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Quebec Anti-Semitism and Anti-Semitism in Quebec*

 
Filed under: Anti-Semitism, World Jewry
Publication: Post-Holocaust and Anti-Semitism

No. 64,

  • Jewish marginality is an ongoing feature of Quebec Jewish life. The Jewish case in Quebec is unique in North America. French Quebec has not come to a full societal resolution of the legacies of its attitudes toward Jews and World War II during the 1930s and 1940s.
  • The extensive sociocultural segregation of Jews in Quebec is greater than that in English Canada, the United States, and even France. Although this does not constitute anti-Semitism in any direct variant, it plays a role in shaping attitudes about Jews in Quebec.
  • Contemporary currents of elite and popular political thought are more likely to be anti-American (and specifically anti-George Bush) and anti-Israeli than in English Canada. A September 2006 survey for the Association for Canadian Studies found higher proportions in Quebec-38 percent, compared to the full Canadian average of 31 percent-attributing the conflict in Lebanon to “Israel’s actions in the Middle East.”

An analysis of anti-Semitism anywhere should include features peculiar to the specific environment as well as generic themes. For convenience, the term “Quebec anti-Semitism” refers to specific sets of circumstances that relate directly and perhaps uniquely to the forms of anti-Semitism in the Quebec context. The term “anti-Semitism in Quebec,” by contrast, refers to global and common anti-Semitic forces that manifest themselves in Quebec as well as other Western societies. Both shape the contemporary social environment of Quebec Jews. From the prewar period to the early twenty-first century, a historical shift occurred in anti-Semitic experience in Quebec from the former to the latter.

An Insular Community

Quebec is a French-speaking and historically Catholic province, the more so in the pre-World War II period. Since 1945 Quebec has modernized and continued to urbanize. It has retained its distinct identity though shifting the focus from religion to the French language and culture. This makes it unique in the North American continent, though some might draw parallels with the growing assertiveness of the Spanish language, and Latinos, in some American states. French Quebecers have historically seen themselves as a besieged island of French surrounded by a sea of continental English, and with good reason.

There are about ninety-two thousand Jews in Montreal, home to almost all the Jews in the province. About 70-75 percent are Ashkenazi, the rest Sephardi. There is a high percentage of English-French bilingualism. Jews in Quebec are very successful by most socioeconomic indicators, notably education, occupation, and income. At the same time they are a very insular community. They were insular in the past, and though they are less so today, they remain largely isolated from the surrounding francophone French-speaking milieu in Quebec.[1]

The term insular ought not to be construed too negatively. The Jewish community in Montreal is very “institutionally complete.”[2] By every indicator of Jewish identity it is a very “Jewish” community, more so than American Jewish communities and also arguably more than the Toronto community, and certainly more than Vancouver or Calgary. (See below.)

Moreover, Jews have “agency,” as do all minorities. They are social actors, and especially in the modern period can play a role in shaping their fate. It is misleading to focus on them only as passive victims and objects of anti-Semitic prejudice. There is an interaction, and in Montreal the very vibrant and positive Jewish identity may also be linked to the isolation and insularity of Jews from the surrounding francophone milieu. For a variety of reasons the Jews in Montreal attempted to integrate more into the English-speaking segment of Quebec society, or at least chose English over French as their predominant language. So there may well be a tradeoff, with enhanced cultural-survival prospects associated with lesser sociocultural integration.

In the prewar period anti-Semitism in Quebec was found in both the English and French segments of the population, as it was in English Canada as a whole.[3] From the 1960s the rise of French nationalism and specifically the independence movement weakened the demographic base of the population  as significant numbers of Quebec Jews migrated to other provinces, fearing insecurity or loss of status as English speakers should Quebec become  independent. In the 1960s the Quebec Jewish population numbered about 115,000, and by 2006 about 92,000. The Jewish population of Toronto has been growing because of movements from places like Montreal, but also a great deal of international immigration to Toronto, and so by 2006 the Jewish population there may have been around 170,000.

What evidence is there for the relatively high degree of Jewish identity in Montreal?[4] To begin with, Canadian Jews as a whole have a higher average level of identity than American Jews. By every measure, Jews in Canada are more religiously involved than those in the United States. Jews in Canada also are one generation closer to the old country than their American counterparts. Whereas about 10 percent of American Jews are foreign born, in Canada it is about 25-30 percent-a dramatic difference.

Canadian Jews identify more as Orthodox and less as Reform. They also are much more communally involved. They read Jewish newspapers, belong to Jewish organizations, make United Jewish Appeal donations at a higher rate, and donate more per capita. More of their close friends are Jewish and they are more socially segregated. They can converse more in Yiddish and in Hebrew compared to American Jews.

Canadian Jews also are much more involved with Israel. For example, in 1990 only one-third of Canadian Jews had “never” visited Israel compared to two-thirds of American Jews. Seventy-two percent of Canadian Jews knew the year of the Six Day War compared to only 40 percent in the United States.

Montreal Jews expand further on these gaps, in that they are more traditional and more communally involved than the Jews in Toronto and elsewhere in Canada. Jews in Montreal are more likely to be Orthodox and less likely to be Reform. By a slight yet consistent margin, Jews in Montreal in 1990 were more likely to belong to Jewish community centers, to read Jewish newspapers, to have visited Israel, to feel very close to Israel, and to talk about Israel. All this is echoed by intermarriage data: Jews in Canada intermarry less than Jews in the United States and Jews in Montreal even less than Jews in Toronto.[5]

A Third Solitude

Why this very intense and distinctive brand of Jewish identity and cohesion in Montreal? One can argue that Jews in Montreal represent what is called a “third solitude.” English-French relations in Montreal were described as “two solitudes” in a celebrated novel of that title.[6] By now the French in Montreal are far more numerous than the old-stock English, but historically those were the two solitudes with very little social and cultural contact between them. The Jews, an immigrant group who came later, were a “third solitude.” In the early years of the twentieth century Yiddish was the third most common language in Montreal. Jews were caught in the middle, not accepted by the French Catholics or by the Anglo (English and Scottish) establishment in Montreal, and marginal to both.

That marginality and internal focus may have spawned a great deal of cultural creativity. When one thinks of the greatest Canadian Jewish poets and writers one does not think of Toronto artists but rather of Montreal’s: J. I. Segal, Sholom Shtern, Melech Ravitch, and Rachel Korn in Yiddish, Leonard Cohen, A. M. Klein, Irving Layton, and Mordecai Richler in English.[7] So a third solitude nurtured that creativity. In recent years the weight of numbers has shifted the center of gravity for Jewish Canadian culture to Toronto.[8]

Moreover, one element of that third solitude-the barriers between Jews and Anglos-has broken down. Jews now are totally accepted among Quebec Anglos largely because both groups have shrunk. It used to be that Jews would face discrimination, even anti-Jewish quotas, at McGill University, but by 2007 Jews had served as its two most recent principals. English- language society and culture today in Montreal-schools, universities, journalism, hospitals, theater-would implode without Jewish involvement and leadership.

Attitudes in Francophone Quebec

So that barrier has fallen, but the French-Jewish barrier remains, though it has weakened. The francophone Quebec environment developed a distinctive sociopolitical and geopolitical character. By now Quebecois share a strong antipathy-stronger than other Canadians-toward the United States and toward George Bush. In this they have adopted a politically progressive posture rather like the very left wing of the U.S. Democratic Party or Canada’s New Democratic Party (NDP).

Polls and studies show Quebecers with more unfavorable attitudes toward the United States and toward U.S. policies in the world than English Canadians. They are more likely to blame the United States or even Israel’s policies in the Middle East for the 9/11 attacks. French Quebecers also are more opposed in general to military spending and to Canada’s military role in Afghanistan, and while many Canadians oppose contemporary globalization (a trend that is seen as furthering American interests), the movement seems stronger in Quebec despite the province’s earlier support for North American free trade in the 1980s.[9]

Is this attitude an anti-American or antiwar phenomenon? Is there a pacifist strain in modern Quebec? There may be. Quebec as a region of Canada was the most opposed to Canada’s involvement in World War I and World War II, notably to conscription. There was a referendum on conscription in Canada in the spring of 1942. About 72 percent of the Quebec population voted against it whereas in Canada as a whole, including Quebec, the figure was only 35 percent.

What fueled that opposition?  There were many factors. When Quebec also opposed conscription during World War I, it had nothing remotely to do with Jews and sparked a violent reaction by the Canadian government. But by the second conscription debate, clearly anti-Semitism was now added to the mix of factors.[10] Just how much a part it played is still a subject for debate.

In the 1930s there was much sympathy in Catholic Quebec society, including French intellectual and elite segments, for Mussolini, Franco, and fascism in general. Quebec’s government and the church were strongly anticommunist and even antiliberal. Anti-Semitism was part of that ambience, and it affected many young Quebec intellectuals at the time.[11] A recent biography of Pierre Trudeau, long-serving prime minister of Canada, revealed that in his twenties even he was part of those fascist, nationalist, and anti-Semitic movements, before he evolved into a committed democrat and civil libertarian.[12]

So Quebec voted in the spring of 1942 against conscription, when the Nazis’ record of brutality was becoming abundantly clear. There has not yet been in Quebec a frank and full reckoning, combining public and intellectual discourse, with this particular period. Every European society has had a reckoning of some sort. West Germany of course had no choice. In France it was the myth of La Resistance that finally was challenged by the facts of  Vichy collaboration as revealed in subsequent research, trials, and artistic works. Even Austria was forced to do soul-searching, confronting the myth of Austria as among Hitler’s first victimized states, by the Kurt Waldheim affair.

Two Critical Books, Two Reactions

English Canada also was far from blameless. In the 1930s and early 1940s Canada, under the government of Mackenzie King, did not accept Jewish refugees from Germany or Europe. In 1982 historians Irving Abella and Harold Troper’s bestselling book None Is Too Many[13] described in new detail the story of Canada’s refusal to admit the Jewish refugees, and the anti-Semitism in English and French Canada. The title refers to a quote from an anti-Semitic Anglo public servant at the time.

 The reaction of English Canada to this highly critical book was clear: mea culpa. The phrase “none is too many” entered the Canadian political lexicon, and the related guilt has helped shape subsequent Canadian refugee policy in more liberal directions. The book has continued to sell though it has never been translated into French. English Canadian elites responded with self-flagellation. The Literary Review of Canada recently selected the book as one of the hundred most important Canadian books in English.[14] None Is Too Many received awards and its authors were acclaimed in English Canada.

A very different reaction awaited the French equivalent.[15] A Quebecoise scholar named Esther Delisle, a non-Jewish philo-Semite, wrote her doctoral thesis at Laval University in Quebec City on the topic of French anti-Semitism in the 1930s in Quebec. She exposed in particular the currents of anti-Semitism-editorials, letters, articles, and cartoons-in a leading French daily, Le Devoir. Le Devoir was by no means Der Stürmer, but a significant amount of anti-Semitism could be found in its pages and Delisle highlighted it. Although the paper is not in mass-circulation, it is very respected and entrenched among French intellectual elites, with the clout of a New York Times.

 Her case was debated in intellectual circles from 1990 to 1992, but the tone was the opposite of the None Is Too Many case. Delisle’s dissertation dealt particularly with Lionel Groulx, a leading Catholic theologian and intellectual and one of the founding fathers of modern Quebec nationalism. His writing included the reflexive anti-Semitic prejudices of conservative Catholics of the era. But he would occasionally add a philo-Semitic remark (or stereotype), suggesting French Canadians should admire the Jews for their tenacity in surviving so long. The preponderance of Groulx’s writings, however, painted a negative picture of the Jews.[16]

Delisle’s dissertation attacked both Le Devoir and Groulx, and became a cause célèbre. It was covered in newspapers and in L’Actualité, the Time magazine of French Quebec. There was no consensus among the professors involved in her dissertation and defense. The examining committee awarded her degree by a 3-2 vote. After this episode and the resulting publicity, she was demonized by the Quebec intelligentsia. She could not get a job as an academic anywhere in Quebec, where there were no mea culpas but only denunciations. Her dissertation was eventually published as a book in English and French.[17]

Richler’s Further Provocation

Delisle had committed the sin of washing her group’s-a minority-dirty laundry in public. Jews, and any minority with a sense of victimization, understand this too. The Quebec intelligentsia closed ranks and attacked her. Around the time that her case was just subsiding, satirist Mordecai Richler published a famous article in the New Yorker, then a book titled O Canada, O Quebec in 1992.[18] These works lampooned Quebec nationalism and Quebec’s restrictive language laws. The late Richler’s approach was to satirize everything: Jews more than anyone, followed by English Canadians and French Canadians. He rankled many, certainly including Jewish readers. Yet for Jews at least he was an insider.

But with these latest writings Richler the outsider-who spoke very little French to boot-attacked Quebec nationalists and ridiculed their excesses in front of the Americans. They were furious. To make matters worse, Richler also used the suspect Delisle as a research assistant, and he cited some of her own work with reference to anti-Semitism in the 1930s. He also cited more recent surveys that seemed to show there was more attitudinal anti-Semitism in the Quebec population than in the English population in Canada.

So Mordecai Richler and Esther Delisle together became vilified as anti-Quebec and antinationalist. Actually Richler admired much about French culture in Quebec; he opposed excessive nationalism whether in Quebec or among right-wing Zionists in Israel. Nevertheless, Jewish issues became intertwined with the English-French struggle in Quebec. Many Quebecois thought Richler somehow represented the official Jewish community, which he of course did not. But it also was no secret that the Jewish community, like certain other minority groups in Quebec, was strongly federalist in orientation and opposed to Quebec independence.

Note the very different receptions of the work of Abella and Troper and of Delisle. Until now, at the societal level, francophone scholars have been reluctant to confront these dark moments of Quebec history, with just a few exceptions.[19] Quebec is not unique here. One might ask whether Israeli society (and not just several gadfly intellectuals or post-Zionists) has undergone a collective soul-searching in dealing with unpleasant anti-Arab episodes during the 1948 war, or some excesses in the post-1967 period. All minorities-Jews, Quebecois, blacks­-are defensive if accused of causing the victimization of others.

“Quebec Anti-Semitism” at Present

What, then, is the state of Quebec anti-Semitism today? There are surveys not in the public domain that find conventional measures of anti-Semitic attitudes several percentage points higher for francophones than anglophones in Canada. And several high-profile incidents are troubling, as will be seen below. On the other hand, as also noted, Jewish life in Quebec is thriving. Montreal is awash in synagogues and communal institutions, notably Jewish day schools that have historically received significant  financial support from the provincial government in Quebec, unlike the United States or Ontario.

The attitudinal anti-Semitism in Quebec can be juxtaposed with data on a kind of (voluntary) social segregation.  One study found that in Canada, 34 percent of English-speaking Canadians had no contact whatsoever with Jews; among the French-speaking it was 68 percent.[20] There is extensive sociocultural segregation of Jews in Quebec that is different from that in English Canada, the United States, and even France. Although this is not anti-Semitism in any direct variant, it plays a role in shaping attitudes about Jews in Quebec.

A comparison with Toronto and Ontario generally illustrates the degree of isolation of Quebec Jews. In the postwar period in Toronto there have been three Jewish mayors: Phil Givens, Mel Lastman, and Nathan Phillips. In Ontario all three of the major provincial political parties have had Jewish leaders: Larry Grossman of the Conservatives, Stephen Lewis of the NDP, and Stuart Smith of the Liberals. There has been no recent Jewish mayor of Montreal nor leader of the current political parties in Quebec. Nor is one likely in the near future, even assuming he or she speaks perfect French.

Even in France since the 1930s there have been Jewish premiers: Léon Blum, René Mayer, and Pierre Mendes-France. The current president Nicolas Sarkozy, has Jewish ancestry. In France these Jews, admittedly very assimilated, were accepted as part of the French collective project at the very highest levels. There have been individual Jewish politicians as cabinet ministers in Quebec provincial politics-essentially in the federalist Liberal Party-but never as leaders.

At the level of culture, most of the leading Quebec Jewish writers such as A. M. Klein, Leonard Cohen, Irving Layton, and Mordecai Richler worked in English. Their creations were relatively unknown to French Quebec and had little or no influence on the French cultural milieu. This differs dramatically from the American case where Jews are intimately involved in cultural production in every sphere. The anti-Semites say Jews control Hollywood and the media. The notion of Jewish control is of course nonsense. But Jewish artists, writers, journalists, and so on, and through them Jewish themes and sensibilities, are transmitted into the matrix of American culture through the institutions of popular and high culture alike, from Broadway to the New York Times, from Seinfeld to Spielberg.[21]

In English Canada, Jews have also become well integrated in the postwar period. In the field of journalism, in recent years the Globe and Mail has had a Jewish editor, the conservative National Post had Jewish ownership and a strong presence on the editorial staff, while the more liberal Toronto Star had a Jewish publisher. Jews also are well represented as reporters and columnists. In Quebec such involvement is nonexistent. The two newspapers of record in French Quebec are Le Devoir and La Presse, and there is negligible Jewish involvement at any level. There is no Quebec equivalent of the influence of urban-liberal-Jewish creativity, from Hollywood to New York, on the American public.

The same pertains to the Jewish religious calendar. On English-language media in Canada or in the United States during the High Holidays or Passover, one often hears the Gentile hosts on TV or radio wishing Jews a Happy New Year or easy fast on Yom Kippur, or talking about Passover and so on. It is part of the discourse there but not in French Quebec, where such chatter is very rare.

“Anti-Semitism in Quebec” at Present

This, then, is the unique context of “Quebec anti-Semitism.” In no way has it led to any serious level of anti-Semitic experience in the day-to-day lives of Quebec Jews. And, as suggested, the harms of this high level of sociocultural segregation may also have ironically helped nurture the high levels of communal Jewish solidarity and cultural vitality.

As for “anti-Semitism in Quebec,” it concerns global issues and specifically Israel. Attitudes toward Israel in Quebec are very different than in English Canada. The immigration of significant numbers of francophone North African and Lebanese Arabs has injected a different perspective in popular and elite Quebec discourse on the Middle East. A September 2006 Leger survey for the Association for Canadian Studies found higher proportions in Quebec-38 percent, compared to the full Canadian average of 31 percent-attributing the conflict in Lebanon to “Israel’s actions in the Middle East.”[22] For many Jews any systemic devaluation or criticism of Israel is linked to anti-Semitism in some way. At least one empirical study of European attitudes toward Jews and Israel has established such a link.[23]

Three recent events in Quebec illustrate and bridge the local and the global themes. The first was the April 2004 bombing of a Jewish school’s library in Montreal. It turned out the bomber was an eighteen-year-old Lebanese immigrant to Quebec. This event, related to the Middle East, is an example of imported global anti-Semitism. The Montreal Jewish community was traumatized by the event. Some of the non-Jewish political leaders had notable reactions. The then Canadian prime minister Paul Martin said: “The assault was not directed against the Jewish Community of Montreal, but against all Canadians.”[24] He was clearly trying to universalize the event and diminish, perhaps inadvertently, its specifically Jewish character, and by extension its link to Israel and the Middle East conflict.

A second event could be construed as playing on older indigenous Quebec themes. A few months after this bombing, the Quebec provincial government decided to increase its funding to Jewish day schools from 60 to 100 percent of the secular portion of the school costs. As mentioned earlier, the absence of a firm wall separating church and state does not preclude government funding of religious schools in Canada in those provinces that accept to do so.

That decision led to an explosion of controversy in the French media in Quebec. People did not understand the issue. Many French-speaking Quebecers did not know that there was any funding to any private schools with a religious or ethnic character or to private schools in general. People thought the Jews were getting a special deal, though Greek private schools had long also benefited from the same program. Eventually there was such an outcry that the government reversed its decision.

Editorial cartoonists took part. In one cartoon by Serge Chapleau that appeared in La Presse on 18 January 2005, the francophone education minister in Quebec, Pierre Reid of the (federalist) Liberal Party, is depicted as a stereotypical Hasid with text saying he was “very moved by the fire in the [Jewish school] library. Minister Reid increased the subventions given to the Jewish schools.” The cartoon shows him taking a phone call from someone who is obviously a Sikh, saying, “What are you saying Mr. Singh? Your cafeteria had a fire? Sorry, that doesn’t fit within our regulations.” In other words, the minister is using the excuse that a cafeteria does not qualify for financial aid as a library does.

The context of the increased school subvention is complex. Before this decision some wealthy Montreal Jews held a meeting to raise money for the Liberal Party in Quebec. So it was not baseless to identify two reasons for this change in policy. One was to make amends for the bombing of the school, but the other could be a quid pro quo.

This was the theme of a second cartoon, by Garnotte in Le Devoir on 19 January 2005. Its header in English was “Money and the ethnic vote, part II.” In 1995 Jacques Parizeau, the outgoing sovereignist premier of Quebec, uttered the infamous phrase when he blamed the defeat of the independence referendum in Quebec in 1995 on “money and the ethnic vote.” These were seen as code words for Jews, Italians, Greeks, and their money, since the major organizations of these three groups had lobbied against separatism in Quebec during that referendum campaign.

The cartoon itself shows the federalist Liberal premier of Quebec, Jean Charest, slipping on a banana peel outside a building labeled as a “private Jewish school.” Education Minister Reid is depicted as also walking out with an open briefcase brimming with money. What is not certain is whether this money is going to the Jewish schools or coming to him from Jewish donors. The bubble has Parizeau saying “That’s what I call slipping on your own banana peel.” The message is that the provincial Liberal Party brought this on themselves. The cartoon makes the link between Jews, money, and a payoff.

Do such cartoons cross a line, and could they be in any sense considered anti-Semitic? They appear instead to be hard-hitting, fair comment and not anti-Semitic in any real sense. At the same time, it seems highly unlikely that such cartoons, and certainly the one with Reid depicted as a Hasid, would appear in English papers in Canada or the United States. Many Jews would indeed find such cartoons offensive. A delegation of the Montreal Jewish community met privately with the editors of one of the papers to discuss the matter, and received a fair and responsive hearing.

A third event took place during the summer 2006 war in Lebanon. A large “peace” march was held in Montreal that became a de facto rally opposing Israel’s offensive against Hizballah and focusing uniquely on the plight of Lebanese victims. Among the leaders of the march were prominent Quebec politicians, notably Andre Boisclair, former leader of the Parti Quebecois, Gilles Duceppe, leader of the Bloc Quebecois, and Denis Coderre, a federal Liberal MP, along with union and other officials. The sight of fifteen thousand marchers in a de facto anti-Israeli protest led by major Quebec politicians was frightening to many Jews, and remained a sore spot despite clarifications by the politicians present that they were not supporting Hizballah and were simply promoting peace.

A Unique Case

The Jewish case in Quebec is unique in North America. The community is socioculturally segregated to a high degree from the mainstream society. French Quebec has not come to a full societal resolution of the legacies of its attitudes toward Jews and World War II during the 1930s and 1940s. Contemporary currents of elite and popular political thought are more likely to be anti-American (and specifically anti-Bush) and anti-Israeli than in English Canada. Marginality remains an ongoing feature of Quebec Jewish life.

*     *     *

Notes

*  This essay is a version of a chapter in a planned forthcoming volume, Charles Small, ed., Yale Seminars in Anti-Semitism: A Comparative Perspective (Yale University Press). The author expresses thanks to Prof. Richard Menkis, Dept. of Religion, University of British Columbia and Mr. Daniel Boyer, Wainright Librarian of the Nahum Gelber Law Library, McGill University for their kind assistance. Prof. Menkis is working on a book-length study of the writing of Canadian Jewish history. Errors of fact and unwarranted interpretations are this author’s responsibility. Thanks also to editorial cartoonists Serge Chapleau of La Presse and Garnotte of Le Devoir for permission to reprint their works.

[1] For a historical overview of recent Quebec Jewish history within a broader Canadian discussion, see Gerald Tulchinsky, Branching Out (Toronto:  Stoddart, 1998). For a sociological analysis, see Pierre Anctil and Gary Caldwell, eds., Juifs et réalites juives au Quebec (Quebec: Institute quebecois de recherche sur la culture, 1984 [French]; Morton Weinfeld,  Like Everyone Else but Different: The Paradoxical Success of Canadian Jews (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2001). For sociodemographic profiles of the Montreal Jewish community, see Charles Shahar, A Survey of Jewish Life in Montreal, Part I (Montreal: Federation CJA, 1996); Charles Shahar and Randal Schnoor, A Survey of Jewish Life in Montreal, Part II (Montreal: Federation CJA, 1997).

[2] Raymond Breton, 1964. “Institutional Completeness of Immigrants and the Personal Relations of Immigrants,” American Journal of Sociology, 70 (1964): 193-205.

[3] For a succinct review of Canadian anti-Semitism from New France until the immediate postwar period, see Richard Menkis, “Anti-Semitism in the Evolving Nation: From New France to 1950,” in Ruth Klein and Frank Dimant, eds., From Immigration to Integration: The Canadian Jewish Experience (Toronto: Institute for International Affairs of B’nai Brith Canada and Malcolm Lester, 2001), 31-51.

[4] For survey data on the indicators below, see relevant tables in the Appendix of Weinfeld, Like Everyone Else.

[5] Ibid., 154-60.

[6] Hugh McLennan, Two Solitudes (Toronto: Collins, 1945).

[7] For Yiddish, see Eugene Orenstein, “Yiddish Culture in Canada: Yesterday and Today,” in Morton Weinfeld et al., eds., The Canadian Jewish Mosaic (Rexdale: John Wiley & Sons, 1981), 293-314.

[8] Norman Ravvin, A House of Words: Jewish Writing, Identity and Memory (Montreal: McGill Queen’s Press, 1997).

[9] For a sampling of many of these polls, especially post-2001, see the website of the Association for Canadian Studies, http://www.acs-aec.ca/.

[10] Jack Granatstein, Conscription in the Second World War: A Study in Political Management (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1969); Jack Granatstein and J. M. Hitsman, Broken Promises: A History of Conscription (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1977).

[11] André Laurendeau, La Crise de la Conscription (Montreal: Editions du jour, 1962) [French]; André Laurendeau, Witness for Quebec: Essays Selected and Translated by Philip Stratford (Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1973).

[12] Max Nemni and Monique Nemni, Trudeau, fils du Quebec, père du Canada (Montreal: Editions de l’homme, 2006). [French]

[13] Irving Abella and Harold Troper, None Is Too Many (Toronto: Lester, Orpen & Dennys, 1982).

[14] www.reviewcanada.ca/hundredbooks.html.

[15] For a detailed review of this issue, see Richard Menkis, “What Is at Stake in the Study of Anti-Semitism in Quebec?” paper presented at the 37th Annual Conference of the Association for Jewish Studies, Washington, DC,  December 2005.

[16] Gerard Bouchard, Les deux chanoines: contradiction et ambivalence dans la pensée de Lionel Groulx (Montreal: Boreal, 2003). [French]

[17] Esther Delisle, The Traitor and the Jew (Montreal: R. Davies, 1993).

[18] Mordechai Richler, Oh Canada, Oh Quebec: Réquiem for a Divided Country (Toronto: Penguin, 1992).

[19] Anctil and Caldwell, Juifs et réalites juives.

[20] Gabriel Weimann and Conrad Winn, Hate on Trial (Oakville, Ont.: Mosaic Press, 1986).

[21] Stephen Whitfield, In Search of American Jewish Culture (Hanover, NH and London: Brandeis University Press/University Press of New England, 1999).

[22] http://www.acs-aec.ca/.

[23] Edward Kaplan and Charles A. Small, “Anti-Israel Sentiment Predicts Anti-Semitism in Europe,” Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 50, No. 4 (2006): 548-61. See also Manfred Gerstenfeld, “Anti-Israelism and Anti-Semitism: Common Characteristics and Motifs,” Jewish Political Studies Review, Vol. 19, Nos. 1-2 (Spring 2007): 83-108.

[24] http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story%202004/04/05/mtlschool040405.html.

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Morton Weinfeld is professor of sociology at McGill University where he holds the Chair in Canadian Ethnic Studies. He is the author of Like Everyone Else but Different: The Paradoxical Success of Canadian Jews  (McClelland & Stewart, 2001) and editor of the section on “Modern Jewish Life in the Diaspora” in Zman Yehudi Chadash: Tarbut Yehudit Be’edan Hiloni (Keter, 2007, Hebrew).