Page 8-The Canadian Jewish News, Thursday, August 10, 1989
An independent Community Newspaper serving as a forum for diverse viewpoints:
Av 10, 5749 - Va'etchanan Candlelighting: Montreal 7:48; Toronto 8:07
Israel did right
The Israeli government-is to be applauded for the recent step it took in reopening elementary schools in the West Bank at the end of a lengthy closure period occasioned by violence in the school
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TTie decision, taken at the end of July, was obviously welcomed by the administrators of the 1,000 schools in the territories. The opening of the schools has begun with the elementary grades but it is expected that high school will also be opened shortly.
The relative quiet which accompanied the resumption of studies suggests that the Palestinian leadership has had some second thoughts about using children as weapons in their struggle with Israel.
In fact, PLC activists and even the Islamic fundamentalist faction, Hamas, urged teachers and pupils to resume their studies. This was a natural reaction because intifada leaders have described the elosureof the schools as a deliberate policy of Israel to keep Palestinians ignorant.
That Israel has permitted the reopening of schools gives the lie to PLO propaganda. The schools were closed for one simple reason: they were being used as staging grounds for rock-throwing protests and ambushes against Israelis.
It is significant that Israel resisted reopening the schools despite protests from international sources and from Israeli civil rights activists. It was only with the assurance that the schools would remain quiet that the authorities agreed to reopen them.
Israel has acted wisely to counteract the psychic damage being done to Palestinian children by permitting them to go-back to school.
It is to be hoped that their education will be conducted along traditional pedagogic and not political lines.
The recent visit to Canada by President Chaim Herzog has provided an auspicious beginning for a bold new venture to be carried out in Jewish Studies by Toronto's York University.
Referring to the Israeli president's recent visit to his institution (where he received an honorary doctorate), Harry Arthurs, president of York University, announced that an ambitious program in Judaic Studies would be inaugurated at the school.
The annoiincement of an expanded Judaic Studies major at VYork is all the more welcome since it comes on the heels of the University of Manitoba's decision last month to phase out jts Jewish Studies major.
York University's offerings in Judaic Studies will contain the traditional strengths of such programs — Bible, Talmud and Jewish history and Jewish education — but will also incorporate some new emphasis; "
Profiting from the presence on its campus of scholars interested in theCanadian Jewish scene, the university will use their expertise to develop a program in Canadian Jewry and public policy.
Closely tied to this Canadian-oriented approach, York's Judaic Studies option will also inaugurate, through its projected centre a study of the Holocaust and its impact on Canada. , This is a particularly important and valuable project in as miich as there are, in Toronto alone, more than 30,000 Holocaust survivors. The York Holocaust project will use audio and videotapes in gathering documentation from Canadian Jews!
The Centre for Jewish Studies at York will also expand its Jewish history program by introducing courses on the archeology of die Land of Israel. These courses will contain both classroom ac-dvity and field studies of such ancient sites as Masadaaiul Je
York University has planned an anibitious enlargement of its Judaic Studies program. Its faculty members are on the cutting edge of research and publication in the discipline and the University has supported efforts to promote Jewish Studies.
The-Leonard Wolinsky Lectures on Jewish Life, academic exchanges with the Hebrew University, Canada-Israel Academic Ex--changes, the Abiiaham Isaac Silver scholarships — these are but a few of the ways in which Judaic Studies-at York have been encouraged in the past. — _
When the new programs are added to York's current profile in Judaic Studies a much strengthened and enlarged framework will emerge. This will benefit immeasurably the study of die Jewish past and present in Toronto and across Canada as a whole.
By
SHELDON KIRSHNER
Books of Jewish interest continue to be cftumed out by publishers. Here are some of the latest offerings, reviewed in capsule form...
When the war in Europe ended in May of 1945, the war in Palestine erupted.
The British Mandate authorities, still hewing to their 1939 White Paper policy restricting Jewish immigration to Palestine, tried to bloGk the flow of . "illegal" immigrants from Europe organized by. the Yishuv (the Jewish community in Palestine).
That struggle, which went on until Israel's establishment in May of 1948, was largely played out in the Mediterranean Sea. Many of the ships carrying these Holocaust survivors to Palestine were manned by Jewish volunteers from North America. Vie Jews' Secret Fleet (Gefen Publishing House. POB6056, Jerusalem, $30) is the story of how they smashed the British blockade.
From 1945 until 1948, 64 ships set sail from ports in France, Italy, Yugoslavia, Greece, Bulgaria and Romania, bearing almost 70^000 men, women and children to Palestine. About 32,000 of these immigrants travelled on vessels purchased iq the U.S. and sailed by North American volunteers. . . Interestingly, two of the ships were war surplus coryeftes of the Royal Canadian Navy,
Some fascinating characters were involved in the operation, including Samuel Zemurray, a Bessarabian Jew who had immigrated to the U.S. and rose to head the United Fruit Company .which practically owned Honduras.
The authors of The Jews 'Secret Fleet are Joseph Hochstein, the former editor-publisher of The Jewish Week of Washington, and Murray Greenfield, a Tel Aviv business, consultant who arrived in Israel as a volunteer crew member aboard the Hatikvah.
It's a tale of high intrigue and should be read by anj^one with an interest in pre-state Israel.
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The Jews of North America (Wayne State University Press, $14.95 U.S.) makes for worthwhile reading. Consisting of 15 essays by scholars from Canada; Israel and the U.S., it deals with such broad themes as modem . migration, folk culture, communal institutions, anti-semitism: and integration.
Several essays stand out.
Harold Troper, a Toronto historian, writes on Jews and Canadian immigration policy in the period from 1900 to 1950. Troper, of course, is„cOr.author of None Is Too Many.^ia classic in Canadian historiography. In another essay, Irving Abella — his collaborator — deals 'with the nature of anti-semitism in Canada in the interwar years.
David Bercuson's analysis of the Zionist lobby and Canada's Palestine policy (1941-1948) is revealjng, while Gerald (jold's discussion of smalltown Jewry in northern Ontario and southern Louisiana is well-researched.
I enjoyed reading Pierre Anctil's essay on A.M. Klein's relationship with French Canada, and Mark Slobin's richly-documented essay on Klezmer music as an ethnic musical style is nothing if not original.
These essays prove beyond any doubt that serious scholai'Iy work is being done on North American Jewry. ■■■
In droves,;the Jews of Syria im-
migrated tofarflung places — Britain, Mexico, Argentina and the U.S. Thousands of them settled in Brooklyn, par-ticulariy in Flatbush, and recreated their old levanUne lifestyle there.
Joseph Sutton, a New York writer, deals with the nature of this immigration in a rather lively anthropological work, Aleppo Chronicles (Thayer-Jacoby, $26 U.S.)
Himself a native of Aleppo, Sutton spent seven years compil ing the basic research and interviewing 50 Syrian Jews from his hometown and Damais-■ cus. ■ ■■■ ' /
IVs generally a weU-tdd story, but occasionally, it gets bogged down in excessive verbiage. I imagine that an alert editor could have cured the problem.
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In 1516, the good burghers of Venice, in their infinite wisdom, confined die Jewish residents to a ghetto. Riccardo Calimani's account of it, as well as his analysis of the political, financial and cultural dynamics of ghetto existence, TTitf Ghetto of Venice (M. Evans and Company, no price listed) offers disturbing insights into Venetian and European society from the Renaissance to World War II.
Although it's rather dense in places. The Ghetto of Venice is an example of fine scholarship. Indeed, I generally agree with Elie Wiesel's assessment. In a brief forward, he notes that Calimani writes with '*the erudition of a historian, the tersene^ of a journalist and the captivating style of a memorialist."
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: Anti-semitism is an awfully big subject, but Bamett Litvinoff, a British writer, is not intimidated by its breathtaking scope.
• In The Burning Bush: Antisemitism and World History (Collins, $39.95), Litvinoff dissects the issue into bite-sized bits for relatively easy consumption. Starting with die Roman Empire, and finishing with Louis Farrakhan, Litvinoff covers imrhense ground in this panoramic survey of one of mankind's oldest pathological diseases.
I have always maintained that anti-semitism is a universal phenomenon and that its intensity only varies by degree from country to country and culture to culture. You may well agree with this after reading The Burning Bush.
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Thanks in part to George Bush's sometimes nasty presidential campaign, liberalism has become something of a dirty Word in the lexicon of American politics. But long before Bush abused the concept, liberalism had been under siege by conservative Americans unable to cope with die onslaught of modernity. .
Jonathan Rieder's study, Ccmarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn
against Liberalism (Harvard University Press. $18.95 U.S.), is required reading for anyone interested in understanding recent transformations in U.S. society.
Liberalism in Camarsie came under fire as a result of legally-enforcwl busing. Rieder, a Yale University sociologist, explains that it was thereafter associated widi elitism, spinelessness, anarchy and irresponsibility.
But Camarsie is more than an account of resistance to change. It's a cogent analysis of Jewish-Italian relations in what passes for a middle-income neighborhood in contemporary America.
In 1981, a Jewish man in Phoenix, Steven Steinberg, murdered Elana Steinberg, his wife. Steinberg claimed that she drove him to the crime, saying diat he could no longer tolerate her materialistic whims and her constant nagging.
Ouring the trial, Elana Steinberg was portrayed as a shrill, demanding bitch who almost deserved her fate. The jury sympathized widi die accused. He was acquitted, in what Shiriey Frpndorf describes in Death of a "Jewish American Princess" (Random House, $25.95} as a "terrible miscarriage of justice."
FrondorTs book, while dealing expertly with a major courtroom cause celebre, transcends the Steinberg case and becomes a meditation about prejudice, stereotyping and Jewish self-hatred.
SHORTER TAKES
Ruth Wisse, a professor of Jewish Studies at McGill University, has written a fine account of two major Yiddish poets — Mani Leib and Moishe Lein Halperin, both of whom were members of a group called di Yunge. A Little Love in Big Manhattan (Harvard University Press, $25 U.S.) is a labor of love besides bejng a rigorous academic work.
Isaac Bashevis Singer's newest novel, 77je King of the Fields (Collins, $27.95), may not be vintage Singer. But who can resist Singer? Even when he's not entirely up to scratch, he's better than most.
Three of his superior novels have been reissued by Collins — Shosha ($13.50), Gimpel the Fool ($13.50) and The Slave ($11.95). They're still sizzling.
Canadian Jewish Outlook has been around for the past 25 years, a journal devoted to secular Judaism and socialism. The Canadian Jewish Outlook Anthology ($14.95), edited by Henry Rosenthal and Cathy Berson, apr proaches a wide variety of topics from a rather different, sometimes refreshing point of view. It is worth remembering that the Jewish community in Canada is not nrionolithic.
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A Nazi anti-semitic caricature of a Jewish stockbroker.