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…
Three years after her controversial book The Traitor and the Jew exposed anti-semitic and Nazi-sympathizing sentiments in Depression-era Quebec, Esther Delisle is working on a second book, this one about an underground “pipeline” that enabled French Nazi collaborators and war criminals to escape to French Canada after World War II. “I’m looking at the Canadian…
Gerald Tulchinsky, professor emeritus of history at Queen’s University in Kingston, has just produced his magnum opus in the form of a new 630-page book, Canada’s Jews: A People’s Journey, published by the University of Toronto Press in both hardcover and softcover. “I wanted to describe and analyze the significance of the transitions that Jews…
The Jews of Hungary: History, Culture, Psychology (Wayne State University Press) by Raphael Patai is a monumental 720-page treatise that traces the history of the Jews of the Carpathian basin from their origin in Roman times to their near-obliteration in 1944 and beyond, right up to the present moment. Patai, who died recently at 86, was…
