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…
Garth Drabinsky was appalled that day in 1987 when he heard that publishers were about to bid at auction for the rights to an unauthorized biography of himself. Realizing that “a book filled with misstatements and misrepresentations and ignorant reporting of the facts would do me a lot of harm,” he quickly took strong evasive…
The 60th anniversary of the atomic blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki this month (August 2005) provides an occasion to recall the small but thriving Jewish community that once existed in the southern Japanese port city of Nagasaki. Nagasaki’s Jewish colony was founded by a few Jewish refugees fleeing the Russian pogroms of the 1880s; the…
Silas Aaron Hardoon was born into a poor Jewish family in Baghdad in 1851, but when he died in Shanghai China 80 years later, he was regarded as the wealthiest man in Asia, leaving behind a fortune worth as much as $15 billion in today’s dollars. When Hardoon arrived in Shanghai as a youth of…
From the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, May 24, 2000 (JTA) The UJA Federation of Greater Toronto is trying to keep pace with the city’s growing Jewish population through a massive building and revitalization project. The most recent is a $150-million Jewish campus in the York region, the area just north of the city that is home…
26 May 2023 Census enumerators across Canada were busy on June 1, 1931, going door to door to gather 40 fields of personal information about 10,376,379 Canadians, including family names and relationships, age, gender, occupation, employment status, racial origin and whether the family had acquired a radio. Having sat in a vault for the past…
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…
Book Review: Yankel’s Tavern: Jews, Liquor, & Life in the Kingdom of Poland. By Glenn Dynner. Oxford University Press, 2014. Despite various expulsions, evictions and repressive tax measures meant to force them out of business, Jewish-run taverns were a ubiquitous presence in Poland from roughly the 17th to the late 19th centuries. Polish historians have often…
◊ In light of the passing of Albert Reichmann in Toronto on December 17, 2022 at age 93, we bring your attention to this review of the most thorough biography of the Reichmann family, Anthony Bianco’s The Reichmanns: Family, Faith, Fortune and The Empire of Olympia & York. As Brooklyn-based author Anthony Bianco chronicles in his…
From Inside Toronto (2017) My niece Katie gave birth to her first child recently (a boy) and she suddenly realized how little she knew about her ancestors, especially on her father’s side. Since I’m the family genealogist and a professional one to boot, I gladly volunteered to research her antecedants. Little did I realize that…
