A Bit More Detail

• Crooked Timber links the near-criminal destruction of Grenfell Tower with Thatcherism's deregulations and catastrophes.


• The Dragon's Gaze notes that TRAPPIST-1e is slated to be among the first observational targets of the James Webb Space Telescope.


• Far Outliers shares Edith Durham's account of an exciting St. John's Day in Albania in 1908.
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• Language Hat looks at a passage from Turgenev.


• What, the LRB wonders, will Emmanuel Macron do with his crushing victory after the parliamentary elections, too?


• Marginal Revolution wonders to what extent is Germany's support for Nord Stream consistent with Germany's concerns over NATO and Russia.


• Ed Jackson's Spacing Toronto article about the need to preserve queer public history in Toronto is a must-read.
  
• Torontoist's Alex Yerman notes the new activity of the Jewish left against a conservative establishment.


• Window on Eurasia suggests that modern Russia is repeating the Soviet Union's overmilitarization mistakes, only this time with fewer resources.

• Centauri Dreams looks at the SPECULOOS red dwarf observation program.


• The Crux examines VX nerve agent, the chemical apparently used to assassinate the half-brother of North Korea's ruler.


• Dangerous Minds shares photos of the inhabitants of the Tokyo night, like gangsters and prostitutes and drag queens.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money examines Donald Trump's tepid and belated denunciation of anti-Semitism.


• Language Log looks at the story of the Wenzhounese, a Chinese group notable for its diaspora in Italy.


• The LRB Blog looks at the by-elections in the British ridings of Stoke and Copeland and notes the problems of labour.


• The Map Room Blog shares a post-Brexit map of the European Union with an independent Scotland.


• Marginal Revolution reports that a border tax would be a poor idea for the United States and Mexico.


• The NYRB Daily looks at the art of the medieval Tibetan kingdom of Guge.


• Otto Pohl notes the 73rd anniversary of Stalin's deportation of the Chechens and the Ingush.


• Supernova Condensate points out that Venus is actually the most Earth-like planet we know of. Why do we not explore it more?


• Towleroad notes Depeche Mode's denunciation of the alt-right and Richard Spencer.


• Whatever's John Scalzi considers the question of feeling empathy for horrible people.


• Window on Eurasia notes the thousands of Russian citizens involved with ISIS and examines the militarization of Kaliningrad.

At first glance, the menu of Golden Chopsticks restaurant doesn’t seem all that remarkable. The long list of items is the same as many Chinese takeout eateries across the city: egg rolls and sweet and sour chicken balls for appetizers, combo specials featuring General Tao chicken and Hunan beef with steamed rice. It’s the big sign on its window proclaiming “We Are Glatt Kosher” that’s unusual.

It’s a Chinese restaurant for Jews who follow a strict kosher diet and its busiest day of the year is Christmas.

Located in a Thornhill strip mall at the corner of Bathurst St. and Steeles Ave., Golden Chopsticks was the first kosher Chinese restaurant in the city when it opened almost 20 years ago.

Rony Gafny, an observant Jew who had never tried Chinese food, wanted to cater to the predominantly Jewish community in the surrounding neighbourhood when he opened the restaurant.

Jewish people eating Chinese food for Christmas is now part of a North American tradition, says Daniel Koren, a former online editor of Canadian Jewish News, and current media co-ordinator for B’nai Brith Canada. He included Golden Chopsticks in his “For Jewish Christmas: The 10 Best Chinese Restaurants in Toronto” roundup for Canadian Jewish News last year.

“Everybody, who’s Jewish, knows the place because it is the only kosher Chinese place. Or it used to be the only one,” he says. Although Toronto doesn’t have much of a kosher foodie scene compared to say New York or Tel Aviv, there’s a definite interest in kosher food in the city — and that’s brought competition.

A referendum vote in favour of banning new houses of worship on one of Montreal’s most upscale streets has inflamed tensions with the district’s community of Hasidic Jews, fuelling a divisive debate over religious minorities and the sharing of public space.

In a vote that coincides with heightened sensitivity across the continent about the treatment of minorities, residents in the borough of Outremont voted 56 per cent in favour on Sunday of upholding a zoning ban on new temples on Bernard Avenue, one of the well-to-do district’s main commercial arteries.

While the bylaw does not identify a specific religion, it coincides with the rapid expansion of the local Hasidic community, a largely insular, ultra-orthodox group that has grown to about 25 per cent of the population.

Some in the Hasidic community see the vote as push-back against its members. With zoning bans in place on residential streets and other commercial areas in Outremont, Bernard was the last place in the developed part of the borough available to open a synagogue.

[. . .]

The referendum vote is the latest iteration of long-standing strains between the Hasidic Jewish community and the majority in Outremont, home to some of the leading political and cultural figures of Quebec (the borough recently made waves when it renamed Vimy Park after the late premier Jacques Parizeau, a long-time resident). Below the surface, the debate is over the notion of belonging and the stresses of co-habitation in the central Montreal borough of 25,000, where black-garbed Hasidic men are a visible presence. The Hasidic community, bound by deep religious tenets, mostly avoids mixing with those outside its faith.

Toronto's rampant development is claiming another casualty this week: community space Beit Zatoun will host its final event on Wednesday.

Tucked away in the Annex neighbourhood, Beit Zatoun has become a hub of social justice and activism in the city.

In its nearly seven years, the Markham street location has hosted more than 1,000 events — everything from poetry readings to film showings, meetings, lectures, art and music.

But like its neighbour, Honest Ed's, Beit Zatoun will soon be demolished to make way for the Mirvish Village development.

"It has blazed a path for the grass roots community," said founder Robert Massoud.

"And now in its leaving, it leaves a hole. And so hopefully people can recognize the need to fill that hole in a different way."

Beit Zatoun helped me learn about my maternal family. What I got out of this place were tiny fractions of my heritage that wouldn’t have been recovered by my mother’s memory or a detailed Google search. I knew folks who were in the same boat as me, but it was a matter of finding a physical ground.

A community can work to revive lost histories and traditions, but it’s location that gathers them together.

Over the past seven years, Beit Zatoun—“House of Olive” in Arabic—has hosted over 1,000 events coming from virtually every community making up Toronto and cutting across many dimensions of identity. It worked tirelessly to create a community based on mutual awareness and building solidarity. Only 25 per cent of its events had anything to do with the Middle East and the centre was well-known in left and radical activist movements as much as it was a space for the arts, like the Shab-e She’r poetry nights.

To me, it felt like visiting the home of a relative you hadn’t seen in a decade.

While it took me forever to finally visit, I was welcomed with a quiet hospitality by way of treats when I did make the trek. And every single time after that. In fact, Beit Zatoun events were known for having bread, olive oil, za’atar to dip, coffee with cardamom, and tea with sage adorn the tables for people to consume.

Robert Zimmerman became Bob Dylan, Allen Konigsberg became Woody Allen, but Leonard Cohen stayed Leonard Cohen. Coming of age at a time when showbusiness demanded Jews not make their background too obvious, Cohen was happy to be named less like a folk icon than a senior partner in an accountancy firm. It seems an obvious point, but it nods to a larger one that was either overlooked or underplayed in the extensive obituaries that followed Cohen's death last week. Put simply, Cohen was an intensely Jewish artist—along with Philip Roth, perhaps the most deeply Jewish artist of the last century.

Of course, there’s been no shortage of writers or performers with a Jewish sensibility. Allen's earliest films were steeped in Brooklyn shrugs and Manhattan angst, with plenty of Jewish neurotic shtick. Dylan's “Neighbourhood Bully,” telling of a besieged, encircled state of Israel, might be the most AIPAC-friendly song in the rock canon. But the Jewishness of Cohen's work is on an entirely different level.

Sure, he could adopt the requisite shrug of self-deprecation. “I'm the little Jew who wrote the bible,” he sang in “The Future.” And he was finely attuned to the epic forces of 20th-century Jewish history. “Dance Me to the End of Love” was prompted by the knowledge that a string quartet played at the Nazi death camps: “Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin,” Cohen sings. In 1973, he volunteered to fight for Israel during the Yom Kippur war, saying, “I am committed to the survival of the Jewish people.” Told he was more use wielding his voice than a gun, he entertained IDF troops in back-to-back performances. During a 2009 concert in Ramat Gan, he blessed his audiences with the ancient benediction of the Cohanim—the priesthood from which his name is derived.

But none of this is what sets Leonard Cohen apart as a singularly Jewish artist. Rather it's his deep and serious engagement with not only Jewish culture and history, but with Judaism itself.

His new and last album, You Want It Darker, for example, begins with the choir of the Shaar Hashomayim synagogue he grew up in. The chazan, or cantor, of that synagogue sings on the title track, incanting the single word Hineni, a word of tremendous significance for religious Jews. Here I am. It is the answer Abraham, the first Jew, gave when God called out to him, asking him to sacrifice his son Isaac. (The same episode is recalled by Dylan on Highway 61 Revisited.) It’s the reply Moses gives when God speaks to him through the burning bush. It stands as a declaration of submission to divine authority (submission being a frequent Cohen motif). In the song, Cohen follows Hineni with the unambiguous statement, “I'm ready, my Lord”, as if offering himself up for death.

Last summer, Elyse Bouvier got into her beat-up Volvo station wagon and drove across Alberta in search of something very personal but very foreign.

It was not any kind of spiritual epiphany or Kerouacian pursuit of freedom. Instead, she ate and took dozens of photos of ginger beef at tiny Chinese restaurants across rural Alberta. Through the lens of her camera, she was trying to capture a cuisine that is ubiquitous and mysterious in Canada, and the trip culminated in an exhibition called Royal Cafe: Chinese-Western in Alberta.

But the journey of reconnecting with Canadian Chinese food is not unique to Bouvier. It’s the same one embarked on by chef Evelyn Wu and professor Lily Cho, each of whom have used their professional lens to better understand the food brought to Canada by Chinese immigrants over a century ago—food that remains a staple of the Canadian diet.

[. . .]

Ginger beef is an iconic Canadian Chinese dish made of battered and deep-fried beef and coated in a thick, dark, sweet, vinegary sauce. It’s the perfect springboard off of which to jump into the murky waters of Canadian Chinese food and its origins.

Ginger beef is indigenous to Alberta but can be found, it’s safe to say, on pretty much any Chinese takeout menu in Canada. But like its American cousin General Tso’s chicken, you’ll have a hard time finding anything resembling ginger beef in China—it doesn’t exist. It is neither Chinese nor Canadian, and yet it is both.

So how can one food occupy such a strange, culturally ambiguous place in Canada? Part of the reason is that Canada was, by all accounts, a very strange and culturally ambiguous place when Chinese immigrants arrived here during the second half of the 19th century. And like a lot dishes, from General Tso’s chicken to poutine, a lot of restaurants claim the inventor’s throne, but there is no definitive evidence to support these claims.

• At Antipope, Charlie Stross imagines what might become possible with cheap heavy spacelift.


• blogTO notes the vandalization of the iconic Toronto sign during Nuit Blanche.


• The Dragon's Gaze links to a paper considering the detectability of interstellar comets.


• Language Log looks at Chinese language transcriptions for Obama, Hillary, and Trump.


• Marginal Revolution looks at impending hard Brexit and notes how the economy of Thailand is dominated by Bangkok.


• The NYRB Daily writes at length about its apparent discovery of the identity of Elena Ferrante.


• Savage Minds shares a Bolivian perspective on Donald Trump.


• Strange Maps shares a list of ten potential Jewish homelands outside of Palestine.


• Window on Eurasia looks at quiet Chechen dissidence and warns about the consequences of Putin's repressions.


• Yorkshire Ranter Alex Harrowell worries about the people soon to be in charge of the United Kingdom's Brexit negotiations.

• blogTO notes that a half-million dollars does not buy one much of a house in Toronto.


• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly celebrates the fifth anniversary of her marriage on the Toronto Islands.


• The Dragon's Gaze considers exoplanet fatigue in the news, suggesting Proxima b is about as excited as the media will get.


• Far Outliers looks at the foreign safety zone set up in Nanjing in 1937 as the Japanese approached.


• Language Hat considers the globalization of Latin American writers.


• Language Log examines the linguistics behind "hikikomori".


• The LRB Blog looks at the British political spectrum.


• The Map Room Blog reports on some beautiful letterpress maps.


• Marginal Revolution notes that in Africa, urbanization is not accompanied by economic growth.


• The NYRB Daily shares vintage photographs of Syria's Palmyra.


• Spacing looks at the examples of the Netherlands.


• Window on Eurasia looks at a call to create a unified Russian diaspora lobby in the United States and examines ethnic Russian migration from Tuva.