Tag: religion
Jordan Peterson’s journey to ‘We Who Wrestle with God’
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Book Review: We Who Wrestle With God (2024) Almost a decade ago, Jordan Peterson listened to his own “still, small voice” and decided to take a strong moral stand, come hell or high water. Peterson was then a relatively obscure professor at the University of Toronto, who also taught at Harvard. His fierce objection to…
Galilean museum showcases the Jesus Boat
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Originally appeared in The Toronto Star Yuval Lufan has the craggy face and rough hands of a fisherman who goes out onto the Sea of Galilee nightly with lanterns that attract the fish into his nets. Born on the shores of the lake about 50 years ago, he says he has dreamed since he was…
The Maccabees & the Temple Mount
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Dan Behat, the former chief archaeologist of Jerusalem, served as a senior lecturer at Bar-Ilan University and has also taught extensively in Canada. He has lectured to Christian groups around the world on Jerusalem in the time of Jesus and was once invited by Pope John Paul II to do so at the Vatican. He…
Secular Humanism: Jews without God (1999)
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From the Globe and Mail, November 1999 Rabbi Sherwin Wine of Birmingham Temple, Detroit, asserts that all of the patriarchs and prophets of ancient Israel are only myths — and so is the God of the Jewish people. Heretical utterances for a rabbi? Certainly, in any previous age. But today Rabbi Wine is the founder…
Review: Joseph Anton, A Memoir, by Salman Rushdie
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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…
Elephantine Island: the Jews who returned to Egypt
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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…
Schneerson sneered at the ‘strange and queer’ (1987)
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◊ Note: This article appears here because it reflects unfortunate attitudes that were prevalent among basic religious fundamentalists of thirty years ago. No doubt Rabbi Schneerson, like so many others, would have amended his opinions if he had lived to the modern era. The article has been edited for clarity and brevity. From The Canadian…
Rabbi W. Gunther Plaut: An Appreciation
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From the Canadian Jewish News, 2017 From the moment in 1961 that he stepped into the role, Rabbi W. Gunther Plaut was always much more than rabbi of the esteemed historic Reform congregation, Holy Blossom Temple of Toronto. It was entirely Toronto’s gain and St. Paul Minnesota’s loss when Holy Blossom enticed Rabbi Plaut here,…
Christian missions proselytized Jews in ‘the Ward’
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From the Canadian Jewish News, April 2015 Having recently marked its 25th anniversary, the organization Jews for Judaism continues to counter the activities of missionary groups in Toronto that deceptively target Jews for conversion. However, Christian missions to the Jews are certainly nothing new in this city. In the era before the First World War, a…
