Tag: religion

Review: Joseph Anton, A Memoir, by Salman Rushdie

From the Canadian Jewish News, January 2013 London-based writer Salman Rushdie was happy to sell his novel The Satanic Verses to Viking Penguin in February 1988. But six months after the novel appeared, the Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against him for his blasphemous insult “against Islam, the Prophet and the Qur’an.” Instantly he became…

Elephantine Island: the Jews who returned to Egypt

Eight centuries after Moses led the Children of Israel from Egypt, a Jewish community thrived on Elephantine Island, a small isle on the Nile in Southern Egypt near the present-day Aswan. Archaeologists date the origin of the Elephantine community to the dispersion and exile of the Jews from ancient Israel following the destruction of the…

Schneerson sneered at the ‘strange and queer’ (1987)

◊ Note: This article appears here because it reflects unfortunate attitudes that were prevalent among basic religious fundamentalists of thirty years ago. No doubt Rabbi Schneerson, like so many others, would have amended his opinions if he had lived to the modern era. The article has been edited for clarity and brevity.  From The Canadian…

Rabbi W. Gunther Plaut: An Appreciation

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,…

Christian missions proselytized Jews in ‘the Ward’

From the Canadian Jewish News, April 2015 Having recently marked its 25th anniversary, the organization Jews for Judaism continues to counter the activities of missionary groups in Toronto that deceptively target Jews for conversion. However, Christian missions to the Jews are certainly nothing new in this city. In the era before the First World War, a…

Review: Alison Pick’s Between Gods

Seven years ago, as Toronto author Alison Pick began researching and writing what would become her prize-winning novel Far to Go, she realized that the seeds of two different projects — one a fictional manuscript, the other a closely allied memoir — were struggling for dominance within her mind. Giving priority to the novel, she…

Author Joshua Max Feldman on ‘Book of Jonah’

From Canadian Jewish News, May 2014 Jonah Jacobson is a young Manhattan lawyer immersed in an important legal deal that could make him a partner, and in relationships with two beautiful women each in love with him, when the heavens open up and he has a bizarre and unexpected Biblical vision at a party. Suddenly…

TORONTO SAGES: Prominent rabbis of blessed memory

TORONTO SAGES is a booklet compiled and published in 2004 by Mayer S. Abramowitz, a grandson of Toronto cantor Nosson Stolnitz. Its full title is “Chachmei Yisrael of Toronto — Toronto’s Sages.” The booklet presents information about 35 Toronto rabbis from their tombstones, translated into English; some Yiddish and English obituaries are also included. The contents…

The Man Who Would Be Messiah (1999)

From the Globe and Mail, 1999   ◊ I wrote this article for the Globe’s Ideas & Beliefs column in 1999, a mere six years after Rabbi Schneerson’s death, when the Lubavitch world seemed to be pulling apart over the issue of his messianic status and who would be his successor. Don’t know what’s happened…

Festival of Sukkot — McCaul Street style, 1952

From the Globe and Mail, Toronto, Oct. 4, 1952 This photo appeared in the Toronto Globe and Mail on October 4, 1952 at the start of the Festival of Sukkot. The photo shows Rene Slonim, daughter of Rabbi Reuben Slonim of the McCaul Street Synagogue, guiding six-year-old Seymour Epstein through the ceremony of the blessing…