Canada is home to one of the world's largest and most culturally creative Jewish communities, one of the few in the Diaspora that continues to grow demographically. With its ability to mirror trends found in Jewish communities elsewhere (particularly in the United States) while simultaneously functioning as a distinct society, Canada's Jewish community holds great interest for scholars, exercising a measurable infl uence on the culture and politics of world Jewry. Consisting of a series of essays written by experts in their respective fields, Canada's Jews is a topical encyclopedia covering a wide variety of subjects from history and religion to the intellectual and cultural contributions of Canada's Jews.

This volume takes a fresh view of the role representations of the past play in the construction of Jewish identity. Its central theme is that the study of how Jews construct the past can help in interpreting how they understand the nature of their Jewishness. The individual chapters illuminate the ways in which Jews responded to and made use of the past. If Jews choices of what to include, emphasize, omit, and invent in their representation of the past is a fundamental variable, then this volume contributes to the creation of a more nuanced approach to the construction of the histories of Jews and their thought.

Canada is home to one of the world's largest and most culturally creative Jewish communities, and one of few in the Diaspora that continues to grow demographically. With its tendency to mirror trends found in Jewish communities elsewhere (particularly in the United States) and simultaneous functioning as a distinct society, Canada's Jewish community holds great interest for scholars, exercising a measurable influence on the culture and politics of world Jewry today. Consisting of a series of essays written by experts in their respective fields, Canada's Jews is a topical encyclopaedia covering a wide variety of subjects from history and religion to the intellectual and cultural contributions of Canada's Jews.

In 1936, Joseph Margoshes (1866-1955), a writer for the New York Yiddish daily "Morgen Journal", published a memoir of his youth in Austro-Hungarian Galicia entitled "Erinerungen fun mayn Leben". In this autobiography, he evoked a world that had been changed almost beyond recognition as a result of the First World War and was shortly to be completely obliterated by the Holocaust. In telling his story, Margoshes gives the reader important insights into the many-faceted Jewish life of Austro-Hungarian Galicia. We read of the Orthodox and the Enlightened, urban and rural life, Jews and their gentile neighbours, and much more. This book is an important evocation of an entire Jewish society and civilisation and bears comparison with Yehiel Yeshaia Trunk's masterful evocation of Jewish life in Poland, Poyln.

This book illuminates important issues faced by Orthodox Judaism in the modern era by relating the life and times of Rabbi Yudel Rosenberg (1859-1935). In presenting Yudel Rosenberg's rabbinic activities, this book aims to show that Jewish Orthodoxy could serve as an agent of modernity no less than its opponents. Yudel Rosenberg's considerable literary output will demonstrate that the line between "secular" and "traditional" literature was not always sharp and distinct. Rabbi Rosenberg's kabbalistic works will shed light on the revival of kabbala study in the twentieth century. Yudel Rosenberg's career in Canada will serve as a counter-example to the often-expressed idea that Hasidism exercised no significant influence on the development of American Judaism at the turn of the twentieth century.

In 1936, Joseph Margoshes (1866-1955), a writer for the New York Yiddish daily, Morgen Journal, published a memoir of his youth in Austro-Hungarian Galicia entitled Erinerungen fun mayn leben. In it, he evoked a world which had been changed almost beyond recognition as a result of the First World War, and was shortly to be completely obliterated by the Holocaust. In telling his own story, Margoshes gives the reader important insights into the many-faceted Jewish life of Austro-Hungarian Galicia. We read of the Orthodox and the Enlightened, urban and rural life, Jews and their gentile neighbours, and much more. The book is an important evocation of an entire Jewish society and civilization, and bears comparison with Yehiel Yeshaia Trunk's masterful evocation of Jewish life in Poland, Poyln.

Divided into three sections, this work explains how the concepts and practices of traditional European Judaism were adapted to North American culture beginning in the late nineteenth century. Part I focuses on the ideas and activities of Cyrus Adler (1863-1940), one of the most prominent leaders of the traditionalist Jewish community in the United States in his era. The issues in these essays include the origins of American Jewish history as a field of study, the Kehilla experiments of the early twentieth century, and the relationship between the Jewish Theological Seminary and Orthodox Judaism. Part II deals with the beginnings of Hasidic Judaism in North America prior to the Second World War. It also includes several studies investigating the shaping of the worldview of Orthodox Judaism in contemporary North America. Part III examines the issue of contemporary American Jewish attitudes toward evolution and intelligent design.

This state-of-the-art account gives readers the tools to understand why antisemitism is such a controversial subject. It acquaints readers with the ambiguities inherent in the historical relationship between Jews and Christians and shows these ambiguities in play in the unfolding relationship between Jews and Canadians of other religions and ethnicities. It examines present relationships in light of history and considers particularly the influence of antisemitism on the social, religious, and political history of the Canadian Jewish community. A History of Antisemitism in Canada builds on the foundation of numerous studies on antisemitism in general and on antisemitism in Canada in particular, as well as on the growing body of scholarship in Canadian Jewish studies. It attempts to understand the impact of antisemitism on Canada as a whole and is the first comprehensive account of antisemitism and its effect on the Jewish community of Canada. The book will be valuable to students and scholars not only of Canadian Jewish studies and Canadian ethnic studies but of Canadian history.

In one of the few studies of the early immigrant Orthodox rabbinate in North America, Ira Robinson has delved into the Jewish community in Montreal in the first three decades of the twentieth century. Rabbis and their Community: Studies in the Eastern European Orthodox Rabbinate in Montreal, 1896-1930, introduces several rabbis who, in various ways, impacted their immediate congregations as well as the wider Montreal Jewish community. Most studies of the early North American rabbinate focus on only one rabbi. Here, though, Robinson carefully examines the interrelationship among a number of rabbis sharing the same communal "turf." He has diligently researched the unpublished source material these men, generally forgotten to history, left behind. Their writing offers a valuable glimpse at some of the struggles and challenges they faced in their own community, as well as those faced by Canadian Jewish society as a whole in the early twentieth century. Robinson introduces the reader to such leaders as Rabbi Hirsh Cohen, a fixture in the Jewish community of Montreal from 1901 through the late 1940s, Rabbi Simon Glazer, Cohen's main rival for the chief rabbinate, and revolutionary thinker Rabbi Yudel Rosenberg. The issues they faced, such as the Kosher meat wars of the 1920s, and the institutions they created, most notably the Jewish Community Council of Montreal, were factors of fundamental importance for the development of the second-largest Jewish community in Canada.