Double Book Launch: Like Everyone Else but Different + Double Threat

Congregation Dorshei Emet, 18 Rue Cleve, Hampstead, QC
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$6 suggested donation

Morton Weinfeld, author of Like Everyone Else but Different: The Paradoxical Success of Canadian Jews will join Ellin Bessner, author of Double Threat: Canadian Jews, the Military, and World War II, for a joint launch of their new books. The event is presented by Congregation Dorshei Emet.

The striking feature of the Canadian Jewish community is its diversity. While this diversity can lead to cases of internal conflict, it also offers opportunities for adaptation and survival. Seventeen years after its first publication, the new edition of Like Everyone Else but Different provides definitive updates that blend research studies, survey and census data, newspaper accounts and articles, and the author’s personal observations and experiences to provide an informative, provocative, and fascinating account of Jewish life and multiculturalism in contemporary Canada.

Double Threat arrives from Ellin Bessner's extensive work conducting hundreds of interviews and archival research to paint a complex picture of the 17,000 Canadian Jews - about 10 per cent of the Jewish population in wartime Canada - who chose to enlist, including future Cabinet minister Barney Danson, future game-show host Monty Hall, and comedians Wayne and Shuster.

Morton Weinfeld is professor of sociology and holds the chair in Canadian Ethnic Studies at McGill University.

Ellin Bessner is a journalist and a professor of journalism at Centennial College in Toronto.