The Challenge of Jewish Difference in Québec

The author discusses three media events in Quebec to illustrate Jewish difference in the province. The first media event is an interview in the 1977 film "20 ans après," in which the Moroccan Jewish filmmaker Jacques Bensimon talks to the director of the Allied Jewish Community Services of Montreal about the Francophone Sephardic community's desire to have a separate community center. The second event is the 2014 interactive documentary "Toi, moi et la charte," that invites users to explore competing opinions on Quebec's proposed Charter of Values, including one Francophone Jewish woman's support for the controversial proposed bill. The third event is "Life Outside of Blackness," a 2016 feature on three generations of Ethiopian Jewish women in Montreal, that was produced as part of the Canadian Broadcasting Company's (CBC) Montreal journalism series called "Real Talk on Race." She argues that an analysis of these media events points to the challenges of language, race, ethnicity, religion, and gender in defining Jewishness in Quebec and the need to understand Jewishness as a theoretically open concept. The author's introduction to her article is an historical summary of Jewish education in Quebec, and the conflicts and disagreements between the various ethnic and linguistic subgroups within Montreal's Jewish community over education.

Journal of Jewish Identities

Vol. 11

no. 1

33-54

January 2018

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