Examines the ambiguous status of the Jews in Canada, caught between competing English and French Canadian interests. Their strong ties with Britain and the USA, and the British heritage of tolerance and pluralism, led the Jews to identify with English-speaking North Americans. Ch. 4 (pp. 119-161), "The French and Roman Catholic Relationship", describes French Canadian hostility toward Jews, seen as a threat to their homogeneous culture and religious heritage, and encouraged by the Catholic Church and the French antisemitic movement. Antisemitism was frequently expressed in the French Canadian press and in literary works, especially issues such as the Dreyfus Affair and the Nathan Affair (criticism of the Pope by the Jewish mayor of Rome). However, antisemitism did exist in Anglo-Canada as well, especially after the mass immigration of Jews.

Examines the ambiguous status of the Jews in Canada, caught between competing English and French Canadian interests. Their strong ties with Britain and the USA, and the British heritage of tolerance and pluralism, led the Jews to identify with English-speaking North Americans. Ch. 4 (pp. 119-161), "The French and Roman Catholic Relationship", describes French Canadian hostility toward Jews, seen as a threat to their homogeneous culture and religious heritage, and encouraged by the Catholic Church and the French antisemitic movement. Antisemitism was frequently expressed in the French Canadian press and in literary works, especially issues such as the Dreyfus Affair and the Nathan Affair (criticism of the Pope by the Jewish mayor of Rome). However, antisemitism did exist in Anglo-Canada as well, especially after the mass immigration of Jews.

Jews and French Quebecers recounts a saga of intense interest for the whole of Canada, let alone societies elsewhere. This work, now translated into English, represents the viewpoints of two friends from differing cultural and religious traditions. One is a French Quebecer and a Christian; the other is Jewish and also calls Quebec his home. Both men are bilingual. Jacques Langlais and David Rome examine the merging — through alterations of close co-operation and socio-political clashes — of two Quebec ethno-cultural communities: one French, already rooted in the land of Quebec and its religio-cultural tradition; the other, Jewish, migrating from Europe through the last two centuries, equally rooted in its Jewish-Yiddish tradition. In Quebec both communities have learned to build and live together as well as to share their respective cultural heritages. This remarkable experience, two hundred years of intercultural co-vivance, in a world fraught with ethnic tensions serves as a model for both Canada and other countries.

The history of the Jewish community in Canada says as much about the development of the nation as it does about the Jewish people. Spurred on by upheavals in Eastern Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many Jews emigrated to the Dominion of Canada, which was then considered little more than a British satellite state. Over the ensuing decades, as the Canadian Jewish identity was forged, Canada itself underwent the transformative experience of separating itself from Britain and distinguishing itself from the United States. In this light, the Canadian Jewish identity was formulated within the parameters of the emerging Canadian national personality. Canada's Jews is an account of this remarkable story as told by one of the leading authors and historians on the Jewish legacy in Canada. Drawing on his previous work on the subject, Gerald Tulchinsky illuminates the struggle against anti-Semitism and the search for a livelihood amongst the Jewish community. He demonstrates that, far from being a fragment of the Old World, the Canadian Jewry grew from a tiny group of transplanted Europeans to a fully articulated, diversified, and dynamic national group that defined itself as Canadian while expressing itself in the varied political and social contexts of the Dominion. Canada's Jews covers the 240-year period from the beginnings of the Jewish community in the 1760s to the present day, illuminating the golden chain of Jewish tradition, religion, language, economy, and history as established and renewed in the northern lands. With important points about labour, immigration, and anti-Semitism, it is a timely book that offers sober observations about the Jewish experience and its relation to Canadian history.

Jonathan Sarna's meticulously documented centennial history presents the personalities and the controversies, the struggles and the achievements behind a century of publishing by America's foremost publisher of Jewish books in English. Sarna's engaging blend of anecdote and analysis contextualizes the Jewish Publication Society within American Jewry's evolving social, political, and cultural history. He demonstrates that the society has been a major factor. Sarna recounts the inspired struggle of the Jewish Publication Society's founders, a group of genteel Philadelphia philanthropists including Cyrus Adler and Mayer Sulzberger, who believed fervently in the need to educate their immigrant coreligionists with Jewish books in the new vernacular. He also tells the story of Henrietta Szold, best known for her later achievements as the founder of Hadassah and Youth Aliyah. Szold worked doggedly for twenty-three years as the society's first editor until a shattered love for a JPS author became the catalyst that led her to Palestine and Zionist leadership. Here too are fascinating accounts of the long deliberations and intense work that produced the authoritative JPS Bible translations of 1917 and 1985, translations acceptable to all major branches of Judaism. Sarna also recounts the controversy surrounding the 1973 publication of The Jewish Catalog, a project developed by the bold JPS editor Chaim Potok. The Catalog, embodying the spirit of the Jewish counterculture, not only became the best-selling JPS book after the Bible, but it also showed that JPS could meet the challenge of a new generation as it moved toward its second century.

When the Constitution Act of 1867 was enacted, section 93 guaranteed certain educational rights to Catholics and Protestants in Quebec, but not to any others. Over the course of the next century, the Jewish community in Montreal carved out an often tenuous arrangement for public schooling as “honorary Protestants,” based on complex negotiations with the Protestant and Catholic school boards, the provincial government, and individual municipalities. In the face of the constitution’s exclusionary language, all parties gave their compromise a legal form which was frankly unconstitutional, but unavoidable if Jewish children were to have access to public schools. Bargaining in the shadow of the law, they made their own constitution long before the formal constitutional amendment of 1997 finally put an end to the issue. In Honorary Protestants, David Fraser presents the first legal history of the Jewish school question in Montreal. Based on extensive archival research, it highlights the complex evolution of concepts of rights, citizenship, and identity, negotiated outside the strict legal boundaries of the constitution.

Using long-ignored constitutions of various Jewish organizations, this unique book uncovers the political history of Canadian Jewry since its beginning during the 1700s. Building on the premise that Jews, since time immemorial, have written down their values and ideologies, this study effectively demonstrates how these writings record the principles and values that motivated a community.