The Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies is excited to announce two book publications by our affiliated faculty member, Professor Robert Brym. Professor Robert Brym is cross appointed with the Department of Sociology at the University of Toronto.
The first book is The Ever-Dying People? Canada’s Jews in Comparative Perspective, a co-edited volume by Robert Brym and Randal F. Schnoor, adjunct professor at the Israel and Golda Koschitzky Centre for Jewish Studies at York University. This volume brought leading Canadian and international scholars together to provide a report on Canadian Jewry based on contemporary data sources from around the world. Canada’s Jews are compared with other Canadian ethnic and religious groups and with other Jewish communities in other countries, such as USA, the UK, France, and Australia. The Ever-Dying People? demonstrated that Jewish diaspora , while held to be in decline, is influenced by a range of sociological and historical forces, which can also breathe life into Jewish communities, including Canada’s. (Short description taken from: https://utorontopress.com/9781487528775/the-ever-dying-people/)
This book was published by the University of Toronto Press in March 2023. If you would like to purchase the book online, please visit University of Toronto Press.
Additionally, in March 2023, Professor Robert Brym edited and also co-translated with Eli Jany, The Last Years of Polish Jewry, Volume 1: At the Edge of the Abyss: Essays 1927 – 1933 by Yankev Leshchinsky. Eli Jany is a PhD Student in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures and the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto.
Born in Ukraine, Yankev Leshchinsky (1876-1966) was the leading scholarly and journalistic analyst of Eastern European Jewish socioeconomic and political life from 1920-1950s. He published a series of insightful and moving essays in Yiddish on Polish Jewry between 1927-1937. Despite heightened interest in interwar Jewish communities in Poland in the recent years, most of Leshchinsky’s work had never been translated into English until now. This edited and translated volume sought to rectify this situation by making available in English, some of Leshchinsky’s key essays. Robert Brym included a thoughtful introduction to contextualize the author’s life and work.
Leshchinsky’s essays focused on the period 1927-1933 and provided first-hand observations on the rise of militant Polish nationalism and the ensuing anti-Jewish progroms; the increasing exclusion of Jews in government and universities; other socioeconomic challenges that characterized Jewish life; along with the psychological toll of mass uncertainty and hopelessness. No work in English has come close to the range and depth of Leshchinsky’s essays. (Short description taken from: https://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0341)
If you would like to purchase or download a pdf copy of The Last Years of Polish Jewry, please visit OpenBook Publishers.