Officiellement, la présence des personnes juives en Nouvelle-France était interdite sous le Régime français. Et pourtant, Esther Brandeau y débarque en 1738 et refuse de se convertir. Étant à la périphérie d’un monde majoritairement chrétien, les personnes juives se servent de plusieurs stratégies afin de survivre et deviennent ainsi des figures caméléonesques. Cette étude vise à mettre en lumière Brandeau telle qu’elle est dépeinte dans les archives ainsi que chez Pierre Lasry, auteur du tout premier roman sur ce personnage historique. À travers cette comparaison, nous pouvons également observer la relation entre la réalité et la fiction, l’Histoire et la littérature, l’historien et l’écrivain. Enfin, l’histoire Brandeau rappelle que les Juif.ves sépharades, après leur expulsion de la Péninsule Ibérique, se sont installés non seulement dans le bassin méditerranéen, mais aussi bien au-delà de l’Europe, y compris au Canada.
Canada’s Jewish population is growing slowly and aging rapidly. However, the national portrait may hide great variation across different contexts. This article examines Canada’s tenth largest Jewish community, that of London, Ontario. First, I highlight the size of the Jewish community according to different measures and how it’s changed between 2001 and 2021. Next, I examine the households in which London’s Jews live and what we can learn about changes in the characteristics of Jewish households and their members. This detailed analysis of the Canadian long-form census data highlights challenges and opportunities for local Jewish community leaders and institutions.
A late summer 2024 web panel survey of 588 Canadian Jews found that 49 percent of respondents do not identify as Zionists. Anti-Zionists rejoiced that rejection of Zionism is widespread in the Jewish community. Zionists took comfort from the same survey’s finding that 94 percent of Canadian Jews said they support the existence of a Jewish state in Israel. Many observers were puzzled over how both findings could be accurate at the same time. This paper begins to address that issue. It is based mainly on a January 2025 follow-up survey of 332 of the original respondents. The follow-up finds evidence that refusal to label oneself a Zionist is largely due to the increasingly negative connotation of the word Zionism—what linguists call “semantic drift.” This paper also finds that just 1 percent of Canadian Jews (4 percent of those who reject the Zionist label) say they are anti-Zionists.
Contrary to widespread opinion, Jewish voting patterns are not governed solely or sometimes even mainly by the commonly perceived ethno-religious interests of Jews, such as support for Israel and opposition to antisemitism. They are also governed by the same social forces that affect all Canadians. Focusing exclusively on the presumed Jewish interest underlying the Jewish vote prevents us from fully understanding why Jews vote the way they do. This paper seeks to demonstrate as much by examining trends in Jewish voting patterns over time and analyzing the factors that led some Jews to vote Liberal and others to vote Conservative in the 2025 federal general election. Along the way, it also examines the degree to which the Jewish vote helped to elect Jewish candidates. The paper is based mainly on the 2025 Canadian Jewish Voter Study, a web panel survey of five hundred Canadian Jewish adults that was in the field April 15–25, 2025, days before the April 28, 2025, federal general election.
Chaim Kruger (1877–1933) was born in Lithuania, educated in Lithuanian yeshivas, and became a personality of some importance in the Montreal Jewish community after his emigration to Canada in 1907. He was a rabbi, a rosh yeshiva (teacher of Talmud), a shokhet (kosher slaughterer), and, not least, a mainstay on the journalistic staff of Montreal’s Yiddish newspaper, Der Keneder Adler, from 1921 to 1933. At the Keneder Adler, he contributed to nearly every section of the newspaper. Kruger translated into Yiddish the wire service reports of items of national and international interest for the front page. He wrote thousands of articles under his own name as well as several pseudonyms on a wide range of subjects including extended series of articles on Judaic studies, Canada–US relations, economics, and ecology on the editorial and op-ed pages. He edited the newspaper’s weekly children’s column as well as its daily advice column. Not least, from 1927 to 1933, Chaim Kruger published no fewer than ten serial novels in the Keneder Adler under the pseudonym “Hyman Zinman.” None of them was ever published in book form. This article will briefly survey all of Kruger’s serialized novels, and examine one, Der Froyen yeger (The Stalker of Women), in greater detail. It will attempt to situate Kruger’s novelistic oeuvre in the context of the publication of scores of such serialized novels in the North American Yiddish press in the early twentieth century as well as in the context of attitudes toward popular Yiddish literature (shund) during that period.
