From the Toronto Daily Star, May 10, 1920 Thirty-Five Thousand Held a Parade, Followed by Meeting in Massey Hall Thirty-five thousand of the Hebrews of Toronto formed in procession Sunday afternoon as part of the demonstration that was to testify to their loyalty to the British Empire and their thankfulness to Britain for accepting the…
Montreal resident Edeet Ravel admits that she’s been fairly negligent until recently about getting her writing into print. A teacher at a Montreal-area high school until last year, the Israeli-born author expresses amazement that the British publisher Headline found her letter on its slushpile of unsolicited manuscripts and was interested enough to ask to see…
By “A. I.” David ◊ Note: This article is written in the style of a newspaper report that might have appeared at the time the following events took place. Damascus, August 4, 1840 After a protracted international drama, the Ottoman authorities in Damascus have released their remaining Jewish prisoners, bringing an end to one of…
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…
by Ben Lappin (from Commentary, 1955) Spadina Avenue, the main street of the needle trades in Toronto, looks very much the same as it did ten, twenty, thirty years ago. The same kind of old-fashioned haggling still goes on between the employers and the handful of tense harassed business agents – former pressers, operators, and…
From the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 2001 Canadian Jews are calling on their government to tighten its borders with the United States following unconfirmed reports that some of the terrorists involved in the terror attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon may have entered the United States from Canada. Jewish officials long have been…
Remember Jody Wilson-Raybould? She’s the former Trudeauvian Minister of Justice and Attorney-General who — incredible as it sounds — insisted upon telling the truth, a course that must have seemed all but inconceivable to the PM and his appointed viziers. In her 2021 memoir, Indian In The Cabinet, Wilson-Raybould, an Indigenous Canadian who uses the…
Report from the Canadian Jewish Chronicle, 1919 Ukraine, the Scene of Wholesale Murder Since Last November. Whole Communities Wiped Out. Troops of Petliura and Grigorieff Principal Culprits. Bolshevik Troops Kill Many in Spite of Rigorous Measures of Their Commanders Authentic reports have reached this country of a series of massacres which have raged in the…
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…
From the Canadian Jewish News, April 8, 2020 Note: I compiled this quiz for the Canadian Jewish News, and it ran as the cover story on the very last issue that was published. Answers appear below. ♦ QUESTIONS 1. What wartime Canadian novel dealt centrally with Jewish characters and themes and won a Governor General’s…
