{"id":32575,"date":"2019-05-17T03:59:21","date_gmt":"2019-05-17T10:59:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/?p=32575"},"modified":"2019-05-16T12:07:45","modified_gmt":"2019-05-16T19:07:45","slug":"community-day-of-learning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/2019\/05\/17\/community-day-of-learning\/","title":{"rendered":"Community day of learning"},"content":{"rendered":"

Prof. Norma Joseph (photo from Association for Canadian Jewish Studies)<\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

On June 2, the Association for Canadian Jewish Studies is holding a day of lectures in the Jewish community that will be topped off with music from the Vancouver Jewish Folk Choir, the granting of the 2019 Louis Rosenberg Canadian Jewish Studies Distinguished Service Award to scholar and activist Norma Joseph and a talk by Franklin Bialystok on Canadian Jewish Congress.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe offer a community day every year, and it\u2019s always the opening day of the conference,\u201d co-organizer Jesse Toufexis told the Independent<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe motivations for the community day are plentiful,\u201d said Toufexis. \u201cFirstly, we receive great support in a number of ways from Jewish communities all over Canada, so this is an excellent way not only to thank them but to show them what the scholarly community is up to.<\/p>\n

\u201cSecondly, the Jewish community is interested in the topics we cover, from history to sociology to literature and art. So, coming from fields where we work on such minutely detailed projects, it\u2019s fun to engage with a community that gets excited about the topics we ourselves find exciting.<\/p>\n

\u201cThirdly, I think holding a community day is just part of a tradition that fosters togetherness. We aren\u2019t scholars out in the ether, doing our own thing and keeping it to ourselves. I think of us more as a branch of a much larger Canadian Jewish community that includes all the various roles and aspects of Jewish life in this country, and I think it\u2019s something of a duty to share what we\u2019re constantly learning about our common past, present and future.\u201d<\/p>\n

Prof. Rebecca Margolis, ACJS president, praised Toufexis and co-organizer Prof. Richard Menkis on having \u201cput together an amazing community day together in partnership with a team of local organizations that have gone above and beyond to make this day a success: Jewish Museum and Archives of B.C. and our host, the Peretz Centre for Secular Jewish Culture. As a member-run organization,\u201d she said, \u201cwe value opportunities to collaborate with local organizations in order to produce exciting programming on the Jewish Canadian experience.\u201d<\/p>\n

The first panel session of the day is Jewish Space in Literature and Popular Culture, followed by Antisemitism and the Holocaust. At lunch, a panel discusses the topic Archives Matter. The two afternoon panels are Media Studies, and Challenging the Status Quo. Joseph\u2019s talk in this last session is called No Longer Silent: Iraqi Jewish Immigrants and the CJC.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve been working on the Iraqi Jewish community in a bunch of different ways and my most recent publications are about their food and what we can learn about their cultural history and immigration patterns through studying their food,\u201d Joseph told the Independent<\/em> in a phone interview from her home in Montreal. \u201cBut I\u2019ve also looked at, through the immigration pattern, the traumas they suffered by the expulsion from Iraq and the processes through which they had to escape from Iraq, as well as the ways in which they adapted to life in Montreal.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is only in the last decade or two, said Joseph, that Iraqi Jewish community members have \u201cbegun to present their memoirs and talk about how awful the experience from the Farhud in 1941 was. So, then I began to gather their stories.\u201d<\/p>\n

Joseph is particularly interested in the transition of the community from being unwilling to talk about their experiences to talking about them. \u201cAnd also,\u201d she said, \u201cin the process of [preparing for] this year\u2019s conference, which is celebrating 100 years of Canadian Jewish Congress, to figure out in what ways did Canadian Jewish Congress help or not help this community migrate or emigrate into Canada, which was, in fact, to Montreal. And that\u2019s where I\u2019m doing research right now. The Iraqi Jews themselves say, oh no, they didn\u2019t help us \u2026 we came alone, we found our way on our own and nobody ever helped us. We didn\u2019t ask for help. We weren\u2019t refugees\u2026. End of story.\u201d<\/p>\n

This perspective, as well as the larger Jewish community\u2019s focus at the time on dealing with the impacts of the Holocaust, contributed to the silence, said Joseph.<\/p>\n

\u201cI wanted to go behind the scenes and say, OK, but in what ways that they [Iraqi Jews] might not have known was Congress working with the Government of Canada to open the doors, because we know that the doors of Canada were closed to Jewish immigration during World War Two but, afterwards, in the 1950s the doors open…. Did anyone in Congress help Middle Eastern Jews come? That\u2019s my question. And that\u2019s what I\u2019m researching now at the archives, interviewing some people.\u201d<\/p>\n

Joseph\u2019s interest in the Iraqi Jewish community comes in part from her and her husband Howard\u2019s experiences.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn 1970,\u201d she said, \u201cwe came to Canada [from the United States]. He was invited to become the rabbi of the Spanish and Portuguese congregation. He was their rabbi for 40 years. And the congregation has many different communities \u2013 it has Iraqis, Lebanese, Moroccan, some Iranians, and we love the diversity of communities, the cultural diversity was so exciting.<\/p>\n

\u201cI never thought of studying the communities that we were friendly with and that my husband was the rabbi of, but, eventually, at some point, somebody said to me, why don\u2019t you study Canadian Jews? And I looked around me at all these wonderful, diverse ethnic communities of Jews and I said, oh, this is a great idea, why not study the people I know so well?<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd I was interested in gender. I started asking a lot of questions and I especially focused on the women. And it came out that they were willing to talk to me, especially about food, and food was an entree into learning about their experiences, both in Baghdad and the transitions to Montreal and how hard those transitions were\u2026. They couldn\u2019t find the right foods and they didn\u2019t know how to cook and there were no cookbooks and how were they going to cook and where were they going to find the spices? That was very symbolic of life, the difficulties of life in Montreal for this community that didn\u2019t like gefilte fish.\u201d<\/p>\n

Joseph is being honoured by the ACJS for attaining the \u201chighest standards of scholarship, creative and effective dissemination of research, and activism in a manner without rival in our field of Canadian Jewish studies, as well as being a respected voice in Jewish feminist studies more broadly.\u201d Not only is she being recognized for \u201cher mastery of both traditional rabbinic sources and anthropological methods,\u201d but her teaching, her work in documentary and educational film, being a founding member of the Canadian Coalition of Jewish Women for the Get, as well as participating in the founding of the Institute for Canadian Jewish Studies at Concordia University, among many other accomplishments. For more than 15 years, she has written a regular column in the Canadian Jewish News<\/em>. In one of these columns, in recent months, she recalled a time \u201cwhen the phrase \u2018liberal values\u2019 was not a dirty word.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI was raised Orthodox,\u201d she told the Independent<\/em>. \u201cMy grandfather was a great Orthodox rabbi in Williamsburg\u2026. But my parents worked very, very hard to send me to one of the great liberal Orthodox schools. It was called the Yeshivah of Flatbush, where boys and girls study together and we were taught that boys and girls could learn, and girls were included in that equation. It was one of the best schools because I learned fluent Hebrew, which was very rare, and it was a Zionist school, beginning in the \u201950s.\u201d<\/p>\n

She added, \u201cIt wasn\u2019t our liberal values in the 21st century, but it was mid-20th-century values. We learned to love Israel. We learned about justice, we learned about equality in some very interesting ways. We were patriotic Americans, my country right or wrong, which, after Vietnam, we had to rejig, but we were there before Vietnam\u2026. I\u2019ll tell you another thing that\u2019s interesting about my upbringing \u2013 we didn\u2019t learn about the Holocaust. At that age, in the \u201950s and \u201960s, parents didn\u2019t want their children traumatized by stories of the Holocaust.\u201d<\/p>\n

Between her own studies of Jewish law and those of her husband, Joseph lauded the insight and flexibility that can be found in Judaism. \u201cMy husband always taught me that, if you are a legalist, are in charge of the law \u2026 the easiest answer is no, because it means you don\u2019t have to examine and search the law. The hardest thing, but most creative thing, is to find a way to say yes\u2026. We have thousands of years of law \u2013 surely in all that precedent you can find something.\u201d<\/p>\n

As but one example, Joseph has used Jewish law to argue for the rights (and obligations) of women, and has seen progress on the feminist front.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor example,\u201d she said, \u201clet\u2019s just take the world of bat mitzvah. In the 1950s, there weren\u2019t bat mitzvahs, for the most part. Even the Conservative and Reform movements didn\u2019t want bat mitzvahs\u2026. Today, 2019, there isn\u2019t a community that doesn\u2019t offer some form of recognition of a girl\u2019s 12th birthday,\u201d including Chassidic communities.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s a transformation because of feminist critique,\u201d she said. \u201cThey will never admit it. They will say we always did it. But that\u2019s a big change, on one hand. On the other hand, it\u2019s silly, it\u2019s narishkeit<\/em>; it\u2019s small, it\u2019s nothing.\u201d<\/p>\n

But even incremental change leads to larger change, and Joseph spoke about the \u201cincredible historical research coming out \u2013 women [always] had strong ritual lives, but what\u2019s coming out now is the need for public ritual formats for women in all sectors of society.\u201d<\/p>\n

For the full schedule of and to register for the ACJS community day, visit eventbrite.ca<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Prof. Norma Joseph (photo from Association for Canadian Jewish Studies) On June 2, the Association for Canadian Jewish Studies is holding a day of lectures in the Jewish community that will be topped off with music from the Vancouver Jewish Folk Choir, the granting of the 2019 Louis Rosenberg Canadian Jewish Studies Distinguished Service Award […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":32576,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[3076,4242,1342,8994,8993,1710,6784,373],"class_list":["post-32575","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-local","tag-education","tag-history","tag-iraq","tag-jesse-toufexis","tag-norma-joseph","tag-peretz-centre","tag-rebecca-margolis","tag-richard-menkis"],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":8}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32575","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32575"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32575\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/32576"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32575"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32575"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32575"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}