No Better Home? Jews, Canada, and the Sense of Belonging ed. by David S. Koffman

Abstract

Reviewed by: No Better Home? Jews, Canada, and the Sense of Belonging ed. by David S. Koffman Gerald Sorin (bio) No Better Home? Jews, Canada, and the Sense of Belonging. Edited by David S. Koffman. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021. 314 pp. No Better Home? begins with an audacious question: "Has there ever been a better home for Jews than Canada?" The question, however, seems rhetorical, inviting only one answer: "No. There's never been a better home for the Jews." But David Koffman, the editor of this extraordinarily rich anthology, has asked more than a dozen top-ranking specialists in Canadian Jewish history to take the question seriously and to shape their answers in scholarly articles, essays, and personal memoirs. Koffman says he raised the question "because it has seldom been asked" (3). One might argue, however, that it is seldom asked because it can't be answered. What, after all, do we mean by such non-academic categories as "better" or "best," or even by the concept of "home?" Putting aside these epistemological problems, there remain enormous methodological barriers to answering the question. A responsible conclusion would require comparing the quality of Jewish life in Canada, not only to the US, which has been done several times before, but to Jewish life in more than one hundred other diasporas over many continents, over the course of many centuries. Canada, with 390,000 Jewish residents, is the fourth largest Jewish community in the world, trailing only Israel, the US, and France, but not by very much. This alone merits the attention of Jewish historians, anthropologists, and sociologists and explains why they established the now long-standing field of Canadian Jewish Studies. It is not clear to me, however, whether the book at issue here, as good as it is, muddies the waters or serves as a useful exploratory start to answering the question it raises. Morton Weinfeld wisely restricts his comparative essay to the Western liberal democracies of the past two hundred years. He examines a series of data points which reveal aspects of Jewish self-possession and religious and communal freedom in a multicultural Canadian society. Weinfeld is confident that within his circumscribed comparisons, Canada has been the best home for Jews over the past two centuries. In her chapter, however, historian Hasia Diner takes issue with Weinfeld. Canada, she writes, certainly offered a better home than the various other "homes" Jews left behind. But this does not mean that immigrants to Canada made the best choice, particularly in comparison to destination USA. Diner points to the fact that in the vast compendium of information consumed by East European Jews considering a new home, "Canada occupied a decidedly minor role" (35). But how does that claim address [End Page 314] the question about the quality of life Jews actually experienced in their new location? The essay fails to say. Kalman Weiser's chapter demonstrates that Jewish intellectuals, especially those who visited Montreal in the first half of the twentieth-century, envisioned the city as a "Vilna on the St. Lawrence." They had reasonable expectations that Montreal's Jewish culture might prove fertile ground for Yiddish and Yiddishkeit when sheltered from some of the assimilating forces Jews faced in the US Jews were the largest immigrant group in Montreal, and Yiddish did indeed remain the third most spoken language in the city into the early decades of the twentieth century. Other essays by historians Harold Troper, Ira Robinson, and Richard Menkis pay attention to positive transformations in Canadian Jewish life over time, including increased political and cultural influence and more assurance of Jewish continuity through the growth of Jewish day schools. The picture is mixed, however. Robinson describes the institutional and demographic shifts that reshaped the Canadian Jewish experience, particularly in Montreal after the Parti Quebecois gained influence in the 1970s. The pronounced nationalism expressed in French Canada's "Quiet Revolution" was alarming to Jews who thought their safe and stable home, as one group among other minority groups, might be threatened. For some Jews, the reemergence of a radical French nationalism prompted memories of Canada's restrictive immigration policy toward Jewish refugees during the Holocaust years. The...