Recently I had the pleasure of meeting Izzy Ezagui, the famous IDF soldier who lost his left arm to a mortar shell in Gaza, yet returned to duty as a reservist. Author of the 2018 book, Disarmed: Unco...
Jewish jokes tend to mingle humour with a touch—or more—of melancholy. Here’s an example that’s old, but seems sadly relevant to the U.S. news cycle of the last few weeks. Two yeshiva boy...
Election Day is Oct 21. This year, the date coincides with Shemini Atzeret, one of several “High Holidays” festival dates in the annual Jewish calendar, at the tail end of the harvest festival cal...
The other morning, I received an email from the president of my synagogue, an invitation for the membership to attend a town hall, where “a comprehensive discussion on safety and security”...
One of my niche subjects is the epidemiology of dog bite-related injuries and deaths according to canine breed. Epidemiology, which Wikipedia defines as “the study and analysis of the distribution a...
The announcement was not unexpected. On the contrary, for those who follow the subject, it was long anticipated. But the words themselves, spoken by Israel’s Immigration Minister, Sofa Landve...
My Jewishly oriented attention was captured – and in short order captivated – by a five-part series in the Jerusalem Report, written by its senior editor, Amotz Asa-El. His crisply written essays,...
As Canada celebrates its 150th anniversary, it offers the opportunity for the Jewish community to evaluate its role within Canadian society, and how it has evolved since Confede...
I have serious concerns about M-103, a private member’s motion currently before Parliament that would condemn Islamophobia. But I want to reassure my colleague Andrew Coyne that I’m not nearly...
 In a Feb. 25 Facebook post, McGill student Molly Harris recounted her experience in a “Rez (residence) Project” workshop, a (mandatory) three-hour discussion on “oppress...
In divorce, as in marriage, Prince Charles and Princess Diana acted according to their wildly opposite natures. For his divorce lawyer, Charles chose Fiona Shackleton, a prototypically establis...
In the aftermath of what emerged, against early predictions, as a wildly successful Olympic Winter Games in Vancouver, Canadians are basking in an uncharacteristically bullish glow of national prid...
Thank you for that warm introduction. I am pleased and honoured to have been asked to speak to the London community tonight on a subject of great importance to all Canadian Jews. If you read my colum...
My Aug. 9 column, "The Rise of Quebecistan," has become a focus for great controversy in Quebec. In the past week, I have been interviewed by numerous radio stations, both French a...
In 2022, it became clear that our federal government has an antisemitism-linked funding problem. News stories over the last year featured such recipients of federal largesse as “anti-racist&rdqu...
On January 27, 1945, the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, whose gas chambers claimed the lives of more than a million people, most of them Jews, was liberated. Never again, it was assumed. But, followin...
In the days after Hamas’s murderous pogrom, it became clear that sympathy for Israel’s victims, although robustly demonstrated by heads of government, was far from the norm in the streets,...
On Sunday night, Montreal Mayor Valérie Plante stated the obvious: “At this moment, the Jewish community is under attack in Montreal.” Bullets had been fired at two Jewish religiou...