![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldI'd like to begin this by apologizing for my lateness in participating in Jonathan Edelstein's Arrival Day blogburst, this year commemorating the 350th anniversary of the arrival of the first Jews in the North American continent. In my defense, I can claim that my participation last year was early, so early that I can claim a couple of days slack this year.
The Arrival Day posting I made last year was concerned with the near-complete lack of Jewish visibility on Prince Edward Island when I was growing up in the 1980s and early 1990s. This year, I found myself stuck trying to figure out what I'd write this year until I noticed that the percentage of Jewish bloggers I have links to, whether on my Livejournal friends list or on the blogs I've got listed on my blogroll, is quite high, at least 5% of the total. I hinted last year that the technologies associated with globalization have enabled me, an unexceptional Gentile from the depths of rural Canada, make the acquaintance of far more Jews than I could ever have hoped to meet without. Globalization in all of its manifestations, virtual and actual, has had that effect generally on non-Jewish Canadians. Canada's Jewish community has, in many ways, benefitted enormously from globalization.
Canada's Jewish population has become, almost without anyone taking note, one of the largest in the Diaspora. According to the statistics at the Jewish Virtual Library, Canada's Jewish population is fifth-largest in the Diaspora, far behind the United States, more substantially behind France and Russia, and just a bit behind Ukraine. Since the time these figures were assembled, however, ongoing Jewish emigration from Ukraine has probably boosted Canada to fourth place. This places Canada's Jewish population in a separate order of magnitude from other, more historically prominent, Jewish populations in countries as various as the United Kingdom, Argentina, South Africa, Hungary, and Germany. Daniel J. Elazar, pointing to this rapid growth, was correct in concluding that "Canadian Jewry is worthy of far more attention than it has received."
As elsewhere in the Western world, Canadian Jews have preceded their Christian co-citizens in the demographic transition. That Canada's Jewish population has grown by almost a quarter between 1981 and the present is the product of a long history of mass immigration. The community first emerged as a product of Ashkenazic immigration from eastern Europe beginning in the last decade of the 19th century and continuing to the Second World War. Later, this was supplemented by Sephardic immigration from North Africa, directed particularly towards Montréal, in the 1960s and 1970s. The most recent waves of Jewish immigrants have come from the former Soviet Union and Israel. The late Mordecai Richler, born in Montréal to an Orthodox family of Ashkenazic background, was perhaps the first major Jewish figure in Canadian prose literature. It says something about the ongoing shifts in the Jewish community's composition that the most recent literary wünderkind of Jewish background is David Bezmogis, born in the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic and an immigrant to Canada in the early 1980s.
The rapid growth of Canada's Jewish community goes along with the presence of adequate services. The Canadian Jewish community, all things considered, is very well off, with a dense institutional network manifested in private schools, abundant print and electronic media, and numerous religious congregations reflecting the three major and many minor streams of Judaism. The Miles Nadal Jewish Community Centre is a prominent feature on Bloor Street, reminding me very strongly of the Carrefour de l'Isle-Saint-Jean, a multipurpose community centre (school, library, bookstore, theatre) for Francophones living in the Charlottetown area. It's rather impressive, all the more so for being constructed using largely private funds, not public funds as is the case with the comparable structures for Canada's official-language minorities.
In many ways, Canada's Jewish community--demographically buoyant, organizationally solid, the subject of respect--is the poster community for Canadian multiculturalism.
Bonnie Menes Kahn, in her sadly underappreciated book Cosmopolitan Culture, noted that Jews have often found themselves a step or two ahead of their non-Christian neighbours. She identified the cause in the need of Jews, constantly menaced by oppression, to innovate. When Judaism and Jewish theology were attacked, literacy was required to defend their religion. When peasants proved violently inhospitable to Jewish neighbours, shtetls formed. When liberal political ideologies allowing Jews to be citizens like their Gentile neighbours appeared, Jews embraced them.
The result? By the time that the great migrations from Ashkenazic Jews from central and eastern Europe began at the end of the 19th century, potential Jewish migrants had become preadapted to urban civilization, and were able to thrive in liberal and prosperous environments. Gradually freed of the relatively benign informal quotas and prejudices in Canada (relatively, I hasten to add, relative to the more noxious and often more violent anti-Semitism in their ancestral homelands), Canadian Jews were able to quickly ascend into the most prominent ranks of Canadian society, in the professions and the arts.
The problem, in Canada as in other societies in the Diaspora where Jews were accepted as fellow citizens, is that this very acceptance makes it very difficult to maintain. Multiculturalism, as a policy of government as well as a set of attitudes, is quite correct in encouraging the acceptance and normalization of foreign to the mishmash that's traditional culture. Multiculturalism can also be quite flawed, in its tacit assumption that cultural boundaries between groups will remain static. Looking around me in Toronto, that isn't the case at all. As intermarriage rates continue to climb while rates of religious practice and first-language fluency in traditional Jewish languages like Yiddish decline (despite, as the Toronto Star reports, a recent revival), the rationale for the maintenance of strong Jewish communities. The heterogeneous origins and distribution of Canada's Jewish population makes the maintenance of community solidarity all the more difficult.
What is happening with Canada's Jews will, of course, happen later to Canada's other immigrant groups over time, indeed already is happening. Future generations of sociologists will pore over the statistics that have been and will be accumulated, and be thankful. For the time being, though, Canada's Jewish population is faced with the prospect of an impending sharp decline. The Carrefour de l'Isle Saint-Jean, I might add, has done little to reverse the galloping rate of assimilation among Island Acadians; I'm skeptical about the ability of the Miles Nadal centre to do anything to slow down the assimilation of individual Jews into a non-descript general Canadian population.
I'm not fond of references to the "Jewish Question," or the "Muslim Question," or the "Hispanic Question," or the "Gay Question," or other comparable questions. Apart from treating fairly large and diverse communities as unitary entities, and attributing to these entities motivations and concerns which simply don't manifest themselves uniformly, there's usually a nasty tone beneath these questions. "When will they stop hurting us?", say, or "When will they become like us?"
The Jewish Question I have in mind is rather more benign. It's something that can be answered only by Canadian Jews themselves, in relationship to their personal goals, their relationships with other Canadians, and their connection to the wider Canadian Jewish community. What can be done to adapt Canada's Jewish community to a future where boundaries between communities will be much more porous than ever before, what can individual Jews do, what can the community as a whole do, what can individual segments do? Canada's Jewish community has to be concerned with retaining its membership, obviously, but it also has to be concerned with recruiting new members. To one degree or another, it has to become a missionary religion.
How this last bit is to be achieved is uncertain. Jonathan Edelstein has written eloquently [1, 2, 3] on this possibility, while Ikram Saeed in his own Arrival Day post suggests that Jewish Canadians--and members of other ethnoreligious communities--should try to introduce non-Jews, particularly children, with elements of Jewish culture.
This idea has some merit. I'm not sure how it can actually initiate change, though. I took late French immersion on Prince Edward Island--all of my classes in grades 7 through 9 save English and (in Grade 9) Phys Ed were taught in French, and a significant proportion of my classes in high school were also instructed in the medium of French. I'd like to say that I'm bilingual, despite my less-than-satisfactory command of idiomatic French and my shakiness on certain of the more exotic grammatical tenses of the language. I think that my fluency in French has allowed me to access cultural networks--a fondness for the music of Mylène Farmer, an ability to undertake competent thematic criticism of Ringuet's Thirty Acres for my Honours English thesis, an interest in French-language print and electronic media, and so on.
At the same time, though, although I can access these networks, I remain an English Canadian of Prince Edward Island birth. I can access these networks, and I can claim a moderate level of fluency with these networks, but I am not a French Canadian. If I so chose, I suppose that I could assimilate over time (move to Montréal or better yet Québec City, take up a Francophone partner, ignore English-language media and mass culture). Frankly, I don't think that's very likely.
Canada's Jewish community faces a future that's uncertain. It's some comfort, I'd hope, to know that this future is uncertain in the best way possible. The way lies open for Canada's Jewish community, going from strength to strength as it has for the past century, to change radically, to make a radical break with existing trends as they are projected indefinitely into the future. I hope that it isn't misplaced Canadian nationalism to expect that this community to be able to do that. Whether it actually will or not ultimately remains up to the members of the community themselves.
The Arrival Day posting I made last year was concerned with the near-complete lack of Jewish visibility on Prince Edward Island when I was growing up in the 1980s and early 1990s. This year, I found myself stuck trying to figure out what I'd write this year until I noticed that the percentage of Jewish bloggers I have links to, whether on my Livejournal friends list or on the blogs I've got listed on my blogroll, is quite high, at least 5% of the total. I hinted last year that the technologies associated with globalization have enabled me, an unexceptional Gentile from the depths of rural Canada, make the acquaintance of far more Jews than I could ever have hoped to meet without. Globalization in all of its manifestations, virtual and actual, has had that effect generally on non-Jewish Canadians. Canada's Jewish community has, in many ways, benefitted enormously from globalization.
Canada's Jewish population has become, almost without anyone taking note, one of the largest in the Diaspora. According to the statistics at the Jewish Virtual Library, Canada's Jewish population is fifth-largest in the Diaspora, far behind the United States, more substantially behind France and Russia, and just a bit behind Ukraine. Since the time these figures were assembled, however, ongoing Jewish emigration from Ukraine has probably boosted Canada to fourth place. This places Canada's Jewish population in a separate order of magnitude from other, more historically prominent, Jewish populations in countries as various as the United Kingdom, Argentina, South Africa, Hungary, and Germany. Daniel J. Elazar, pointing to this rapid growth, was correct in concluding that "Canadian Jewry is worthy of far more attention than it has received."
As elsewhere in the Western world, Canadian Jews have preceded their Christian co-citizens in the demographic transition. That Canada's Jewish population has grown by almost a quarter between 1981 and the present is the product of a long history of mass immigration. The community first emerged as a product of Ashkenazic immigration from eastern Europe beginning in the last decade of the 19th century and continuing to the Second World War. Later, this was supplemented by Sephardic immigration from North Africa, directed particularly towards Montréal, in the 1960s and 1970s. The most recent waves of Jewish immigrants have come from the former Soviet Union and Israel. The late Mordecai Richler, born in Montréal to an Orthodox family of Ashkenazic background, was perhaps the first major Jewish figure in Canadian prose literature. It says something about the ongoing shifts in the Jewish community's composition that the most recent literary wünderkind of Jewish background is David Bezmogis, born in the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic and an immigrant to Canada in the early 1980s.
The rapid growth of Canada's Jewish community goes along with the presence of adequate services. The Canadian Jewish community, all things considered, is very well off, with a dense institutional network manifested in private schools, abundant print and electronic media, and numerous religious congregations reflecting the three major and many minor streams of Judaism. The Miles Nadal Jewish Community Centre is a prominent feature on Bloor Street, reminding me very strongly of the Carrefour de l'Isle-Saint-Jean, a multipurpose community centre (school, library, bookstore, theatre) for Francophones living in the Charlottetown area. It's rather impressive, all the more so for being constructed using largely private funds, not public funds as is the case with the comparable structures for Canada's official-language minorities.
In many ways, Canada's Jewish community--demographically buoyant, organizationally solid, the subject of respect--is the poster community for Canadian multiculturalism.
Bonnie Menes Kahn, in her sadly underappreciated book Cosmopolitan Culture, noted that Jews have often found themselves a step or two ahead of their non-Christian neighbours. She identified the cause in the need of Jews, constantly menaced by oppression, to innovate. When Judaism and Jewish theology were attacked, literacy was required to defend their religion. When peasants proved violently inhospitable to Jewish neighbours, shtetls formed. When liberal political ideologies allowing Jews to be citizens like their Gentile neighbours appeared, Jews embraced them.
The result? By the time that the great migrations from Ashkenazic Jews from central and eastern Europe began at the end of the 19th century, potential Jewish migrants had become preadapted to urban civilization, and were able to thrive in liberal and prosperous environments. Gradually freed of the relatively benign informal quotas and prejudices in Canada (relatively, I hasten to add, relative to the more noxious and often more violent anti-Semitism in their ancestral homelands), Canadian Jews were able to quickly ascend into the most prominent ranks of Canadian society, in the professions and the arts.
The problem, in Canada as in other societies in the Diaspora where Jews were accepted as fellow citizens, is that this very acceptance makes it very difficult to maintain. Multiculturalism, as a policy of government as well as a set of attitudes, is quite correct in encouraging the acceptance and normalization of foreign to the mishmash that's traditional culture. Multiculturalism can also be quite flawed, in its tacit assumption that cultural boundaries between groups will remain static. Looking around me in Toronto, that isn't the case at all. As intermarriage rates continue to climb while rates of religious practice and first-language fluency in traditional Jewish languages like Yiddish decline (despite, as the Toronto Star reports, a recent revival), the rationale for the maintenance of strong Jewish communities. The heterogeneous origins and distribution of Canada's Jewish population makes the maintenance of community solidarity all the more difficult.
What is happening with Canada's Jews will, of course, happen later to Canada's other immigrant groups over time, indeed already is happening. Future generations of sociologists will pore over the statistics that have been and will be accumulated, and be thankful. For the time being, though, Canada's Jewish population is faced with the prospect of an impending sharp decline. The Carrefour de l'Isle Saint-Jean, I might add, has done little to reverse the galloping rate of assimilation among Island Acadians; I'm skeptical about the ability of the Miles Nadal centre to do anything to slow down the assimilation of individual Jews into a non-descript general Canadian population.
I'm not fond of references to the "Jewish Question," or the "Muslim Question," or the "Hispanic Question," or the "Gay Question," or other comparable questions. Apart from treating fairly large and diverse communities as unitary entities, and attributing to these entities motivations and concerns which simply don't manifest themselves uniformly, there's usually a nasty tone beneath these questions. "When will they stop hurting us?", say, or "When will they become like us?"
The Jewish Question I have in mind is rather more benign. It's something that can be answered only by Canadian Jews themselves, in relationship to their personal goals, their relationships with other Canadians, and their connection to the wider Canadian Jewish community. What can be done to adapt Canada's Jewish community to a future where boundaries between communities will be much more porous than ever before, what can individual Jews do, what can the community as a whole do, what can individual segments do? Canada's Jewish community has to be concerned with retaining its membership, obviously, but it also has to be concerned with recruiting new members. To one degree or another, it has to become a missionary religion.
How this last bit is to be achieved is uncertain. Jonathan Edelstein has written eloquently [1, 2, 3] on this possibility, while Ikram Saeed in his own Arrival Day post suggests that Jewish Canadians--and members of other ethnoreligious communities--should try to introduce non-Jews, particularly children, with elements of Jewish culture.
40% of Jewish children in Toronto attend ethnically segregated private schools (known as Jewish day schools). Jewish-Canadian traditions are valuable -- why not bring them out from the day-school ghetto. Abolish day-schools and shift the funds to provide a chance for Jewish education classes for all of Toronto's schoolchildren. Short of that drastic step, reserve 50% of the places at Jewish day-schools for non-Jewish-Canadians.
And since this country has created a nationwide network of French schools which no francophones attend, why not set up Jewish immersion schools across the country? Beyond schooling, why not have exchange programs in which Jewish teenagers live with a Italian, Sikh, or Ukrainian family for a few months, and vice versa.
This idea has some merit. I'm not sure how it can actually initiate change, though. I took late French immersion on Prince Edward Island--all of my classes in grades 7 through 9 save English and (in Grade 9) Phys Ed were taught in French, and a significant proportion of my classes in high school were also instructed in the medium of French. I'd like to say that I'm bilingual, despite my less-than-satisfactory command of idiomatic French and my shakiness on certain of the more exotic grammatical tenses of the language. I think that my fluency in French has allowed me to access cultural networks--a fondness for the music of Mylène Farmer, an ability to undertake competent thematic criticism of Ringuet's Thirty Acres for my Honours English thesis, an interest in French-language print and electronic media, and so on.
At the same time, though, although I can access these networks, I remain an English Canadian of Prince Edward Island birth. I can access these networks, and I can claim a moderate level of fluency with these networks, but I am not a French Canadian. If I so chose, I suppose that I could assimilate over time (move to Montréal or better yet Québec City, take up a Francophone partner, ignore English-language media and mass culture). Frankly, I don't think that's very likely.
Canada's Jewish community faces a future that's uncertain. It's some comfort, I'd hope, to know that this future is uncertain in the best way possible. The way lies open for Canada's Jewish community, going from strength to strength as it has for the past century, to change radically, to make a radical break with existing trends as they are projected indefinitely into the future. I hope that it isn't misplaced Canadian nationalism to expect that this community to be able to do that. Whether it actually will or not ultimately remains up to the members of the community themselves.
