Separate but connected lives
“I remember the deep pleasure I had as a child when I first began reading,” author Méira Cook told the Independent. “It was like climbing into a book and pulling the covers down over my head. When I write, I…
Books
A grandfather’s sins
Prof. Roger Frie’s Not in My Family rises above the merely personal (image from cenes.ubc.ca) Forty-three years ago, at Vancouver’s first Holocaust Symposium, for which I was the chair, the keynote speaker was the Lithuanian partisan fighter Leon Kahn. His presentation to…
Londres foresaw fate of Jews
Albert Londres was a Parisian journalist born in 1884. He became an international reporter who chose to chronicle human suffering and expose injustice and cruelty. He denounced inhuman conditions in mental asylums, the ordeals of black workers, conditions in a…
A new foundational resource
The book The More I Know, the Less I Understand (Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, 2017) summarizes the findings of University of British Columbia students in various fields of Holocaust research and the implications of Nazi German crimes committed in Central and…
The greatest Jewish novel?
What strange quirk brought it about that what may be one of the greatest and most Jewish of Jewish novels should be written not by a Diaspora Jew, nor an Israeli Jew, nor a Diaspora Jew who had made aliyah,…
Ever-changing job landscape
Prof. Ilana Gershon’s latest book is Down and Out in the New Economy. (photo from Ilana Gershon) An increasing number of people in their 50s and 60s are needing or wanting to find work – and are finding that next…
Life-giving practice
On Feb. 1, Sarah Peyton speaks at Or Shalom on the topic Why Love is Not Enough: Family Heartache and the Path of Repair. (photo from Or Shalom) Have you ever longed for someone who would be able to listen…
Perpetrators offers new insights
Who could shoot at close range two million children, women and men who were standing at the sides of graves they had just been forced to dig? And then, when this process proved inefficient, who could herd four million more…
Help share aliyah story
An illustration from Yerus Goes to Jerusalem. (photo from Sid Tafler) The Ethiopian aliyah to Israel inspired people around the world when it was first revealed in the 1980s. Today, there are 125,000 first-, second- and third-generation Israelis from Ethiopia.…
Immersed in Judaism
Abigail Pogrebin, author of My Jewish Year: 18 Holidays, One Wondering Jew. (photo from Abigail Pogrebin) A few years ago, author Abigail Pogrebin spent an immersive year studying the Jewish calendar and attempting to observe it. She chronicled her experience…
