From the Globe and Mail, 2003 As a great-grandson of American slaves, Dr. Daniel Hill carried the lessons of universal equality and civil rights in his blood. Founding director of the Ontario Human Rights Commission and a former Ontario ombudsman, Dr. Hill is being remembered as a pioneer of the human rights movement in Canada…
From the Toronto Star Weekly, July 5, 1913 Emphatically the right man in the right place is Dr. George H. Locke as Toronto’s chief librarian. Possibly he does not look quite look the part, for there is a notable absence of “mustiness” about him. And “mustiness,” to many people’s minds, should be the lot of…
From the Globe and Mail, February 2002 As a Trotskyite and leader of the Revolutionary Workers Party, Ross Dowson might have been expected to tarry on the fringes of Canadian political life forever, so it came as a considerable shock to many Torontonians when he drew twenty per cent of the vote in a mayor’s…
From Canadian Jewish News, 2003 He was a British soldier and she was a Jewish nurse in British-mandate Palestine: they met in Egypt about 1940. She was killed in an accident and he vowed to let her family know. But how to find them? He — the British soldier — knew that she had been…
For those who love the classic tunes of the so-called American “songbook” and particularly the timeless melodies and lyrics of George and Ira Gershwin, Michael Feinstein’s new book, The Gershwins and Me: A Personal History in Twelve Songs is much more than heartfelt homage by an outsider or Johnny-come-lately to a remarkable musical era that is…
From the Toronto Star Weekly, December 31, 1926 by Frederick Griffin You can’t imagine the gigantic United States with all its doughboys and buddies being scared of a woman. It is like a man being scared of a mouse. And yet we have the fact that they were so frightened over there by the presence…
From The Canadian Jewish Chronicle, December 8, 1939 The Jewish community of Montreal, thousands strong, paid final tribute to the memory of Reuben Brainin, noted Hebraist, author and pioneer Zionist, who died in New York on November 30, 1939 at the age of seventy-seven. From 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. his body lay in state…
Samuel Koteliansky was never a major figure in the Bloomsbury circle. Author Leon Edel never even mentions him in Bloomsbury: A House of Lions, his masterful portrait of the loose affiliation of writers and artists associated with the London-based Bloomsbury circle. Neither is Koteliansky mentioned in the other books about Bloomsbury on my shelf. We…
Adapted from the Canadian Jewish News, June 10, 1977. Recently Jim “Yascha” Blugerman, who is nearly 90 years of age, was installed as the 58th president of Toronto Lodge, the oldest and largest B’nai Brith chapter in Canada. Yascha had only five rubles in his pocket when he came to Toronto in 1908. He also…
As a volunteer for the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, the organization created by filmmaker Steven Spielberg, author Alvin Abram gained first-hand knowledge of the experiences of Holocaust survivors. In his recently published seventh book, The Minyan, Abram combines his flare for detective crime mysteries with a story about the Holocaust, featuring locales…
