A Review of the Yiddish Media: Responses of the Jewish Immigrant Community in Canada

Type of resource
Authors/collaborators
Title
A Review of the Yiddish Media: Responses of the Jewish Immigrant Community in Canada
Abstract
With the gates to Canada all but shut to immigrants after 1931 and danger looming over European Jewry, the author examines how and where Canadian Jews got their news about the fate of Jews trapped in Nazi Europe. Focusing on three Canadian Yiddish newspapers at a key moment in Canada's immigration history -- the arrival of some 400 Iberian refugees in 1944, an exception to the country's closed-door policy -- the author compares the coverage in Montreal's Keneder adler (Jewish Daily Eagle), Toronto's Yidisher zhurnal (Daily Hebrew Journal) and Winnipeg's Yidishe vort (Israelite Press), and compares this coverage to English and French-language daily papers, as well as to Anglo-Jewish publications. The author concludes that a study of the Yiddish press offers a very different perspective than the historiography that focuses solely on the non-Yiddish press for the Jewish community's knowledge and reaction to the Holocaust. She points out that the historiography focusing on the non-Yiddish press emphasises the political weakness of the Canadian Jewish community, while an examination of the Yiddish press shows a community determining a variety of responses to the unfolding realities of Nazi Europe.
Book Title
Nazi Germany, Canadian Responses: Confronting Antisemitism in the Shadow of War
Place
Montreal and Kingston
Publisher
McGill-Queen’s University Press
Date
2012
Pages
114-143
Language
en
Notes

For political study of the 1944 Iberian refugee immigration to Canada, see: Reed, Patrick. "A Foothold in the Whirlpool: Canada's Iberian Refugee Movement." Unpublished Master's thesis, Concordia University, 1996.

Citation
Margolis, Rebecca. “A Review of the Yiddish Media: Responses of the Jewish Immigrant Community in Canada.” In Nazi Germany, Canadian Responses: Confronting Antisemitism in the Shadow of War, edited by Ruth Klein, 114–143. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2012.
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