The effort to solve a century-old Winnipeg murder mystery is a personal one for American author Wayne Hoffman
It’s a mystery nearly 110 years in in the making: Who murdered Winnipegger Sarah Feinstein? Finding an answer to that question occupied over a decade of Wayne Hoffman’s life. Hoffman, the executive editor of Tablet and a resident of New York City, is the great-great-grandson of Feinstein, who was murdered in 1913. The killer was never found. […]
Jewish-Canadians in the Spanish Civil War as viewed by historian Michael Petrou
Excerpted from Michael Petrou’s chapter “‘Our Fight Is Not Yet Over’: Jewish-Canadians in the Spanish Civil War” in the book Armed Jews in the Americas (Brill, 2021), edited by Raanan Rein and David M. K. Sheinin. In July 1937, while crossing the Atlantic Ocean on the Cunard-White Star liner Alaunia, Maurice Constant, a former student […]
Jonathan Kay on the model Jewish immigrant who became one of New York’s vaudeville kings
During his early 20th-century heyday as a New York City showman, B.S. Moss (1878-1951) lived a professional life that was likely more intense than that of any modern movie executive. He found himself with more than a dozen theatres to stock with daily entertainment. Each hybrid show—part film, part live act—might involve hundreds of moving […]
Open marriages and war criminals: Vancouver Jewish book festival goes virtual (again) with 27 authors in 2022
Toronto-raised and Boston-based novelist Jonathan Papernick decided to write his latest novel on a subject some may regard as taboo—open marriages, where partners continue to be in a romantic relationship while seeing other people. “The book deals with a reconfiguration, or recalibration, of how relationships are,” said Papernick, the author of I Am My Beloveds. […]
Fiction on Soviet Jewish life and Canada during the Holocaust win 2021 Quebec Writers’ Federation Literary Awards
Two books of fiction with strong Jewish themes won 2021 Quebec Writers’ Federation (QWF) Literary Awards, which recognize the best recent works in English by authors in the province. Love Like Water, Love Like Fire by Mikhail Iossel received the Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction and Room For One More by Monique Polak took […]
Alon Ozery’s tale of 1980s Toronto, before the bakery: Coleman’s Deli and high school hideaways
Born to an Orthodox Jewish father and a British mother, Toronto-born Alon Ozery was raised in Israel, and educated in Canada. Ozery Bakery, which he co-founded in 1996, spawned from the Pita Break restaurant he started with his dad on Yonge Street in downtown Toronto. His new memoir, Even the Sidewalk Could Tell, focuses on […]
The beloved song ‘Hava Nagila’ has come to life in a children’s book by an author from Montreal
She is a Jewish woman who wears a traditional Indian sari, but was born in a Ukrainian shtetl. And although she is now almost two centuries old, she still dances across the globe bringing the same delight she always has to Jewish people, whether they are celebrating or enduring hardship. Her name is Hava Nagila […]
While working on his fourth novel, Hal Niedzviecki finally felt like a Jewish book writer
Hal Niedzviecki is a Toronto writer, speaker, culture commentator and editor whose latest book The Lost Expert launches Wednesday, Nov. 17. For an excerpt from the novel click here. I’ve been reading a biography of Mel Brooks, a.k.a. Melvin Kaminisky, born 1926 in the family’s tiny tenement apartment in New York City’s Lower East Side. […]
Lost in the woods: An excerpt from the novel ‘The Lost Expert’ by Hal Niedzviecki
Featuring: Twenty-four-year-old sometimes waiter Chris. Having stumbled onto the set of the movie The Lost Expert and been promptly mistaken for the lead in the film, movie star Thomson Holmes, he now finds himself in North Ontario impersonating a man he’s never met… and Famous, now elderly director Bryant Reed, who has reluctantly agreed to […]
Carol Matas is launching her newest book for young adults at Winnipeg’s first-ever Holocaust Education Week
After surviving the Holocaust as a teenager, Ruth now finds herself in Palestine during another war as Israel battles for its existence. Her brother is on the front lines, and Ruth and her boyfriend are taking care of children in a hospital. To distract them, Ruth tells stories. That causes her to remember another time […]
