I optimize my daily walks or bike rides with audiobooks, taking special enjoyment in well-narrated classics. For balance, I add the guilty pleasure of lightweight movies. This summer’s annual holida...
CJNews
CJNews
In my reading of the Raj Quartet, Paul Scott’s magisterial series of novels chronicling the last days of empire in India, one incident continues to haunt me, due to its (unintended) Jewish symbolism...
Khawla is a Yazidi woman from Dugri, Iraq. I interviewed her a few weeks ago, in the company of Mirza Ismail, the chairman of Yezidi Human Rights Organization-International, who acted as our interpret...
Two American giants exited the literary world in May: Tom Wolfe and Philip Roth. Apart from their brilliance in mapping America’s social and cultural landscape, they could not have been more differe...
In the upwardly mobile Jewish enclave of Toronto where I was raised, Yiddish was the language of my parents’ generation. It was reserved for Borscht-belt humour and hiding certain subjects from chil...
In January, an incident took place – or, rather, didn’t take place – in Toronto, which came to be known as #hijabhoax on social media: a young Muslim girl had alleged that an Asian man attacked ...
The Feb. 8 issue of The CJN featured an irate letter to the editor signed by 26 readers, including several rabbis (including my own), who were incensed by my last column, which argued that basic Torah...
In our liturgy, the Torah is referred to as the “tree of life.” But although it’s rich in general guiding principles, the Torah is paradoxically terse or mute on several of our era’s hottest i...
In The CJN’s Nov. 30 edition, prominent attention was given to the question of whether Rebel Media founder Ezra Levant is good or bad for the Jews. JSpace president Karen Mock opined that Levant’s...
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,...
What’s in a name? In identity politics, plenty.
It’s confusing, for example, to keep track of the evolving nomenclature for the people we used to call natives. Once they were Indians, then aborigi...
In her op-ed in the Oct. 8 CJN, Danielle Kubes asks why “Jews have not come out in mass support” of Ishaq Zunera, who refuses to take her citizenship unmasked.
I can’t speak for other Jews, but ...
One of the advantages for young mothers who stayed at home with their children, as most of my cohorts did in the ’60s and ’70s, was that once their children were at school – and if a...