Amused as I was to find out that Avrumie, as he was known in shul (with the accent on the second syllable), had been calling himself a rabbi—imagine Colonel Sanders claiming to have commanded the 82nd Airborne—I was amazed to discover that U.S. government investigators allege him to be the ringleader of “one of the largest immigration fraud schemes to have ever been committed in our country.”

According to charges filed by Preet Bharara, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, David headed up a scheme that involved 26 others, among them employees at his law offices, to help illegal aliens obtain green cards for a fee. A statement from Bharara’s office says David and his cronies “created fake documents to support the fraudulent immigration applications; numerous phony ‘sponsors’—individuals who, in exchange for payments from David and his employees, agreed to falsely represent that they were sponsoring aliens for employment; corrupt accountants who created fake tax returns for fictitious sponsor companies; and a corrupt Department of Labor employee who assisted the scheme.”

They are allegedly responsible for at least 25,000 fraudulent applications between 1996 and 2009, charging clients up to $30,000 a pop. With that kind of money, Avrumie could have sponsored many a kiddush.

This shanda cake has a northern icing. David, who is Canadian by birth, was arrested in Toronto, and the judge who presided over his unsuccessful request for bail pending his extradition hearing wrote, “I have no confidence in the honesty of Mr. David in light of his conduct in misleading the court.” Meantime, the accused, who was arrested on Oct. 12, awaits extradition to the United States.

Amusement and amazement are one thing; panic didn’t set in until I recalled that, as one of the synagogue’s two regular cantors, Earl or Rabbi or Avrumie had begged God to forgive me and a shul’s worth of other Jews on more than one Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. His arrest is the biggest scandal to hit this little community since 2002, when an elderly congregant who had been diagnosed with terminal cancer bludgeoned his wife to death and then hanged himself.

Bharara’s statement goes on to say that David “was suspended from the practice of law in New York State” and, in 2006, “fled to Canada … after learning that his firm was under federal criminal investigation.” And where in Canada did he flee? To the shul that his uncle was running on Markham St. in Toronto, one of three old-style shuls still functioning in downtown Toronto. Each is what Daniel Pinkwater once called “your basic, Orthodox, bare-knuckles shul.” Yom Kippur of 1982, the first that I spent at Markham St., was marked by a shouting match between two old men who couldn’t agree about whether to open a window. “Who cares what you want?” one of them yelled. “You’re nothing here.”

“I’m nothing?” They were already nose-to-nose. “You’re the one who’s nothing.”

Nobody said, “Look who thinks he’s nothing.” Instead, the cantor interrupted himself mid-daven, turned around, and screamed, “You’re both nothing, so shut the hell up. And open the window already.”

It beats the hell out of another Israel Bonds appeal.

I once tried to phone a neighboring shul. There was no listing in the phone book; directory assistance couldn’t help. I’d asked about it when I got to shul. “You didn’t know? They took out the phone because the shammes”—the guy who ran this rabbi-less congregation—“was making book on it.”

Avrumie wasn’t with us this past Yom Kippur. He and his uncle stormed out of the shul six or seven months ago, after an argument with the custodian, and never came back—and his absence was definitely noticed. Avrumie had been leading prayers ever since health problems made it impossible for his Uncle Sholem, a superb baal-tefillah, to go on doing so. Saturday after Saturday, holiday after holiday, even on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the aspirations and regrets of an entire congregation were borne up to heaven on the wings of his maddeningly enthusiastic and utterly tone-deaf yawp.

In a shul that was once home to a mentally handicapped man in his sixties who would rinse his hands in the sink in the foyer and then dry them on the prayer shawls or coattails of daveners in the sanctuary, Avrumie didn’t really stand out. He seemed harmless enough, part Barney Rubble, part Willie Gingrich, the lawyer played by Walter Matthau in The Fortune Cookie. So what if he thought he could sing? At least his Hebrew was OK. His fondness for gematria, a venerable technique of biblical interpretation based on the numerical values of Hebrew letters, was considered a harmless, if slightly tedious, tic. In a milieu that often looks like a Yiddish-theater version of Of Mice and Men, strained or implausible interpretations of scriptural texts can’t really compete with the quotidian slapstick.

Sure, one of my teachers once defined gematria as “the last refuge of a guy who hasn’t looked at the sedreh”—someone forced to speak about a Torah portion that he hasn’t bothered to look over. Once you get the basic idea, you can do it in your sleep and still produce an illusion of insight—you can make anything mean whatever you want it to mean.

Avrumie is so fond of gematria that he even wrote a book about it called Code of the Heart. His interpretations are a tad discursive and difficult to excerpt, but his introduction provides a taste of his style and method: “Numbers are very important and relevant since we utilize them on a daily basis and it is easy to relate to them.” A tweet from Sept. 18, before he was arrested in Toronto, gives us a concrete illustration of his thesis about numbers. (I’ve substituted a transliteration for the final phrase, which he gives in Hebrew; spacing, punctuation and capitalization are Avrumie’s):

The last word in Torah,Israel has a gematria of 541.the first word in Torah, bereishis, has a gematria of 913.the difference is Dovid moshiach.

Your guess is as good as mine.

Bharara, the U.S. attorney, claims that some of Avrumie’s profits from the immigration scheme were funneled into Canada “through a bank account in the name of” his book, and I was struck by the fact that a number of Avrumie’s co-accused are thanked in the acknowledgements of Code of the Heart. Nu, you spend part of your time forging official documents, then use some of the proceeds to help demonstrate the inerrant authenticity of another document: Iz dos yidishkayt? You call this Judaism? Is evil being used in the service of good, or are Avrumie’s gematrias the fruit of a poisonous tree?

And what about Avrumie as a representative of the congregation? I know from what they told me in the schools where I learned gematria that God, if he’s listening at all, won’t hold any of Avrumie’s possible crimes against the hapless congregants on Markham St. We’ve got enough on our own consciences without having to worry about his.

At noon Israeli time, gunmen did a drive-by on an Israeli bus. Soldiers who rushed to the scene were greeted by detonated explosives. A mortar and then a pair of anti-tank missiles were then fired into Israel from Sinai; the second one hit a private car and killed six. Prime Minister Netanyahu promised to respond to the three apparently coordinated attacks, which took place near the southern port of Eilat, and Defense Minister Barak claimed that they originated from Gaza while also arguing that they “demonstrate the weakening of Egypt’s control over the Sinai peninsula and the expansion of terrorist activity there.” I am no expert, but the implication would be that, in a stark reversal of what would have happened when President Mubarak was in power, the terrorists slipped out of Gaza into Israel and the Sinai in order to perpetrate the attacks. One explanation for why they might do this is that they could be more radical even than Hamas, which may have prevented them from doing this directly from Gaza, which Hamas controls. But that is just speculation. Hamas declined responsibility for the attacks … which it celebrated: “We praise them because they were against soldiers,” said an official (actually, most of them weren’t).

In an interesting twist, this Saturday’s planned #j14 social justice protests have been cancelled in light of the attacks. Perhaps, per Yoav Fromer, young Israelis are noticing the other problems their country faces?

Meanwhile, take it away, Mr. President:

The future of Syria must be determined by its people, but President Bashar al-Assad is standing in their way. His calls for dialogue and reform have rung hollow while he is imprisoning, torturing, and slaughtering his own people. We have consistently said that President Assad must lead a democratic transition or get out of the way. He has not led. For the sake of the Syrian people, the time has come for President Assad to step aside.

Canada and the European Union followed suit (so did prominent Rep. Eric Cantor, Republican from Virginia, who is currently in Israel). The U.S. also placed further sanctions on his regime.

I certainly don’t always agree with Tablet Magazine’s Mideast columnist Lee Smith. But he, who said Obama should say what he said today in April, has certainly been vindicated by events here (as have I, except I was far later to the party). Engagement with Assad—both in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and just generally—has clearly failed. Obama went on to note, “The United States cannot and will not impose this transition upon Syria. It is up to the Syrian people to choose their own leaders,” as if in further confirmation that this has nothing to do with the U.S. Here are some of Lee’s Syria columns from the past, which have all argued that engagement, and the assumption—or even hope—that Assad is a “reformer” is a pipe dream.

7 Dead in Attacks on Israelis Near Egypt [NYT]
Obama Calls on Syrian President to Step Down [NYT]
Seven Killed in Series of Terrorist Attacks in Southern Israel [Haaretz]
Netanyahu Promises Israeli Response to Eilat Attacks [JPost]
Hamas Praises Deadly Attacks in Israel [DPA/Vos Is Neias?]
Israeli Social Justice Campaigners Cancel Weekend Protests After Attacks in South [Haaretz]
Obama on Syria [Politico]

As prime minister, Harper has transformed Canadian foreign policy toward Israel and the Middle East. Abandoning Canada’s longstanding posture of even-handedness in the Arab-Israeli conflict, the country has become arguably the most pro-Israel country in the world. From being the first world leader to cut off funds to the Palestinian Authority in 2006 when it was taken over by Hamas, to speaking out against growing global anti-Semitism, Harper has embraced Israel as has no Canadian leader before him. “It is hard to find a country friendlier to Israel than Canada these days,” gushed Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, in 2010. “No other country in the world has demonstrated such a full understanding of us.”

While Harper’s pro-Israel bona fides are not in doubt, his motivations have been less clear. In political terms, Harper may not stand to gain much by adopting such a passionately pro-Israel stance. In a country of nearly 34 million, Canadian Jews number only 315,000—and that figure is declining. In fact, Jews were the only ethnic group in Canada to show a decline nationally according to the 2006 census, a trend that shows no sign of reversing. In contrast, the number of Canadian Muslims is expected to nearly triple in the next 20 years, from about 940,000 in 2010 to nearly 2.7 million in 2030, according to the Pew Research Center. There are also nearly 500,000 Canadian Arabs, a somewhat overlapping group. Clearly, if there is an emerging demographic to be captured for partisan purposes, Jews are not it.

Of course, sheer numbers are only one measure of a minority’s clout. “Canada’s Israel lobby is every bit as powerful as America’s,” says John Mearsheimer, co-author of the controversial book The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, even though Canada’s national elections are publicly funded, making financial contributions far less important in the Canadian political system than in the United States. Brent Sasley, a political scientist at the University of Texas at Arlington who studies Canadian ethnic demographics, agrees that Canadian Jews have been more successful lobbyists than their Arab and Muslim counterparts but argues that historical factors above all are responsible. “Put simply, Jews have had a much longer history of acclimatization into the Canadian economic, social, and political environment,” Sasley has written.

But Harper seems to be acting out of personal conviction. According to Gerry Nicholls, who worked with Harper at the National Citizens Coalition, a conservative economic organization, from 1997 to 2001, the future prime minister was praising Israel in those days, too. “Though our group didn’t really deal with foreign policy, he was always very clear that he believed Canada should be a loyal, true ally of Israel,” says Nicholls. “There was no political calculation then, no votes to be had.”

For all Harper’s undeniable success in making himself attractive to a broad coalition of voters in Canada, he also emerged from a very distinct social and political milieu that might be more familiar to Americans than to many Canadians. Though born in Toronto, Harper moved soon after high school to work in the oil industry in the western province of Alberta. He received his bachelor and master’s degree in economics at the University of Calgary there, and he represented the local riding, or county subdivision, in parliament. Though most Americans think of Canada as a European-style social democracy, Harper’s Alberta in many ways shares a political and economic climate in tune with pro-business U.S. states. Buoyed by oil reserves, the province follows behind only Texas and Delaware in measures of economic liberalization in North America, according to one study. Alberta also boasts Canada’s strongest support for loose gun laws, opposition to same-sex marriage, and support for the death penalty. In 1997, Harper called Canada “a Northern European welfare state in the worst sense of the term.” In 2003, Alberta’s right-wing Premier Ralph Klein sent a letter to President George W. Bush expressing support for the Iraq War. Harper and another prominent conservative Albertan, Stockwell Day, wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal in 2003 calling Canada’s position to opt out of the war a mistake, a position that was highly unpopular in other parts of the country.

Harper’s strong feelings for Israel can be seen as consistent with his distinctly conservative background and worldview. He believes Israel is a bulwark of democracy and Western civilization warring against terrorists in a region governed by brutal autocrats. The prime minister said at an Ottawa conference on anti-Semitism in 2010 that he supports Israel “not just because it is the right thing to do, but because history shows us, and the ideology of the anti-Israel mob tells us all too well, that those who threaten the existence of the Jewish people are in the longer term a threat to all of us.” Harper’s support for the current leadership of the Jewish state is perfectly in line with his other beliefs, then, that share similarities with the Republican Party’s agenda in the United States. Shrewd politician that he is, however, Harper is fully aware that many of Canada’s liberal laws—on health care and abortion, for instance—are untouchable for any party aspiring to majority status. On Israel, by contrast, the prime minister has been able to transform Canadian policy with very little opposition.

Harper began steering Canada in a pro-Israel direction soon after taking office in early 2006. During that summer’s skirmish between Israel and Hezbollah, the prime minister defended Israel’s right to defend itself, blamed Hezbollah for the war and civilian deaths in Lebanon, and rejected widespread calls for an immediate ceasefire. In 2008, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations presented Harper with its inaugural International Leadership Award for boycotting the Durban II Conference, a U.N. conference against racism, and for consistently siding with Israel at the United Nations. Harper said in 2008 that global anti-Semitism was rising and that “anti-Israeli sentiment, [is] really just a thinly disguised veil for good old-fashioned anti-Semitism, which I think is completely unacceptable.” Most recently, in May, Harper maneuvered to keep a G8 statement from specifically calling for talks based on a return to Israel’s 1967 borders, plus land swaps negotiated with Palestinians, an idea pressed by President Barack Obama. Haaretz reported that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had called Harper to veto inclusion of the language, though Harper’s office denied the claim. In early 2010, Harper’s Junior Foreign Affairs Minister Peter Kent declared that any attack on Israel would be assumed to be an attack on Canada, a statement Kent clarified as reflecting the prime minister’s personal feelings.

The changes in Canadian foreign policy have not gone unnoticed by Israel or its critics. Al Jazeera aired a documentary last year titled The Other Special Relationship on the Canada-Israel alliance. After Canada recently lost a bid for a seat on the United Nations Security Council, Harper suggested it was because of the country’s stalwart defense of Israel.

For the prime minister, however, it was a small price to pay. “Whether it is at the United Nations or any other international forum, the easy thing to do is simply to just get along and go along with this anti-Israeli rhetoric,” Harper said. “As long as I am prime minister, whether it is at the U.N. or the Francophonie or anywhere else, Canada will take a stand whatever the cost.”

Jordan Michael Smith, a Canadian writer living in Washington, has written for the Forward, Jewcy, the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and Newsweek.

• Egyptian pro-democracy activists, impatient with the slow pace of reform, have been organizing and calling for a “Second Revolution,” and it begins today. [LAT]

• The U.S. Senate confirmed Dan Shapiro as America’s next ambassador to Israel. [All Headline News]

• In a new poll, 40 percent of Israelis said they thought the Obama administration was pro-Palestinian; only 12 percent thought it pro-Israel. [JPost]

• Columnist Charles Krauthammer is with the 40 percent. [WP]

• The State Department expressed cautious optimism that Egypt’s opening the Rafah Crossing into Gaza, tomorrow, would ease the humanitarian situation but would not allow for additional weapons to get in (they’re already mostly smuggled in I guess?). [DPA/Haaretz]

Throughout his previous term, Harper hammered his the Liberals for alleged anti-Israel positions in an effort to pull more votes from the generally Liberal-favoring, 350,000-strong Jewish community. And it appears to have worked: The Conservatives held several seats and even won some more in heavily Jewish districts, including ones in which the incumbent Liberals were Jews (two of these went down to Jewish Tories). Even Liberal Irwin Cotler, probably the highest-profile Jewish politician in Canada—who represents Montreal’s Mont Royal neighborhood—escaped only with the closest victory of his career.

Canadian Leader Celebrates Victory Over Opposition [NYT]
Tories Take Some ‘Jewish’ Ridings From Liberals [The Canadian Jewish News]
Related: Oh, Canada [Tablet Magazine]
Perky ‘Canada’ Has Own Government, Laws [The Onion]
Earlier: Canada PM Harper Continues Drive for Jewish Vote

My wife is a Jew. My son is a Jew. I am not. Nearly all of my closest friends live in various states of mixed marriages, and if you know any Jews—any urban-dwelling non-Orthodox Jews, that is—it’s nearly impossible that you don’t know at least a few mixed couples. My mother-in-law can recall going to classes in her small-town Ontario synagogue in the 1950s where “Intermarriage is the Second Holocaust” was written on the chalkboard. The attempt to prevent Jewish intermarriage may be the most epically failed social-engineering experiment of all time. The most recent National Jewish Population Survey set the mixed-marriage rate for Jewish newlyweds in North America at 47 percent, but that was 2002, and the rate was accelerating. It is likely that more than half of Jewish newlyweds in North America today are marrying non-Jews. The response from institutional Judaism varies from outright horror to sighing acceptance, but the sighs and the horror don’t matter. Fearing intermarriage is like fearing weather, equally pointless and silly. It is much better to prepare. We are seeing the emergence of a category of gentile that is historically unique: millions of non-Jews who are attached to Jews but not affiliated with Jews. The emergence of a large group of these attached goys (goyim, to be precise) is a highly significant social development, an unprecedented development even, and it raises obvious questions: Who are the goys? What do we mean? And, of course, are we good for the Jews?

I am not going to pretend that I can give a precise definition of a goy. In biblical Hebrew, the word means “nation,” and in Yiddish it is simply “gentile.” Even if the term does have a faint pejorative sense, we don’t have to go very far to reclaim “goy.” It’s a word that Jews use to describe non-Jews, and that’s the sense I mean: non-Jews in a Jewish context. Converts don’t count, obviously. I have resisted conversion because I cannot say that I believe in God, but several atheistic friends have converted without this quibble of mine, spurred by the robust atheism of many Jews who dutifully attend synagogue. A rabbi I once knew told me that Catholics make the best converts to Judaism: They are already used to lighting candles for reasons they only dimly understand. But the converts have put their money where their mouths are, and who am I to doubt their full inclusion among the Chosen People?

Goyishness may at first seem like a variety of philo-Semitism, but it isn’t really. You occasionally meet goys who fall in love with everything Jewish, particularly early in their relationships with Jews. I myself definitely fell into this category, reading Rashi and Pirkei Avot, going to klezmer concerts, and so on. But it soon passed. A certain brand of clichéd philo-Semitism is well-established in North America, of course: Woody Allen and matzo-ball soup and mother-in-law jokes and the rest of it. Pop culture revels in these stereotypes. Political and religious leaders indulge them. Among literary types, they’re commonplace. The clichés are mostly harmless, if sometimes strikingly inaccurate. (Anyone with a Jamaican, Chinese, WASP, or Italian mother can attest that Jewish mothers have no monopoly on the deployment of guilt, for example.) But philo-Semitism can be dangerous, too, particularly in Europeans. Philo-Semites tend to believe that Jews, because of their unique history, are better or should be better than other people, which is a hideous idea; it explains why Israel is held to a completely different standard of conduct than any other country in the world. (Even as a write this, I realize how much it reveals the peculiar position I am in as a goy: I consider myself so intertwined with the Jews, though I am not in any way Jewish, that I distrust Jew-lovers.)

Goyishness is a kind of belonging, with separation—actually a rather pleasant position to be in. Goys are a hyphenated identity in a world of hyphenated identities, pioneers of epiphyte culture. In my son’s kindergarten at a good public school in a nice area of Toronto, almost every kid is half-something; if his class is anything to go by, the world is filling up with black girls with green eyes and blonde hair and rambunctious half-Korean, half-Italian boys. Jews are at the forefront of this hyphenation. There’s a tendency, in the wider discussion of intermarriage, to assume that the phenomenon is something that has happened or is happening to Judaism, an outside force requiring evasive maneuvers. The truth is that the rise of goys in Jewish life over the past 50 years has emerged out of realities within Judaism and not outside them. Partly, the Jewish tendency to exogamy has emerged naturally from the cosmopolitanism of people who have made their homes in the biggest, and most mixed, cities of the late 20th and early 21st century. The institutional incoherency of Judaism has also done its bit. Goys fall between the cracks, and Judaism is full of cracks (“that’s how the light gets in,” according to Leonard Cohen). In Rome, in the year 1555, Pope Paul IV decreed that the Jews of the city could have only one synagogue. Instead of banding together under the impetus of the political nightmare and coming to a theological compromise, the Jews of Rome set up six different spaces for worship within the same synagogue. That magnificent fractiousness means that the disapproval of any given rabbi is more or less irrelevant; if you want a rabbi who approves, just walk a little farther down the counter. When my mother-in-law heard “Intermarriage is the Second Holocaust,” the message failed to sink in, at least in part, because the rabbi who wrote it down was not an authority the way, say, a Catholic priest is a conduit to God.

My experience of rabbis has been like my experience of priests of all types and kinds: I find their presumption of spiritual and moral authority hilarious and somewhat grotesque. Most rabbis—not all—have tended to look at me, when we’re introduced, rather the way a vegetarian looks at a fat man eating a bacon double-cheeseburger—with a mixture of beleaguered tolerance and suppressed abjection. There have been several who have spoken to my wife and not to me. But who cares? Where intermarriage is concerned, they don’t matter anyway. If they mattered, would the majority of Jews be marrying non-Jews? No. For day-to-day affairs, Jewish society is run by the bubbes. And while the rabbis disapprove of intermarriage, for the most part the bubbes have made peace with it. And they are who matter.

The lack of institutional structure—the cracks in the system that have allowed intermarriage to blossom—have another consequence for the lives of goys; our households necessarily work idiosyncratically. This may seem like a minor point, but its consequences are vast. In general the idiosyncrasy of the contemporary marriage is one of the least understood and most powerful forces shaping the future. The fact that your family doesn’t have to be like other people’s families, that in a sense you can’t be like other people, is transforming private life, and for everybody, not just those of us in mixed marriages. The plethora of magazine and newspaper articles about trends in family life doesn’t establish any pattern other than the constant shifting of the patterns—family life has become an always-turning kaleidoscope. The mixed Jewish family is at the center of that transformation: We are among the clearest examples of how identity has become a choice, rather than an irreducible substance.

When my son’s Sunday school classes are finished, we go out and eat bacon for lunch—my son and I but not my wife. When my wife and son go out for Yom Kippur services, I stay home to bake the lasagnas for the break fast. (This is a side benefit to having a goy around.) We have decided, for reasons that are more or less unrelated to Judaism, to have a digital Shabbat in our house—no screens of any kind for one day a week. And when we decided to take this step we chose to block off Friday night to Saturday night for the holiday, without giving it much thought. We even do 25 hours, not 24, following the principle of building a fence around the law. We build a fence around the law, which we violate simply by the existence of our family.

I know that some will find these choices distasteful—shallow playacting, reducing religious matters to mere lifestyle questions. Perhaps so. My point is that when I look around the mixed households that I know, I am amazed not by the evidence of the dissolution of Judaism but by the way Jewish practices continue to exert themselves in the lives of people whom they should properly exclude. Goys necessarily have a fluid relationship to ethnic identity. Like Barack Obama, they are going to choose who they are, whom they belong to, and who belongs to them. One consequence of the destabilization of ethnic identity is that some Jews will decide to have nothing to do with Judaism. Another consequence is that some non-Jews will decide to act like Jews. The bris for my son was the most moving event of my life. Because the man who holds the baby for the ceremony has to be a Jew, my dad couldn’t do it, so we got my wife’s grandfather’s friend, a Holocaust survivor. The ceremony combined the nonsensical with the eminently reasonable: The circumcision itself a relic from Middle Eastern shepherds dead for 5,000 years contained within a small party eight days after the birth to recognize and to celebrate the existence of a new human being. I was just happy my son was alive and that there were people around who cared.

The traditional way of viewing mixed marriage is as a threat to Jewish life, akin to the explosion of ultra-Orthodox births or the continued existential crisis of Israel. I’m not sure this view is altogether healthy. Some of us are good friends to have. Chelsea Clinton’s a goy. Mark Kelly’s one. In my experience, and I admit my evidence is entirely anecdotal, goys are much more hawkish than their partners on the question of Israel. I remember returning home from a summer job working at a children’s camp one year, and an ancient relative asked me, entirely unselfconsciously, “So, I heard last summer you were working for Jews.” Every time Israel comes on the news I hear again that tone of casual anti-Semitism she assumed we shared. Even in multicultural, boring, agreeable Toronto, the Hebrew school has security guards and computerized entry passes. Somebody wants to blow the children up. Goys know that this is not normal.

Goys, it seems obvious to me, are potentially an immense strength. They are exactly the kind of people you want for friends. God agrees with me, or at least the Torah does. It’s always Ruth who gets the attention in the wedding ceremonies between Jews and non-Jews; “Your God will be my God, your people my people” is the Corinthians 1:13 of mixed marriages. Moses’ wife, Zipporah, a goy, never gets her due. She saves his life when, in a confusing twist, God briefly decides to kill him on his way home to Egypt out of Midian; she saves him by circumcising their sons Gershom and Eliezer and placing the foreskins at his feet. Later when Aaron and Miriam complain that Moses has married a non-Jew, God punishes them by giving Miriam leprosy. Why shouldn’t contemporary goys, as invested as Zipporah, not be just as useful?

Recently, my wife and I were toying with the idea of having another baby, contemplating different kids’ names. For a boy, I suggested Simcha, which I absolutely love; it means “joy.” “A kid deserves a name his father can pronounce,” my wife countered. After Sunday school the other day, my son described the rules of building a sukkah to me. “You have to be able to see three stars through the roof,” he said. I had that feeling I so often have when new facts about Judaism are communicated to me: That is crazy and beautiful.

When my son started attending Sunday school, at first I didn’t want to go to the parent meetings and school holiday celebrations. I didn’t want that goy-meets-a-rabbi feeling. But one day, around Hanukkah, I went to pick him up and saw my folly. I realized instantly, looking over the classroom, that there’s not much difference between his Jewish class and his regular kindergarten class. My son’s best friend there is a kid whose dad is a 6-foot-6 Indonesian engineer. Another dad is a professional DJ with shoulder-length dreads. My son’s experience of learning about Judaism will not be homogenous. This is the future: a kid with ice-blue eyes and blonde hair makes friends with a couple of black sisters, and they’re all Jews.

I had another reaction, too, looking over that room of the mixed and the mixed-up. These are my people, I thought. It’s like what Bernard Malamud said at the end of “Angel Levine:” “There are Jews everywhere.” There are goys everywhere, too.

Stephen Marche is a novelist and a columnist for Esquire. His latest book, How Shakespeare Changed Everything, will be published this spring. Follow him on Twitter @StephenMarche.

While we never dared retaliate against the stunning stained glass of the town’s ubiquitous Catholic churches, vigorous snowball battles between Jewish and French kids (often with rocks embedded in the snow) were an almost daily activity in the wintertime. I recall this warfare rather fondly, as I do many more unhealthy aspects of growing up in a charged and diverse environment in the days before “diversity” became an abstract social ideal.

We kids did not shake; we fought back. And the shattering of glass did not evoke Kristallnacht to the many equally unshaken Holocaust survivors then living in Outremont. The most frequently targeted shuls simply installed wired window shields. Problem solved.

How different has been the worried response to this weekend’s attacks on four synagogues and a yeshiva in Montreal’s most heavily Jewish-populated township, Cote St. Luc. The vandalism, which left a number of windows shattered but no one hurt and no Torah scrolls or sacred books damaged, led the evening news on both of Montreal’s English television stations. “Montreal Jews Shaken After Four Synagogues, School Vandalized” read the headlines in Monday’s Montreal Gazette. The story also led the Sunday evening news on Canada’s national CTV network.

One might credit this sudden flood of attention to the prevailing ethic of political correctness, in which slurs and petty hate crimes that were once accepted as part of life in the big city are now taken with the utmost seriousness. After all, the very idea of creating a separate, more seriously punishable, criminal category for “hate-based crimes” only emerged in the 1980s, in both Canada and the United States.

Yet the real reason the recent spate of attacks on Montreal’s Jewish institutions—as well as some recent physical assaults on Hasidic Jews in Outremont—is newsworthy is that ethnic violence is no longer local, and the perpetrators (those who have been apprehended to date) are not Quebecois street toughs. After the firebombing of the United Talmud Torah in the Montreal suburb of Ville St. Laurent in 2004, the nasty work of North African Muslim immigrants, the Jews of Montreal came to a painful realization that they were no longer dealing with rock-filled snowballs. Today’s attacks are not a continuation of the lame local games we used to play. They are something new, and more frightening.

The Montreal Chamber of Commerce has long showcased the city as a taste of Europe within driving distance of New York and Boston, which it is. But, along with the sweetness of old Europe, Montrealers have been tasting the ugliness of the new Europe’s serious violence and racial tensions, generated by a rapidly growing underclass of Muslim immigrants.

Unlike American states, as well as Canada’s other nine provinces, Quebec enjoys complete autonomy in the domain of immigration policy—and has long given priority to immigrants from former French colonies such as Haiti and Vietnam. Today, the largest numbers of French speakers come from former colonies in Arab lands from Morocco to Lebanon. The city of Montreal today has the world’s largest Lebanese community outside of Beirut and the second-largest Moroccan and Algerian diasporas, after Paris and Marseilles. As in France itself, these immigrants have brought a deep, historically rooted contempt for European cosmopolitanism and heavy doses of anti-Semitism. Those apprehended by the Montreal police and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police for involvement in the dozen or so attacks on Jewish institutions in the city during the past five years—which included the fire-bombings of a synagogue and a Jewish day school—were all Quebeckers of North African descent. None were native French Quebecois.

How the city’s Jewish community, already severely depleted by the mass exodus that followed the rise to power of the separatist Parti Quebecois, fares remains to be seen. But one thing is certain: Attacks on Jewish institutions such as those of last weekend are part of a grave international problem. And Montreal is increasingly becoming a lure for those who dream of more spectacular—and potentially devastating—acts of terror.

• Later this month, Netanyahu will become the first Israeli prime minister to visit Canada since Yitzhak Rabin. [Arutz Sheva]

• Manhattan’s Union Square will be the site of a massive Sukkah competition this September. [Sukkah City]

• More on the new Dubai Murder Mystery suspects: One is an Israeli citizen who is wanted in New Zealand for passport fraud. [Haaretz]

• A New York-style deli settles down in the relatively exotic realm of … Tel Aviv. [Forward]

• Tonight, the unofficial poet laureate of New Jersey Bruce Springsteen and the onetime official poet laureate of the United States (and Nextbook Press author) Robert Pinsky will discuss Pinsky’s poem “Jersey Rain”. You get three guesses as to which state this event is taking place in. [INJersey]

‘And my machine, she’s a dud/She’s stuck in the mud/Somewhere in the swamps of Jersey.’

Several groups, including Canadian Friends of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, have called for the book not to be placed on a special reading list formulated each year by the Ontario Library Association. Ingall disagrees:

Might young people have better critical faculties than we give them credit for? … being disingenuous and hyperbolically alarmist about the threats posed by novels—as opposed to the threats caused by shutting down all discussion—means we don’t get the chance to elucidate and debate. If The Shepherd’s Granddaughter can teach us anything, it’s that even educated people with a glorious literary tradition sometimes feel justified in banning books. And we’re all poorer for it.

(Very vaguely relatedly, today Tablet Magazine published a report on anti-Zionism at Canadian universities.)

Ingall’s article prompted a robust discussion in the comments section. Many agreed with Ingall. “I oppose censorship—and with books, it is too much like book burning,” argued fred lapides. As an alternative, he suggested, “Swamp the papers with letters suggesting the book is very biased and does not tell readers how youngsters are taught to hate and kill Israelis and how grandfather probably wants Israel destroyed.”

But some argued that, while perhaps the book should not be banned outright, the problem is that it is currently being actively promoted. Foremost among the commenters who made this argument was Brian Henry, a Jewish Tribune writer (and Toronto parent) who wrote an impassioned open letter asking that the book not appear on the reading list. In his comment, Henry says, “Our schools shouldn’t promote anyone’s political agenda, but with this book that’s precisely what they’re doing. The article also understates the book’s offensiveness: it portrays Israelis as child-murderers, commanded by the Jewish God to steal and kill.”

Henry advocates that, in the future, the reading list include “alternate material about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for kids of this age.” Ingall herself, weighing in in the comments, has vowed to take up that particular challenge:

Next week’s column will offer suggestions of different young adult novels about the “matzav,” as the Israel-Palestinian conflict is called in Israel — it means The Situation (which sounds to me like a great name for a band). It will offer more ideas, short of calling for a book ban, about what to do when you’re horrified by a children’s or young adult book. Right now, I’m frantically reading.

In other words: stay tuned!

Banned in Canada [Tablet Magazine]

UPDATE: Guess what? They are brothers!

The violence contradicts the Canadian government’s dramatically pro-Israel turn in the last several years. Compared to America’s “love-fest,” Canada has always been more “reservedly respectful” of “both Israel and Jews,” says Ted Sokolsky, president of the UJA Federation of Greater Toronto. Former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien’s Liberal government from 1993 to 2003 treated Israel coldly. But since 2006, Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative government has been enthusiastically pro-Israel. Last spring, Canada led in boycotting the Durban Review Conference in Geneva, fearing a rehash of the 2001 anti-Zionist hate-fest.

Thanks especially to Irwin Cotler, a Liberal MP and former justice minister, support for Israel is what Canadians call “all party.” This year, the Liberal leader and human-rights activist Michael Ignatieff repudiated the false analogy that has become a central anti-Zionist tenet: that of equating the Israeli-Palestinian national conflict with the systematic racism of South Africa’s Afrikaner regime. “International law defines ‘apartheid’ as a crime against humanity,” Ignatieff has said. “Labeling Israel as an ‘apartheid’ state is a deliberate attempt to undermine the legitimacy of the Jewish state itself. Criticism of Israel is legitimate. Attempting to describe its very existence as a crime against humanity is not.”

Nevertheless, despite all this goodwill off-campus, and even considering Canadians’ cultural aversion to conflict, many Jewish college students in Canada report feeling “uncomfortable, unsafe, and targeted” on campuses, says Zach Newburgh, the Hillel Montreal president. Newburgh transferred from the University of Toronto to McGill partially because of Toronto’s aggressive anti-Israel environment, which peaks during anti-Israel week. Many Jewish students felt besieged, “no matter what stripe they were,” Newburgh recalls, “whether they were Orthodox, Reform, Conservative, or just Jewish, had been to Jewish summer camp or not, had been to Israel or not—it did not matter.” Newburgh received death threats, he says, because he criticized the IAW’s activities in online forums.

One of the most violent anti-Israel incidents ever in North America remains the September 9, 2002, riot at Concordia University in Montreal. Protesters blocked Benjamin Netanyahu, then on the global lecture circuit, from speaking, smashed windows, threw pennies at Jewish students to mock them as cheap, and shut down the school’s downtown campus. For years, Concordia was the center of Canadian anti-Zionism, a dubious mantle York University now wears.

Canadian anti-Zionism, like much student activism, benefits from the minority megaphone effect, in which small but shrill groups can command attention, especially on today’s quiescent campuses. Reut, the centrist Tel Aviv-based think tank, recently identified the anti-Zionists’ “hub” strategy: concentrating activist firepower in calm, carefully selected areas to allow a few marginal but persistent protesters to masquerade as members of a mass movement. Today’s campuses serve as excellent hubs.

Much anti-Israel activity on campus reflects a strategy with Soviet and Nazi roots, hatched in Durban, South Africa, days before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Both the U.N.’s World Conference Against Racism and the parallel, non-governmental organization meetings singled out one form of nationalism as racist—Jewish nationalism, meaning Zionism. The NGO Forum produced a declaration announcing “a policy of complete and total isolation of Israel as an Apartheid state.” This “Durban Strategy” targeted Israel as illegitimate because of its alleged racism, fueling the BDS movement, which seeks to isolate Israel through Boycotts, Divestments, and Sanctions.

“BDSers” selected London as a European hub and then targeted Toronto, making York University and University of Toronto anti-Israel hotspots. Off-campus, agitators advocated boycotting Israeli wine, a museum exhibition showcasing the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the Toronto Film Festival’s celebration of Tel Aviv’s centennial. Those efforts backfired.

Delegitimizers have targeted Toronto, like London, because a core group of activists already exists, and the anti-Zionists believe their campaign might flourish there. Many of the most strident anti-Zionists are Muslims. Canada’s Muslim population grew more than tenfold from 1981 to 1991 then doubled to nearly 600,000 by 2001, with a strong concentration in Toronto. “University of Toronto, where I spent my first year, had a far more oppressive anti-Israel atmosphere than McGill,” says Mookie Kideckel, the president of Hillel McGill, who in February mobilized hundreds of McGill students to defeat a resolution advocating boycotting Israel. Many observers believe that there are more Muslims at the University of Toronto than at McGill, and that the Muslims at the Toronto campus are more active.

The Canadian multicultural “salad bowl” facilitates ethnic bonding, for better and worse. Jews, Italians, Greeks, and Muslims often find it easier to maintain their traditions and distinct identities in Canada, without the pressures of America’s “melting pot.” In Canada, according to the UJA’s Sokolsky, ethnic divisions are more pronounced. “As a result,” he says, “these ethnic groups tend to be much more siloed” than in the United States. “Behavior we would think of as improper and undemocratic is much more readily accepted socially.”

The virulent anti-Zionism often leeching into anti-Semitism embedded in some Canadian Muslims’ identities receives more in-group encouragement and even government support here. Harper’s government has cut funding to the Canadian Arab Federation and the Canadian Islamic Congress for supporting Hamas and Hezbollah and demonizing Israel, which has triggered accusations of governmental racism.

As in the rest of the West, Canadian anti-Zionism feeds off an unlikely alliance between Islamist fundamentalists and cosmopolitan leftists. Canadian political culture is more European and New Left than American political culture. David Luchins, an American political science professor at Touro College who worked for the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan for two decades, calls Canada a “goo-goo nation,” using the traditional American term for progressive good-government advocates. In this case it means trying to be an upstanding member of the community of nations, which is admirable, but also a devotee of the United Nations, which risks being delusional.

Many Canadian elites still worship at the altar of the international human rights regime McGill Professor John Humphrey helped construct after World War II. An elaborate organizational infrastructure also intensifies and funds Canadian anti-Zionism as an expression of general solidarity with the left, including the CBC public broadcasting system, leading labor unions, some government-mandated student organizations, and certain Quebec nationalist organizations. Jean Ouellette, a retired professor at the Université de Montréal, notes that, like most Canadians, Quebecois see the conflict “in purely territorial terms and not as an existential divide between Jews and Arabs and between Islamism and the West.” Thus, if campuses are among the most Europeanized—and most anti-Israel—spaces in the United States, Canada is the most Europeanized and most anti-Israel space in North America.

Facing this aggressive offshoot of multicultural leftism dominating Canadian universities is an Anglicized administrative culture more primed to appease radicals than to ensure that embattled Jewish students feel safe in their campus homes. The leading Canadian universities are public; most leading American universities are private. Private institutions enjoy more latitude to curtail rambunctious student groups and are more donor-sensitive. At pricier private schools, it is rare for individuals to “take one class and stay as professional activists,” which was a “big problem at Concordia,” notes Dan Hadad, the marketing and communications director for the Canadian Council for Israel and Jewish Advocacy.

This year’s under-attended Israeli Apartheid Week activities revealed that despite all their advantages, the pro-Palestinian forces trying to delegitimize Israel with the apartheid slur have failed to mount a mass movement. Most students on the targeted campuses north and south of the border ignored the activities. The Middle East remains a marginal matter for most Canadians and Americans.

Pro-Israel forces have also pushed back. “Buycotts” have trumped “boycotts,” most notably in Toronto, where Israeli wine, the Dead Sea museum exhibit, and the Israeli films all sold out when targeted. This year, editorials and politicians in Canada denounced IAW vehemently while in the United States IAW was mostly ignored. On February 25, the Legislative Assembly of Ontario unanimously passed, by voice vote, a resolution condemning Israel Apartheid Week “as it serves to incite hatred against Israel, a democratic state that respects the rule of law and human rights, and the use of the word apartheid in this context diminishes the suffering of those who were victims of a true apartheid regime in South Africa.”

University administrators are also starting to lead. Last year, Carlton University—invoking Canadian human rights and equity laws that are less protective of free speech than American laws—banned an IAW poster caricaturing a menacing Israeli Army helicopter shooting at a Gaza child clutching his teddy bear. Others are objecting on the grounds, as a National Post editorial put it, that trying “to vilify a single country [is] an inherently bigoted exercise. Unlike, say, ‘anti-racism week’ or ‘diversity awareness week,’ IAW does not champion a concept—rather, it targets a particular group of people defined by religion and citizenship.”

What most compels administrators is the Concordia calculus. The anti-Netanyahu riot so damaged Concordia University’s reputation that engineering and business students united to unseat the radical, pro-Palestinian student leadership fomenting much of the trouble. Since last year, York University has also recognized the need to undertake massive reputational damage control.

Most Canadian Jewish activists interviewed noted these triumphs, as well as the flashpoints in the United States, especially at Berkeley and another University of California campus, Irvine. The IAW forces seem increasingly marginalized, administrators are responding, and individual students refuse to be cowed. Zach Newburgh not only transferred successfully to McGill University and became the president of Montreal Hillel, but he is also the incoming president of the McGill student society. These subtle but significant successes are often drowned out by louder, shriller protests. The challenge in Canada, as elsewhere, remains to fight the toxic anti-Israel atmosphere that poisons so much discourse about the Middle East without exaggerating the strengths of this megaphone minority.

Gil Troy, a professor of history at McGill University in Montreal and a fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, is the author of six books on American history and Why I Am A Zionist: Israel, Jewish Identity and the Challenges of Today.

• Could recent scandals in the ultra-Orthodox community—Tropper, Balkany, Dwek, et al—lead to a waning of the bloc’s political influence? [The Jewish Week]

• Dan Senor, one of the top Jewish foreign policy advisers in the Bush administration, is mulling a Senate run … for Kirsten Gillibrand’s New York seat, also (maybe) to be contested by Mort Zuckerman and Harold Ford. [NY Post]

• The number of anti-Semitic incidents in Canada rose over 11 percent from 2008 to 2009, reaching its highest figure in three decades. False reports alleging Jewish/Israeli organ trafficking were blamed in part. [JTA]

• The family of Rachel Corrie—the American pro-Palestinian activist who was killed by an IDF bulldozer in Gaza in 2003—is suing Israel in Israeli court. An army investigation found that her death was accidental, and that the bulldozers driver did not see her. [JTA]

• Ira Stoll: anti-Semite. (If you know who Ira Stoll is, you know how funny this is.) [JTA]

I appreciate the support of the Jewish community, unequivocally I appreciate the support of Israel. But by making it frequently into a black-and white-issue, [the Conservatives are] setting it up as a wedge. And they’re also setting it up so that people who have been long-time strong supporters of Israel are questioning issues like the de-funding of Kairos. And it’s creating a backlash.

(Kairos is a church-sponsored non-governmental organization that has helped organize anti-Israel boycotts, and which the government has de-funded.)

In purporting to represent the best interests of Canada’s Jewish citizens, the Liberals possess a certain inherent credibility: as in the United States, most of Canada’s Jews tend to vote for the more left-wing of the two main political parties.

Canadian Opposition: Harper’s Staunch Pro-Israel Support May Spark Anti-Semitism [Globe and Mail/Vos Iz Neias?]

Earlier: Canada’s PM Harper Continues Drive For Jewish Votes

For its part, three Israelis will compete: downhill skier Mikail Renzhin, and Alexandra and Roman Zaretsky, a brother-and-sister ice-dancing team. Faster, higher, stronger!

Vancouver Jews Gearing Up for the Games [JTA]
Israel in Olympics To Win, or Not At All [JTA]

Then, last week, Minister of Citizenship, Immigration, and Multiculturalism Jason Kenney lit a new fire while visiting, yes, Jerusalem. There, he announced the Harper government’s stern opposition toward those who “advocate the destruction of Israel and the destruction of the Jewish people.” (As The Globe and Mail’s Gerald Caplan wryly added, “That is in sharp contrast to those Canadian parties that do not oppose those who advocate such destruction.”) Kenney further announced that the administration is ending the funding of a popular left-wing NGO, because, it says, of its Israel position.

If nothing else, the kerfuffle is a good reminder that American Jews are not the only ones facing this dynamic. It’s also a good reminder of, y’know, Canada.

Is The Harper Government Playing the Anti-Semitic Card? [The Globe and Mail]
Conservatives Wooing Traditionally Liberal Canadian Jews [Forward]

Earlier: Canada’s Conservatives Suggest Liberals Are Anti-Semites

Related: The Return of the Native [The New Yorker]

The Liberals (along with other opposition parties, the Bloc Quebecois and the New Democratic Party) have fired back, with Montreal Liberal M.P. Irwin Cotler, who’s Jewish, calling the mailers “totally misleading … it basically seeks to associate the Liberal party with anti-Semitism,” according to the Toronto Star. But the Conservatives have effectively shaped the Canadian political discourse on Israel, and the Liberals they’ve attacked—including Cotler and other Jewish parliamentarians—are denying or taking back any criticism of Israel they’ve ever made. (Cotler says he only went to Durban to defend Israel and that he supported last winter’s Gaza war; Ignatieff apologized long ago for his “war crimes” comment; Liberals were in fact the first to classify Hamas and Hezbollah as terrorists.) The Conservative immigration minister, meanwhile, told reporters that anyone who’s read accusations of anti-Semitism into the fliers “is being completely over the top and mischievous.”

Opposition Decries Tory Attack Ads Sent to Jewish Voters [Globe and Mail]
PM’s Jewish Pitch Hits a New Low, Critics Say [Star]
Canadian Conservatives Woo Jews [Jewschool]

“Although Manitoba’s Jews have kept themselves closely informed of developments throughout the world … their geographic situation has enabled them to grow independently as a community,” he wrote. “Isolated by distance and by the long, severe winters the Jews of Winnipeg … worked with these conditions and wrought great creativity in communal, cultural, and religious life, in education, in music, in drama and in Jewish journalism.”

Chiel’s glowing assessment was the first systematic account of Manitoba Jewry, but it would be far from the last. Jewish communities since Biblical times have been notorious self-chroniclers, and for its size, Winnipeg’s been remarkably prolific. The most recent volume—and, at 500 pages, certainly the most thorough—is Coming of Age: A History of the Jewish People of Manitoba by the historian Allan Levine.

The first Jews to trickle into Western Canada in the 1870s and 80s were English and German speakers from Western and Central Europe who came with the land boom that accompanied the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway. In the decades that followed, a much larger influx of Jews from the Russian Pale of Settlement immigrated to the province, as they did in great numbers to other parts of North America.

My own great-grandfather came from Bialystok, where, according to family lore, he once studied with Rabbi Israel Kahanovitch, who later became the Chief Rabbi of Western Canada. (Rabbi Kahanovitch’s great-grandson is today a friend of mine.) It was because of Kahanovitch that my great-grandfather made his way to Manitoba, but instead of settling in Winnipeg, he drifted around the province’s northern towns with his wife and growing family, trading cattle and furs with Native Canadians. Eventually they settled in Arborg, Manitoba, a small town of Icelandic settlers located 64 miles north of Winnipeg. That’s where my grandfather was born.

Fur trading in the Canadian North may be, as Levine puts it, “one of the more unusual career choices for a Jewish boy,” but my family’s trajectory there was not uncommon. One of the first Jewish visitors to Winnipeg was Joseph Ullman, who founded the Jewish community of St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1854, and who eventually expanded his fur business into an international concern with offices from Leipzig to Shanghai.

More typically, Manitoba’s early Jewish settlers were rag-and-scrap peddlers, laborers, or the proprietors of small businesses. Others, who had been enticed west by the promise of free land, took up farming, and established small colonies across the Canadian prairies. As Levine observes, these were often idealists who “dreamed of becoming farmers in the New World and transforming the Jews’ long-standing and frequently detested economic role as middlemen.”

But the majority of the immigrant population settled in Winnipeg, clustered around Selkirk Avenue in the North End of the city. Though the neighborhood has long since lost its Jewish character, it remains enshrined in the collective memory, like New York’s Lower East Side. It produced a string of notable personalities, including novelist Adele Wiseman, poet Miriam Waddington, and Let’s Make a Deal host Monty Hall.

Even at the height of the North End’s strength, however, Winnipeg’s upwardly mobile Jews were moving to the more affluent South End, tipping the balance in a long-standing feud between Jews on either side of the city. Levine locates the beginning of this antipathy in the city’s first Jewish residents and their distaste for the less-wealthy, less-educated immigrants who poured in from Russia, Romania, and Bessarabia. Even amongst North Enders there were fierce disputes, as between the socialist Yiddishists, who sent their children to school at the secular Peretz Shul, and the more orthodox Zionists, who sent their children to the Talmud Torah. But it is the South-North rivalry that persists, even though the majority of today’s South End Jews descend from, or were once themselves, North Enders.

The most cataclysmic change over which Levine’s history presides is the opening in 1997 of the Asper Jewish Community Campus in the South End, which consolidated the city’s Jewish organizations and forced many of the North End institutions to either close or relocate. Whether this was a “coming of age” or an incalculable loss is still a matter of debate. Gone is the old Jewish Public Library, whose priceless collection once contained first editions of books by Isaac Bashevis Singer and Sholem Asch, as well as many books salvaged in Europe after the Holocaust. The Orthodox Talmud Torah Beth Jacob synagogue, which in an earlier incarnation had been the pulpit of Rabbi Kahanovitch, was forced to move into a run-down movie theater, which, ironically, had once been owned by Leon and Celia Asper, after whom the new community campus was now being named.

But for better or for worse, there is no question that the face of Winnipeg’s Jewish community is changing. After decades of decline from its height of 19,376 people in 1961, the Jewish population of Winnipeg is growing again, thanks to immigration from Argentina, Brazil, Israel, and the former Soviet Union. Whether these new arrivals will be able to revive Winnipeg Jewry has yet to be seen. Chiel, writing in 1955, observed that “the zeal of the Eastern European immigrants, their fiery partisanship to particular causes and philosophies … has been largely supplanted by a concern with efficiency and coordinated effort … . Community effort is still at a maximum… [but] the fire, the vigour, and the colour of earlier days are almost history.”

Ezra Glinter is a freelance writer from Winnipeg.

My grandfather, Yakov Milner, was born in November or December of 1915 in the Latvian town of Baltinava, at the edge of the Eastern Front. He claimed as his earliest memory the rumble and menace of artillery. The rest of his childhood memories were almost uniformly idyllic. Until the onset of the next war, he lived in a kind of a Yiddish fairy tale—a sweet, remarkably peaceful interlude between calamities. His father was a respected merchant who owned a general store and a boot-making workshop where Jews and Latvians cobbled amiably together. Family, community, and Jewish tradition ordered daily life. To the east and to the west the type was being set for a death sentence, but in Baltinava my grandfather went to synagogue, attended festive weddings, and observed the holidays. So deeply was he a product of this fading world that he, like others of his generation, only knew his birthday according to the Hebrew calendar. And although his passport arbitrarily gave as his birthday the 20th of August, we always celebrated the occasion on the proper date, varyingly in November or December, on the eighth day of Hanukkah.

I was born on June 2, 1973, in what had by then become the Soviet Socialist Republic of Latvia. If my birthday coincided with a Jewish holiday, I do not know it. The Communist revolution had obviated Jewish religion and replaced it with the teachings of Lenin and Marx. Any attempt to uphold Jewish tradition was considered subversive and so most Jews relinquished the traditions and aspired instead to be model Soviet citizens. Ostensibly, my family was also composed of model Soviet citizens—university graduates, esteemed professionals, even a few Party members—but during Jewish holidays we gathered at my grandparents’ house, drew the curtains, and engaged in subversive activities. The main provocateur was my grandfather, whose commitment to Judaism never wavered. For Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Purim, and Passover, the curtains were drawn and the family gathered. And, every year, on the eighth day of Hanukkah, my grandmother fried potato latkes, the curtains were drawn again, and we celebrated my grandfather’s birthday. I was a child at the time, kindergarten-aged, and for everyone’s protection—lest I disclose the dark family secret—the nature and significance of these gatherings were never explained to me. Instead I was told that we were marking my grandfather’s birthday. Thus, to my childhood mind, my grandfather was singularly blessed with four or five birthdays each year.

This episode is part of the family lore which, like lacquered wood paintings, feather pillows, and Russian translations of Sinclair Lewis, we brought with us to Canada. My memory of it is not very distinct. Memories of family life begin for me in the northern suburbs of Toronto, which became home. Here, liberated from Lenin and Marx, we made an effort at resuming the old ways. I was sent to Hebrew school. My father dutifully gave money to support the Jewish Russian Community. For the High Holidays, my parents dressed up and chatted with their friends outside the junior high school that served as a makeshift synagogue. And yet, fundamentally, we did not change. To experience a sense of solidarity with God, the Jewish people, and each other, we still gathered around my grandparents’ dining room table—albeit with the curtains open. We didn’t become more observant, only less anxious. Customs which we had neglected in Latvia—eating kosher, keeping the Sabbath—we mostly neglected in Canada. But the rituals which we had performed furtively there we now performed more elaborately here.

Hanukkah, for instance, saw us making a concerted attempt to light candles on each of the festival’s eight nights. After dinner, often with a hockey game on in the background, my father and I would obediently retrieve the yarmulkes from a cupboard, place them briefly on our heads, whereupon I would recite the prayers and validate my Hebrew school education. Inevitably, we would skip a night or two, but the general point would have been made: That which was forbidden in Riga could be done with Semitic impunity in Toronto.

Hanukkah mornings, particularly on the weekends, I would wake to the enticing aroma of potato latkes. I would descend and find my mother standing by the stove, continuing a tradition that no commissar had managed to disrupt. At my grandparents’ apartment I would find my grandmother in the identical stance: having peeled and grated dozens of potatoes by hand, she would be poised above a sizzling frying pan. “Yasha, cum essen,” she would call, and my grandfather would join me at the cramped kitchen table, where a container of sour cream would be set amidst chipped plates. If I had to isolate an enduring image of Hanukkah and Jewishness this would be it: sitting in their clean, modest kitchen, eating the rich, oily food, listening to their affectionate fussing, their Yiddish.

My grandmother died in January of 1999, bringing to a painful conclusion many things, but most acutely, the 53 years of my grandparents’ marriage. The division of responsibilities they had established—to him the spiritual; to her the practical—made us wonder how he would be able to manage by himself. His confusion and disarray reflected our own. Without my grandmother’s contribution, her presence, her cooking, it was difficult to envision our future. How could we continue with family gatherings, holidays, birthdays? In Russian, my mother, aunt, and uncle, repeated the mournful refrain: She will be forever lacking. My grandfather nodded sagely, intoned my grandmother’s name, and cried.

And yet gradually, over a period of months, as if recognizing that he must now embody everything, my grandfather started to assume some of my grandmother’s responsibilities. We would visit him and he would lead us into the kitchen and ask—with a mix of apprehension and pride—that we sample his cabbage, his farmer’s cheese, his jam. And nearly a year after my grandmother’s death, for Hanukkah and his birthday, we came to his apartment and smelled the familiar smell. In his slow, meticulous manner, he had worked for much of the day, and he beckoned us into the kitchen, apologizing that they were not hers, but inviting us to try, taste, take more.

David Bezmozgis is the author of the story collection Natasha and Other Stories. His first novel, The Free World, will be published in early 2011. This essay originally appeared in the November 2006 issue of Canadian House and Home and is reprinted by permission of the author.