North Star with Ellin Bessner

Last week, about 100 parents showed up at Yorkdale Mall to protest against the latest round of school closures imposed by the Ontario government. It might be the first time in Ontario, since the pandemic began, that many organized protesters are visibly observant Jews, including parents of students at Jewish day schools. Ontario is unique in North America for keeping schools closed for so long—sin...

One of the most common new year's resolutions is losing weight. But it's also one of the most difficult—and the reason has less to do with willpower than with neurology. Canadian journalist Mark Schatzker is the author of a new book, The End of Craving: Recovering the Lost Wisdom of Eating Well . Schatzker travelled the world, talking to experts and reading scientific studies, to find out why peop...

Last June, the American Food and Drug Administration conditionally approved aducanumab, marketed as Adulehm, to treat those suffering from early Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia. It's the first drug in nearly 20 years to gain some kind of approval, even though other countries' health agencies, including Canada's, are still reviewing the data. There are concerns the drug causes brain bleedin...

As Israel's new ambassador to Canada, Ronen Hoffman has only been in the country a few weeks. But his priority list is already long. He plans to fight antisemitism, counter the threat of global terrorism and forge new industrial and economic ties between Israel and Canada. He steps into a post that's been vacant for two years. Partly because of the pandemic, and partly because of the chaos that ha...

Gary Kapelus is not a trained lyricist, but rather a retired speech-language pathologist and hospital administrator. But that hasn't stopped him from indulging in a pandemic passion project: writing COVID-themed parody songs since spring 2020. He isn't a singer, so his music videos are simply popular musical tracks, often karaoke-style, with lyrics written atop a slideshow-style video. Sometimes h...

In November, as Omicron emerged as the new dominant strain of COVID-19, York Region in Ontario appointed Dr. Barry Pakes as their new medical officer of health. The region covers nine urban centres and more than a million people, including Canada's densest Jewish community, in Thornhill. So the fact that Pakes is an Orthodox Jew who studied, in part, at a yeshiva, gives him a unique advantage to l...

Quebec’s Bill 21, which bars public employees such as teachers and police officers from wearing religious symbols on the job, has been in place for more than two years already. But the recent reassignment of Fatemeh Anvari, the third-grade public school teacher who was removed from her post for wearing a hijab, escalated the issue to an entirely different level. Until now, political leaders have e...

The term "lone soldier" refers to recruits in the Israel Defense Forces who have little or no family support systems in the Jewish state. Israel estimates there 6,000 lone soldiers currently active. While it's impossible to say how many of those are Canadian, it's relatively common for Canadian high school graduates to head to the Holy Land for two years of military service, despite the...

In spring 2020, COVID-19 ripped though the Donald Berman Maimonides Geriatric Centre in Montreal. The facility was understaffed and underprepared to begin with, and while it went into strict lockdown and the army was called in, 67 of its residents have since died from the pandemic. The arrival of the vaccine, one year ago this month, was seen as a beacon of hope. This week, the centre hosted a par...

Amazing Women of the Middle East is an 112-page illustrated children's book. It profiles 25 famous women, including historical figures such as Cleopatra and Nefertiti, and also modern-day heroines like human rights lawyer Amal Clooney. What it doesn't include, however, is the State of Israel. The book's colourful map of the Middle East removed any mention of the Jewish homeland, instead labelling...

It's been a week since the Toronto District School Board held a meeting to vote on whether to censure Alexandra Lulka. The Jewish trustee spoke out about some teaching materials which she felt were antisemitic, and the board subsequently came down on her for failing to support other parts of those materials. The board voted not to censure her, but there are still lingering questions about whether...

This year, an unlikely Hanukkah party was held at the Canada Pavillion of Expo 2020 in Dubai. The emcee for the candlelighting and kosher dinner was Canada's ambassador to the United Arab Emirates, Marcy Grossman, a Montrealer who's spent the last three years in the Gulf state. Grossman has found herself at the centre of Jewish life in the Arab country, embedding herself within a community of abou...

Former Toronto mayor Mel Lastman died on Saturday at the age of 88. Lastman made his fortune as a businessman before becoming mayor of North York for 25 years; after that, he was elected the first mayor of the amalgamated City of Toronto. And while the colourful politician made headlines for some politically incorrect remarks while in office—and may have fathered two sons out of wedlock—Lastman's...

On Wednesday evening, the Toronto District School Board held a lengthy meeting to take a vote over whether to censure trustee Alexandra Lulka. Lulka—who is Jewish—took to Twitter to voice her concerns over some teaching material being passed around by a pro-Palestinian teacher and activist. The materials linked to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, listed as a terrorist organizatio...

Ruth Wisse is the author of the new book, Free as a Jew: A Personal Memoir of National Self-Liberation . Its Canadian debut coincided with Jewish Book Month, hosted by the Jewish Public Library in Montreal. But the timing wasn't a coincidence. Wisse, 85, has spent decades as a professor of Yiddish at Harvard, and pioneered the Jewish Studies graduate program at McGill. These days, her unabashed op...

On Nov. 18, on a remote forest road in northern British Columbia, armed RCMP officers with police dogs and a chainsaw raided a cabin near the Coastal Gas Link pipeline project. They arrested about a dozen people, mostly members of the Wet'suwet'en First Nation who'd been blockading the main access road to the company's construction site. But the police also arrested two journalists who were not me...

Nathalie Fortier is the postmistress of Disraeli, Quebec. She runs the only post office in town, which was named after Benjamin Disraeli, the British prime minister who was born Jewish, faced antisemitism and supported a homeland for Jews. As far as Fortier knows, there aren't any Jews living in Disraeli—and she had never heard of the namesake—until Canada Post approached her a couple of months ag...

For years, "Hanukkah on the Hill" has been an annual in person event for Jewish Members of Parliament and politicians from all stripes, including the prime minister and leaders of the opposition. Hanukkiahs are lit, prayers are said, politics get set aside. But things looked a little different this year. While some politicians got together in-person, including the organizers, Liberal MPs...

Last year, a combination of global lockdowns, uncertainty around COVID-19 and a lack of vaccines convinced many Canadian Jewish snowbirds not to take their annual trip south to Florida. This year, it's a different story. With the vast majority of travellers double-vaccinated, and with Florida's per-capita case counts ranking among the lowest in the United States, it's being estimated that a majori...

Prince Edward Island doesn't have a synagogue or rabbi. But now, exactly 120 years after Jews first began their continuous settlement on the island, the small but active Jewish community of a few dozen families celebrated their provinces's first-ever public Hanukkah ceremony in front of the provincial Legislative Assembly building in Charlottetown. This is the building where the Fathers of Confede...

In the holiday aisle of certain supermarkets, next to the chocolate Maccabees and Star of David cookies, you can find a "Hanukkah house cookie kit". A Jewish cousin to the classic Christmas gingerbread house, the DIY craft-meets-treat trend has sprung up in recent years, seeming more prominent now than ever before. And, it turns out, they're made in Canada. Their maker is Give & Go P...

Michael Posner is known as the "King of Cohen". He spent $35,000 of his own money to travel the world researching Leonard Cohen, the Canadian Jewish poet legend—and only after the globetrotting and spending did a publisher agree to take Posner on. Posner's biography of the late singer is coming out in three volumes. The first was released last November; the second, this month, almost fiv...

Aaron Levy was driving to Chiliwack, B.C., on a Saturday night when it started raining. Hard. There was so much water coming down, in fact, that he lost control of his car and had to call to get it towed. Levy didn't realize at the time how the heavy rainfall he experienced was just a taste of the historic deluge that drowned out huge swaths of southern British Columbia, killing at least five peop...

Kurt Yaakov Tutter was born in Vienna in 1930. Eight years later, Nazi Germany annexed Austria. The Tutters escaped to Belgium, only for the Nazis to follow in 1940. Kurt's parents were arrested and deported to Auschwitz, while he and his five-year-old sister hid in an attic before being smuggled into an orphanage. Austrians have long considered themselves Adolf Hitler's first victims, and it took...

Canada’s 44th Parliament is set to resume Monday at 1 p.m. In it are eight Jewish MPs, including two relatively new faces—Ya'ara Saks, the Liberal representative for York Centre, elected in a 2020 byelection; and Melissa Lantsman, the rookie Conservative just elected by the voters of Thornhill. Both will be sitting for the first time in the House of Commons—Saks has only Zoomed into meetings so fa...