Shir ha-Shirim (the Song of Songs) has lately been the focus of a weekly study group I attend at my shul. Most of the Shir is an explicitly sexual dialogue between two lovers.
A few minutes into last ...
CJNews
CJNews
Saturday Night Live usually hits the mark, humour-wise, but when it misses, it can miss big time.
On Dec. 1, SNL mounted a skit called “Dad Christmas.” One blogger commented on it, &ldquo...
Baby, it’s cold outside. Seriously. I live in Montreal and it’s extremely cold outside. We’re also deeply into pre-Christmas festivating, which naturally involves multiple inescapabl...
Oslo, Norway and Marrakech, Morocco were more than geographical miles apart on Dec 10.
In Oslo, Nadia Murad, a courageous Yazidi survivor of genocide, accepted her Nobel prize, alongside Congolese re...
A dialogue between two former enemies, “Can You Love the Person You Love to Hate?” published by the New York Times, has attracted a lot of attention. The protagonists are female writers wh...
The Late George Apley, John P. Marquand’s 1937 novel, chronicles the life of a “Boston Brahmin,” whose encounters with a fast-changing world trace the decline and fall of America&rsq...
Edited version of a talk delivered at Beth Emet Synagogue in Toronto Nov 18, 2018
At the prestigious Munk Debate in Toronto in early November between pundit David Frum and controversial right-winger ...
The Late George Apley, John P. Marquand’s 1937 novel, chronicles the life of a “Boston Brahmin,” whose encounters with a fast-changing world trace the decline and fall of America&rsq...
Activists at some British universities have decreed that the words “woman” and “women” are not inclusive enough in today’s gender-fluid world, so have introduced “w...
On Nov. 1, the illustrious historian Simon Schama was the honoured guest of Montreal’s Jewish Public Library, as the keynote speaker for Jewish Book Month. His topic was his latest book, Belonging:...
In 1905, Harvard College adopted the College Entrance Examination Board tests as the principal basis for student admission, a blind test that favored intelligent applicants even if they lacked poise o...
Planning a group holiday in Kashmir? Airbnb is there to serve you. Likewise in Tibet, northern Cyprus and Georgia’s separatist republic of Abkhazia, all occupied or disputed territories. Airbnb&...
Bill C-78, An Act to amend the Divorce Act had its first reading on May 22.
It is now in Committee with witness presentations underway.
Everyone agrees that government reforms on divorce law were ne...
The world is going to hell in a handbasket, as we know, but to preserve our sanity we must periodically step back from the sturm und drang of hard-core news, without entirely depriving ourselves of fo...
An opinion columnist nowadays could take campus disruptions or deplatformings of conservative speakers as his or her sole weekly topic and never run out of material.
The latest example comes to us ou...
Almost ten years ago, Asia Bibi was an obscure farm worker in Pakistan, whose name would, in the normal course of events as we understand them in the West, remain completely unknown apart from her fam...
In 1939, the MS St. Louis departed Germany with 907 Jewish passengers, who were seeking haven from Nazi persecution. Cuba and the U.S. turned them away. Canada was their last hope. Yet Canada’s “n...
Although not on the ballot, America’s midterm elections were all about Trump. Not his policies or unique personality, but the trend throughout the West — loosely defined as populism &md...
Friday night’s Munk debate between David Frum and Stephen K. Bannon at Toronto’s Roy Thompson Hall had, as its topic, “Be it resolved, the future of western politics is populist, not...
One of the most talked-about Jewish books of the season is Jonathan Neumann’s To Heal the World: How the Jewish Left Corrupts Judaism and Endangers Israel.
The book’s tone, as one can tel...