Pierre Berton’s column “No Jews Need Apply,” which originally appeared in Maclean’s in November 1948 and was reprinted in last week’s CJN, offered a penetrating look at the discreet, country-club-style antisemitism that was rife in Canadian society. Berton, who died last month, pointed out that people with names like Greenberg were frequently denied job interviews,…
Tag: toronto
Jews and the Lord’s Day Act
by •
Deputy Magistrate Kingsford of Toronto had his hands full one October day in 1900 when two Jewish butchers and a Jewish baker appeared before him, all charged with violating the Lord’s Day Act by pursuing their callings on a Sunday. One of the butchers was actually Rabbi Isaac Helpern, spiritual leader of the Austrian Jewish…
Genealogy as a labour of love
by •
“I’m working on a book of family history,” Sara Edell Kelman declares, as she shows me her massive collection of archival documents, ketubot, photographs, Yiddish letters and other family memorabilia, spilling out of diverse albums, binders and boxes. “No, it’s more than one book — it’s a series of books. There’s a lot of stuff…
The sound of no hands clapping
by •
What is the best sort of critical reception to give a newly-published book of revisionist history that exonerates Hitler, minimizes the evil of the Holocaust, and knowingly perpetrates other intellectual frauds? For Michael R. Marrus, the author and professor of European history at the University of Toronto, the answer is simple: no critical reception at…
Miscellaneous theatre notes
by •
Wallace Shawn is known to many for his roles in movies like My Dinner With Andre (which he co-wrote), The Princess Bride and several Woody Allen films. He is also an avant-garde playwright whose latest work The Designated Mourner (Noonday Press, $14) opened in London last year and has been made into a film starring…
Al Waxman is ‘Lost in Yonkers’
by •
With the production of Lost In Yonkers that opened Feb. 4 at the Atlantis Theatre, director Al Waxman has delivered his third theatrical hit in as many years to the Toronto theatre-going public. This production of Neil Simon’s Tony and Pulitzer prize-winning 1990 play is solidly put together, delivering all the laughs, drama, pathos and…
Interview with playwright Jason Sherman
by •
Although his current play It’s All True is based on a “labor opera” from the 1930s, and though many of his previous plays have been highly critical of Israel, Toronto playwright Jason Sherman told an audience at Harbourfront recently, “I don’t think of myself as a political playwright any more than I do a Jewish…
Drabinsky protects Showboat with legal action
by •
Entertainment mogul Garth Drabinsky has filed a legal notice of claim against the Ontario government after learning that the provincial Anti-Racism Secretariat allegedly funnelled $200,000 to various groups that were part of an organized campaign to stop the musical Show Boat from opening at the North York Performing Arts Centre in October 1993. “They have…
The making of Ragtime the musical
by •
Last week in Toronto (1996), arts journalists were given an exclusive first peek at four stage numbers from Ragtime, the musical-in-progress that Livent Inc. is developing from the best-selling 1975 novel by E.L. Doctorow. Given that the show isn’t set to open at North York’s Ford Center until next January, the pieces seemed surprisingly polished.…
Obit: Ben Kayfetz
by •
Forty years ago, Ben Kayfetz, the longtime director of community relations for the Canadian Jewish Congress, flew to Cuba to oversee distribution of a shipment of kosher food to Havana’s isolated Jewish community of 2,500. Benjamin Gershon Kayfetz, former community relations director of the Canadian Jewish Congress, born Toronto, December 24, 1916; died Toronto, February…
