Dr. Joel Hecker, who for more than a decade has been an associate professor at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in the Philadelphia area, visited his home town of Toronto recently to lecture on his book, Mystical Bodies, Mystical Meals: Eating and Embodiment in Medieval Kabbalah, an erudite study published by an American university press in…
Tag: non-fiction
Kvetching All the Way to the Bank
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With two new books in print to follow his 2005 bestseller Born to Kvetch, and enjoying a new popularity with Jewish audiences who delight in his erudite knowledge of Yiddish, Toronto writer Michael Wex can no longer be said to be languishing in obscurity. In the round fullness of middle age, the Lethbridge-born Yiddishist put…
Hubble: Universe In A Mirror
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Regarded by many as one of America’s greatest scientific accomplishments, the 18-year-old Hubble Space Telescope has added immensely to our cosmological knowledge and has changed our conception of the universe. The Universe in A Mirror, a new book by American science writer Robert Zimmerman, offers a history of the epoch-making telescope as well as fascinating…
Colourful History of Warner Brothers
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You Must Remember This: The Warner Bros. Story (Running Press) is an engaging, fully illustrated coffee-table book recounting the many cinematic milestones and many more B-films churned out by the Warner Brothers Studio, one of the major filmmaking factories of Hollywood’s golden era. One of the most significant films to emerge from the hallowed Warner…
Insightful guide to American Jewish fiction
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The esteemed Jewish Publication Society of Philadelphia has just published American Jewish Fiction, a new literary guidebook that is a delight to browse, genuinely thought-provoking to read, and also happens to bring immense credit to one of our own. The author is Josh Lambert, who was born and raised in Toronto, where he graduated from…
Moonlight, Romance & Jewish Songwriters
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“There may be trouble ahead,” begins Irving Berlin’s famed 1936 song, Let’s Face the Music and Dance, and if you are a fan of the classic American songbook and singers, you can easily hear Fred Astaire singing that line in your head. The song is remarkable, according to author David Lehman, because it puts all…
More Wit & Wisdom from Michael Wex
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Michael Wex, the Toronto writer, raconteur and Yiddishist whose previous non-fiction book Born to Kvetch climbed to the top of the bestseller lists, now presents us with an equally learned and funny manual about how to be a human being — humane, considerate, and wise enough to do the right thing. How to Be a…
Beider on Polish-Jewish surnames
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What’s in a name — or, more precisely, a Jewish surname? No one, it seems, has ever been able to answer that question with as much scientific methodology and linguistic and historical background as Alexander Beider, a 32-year-old Moscow-born statistician who emigrated about 1990 to Paris, where he lives and works as a computer programmer.…
Beider on Russian-Jewish Surnames
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Alexander Beider, who is arguably the world’s foremost expert on Jewish names, has revised and updated his 1993 Dictionary of Jewish Surnames from the Russian Empire, a four-year task that he undertook knowing it would probably not generate adequate renumeration for him. If that proves to be the case, he may yet take comfort in…
The ‘Dangerous’ Emma Goldman
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In April 2001, the Toronto Jewish Film Festival screened a 42-minute documentary on Emma Goldman, the legendary American-Jewish anarchist and feminist who spent several periods of exile in Toronto. Coleman Romalis’s film Emma Goldman: The Anarchist Guest presented a refreshing and overdue account of Goldman’s productive years in Toronto. A recent book pays more attention…
