When I grew up in Toronto in the 1980s and early 1990s, a lot of my classmates in day school were the children of recent transplants from Montreal, and they brought with them nostalgia for the Jewish foods of their home city like Montreal bagels and smoked meat. But I longed for a Montreal food…
For Sarah Karnasiewicz of the LA Times, borscht is “my family’s edible valentine,” she shares her ode to the dish and several recipes for varieties including spiced mushroom borscht and a white borscht. Gearing up for Passover, Epicurious wants to know, is “Matzoh, Better Plain or Dressed Up?” In Florida noted chef Michael Baum is…
With star turns in films like “Barney’s Version” and “Lies My Father Told Me,” Jewish Montreal has been making headlines for its cinematic profile. But a string of anti-Semitic incidents over the weekend is shining a less sanguine spotlight on the city’s Jewish community. The Montreal Gazette reported today that four synagogues and a Jewish…
He won a slew of awards, had his books translated into multiple languages, and captured the soul of Jewish Montreal in novels like “The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz” and “Barney’s Version” — both adapted into big-budget Hollywood productions. But Mordecai Richler doesn’t merit the renaming of a street or other public place in the Plateau…
Hosting a group of young adults for Shabbat dinner, Rabbi Yisroel Bernath and his wife, Sara, noticed something odd: salads and kugels were disappearing quickly, but the chicken went largely untouched. When a little post-dinner sleuthing revealed many of their guests were vegetarian, it was all the incentive the Chabad rabbi needed to take his…
Michael Wex is best known for his acerbic, authoritative books on Yiddish language and culture, but in this fall’s “The Frumkiss Family Business,” he has turned his attention to fiction. The sprawling novel is a farcical family saga, following three generations of a Jewish clan in Toronto’s Bathurst Manor neighborhood and questioning, in Wex’s characteristically…
With the recent rise in antisemitic violence in Montreal, Canada, such incidents are at an “all-time high” nationwide, according to B’nai Brith Canada. Even a century ago, however, Canada offered protection to Jews’ “households and rights,” to quote the French version of the Canadian national anthem. A reminder of such days recently appeared from Les…
Could the next guitar-toting, post-adolescent pop sensation — a la Taylor Swift or Colbie Caillat — be a 16-year-old Jewish girl from suburban Montreal? If the buzz around Brittany Kwasnik, a soft-spoken singer-song writer, is any sign, there’s a good chance. Kwasnik, who started writing songs in her bathroom, went from musician in hiding to…
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