Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind has proven to be one of the most thought-provoking non-fiction books published in recent years. It’s such a stimulating book that I reread it recently. Originally written in Hebrew, the English-language version of Sapiens appeared in 2014 and quickly became a publishing sensation. Having dominated the…
Rhea Clyman, an accomplished journalist born to a Jewish family in Toronto in 1904, wrote many front-page newspaper stories in the late 1920s and 1930s about political events and their tragic human consequences in Russia, Ukaine and Germany, but died in near-obscurity in New York in 1981. Clyman wrote rare and chilling eyewitness accounts of…
Four years ago, a Pennsylvanian antiques collector purchased a trove of old scrapbooks and photo albums at an estate sale in the town of Red Lion, Pa. The cache, which included hundreds of photographs including some taken in the Warsaw Ghetto between 1940 and 1943, cost only $10. Discovering that the material was related to…
Seeking the Fabled City: the Canadian Jewish Experience, by Allan Levine (McClelland & Stewart) Proficient, prolific, and preternaturally talented, Winnipeg-based historian Allan Levine has produced a robust new history of the Jewish experience in Canada that seems both compelling and fresh. Seeking the Fabled City — the title comes from a line by the late…
The Ward Uncovered: The Archaeology of Everyday Life, edited by Holly Martelle, Michael McClelland, Tatum Taylor, and John Lorinc. (Coach House Books, 2018) In recent years the history of the old “Ward” neighbourhood of downtown Toronto has been reclaimed and remembered in books, museum exhibits, and, most significantly, a vast archaeological dig behind City Hall…
Jewish Salonica: Between the Ottoman Empire and Modern Greece By Devin E. Naar. Stanford University Press 2016. by Bill Gladstone Jews first arrived in the city of Salonica, formerly known as Thessaloniki, soon after their dispersal following the Roman conquest of ancient Israel. Salonica again became a prime destination for Sephardic Jews after Spain expelled…
Wonder of wonder and miracle of miracles, the new production of Fiddler On The Roof at the Broadway Theatre in New York — directed by Bartlett Sher and freshly choreographed by Israeli choreographer Hofesh Schechter — is good enough to make seasoned theatregoers forget that they ever saw a previous production of Fiddler or…
Curious about your Jewish ancestors from Romania? Read Jill Culiner’s ‘Finding Home: In the Footsteps of the Jewish Fusgeyers’ Between about 1900 and 1914, multitudes of impoverished Jewish refugees sold their meagre possessions, joined into large groups for protection, and trekked hundreds of miles out of Romania on foot. The exodus of the Jewish “Fusgeyers” — Yiddish…
From Canadian Jewish News, November 2015 Containing some 180 million pages of Holocaust-related documents, the vast archives of the International Tracing Service (ITS) of the Red Cross in Bad Arolson, Germany, was subject to strict German privacy laws until 2007, when an 11-country international commission decided to open it up to public access. Today copies…
Police Rushed to Willowvale Park After Ball Game to Restore Order From The Montreal Gazette, August 17, 1933 Toronto August 16 — Hundreds of infuriated Jewish and Gentile youths clashed, and a mob of 10,000 surged riotously around Willowvale Park tonight after a large swastika emblem painted on a white quilt had been displayed on the…
