Septuagenarian Fuad Haba was a long way from his birthplace of Iraq and his family’s famous bakery on Agrippas Street in Jerusalem’s Machane Yehuda market as he made laffa bread in a taboon oven in suburban Toronto. But neither he nor the customers at the new Dr. Laffa restaurant, where the retiree is hard at…
Sabrina Malach is an inspiring leader of the New Jewish Food Movement in her native Toronto. She is currently the Director of Outreach and Development at Shoresh, a grassroots organization that aims to build a more ecologically sustainable Toronto Jewish community. Having received inspiration from her experiences as an Adamah Fellow and her work at…
Muslims and Jews may not always get along, but there are instances in which they manage to put aside differences in order to tend to the basic things in life. While political leaders continue to struggle to make peace in the Middle East, a story out of Toronto proves that coexistence and mutual support is…
While it’s long maintained headquarters in Toronto’s heavily Jewish northern reaches, the Koffler Centre of the Arts has never had a permanent home downtown, where much of its edgy programming originates. As a result, the Koffler made a virtue of necessity, building a brand around acclaimed off-site exhibitions that showcased its content at urban venues…
Recently, my local Jewish newspaper published its perennial look at how day school tuition is rising faster than inflation. This year’s article featured our only local co-educational Jewish high school, which I attended years ago and to which, due to rising costs, I was unable to send my own children. The resulting polarization of the…
Hindus, Christians, and Jews are finally banding together behind a common cause. Unfortunately for Muslims in Toronto, the cause is them. An interfaith coalition — whose less peaceable elements include the Jewish Defense League and Canada’s right-wing Christian Heritage Party — is sounding the alarm over lunchtime Muslim prayer sessions at a Toronto public school,…
In 2000, filmmaker Alan Zweig gained modest success on the festival circuit with “Vinyl,” a documentary probing the quirks and eccentricities of compulsive record collectors. (“Compulsive” referring not to some guy with a few hundred LPs, but to some guy who rents a U-Haul locker on the edge of town to serve as a supplementary…
Extremism makes strange bedfellows. The Jewish Defense League is trying to rally Toronto Jews to protest against the city’s Pride parade committee by comparing gay people… to Nazis. Ironically — as the Forward reported in January — a right-wing fanatic named Scott Lively had floated the notion that Nazis were “a homosexual, pagan cult” in…
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