire of Jewish mysticism down to…
Breaking Bread with Joel Hecker
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Dr. Joel Hecker, who for more than a decade has been an associate professor at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in the Philadelphia area, visited his home town of Toronto recently to lecture on his book, Mystical Bodies, Mystical Meals: Eating and Embodiment in Medieval Kabbalah, an erudite study published by an American university press in…
Chaim Grade letters find home in YIVO
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Readers of Jewish literature will be interested to know that a cache of about 50 letters by Lithuanian-born novelist and poet Chaim Grade (1910-1982) have surfaced in Toronto. The letters belong to Sally Eisner, a longtime North York resident who, together with her late husband Leon Eisner, was a close friend of the New York-based…
Amy Bloom’s Away
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A new sub-genre of Jewish literature seems to be emerging in which the subjects move or have moved across North America in a northwesterly direction. We saw it earlier this year in Michael Chabon’s novel The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, about an alternate postwar history in which a Jewish homeland is established not in Israel but…
Kvetching All the Way to the Bank
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With two new books in print to follow his 2005 bestseller Born to Kvetch, and enjoying a new popularity with Jewish audiences who delight in his erudite knowledge of Yiddish, Toronto writer Michael Wex can no longer be said to be languishing in obscurity. In the round fullness of middle age, the Lethbridge-born Yiddishist put…
Hubble: Universe In A Mirror
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Regarded by many as one of America’s greatest scientific accomplishments, the 18-year-old Hubble Space Telescope has added immensely to our cosmological knowledge and has changed our conception of the universe. The Universe in A Mirror, a new book by American science writer Robert Zimmerman, offers a history of the epoch-making telescope as well as fascinating…
Historic plaque for Kensington Market
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Several hundred people attended a plaquing ceremony in the Kensington Market area on Sunday May 25 as a plaques was unveiled designating the once-Jewish neighbourhood in downtown Toronto as a national historic site. The event was sponsored by Parks Canada and included speeches by important delegates, including the Hon. Jason Kenney, secretary of state for…
Bezmozgis directs ‘Victoria Day’
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David Bezmozgis, celebrated author of the prize-winning book Natasha and Other Stories, was on skates in North York Centennial Arena recently, along with a camera crew and a group of teenaged actors in skates and hockey uniforms. All were involved in filming a scene from Victoria Day, a feature film that Bezmozgis is directing, based…
