Trying to put a yarmulke on the King of rock ‘n’ roll From the Forward, 2002 Evan Popoff, co-producer of a new documentary that demonstrates beyond any reasonable doubt that American rock idol Elvis Presley was Jewish according to halakha or Jewish law, says that the film uses Elvis “as a metaphor for identity —…
From the Canadian Jewish News, 2017 From the moment in 1961 that he stepped into the role, Rabbi W. Gunther Plaut was always much more than rabbi of the esteemed historic Reform congregation, Holy Blossom Temple of Toronto. It was entirely Toronto’s gain and St. Paul Minnesota’s loss when Holy Blossom enticed Rabbi Plaut here,…
Sam Bernstein, a New England industrialist who acquired the franchise to the Frederics hair-styling machine in the mid-1920s, became a remarkable overnight success after America was seized by a permanent-wave craze at the height of the flapper era. “One day in 1927, I didn’t have a nickel to my name,” he used to say. “The…
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…
Toronto publisher Now and Then Books’s latest title — Only Yesterday: Collected Pieces on the Jews of Toronto, by Benjamin Kayfetz and Stephen A. Speisman — is a prolifically illustrated book featuring 18 evocative articles by two notable historians of Toronto’s Jewish community. Culled from a variety of sources, the pieces in Only Yesterday focus…
by Dr. Stephen A Speisman Lewis Samuel, merchant and philanthropist, was born in 1827 at Kingston upon Hull, England. He married Kate Seckelman in 1850 and they had eight children including Sigmund, a prominent philanthropist and patron of the arts in Toronto. He died on May 10 May 1887 at Victoria, B.C. and was buried…
From the Canadian Jewish News, Aug. 7 1980 Peter Sellers, the famed actor who died recently, often spoke proudly of the fact that he was Jewish, even though he never practiced Judaism. According to the Jewish Chronicle News Service, Sellers was once asked by an interviewer if he was half-Jewish. His reply: “I am fully…
Silas Aaron Hardoon was born into a poor Jewish family in Baghdad in 1851, but when he died in Shanghai China 80 years later, he was regarded as the wealthiest man in Asia, leaving behind a fortune worth as much as $15 billion in today’s dollars. When Hardoon arrived in Shanghai as a youth of…
◊ In light of the passing of Albert Reichmann in Toronto on December 17, 2022 at age 93, we bring your attention to this review of the most thorough biography of the Reichmann family, Anthony Bianco’s The Reichmanns: Family, Faith, Fortune and The Empire of Olympia & York. As Brooklyn-based author Anthony Bianco chronicles in his…
Shanghai’s Baghdadi Jews: A Collection of Biographical Reflections, by Maisie J. Meyer, author and editor. Large format, 480 pages, softcover. Blacksmith Books, Hong Kong, 2015. Shanghai’s community of Ashkenazic Jews, who arrived from Poland and elsewhere in Europe in the early 20th century and in advance of the Holocaust, is already fairly well-known. What is…
