With his election last Friday, Michael Applebaum has become not only the first non-native French speaker in a century to hold the post. He is also the first-ever Jewish mayor of the second-largest French speaking country in the world. “It’s definitely a proud day,” Leo Kolber, a businessman, philanthropist, former Canadian senator and lifelong Montrealer,…
Montreal has its first Jewish mayor. Michael Applebaum, 49, won a City Council vote to serve as interim mayor for a year, with a promise not to run in the next municipal election, which is slated for November 2013. He also is the first Anglophone mayor in a century of the predominantly French-speaking Canadian city….
A Canadian lawmaker has proposed a motion in the country’s Parliament calling for formal government recognition of some 850,000 Jews forcibly displaced from Arab lands since Israel’s creation in 1948. In his Nov. 8 motion, Liberal Parly lawmaker Irwin Cotler, a former Canadian justice minister, noted that by rejecting the United Nation’s Partition Resolution of…
It seemed to Michael Prosserman (aka Bboy Piecez) as though his world had stopped spinning when doctors found three congenitally fused vertebrae in his neck when he was 18. Breakdancing had been his passion since he was 12, and his signature move had been to turn continuously on his head in slow motion. Now, his…
Growing up in a predominantly Jewish upper-middle class neighborhood of Toronto and attending Hebrew day school I didn’t know a single person who celebrated Thanksgiving. Naturally, I assumed that it was a Christian holiday. I had learned the origins American Thanksgiving from TV. Canadian children are immersed in American culture well before we enter primary…
The tracks on Max Layton’s new album, “2 The Max,” are more stories than songs. Influenced by two of Canada’s greatest poets, his father Irving Layton and his close family friend Leonard Cohen, as well as his own interesting 66 years of existence, the singer-songwriter shares some hard-earned lessons on life and love set to…
A.M. Klein: The Letters By A.M. Klein Edited by Elizabeth A. Popham University of Toronto Press, 504 pages, $85 Those of us involved with Jewish life and culture in the Diaspora must often ask ourselves a fundamental question: Do we view ourselves as one among many minority cultures that comprise our larger society? Or do…
When I was visiting Toronto recently, an editorial with the purposely provocative title, “’It’s a girl!’ — could be a death sentence” by the editor-in-chief of Canada’s leading medical journal sparked a huge controversy. There were headlines in all the newspapers about Dr. Rajendra Kale’s call in the Canadian Medical Association Journal for waiting until…
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