In 1786 the Italian Jewish scholar Samuel Romanelli (1757 1817) boarded a ship at Gibraltar expecting it to carry him eventually to his home in Mantua. The vessel stopped at several Moroccan ports, however, and Romanelli went ashore and innocently became entangled in some legal trouble. Consequently his passport was confiscated and, to his immense chagrin, his intended brief…
An organization that redeems lost Jews
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A New York rabbinical court made a precedent-setting halakhic decision last summer that could eventually pave the way for legions of “lost” Jews to return to Judaism. The case revolves around Wendy Armstrong, a real estate professional in St. Louis, Mo., who was raised in a Christian home and attended a Methodist church as a…
Conversation thrives on JewishGen discussion group
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Just as the medical profession has debated the ethics of using data from horrendous Nazi medical experiments, the Jewish genealogical community recently discussed the ethics of using a Nazi census of “non-Teutonic” people in Germany in 1938-39. For the most part, the medical community has wisely branded the Nazi’s medical sadism as completely inadmissable to…
Bernard Malamud’s Collected Stories
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In a literary career that stretched roughly from 1940 to his death in 1986, Bernard Malamud wrote a handful of acclaimed novels, including The Natural, The Fixer and The Assistant. Between the novels, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author refined his artistry by writing short stories. For the first time, all of Malamud’s short fiction has been…
Not Quite Mainstream offers rich assortment
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A new collection of 17 short stories by Canadian Jewish writers, published by the Red Deer Press of Calgary, demonstrates both the diversity and literary acumen that we have come to expect from our writing community, pasat and present. Not Quite Mainstream: Canadian Jewish Short Stories is edited by Norman Ravvin, the gifted short-story writer…
Obit: Justice Paul Lamek (2001)
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Remembered for his intellectual vigour and his great love of the law, Superior Court Justice Paul Lamek has died in Toronto at the age of 65. Lamek studied law at Oxford and began his distinguished career as a teacher of law at the University of Pennsylvania for two years and then at Toronto’s Osgoode Hall…
Profile: Author-professor Martin Friedland
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Martin Friedland, the University of Toronto law professor and author of an impressive and influential shelf of books, jokes that he’s not about to change the “O.C.” on his business cards to a “C.C.” just because the Governor General recently upgraded his status within the Order of Canada from “officer” to the much more distinguished…
My Jerusalem, by Bronwyn Drainie
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Canadian writer Bronwyn Drainie, the wife of a newspaper reporter assigned to the Middle East, returned from Israel earlier this year (1994) after living in Jerusalem for two years, and promptly wrote a book capturing her unique perceptions as a self-styled “outsider” to both Jewish and Israeli society. My Jerusalem: Secular Adventures in the Holy…
A study of Toronto’s Orthodox Jews
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Etan Diamond, an American academic, has written a full-length study of the Orthodox Jewish community of Toronto and its pioneering movement northward from the inner city into the suburbs in the postwar era. Published recently by the University of North Carolina Press, Diamond’s And I Will Dwell in Their Midst: Orthodox Jews in Suburbia devotes…
Russian Dance: true romance in Stalinist Moscow
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One evening in 1928, a Russian-Jewish physician and his wife, Marc and Katya Cheftel, attended a large and fancy dinner party at the Manhattan home of the renowned concert-hall impresario Max Rabinoff and his petite wife Bluet, who was equally known for her beauty, wit and charm. Although Rabinoff had made a fortune as a…
