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…
Faux-intellectual “No Logo” celeb Naomi Klein spoke at a “Seder In The Street” last month in New York City before about one hundred mostly adoring JINO (“Jewish-in-name-only”) fans. She shamelessly delivered an antisemitic screed that would have made many of the more discreet, country-club sort of antisemites blush. Klein began her remarks by attacking the…
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…
Writing On The Wall: Review of Indian in the Cabinet (2021) 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,…
As reported in The Montreal Gazette (1938) This shocking photograph was taken at a fascist rally on Wellington Street, Montreal, on May 11, 1938. Inspired by Germany’s National Socialist (Nazi) Party and Italy’s Fascists, Quebec’s National Socialist Christian Party was a strongly antisemitic and anticommunist group led by Adrien Arcand. Party enforcers were called blueshirts,…
by Dr Stuart E Rosenberg From The Canadian Jewish News, 1972 Here’s an interesting footnote to Jewish Canadiana. A very unusual episode, full of portent and prophecy for the future of Jews everywhere, was played out in a remote corner of the country, at an army base in Windsor, Nova Scotia. It was there that…
Book review: Sledgehammer: How Breaking With The Past Brought Peace To The Middle East, by David Friedman, former US Ambassador to Israel. HarperCollins, 2022. In Sledgehammer, lawyer-turned-ambassador David Friedman offers some excellent background to the important story of the Abraham Accords, which stand as the most significant development in Middle East peace since Israel’s treaties…
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…
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…
Becoming Hapsburg: The Jews of Austrian Bukovina, 1774-1918, by David Rechter. Hardcover, 214 pages. Published by The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization. Portland, Oregon, 2013. www.littman.co.uk Author David Rechter, a research fellow in Modern Jewish History at Oxford, has made a full-length and comprehensively researched study of the Jews of Austrian Bukovina, beginning with the…
