The Canadian Jewish Experience
Maintaining Consensus: The Canadian Jewish Polity in the Postwar World, Chapter One
Daniel J. Elazar
A New Force in World Jewry
The Canadian Jewish community today is on the threshhold of
becoming a major force in world Jewry as the result of the
convergence of two factors that are almost cliches and the
addition of a third. The first is that Canadian Jewry is a
generation or two behind the American Jewish community. Like
most cliches, it reflects a basic truth. Just as American Jewry
had a great flowering in the generation immediately after World
War II, so has Canadian Jewry begun to flower in the second
generation after the war, the generation that began in the
mid-1970s and is now reaching its peak. The second cliche
relates to that flowering, namely that Canadian Jewry has now
come of age. Here, too, the cliche states the truth.
Because Canada is territorially adjacent to the United States,
Canadian Jewry has become intertwined with American Jewish
institutions as part of a North American "community." Yet at the
same time it has preserved certain British and Eastern European
models. They are reinforced by the special character of Canada
as a bilingual, multicultural society. This combination has made
Canadian Jewry a linchpin between American and other diaspora
Jewries and even to some extent between the diaspora and Israel.
This is the third factor that has yet to be widely recognized.
One of the first ways in which this latter phenomenon has
manifested itself is in the institutions of the emerging world
Jewish polity. In one manifestation of Canadian Jewry's new
role, the Canadian United Israel Appeal, as part of Keren
Hayesod, is linked with all the magbiot (fund-raising campaigns
for Israel) of the Jewish world other than the United States,
while the Canadian Jewish community federations, which actually
raise the money, are linked through the Council of Jewish
Federations with American Jewry. In the past decade or so, this
has led to Canadian Jewish leaders playing a special role in
helping the reconstituted Jewish Agency move forward.
As the fourth largest diaspora Jewish community in size in the
Free World, exceeded only by the United States, France, and
Britain, Canada is one of those with a sufficient critical mass
to play a creative role on the Jewish scene. Moreover, while
France is limited in its influence by virtue of its language
(since English is now the lingua franca of the Jewish world) and
its own internal limitations, and British Jewry has ceased to
play much of a role on the world scene, in relative influence
Canada probably stands next to the United States. Indeed, as
Canada becomes more bilingual, Canadian Jewry even has begun to
function as a bridge between the Anglophone and Francophone
Jewish worlds. All of this must lead the objective observer to
conclude that Canadian Jewry is worthy of far more attention than
it has received.
This book focuses principally on the first post-war generation
from the late 1940s to the mid-1970s: a generation of
reconstitution. The generation began with the end of the
conflict between the religious and secularist elements in the
community, principally because secularism disappeared as an
ideological force. It continued with the emergence of the
federations or, as they frequently were called in Canada,
community councils as the umbrella organizations in the local
communities, often in ways that went beyond the parallel trend in
the United States. In that different pluralistic environment,
federations had to struggle for position, while in Canada the
kind of oligopoly that they represented was more acceptable and
indeed in the small communities, necessary. Finally there was
the countrywide reconstitution which linked the local federations
with the Canadian Jewish Congress through the merger of the local
CJC chapters with the federations or community councils of the
major cities. Toward the end of the generation, the United
Israel Appeal and National Budgeting Conference took on new roles
-- the former in connection with the representation of Canadian
Jewry in the Jewish Agency and the latter in providing a means
for allocating funds for countrywide projects on a countrywide
basis.
Accompanying these organizational changes was a changing of the
guard as well. The generation that took over during the war
years passed on its mantle by the early 1970s in community after
community and countrywide. By the late 1970s a new generation of
leadership was in place.
The Emergence of Canadian Jewry
Canada as a country is strongly influenced by its proximity to
the United States. Proximity inevitably leads to comparisons
and, more important, to the tendency to lump the two countries
into a larger North America. Similarities rather than
differences are often stressed and the unique aspects of Canadian
life overlooked. In response to this situation, many Canadians
are quite self-conscious about their country and its virtues.
Thus there is a strong emphasis in public life on things which
are genuinely Canadian.
The Jewish community of Canada is in the same situation, yet
there are important differences between the Canadian Jewish
response to it and the general Canadian response. The Canadian
Jewish community is an independent community, with vital
institutions and all aspects of Jewish activity present. Jews
are well-organized, visible, and effective. They play an active
role in Canadian life and in world Jewish affairs. In addition,
there are close ties and relationships with the American Jewish
community, which is twenty times larger. Factors such as
geographical closeness, a common language, the relative sizes of
the two communities, and convenience have led to a limited amount
of integration. For example, the Council of Jewish Federations
includes Canadian as well as American local federations and
regularly selects Toronto or Montreal as the sites of its General
Assembly. But by and large the Canadian community maintains its
own Jewish institutions and organizations and pursues an
independent existence.
Jews in Canada are very much aware that the country itself is
based on the concept of two founding peoples -- the English and
the French. Consequently there is no single Canadian people or
Canadian culture. This makes it easier for minority groups, such
as the Jews, to maintain a separate identity and even a separate
culture; where everyone is a hyphenated Canadian, Jews do not
stand out from their fellow countrymen when they include the
Jewish as well as the Canadian element in their identity. A
reality of Canadian life has been the encouragement of multiple
identities, with a major emphasis on ethnic identification in
addition to religious identification. This contrasts with the
American experience, where religious differences served as the
primary means of self-identification until the recent increase in
ethnic consciousness.
Although Jews first came to Canada in the eighteenth century, the
bulk of the community consists of immigrants who came from Europe
during this century or the descendants of such immigrants. The
recency of much of the immigration is an important factor in
understanding the development of the community. In fact the
immigration and the encouragement of ethnic distinctiveness are
complementary in terms of creating an environment in which Jews
live comfortably as Jews while generally succeeding in efforts to
participate fully in all aspects of Canadian society.
Under French rule Jews were banned from New France (as Canada was
first called), just as they were from France proper. Only with
the British conquest in 1759 could Jews appear openly in that
land. Jewish merchants accompanied the conquering British and
organized communities in Montreal and Trois Rivieres in the
1760s. Canada was almost entirely avoided by the nineteenth
century German and Central European Jewish immigrants because the
United States was the land of opportunity and Canada was a
backwater. Hence it was the Eastern European Jews who were the
real founders of the Canadian Jewish community, at the very end
of the nineteenth century.1
Canadian Jews and the Great Frontier
Canada and Canadian Jewry exist by virtue of the great frontier
of Europe, which began with the voyages of discovery in the late
fifteenth century and persisted until our own time.2 The land
frontier opened in the new territories discovered by European
explorers was based on rural pursuits, whether agricultural or
extractive; it was the classic frontier of the modern epoch. As
distinct from earlier colonization experiences, the modern
frontier was not a temporary phenomenon that lasted only as long
as there was free land. Instead, wherever it took root it
generated a chain reaction that, in turn, opened new frontiers.
Vast territories of the modern land frontier, far away from the
original bastions of civilization, had to be explored, tamed, and
settled. To do this effectively, men invented a new technology
that generated an urban-industrial frontier -- a coming together
of people in cities not to serve agricultural hinterlands but to
concentrate and apply technology so as to create wealth --
ultimately making the agricultural hinterland dependent on them.
Early in the nineteenth century, the first signs of this
urban-industrial frontier appeared in the United States.3 During
that century, it spread in varying degrees to other frontier
countries, reflecting in each country the kind of land frontier
that preceded it.
Canada followed the classic frontier pattern in part because of
its vast continental expanse and in part because of its proximity
to the United States where it benefited from a shared North
American frontier.4 Canada was a place where the Jews from
Eastern Europe had an opportunity to participate in the land
frontier. Baron de Hirsch tried to establish Jewish agricultural
colonies in the Canadian West, as in Argentina, but they failed.
Jews homesteaded on an individual basis, and many more drifted
westward to the small towns of the Canadian great plains in what
were soon to become the prairie provinces, at the time that they
were being settled. Thus the Jews of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and
Alberta share a land frontier tradition with their Canadian
compatriots. Some were there with the first founders of the
major cities on the Canadian prairies. Jews were among the
primary recorders of the frontier experience in Canadian
literature and the arts. While that was happening, Montreal,
Toronto, and other cities were becoming the loci of an urban
industrial frontier that attracted most of the Jews who came to
Canada. Jews made major contributions to that frontier, although
limited by the dominance of the old Canadian families and the
degree to which Canada developed industrially as a branch of the
United States.5
The urban-industrial frontier gave rise to a
metropolitan-technological frontier. The completion of the first
stage of industrialization -- which gave birth to cities as
wealth generators in their own right -- led to new technologies
involving the internal combustion engine, telecommunications, and
synthetics. These made possible the automobile, the airplane,
the telephone, radio and television, and plastics. These
technological changes so greatly altered the world lived in and
the way they settled that world as to remake it.
Metropolitanization became the dominant settlement pattern.
People flocked to urban areas, leaving the rural environment to
an ever-decreasing minority; but they rebuilt those urban areas
as congeries of suburbs -- low density settlements surrounding a
central city rather than as separate cities in the old urban
style.
These metropolitan regions provided the opportunity for a life
style that embodied "rural" amenities such as single-family
homes, lawns, and privacy, with the advantage of urban services.
The regions were linked internally by roads and telephones and
externally by airplanes and the mass media. They rested on a
synthetics-plastics base and generated a new range of occupations
and a new way of life based on consumption. This contrasts
sharply with the great urban agglomerations of the Third World,
which do not reflect an advancing frontier but instead
modernization with its concomitant miseries, as in nineteenth
century Europe, but intensified by the lack of infrastructure.6
Jews were ideally suited for pioneering on the metropolitan
frontier, since it was heavily based on communications and Jews
have been oriented toward the center of the communications
network wherever they have found themselves. Whatever the
relationship of different waves of Jewish settlers or generations
of Jewish residents to particular frontier stages in the new
worlds, where the frontier has existed, it has had a major impact
on how Jews have related to the larger society and on how the
environment has shaped their institutions and behavior. For the
most part, this influence has moved toward integrating Jews as
individuals into the life of the larger community and
transforming Jewish institutions into expressions of the new
synthesis of the Jewish heritage and the new environment.
Louis Hartz, in his important book The Founding of New Societies,
has referred to these frontier societies as fragments that broke
off from European civilization and had to implant themselves in
new soil, pursuing lines of development that reflected their
European heritage but were, nevertheless, substantially different
because of the transplantation.7 These fragments began their
separate development from the point at which they were separated
from European civilization, often maintaining patterns common to
the civilization they left behind in forms that remained frozen
or took radically different directions from those of the original
civilization, which continued to undergo adaptations of its own.
If there is any process in this sequence, it is how these
fragments of civilization were self-consciously conservative in
their earliest stages, as the pioneers of the new settlements
tried to retain the only civilization they knew. Then, once
rooted, the settlements took off in directions that were possible
precisely because the population had become more self-confident
and at home. The Jewish settlements in the Western and Southern
hemispheres followed this pattern. They began as fragments of
different Old World Jewries, making every effort to maintain
familiar ways during the period of settling in, and only later
began to move toward the more relaxed development of indigenous
patterns.
The tendency of Jewish immigrants who tried to remain Jews but
were not learned in Jewish matters was to identify their Jewish
memories of the "old home" as the sum and substance of Jewishness
and to be most fearful of any changes. This tendency was
reinforced by their minority status in the new countries. It was
reflected in the efforts of the Spanish and Portuguese Jewish
immigrants to British North America in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries to preserve their Portuguese ritual and
organization and eastern European Jewish immigrants to Canada in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries trying to
preserve Yiddish as the basis of Jewish life. This need was
intensified by the Jewish fear of assimilation into a non-Jewish
environment if old moorings were let loose.
Eventually the Jews who immigrated to the countries of the New
World had to adapt to their new environments. Despite the common
thread of the frontier experience, each of the communities came
to differ significantly from the others.
The Canadian situation was particularly complex because the Jews
came to a polity founded by two principal fragments -- one French
and one English -- neither of which was particularly hospitable
to them. Almost all the Jewish immigrants to Canada came from
Eastern Europe where they were far removed from either French or
English civilization. Few of the founders of the Canadian Jewish
community passed through either of Canada's original founding
civilizations in the Old World before reaching Canadian shores.
Hence they did not come with an acquired cultural patina to help
them meld with the local population.
On the other hand, Canadian Jewish institutions emerged directly
out of the vitality of Eastern European Jewry to be Canadianised
from that starting point, rather than having to introduce that
vitality into bland Jewish institutions of the post-Emancipation
West. The Jews who founded the Canadian Jewish community were
more "Jewish" in the cultural, national, and religious sense than
those who founded the American Jewish community. This has had
profound consequences on slowing the rate of assimilation within
Canadian Jewry and creating an institutional fabric that is more
traditional and separatist than its counterpart south of the
border. The Jews of Canada have remained a separate and
distinctive group. In some respects they are caught between
Canada's two founding communities; in other respects they can
take advantage of postwar Canada's shift from biculturalism to
multiculturalism, as have other European groups such as Italians,
Ukrainians, and Germans, who immigrated to Canada and found
themselves in the same situation.8
Canada became a multicultural society in the framework of a
federal system that, since Confederation in 1867, has seen the
provinces grow in strength and increase their political power and
sense of identity. One result of this is that Canada has no New
York, no city that served as the major magnet for the Jewish
immigrants. Jews settled almost equally in Montreal and Toronto,
even though the first had some edge until the postwar period.
Smaller numbers concentrated in the major cities of other
provinces. Thus the combined effect of Canadian federalism and
the frontier led to the creation of a multicentered Jewish
community resting on two more or less equal anchors with
institutions structured accordingly.
This has generated certain anomalies. By and large, the Jewish
settlers were more in sympathy with the Protestant English
Canadians who were the dominant group, even though the
Anglophones rejected them through "genteel" anti-Semitism, which
was strong in the last generation of the nineteenth century and
the first generation of the twentieth. They were far removed from
the Roman Catholic French Canadians, who were equally
anti-Semitic but might have sought out the Jews as allies against
the English, had the Jews been open to such an alliance. As a
result, even the Jews who settled in the province of Quebec chose
to assimilate into the Anglophone rather than into the
Francophone community, much to the disgust of the French
majority. This was to come back to haunt the Jewish community in
the 1970s.9
Canadian Jews also remained more traditional than their
counterparts in most of the other countries of immigration. Among
the modified versions of Eastern European institutions
transplanted to Canada was Orthodoxy, to which most Canadian Jews
continued to adhere for a long time after their American
counterparts had abandoned it. To this day most synagogues in
Canada are Orthodox, with the Conservative movement second and
closing, and the Reform movement far behind. Ultra-Orthodoxy,
however, has probably made fewer inroads in Canada than in other
communities like it. There is a growing ultra-Orthodox
population, but it is much less influential in religious affairs
because mainstream Orthodoxy remains strong, with a solid
committed core group as well as Jews who are nominally Orthodox
for public purposes.
The Jewish immigrants established an all-embracing representative
organization, the Canadian Jewish Congress, by the end of the
community's first generation. They also retained Yiddish as a
spoken and written language longer than the other
English-speaking communities. All this was encouraged by their
marginal position in Canadian society, which treated them
ambivalently, opening its doors to them as individuals but
keeping distance from them as Jews.
Public schooling has been much less a political-cultural norm in
Canada than in the United States or France. In Quebec, separate
Francophone and Anglophone school systems were recognized as the
basis of public education and were tied to the dominant Roman
Catholic and Protestant churches. The Jews, eager to enter
non-Jewish society, rejected the opportunity to establish a
parallel Jewish school system and were content with being defined
for school purposes as Protestants. Nevertheless, a Jewish day
school system developed in Montreal when day schools were
confined to the ultra-Orthodox in New York and one or two other
cities in the United States. They have been subsidized by the
Quebec government since 1969 and attracted many Jewish children.
Today the day schools enroll two-thirds of the Jewish school
population in that province.
In unilingual Ontario where public schools were the norm, they
were also more Protestant without the restraints of separation of
church and state as defined in the United States or France. While
most Jews took advantage of the public schools, some wanted to
give their children more intensive Jewish education. They chose
day schools that were not stigmatized as being separatist. Hence
Toronto now has a network of Jewish day schools, and every Jewish
community in the province has its day school. Public schools
were much more likely to be the norm in the prairie provinces and
British Columbia, and day schools were longer in taking root.
The Jews who settled in those regions established communal Talmud
Torahs that provided almost as rigorous a Jewish education
through a supplementary educational framework for several
generations of children, before shifting to comprehensive all-day
education.
The Succession of Generations
Just as humanity puts its changing imprint on space through the
continuing frontier, it shapes times through the passage of
generations. The generational rhythm that shapes human history
reflects the nexus between human biology and civilization that
leads to a patterning and repatterning of events at intervals of
between twenty-five and forty years -- usually between thirty and
thirty-five. During this period the particular population cohort
that sets the pace in any civil society reaches maturity, assumes
positions of responsibility, and then passes from the scene as a
result of death or retirement. Each generation confronts its own
set of issues, which emerge from those dealt with in the previous
generation. It defines those issues and then deals with them
more or less satisfactorily so that new issues emerge from them
to confront the next generation.10
Canadian Jewry dates back some 230 years to the second generation
of the eighteenth century and the British conquest of French
Canada. Because Jews were not allowed to settle in French
Canada, they had no share in the French colonial experience
there. But because the first of them arrived at what was, in
effect, the beginning of a new generation, the Jews easily
adjusted to the rhythm of the British colonial experience. They
were too few, however, to matter in the mythic aspects of
Canadian Jewish history. The few Jewish settlers were mainly
from England, a mixture of Ashkenazim and Sephardim. Many stayed
for a short while and then returned to England or moved to the
United States.
During the next three generations, Canadian Jewry languished in
the backwaters of world Jewry. Canada attracted few immigrants
as long as the United States was the open land of opportunity.
The Jewish community was kept alive by the handful of English
Jews who crossed the Atlantic to Canadian shores. As a result,
there was a hiatus in the rhythm of the Canadian Jewish
community, although the experiences of the Jews who came and
remained continued to fit well into the progression of Canadian
history. It was only with the beginning of the mass emigration
from Eastern Europe in the 1880s, and particularly with the
introduction of restrictions on immigration to the United States
by the American government at the end of the nineteenth century,
that Jews began to seek Canada as an alternative. Fortuitously,
the Eastern European influx also came at the beginning of a new
generation in Canadian history, one that featured the opening of
the West for settlement, so that the Jews fit in harmoniously.
Eastern European Jewry simply took over the community; their
predecessors had insufficient weight to dictate even the forms of
communal life and organization. Thus the Canadian Jewish
community is basically a twentieth century phenomenon, founded by
Eastern European Jews, who came to an essentially empty land,
Jewishly and generally, and founded their institutions from
scratch.
Canada, like most other modern Jewish communities, began to
suffer from anti-Semitism in the last generation of the
nineteenth century. Modern racism took shape in the generation
that began in the late 1870s and lasted until World War I, when
Western imperialism was at its height. Northern Europeans
rejected all others as lesser breeds and created elaborate
theories to justify their attitudes. The Western world saw
itself as a great civilizing force confronting inferior nonwhite
elements. This view became strongest in the Anglo-Saxon and
Teutonic countries, whose people saw themselves as the
culmination of civilization and even doubted the "whiteness" of
the "inferior" peoples of Southern and Eastern Europe including
Jews. Even those not swayed by the new anti-Semitism saw the
Jews as an Oriental people. It is no wonder that the Jews
suffered as a result.11
In their drive for acceptance by non-Jewish society, the Jews
more or less accepted this characterization; many tried to remake
themselves accordingly. Thus, acculturation was one of their
primary goals, even if this meant a level of assimilation beyond
that to which they consciously aspired. Their host societies,
which welcomed them with greater or lesser willingness, expected
them to become fully acculturated if not assimilated.
After World War II, most of the world repudiated racism, and
anti-Semitism was also rejected, chiefly because of the
Holocaust. Anti-Jewish prejudice underwent a marked decline in
Canada. Revelation of the horrors of the Holocaust led to a
change in the hearts and minds of those who were moderately
afflicted with the virus, forcing those with deeper prejudices to
go underground. Today, in a new generation, there are signs that
anti-Semitism is growing again, feeding on the ignorance of a
generation that does not know the evils of Nazism.
The generation that matured after World War II was also less
committed to homogenization. Anticolonialism replaced the white
man's burden as the accepted standard, even in the West. The
definition of "whiteness" had been expanded even earlier to
include all Europeans, and racial barriers between whites and
nonwhites were beginning to break down. Even in the more
homogeneous societies of the West, a new pluralism was stirring
and there was a greater willingness to tolerate differences.
Despite these new openings, Jews have not been as freely admitted
to the upper echelons of Canadian society as in the United
States. In Quebec the French desire for emancipation from what
they perceived to be colonial restraints led to a xenophobia that
was reinforced by the tendencies toward anti-Semitism fostered by
the traditional Roman Catholic church. Even after the 1960s, when
the French Canadians turned secularist with a vengeance, they
brought with them much of this anti-Semitic baggage, and many of
their intellectuals became strong supporters of the Palestine
Liberation Organization and vigorously anti-Zionist. "Zionist"
rapidly became a code word for "Jew."
In English Canada, the class system, much stronger than that in
the United States, maintained the more subtle anti-Semitism of
the British elite and hence excluded Jews. This was particularly
true in Ontario, the great bastion of Anglo Canada and the
country's most powerful province. It was much diluted in the
West, where, as in all frontier societies, there was greater
opportunity for minorities.
The acceptance of multiculturalism and ethnic pluralism as
official Canadian policy during the post-World War II generation
offered the Jews an easy way to maintain their identity as Jews
once they had acquired the elements of Canadian culture expected
of all Canadian citizens. The Jews have been able to take
advantage of those opportunities in Canada; yet because they are
located in the most important centers of Canadian life, they have
a harder time preserving the external manifestations of ethnic
separatism to which more isolated groups cling.
Finally, the resurgence of Jewish corporate identity, a major
feature of the postwar generation, is as notable in Canada as in
the United States. Initiated by the Jews' new pride in and
concern for Israel, it was nurtured by the transformation of
organic Jewish ties into associational ones, the revival of
ethnicity around the world, and a growing consciousness that Jews
everywhere confronted common issues. The postwar generation has
witnessed the revival of Jewish commitment to a Jewish polity, a
commitment evident in Canada as elsewhere.
A Demographic Profile
According to the 1981 Canadian census, there are 296,425 Jews in
Canada, an increase of approximately 8 percent since the 1971
census. Under the new method of questioning religious, ethnic,
and linguistic attachments used in the census, it is possible
that this figure slightly underestimates the actual number. The
1986 American Jewish Yearbook estimates a Jewish population of
310,000.
A considerable body of data about Jews is available because the
decennial Canadian census includes separate questions about
religion and ethnicity. The major feature to note about the
distribution of the Jewish population is that it is concentrated
almost exclusively in a few urban areas. About 85 percent of the Jews live in Ontario
and Quebec, and most of those (about 75 percent) are in the
Toronto and Montreal census metropolitan areas (CMA's). The two
largest CMA's, plus Winnipeg and Vancouver, contain 85 percent of
the Jewish population, while over 96 percent are accounted for by
the top 18 CMAs. Most other Jewish
communities in Canada are really quite small. Therefore most of
the major aspects of Jewish life are confined to Toronto and
Montreal virtually by default.
The Jewish population has grown at a slightly slower rate than
the general population over the past fifty years, especially
after Jewish immigration tapered off. The
low birth rate among Jews would lead one to anticipate that the
Jewish percentage of the population will decline further in the
future.
One of the interesting aspects of Jewish demography that appeared
in the 1971 census was the substantial number of people (over
20,000) who identified ethnically as Jews but did not consider
themselves to be Jewish by religion. Thus about 3 percent of
ethnic Jews professed no religion and about 4 percent professed
various Christian religions. Furthermore,
the percentage of ethnic Jews who are not Jews by religion was
substantially higher in smaller communities than in the big
cities. Samples of the relevant percentages in 1971 included
Newfoundland - 38.9 percent, Prince Edward Island - 41.7 percent,
British Columbia - 20.2 percent, Guelph - 14.9 percent, Edmonton
- 14.9 percent, Saskatoon - 16.2 percent, Kingston - 23.1
percent, Toronto - 5.6 percent, Winnipeg - 5.5 percent, and
Montreal - 4.0 percent. Changes in the questions make comparison
with 1981 data difficult.
Jewish Population Growth over Time
| |
1921 | 1931 | 1941 | 1951 | 1961 | 1971 | 1981 |
| By religion | 125,445 | 155,766 | 168,585 | 204,836 | 254,368 | 276,025 | 296,425 |
| Percent of
total population | 1.4 | 1.5 | 1.5 | 1.5 | 1.4 | 1.3 | 1.2 |
A related matter is intermarriage. Data compiled by the Canadian
Jewish Congress from official government sources indicate that in
1972, 15.4 percent of the Jews who wed married non-Jews. Of the
752 Jews who married out of the faith that year, about 60 percent
were males. There were 2,065 marriages in which both partners
were Jewish.12 Much more alarming trends can be seen among
Montreal's Sephardic Jews, whose intermarriage rate is estimated
at over 50 percent.
Another problem that the Jewish community must confront is that the Jewish population is measurably older
than the general population. In fact, of the 14 ethnic groups
listed in the 1971 census, Jews had the lowest percentage in the
under 15 age group and the second highest in the over 65 group.
This means that the community will have a relatively smaller
group of productive people to rely on for personal and financial
contributions in the future than it does now. Moreover there
will be increasing numbers of aged people who will require Jewish
social services, a trend that was apparent by 1981.
A feature of Canadian Jewish life that was significant for a
number of years was the proportion of Yiddish-speaking people in
the population. This proportion has dropped very sharply over
time and will decline even further in the future. In fact, Canadian Jews are overwhelmingly English
speaking. The French speakers are
almost exclusively North African Jews who have settled in
Montreal during the past thirty years. However, it should be
noted that many Anglophone Jews also speak French. Already in
1971, the extent of bilingualism in the two official languages
was 23.3 percent among Jews, which was higher than for any ethnic
group except the French. It has since increased significantly.
Canada's Jews still contain a large percentage of foreign born
individuals. As late as 1971, some 37 percent of all Canadian
Jews were foreign born. More than half of those 110,000 came to
Canada before 1955.
The Activity Spheres of the Canadian Jewish Polity
The Canadian Jewish community, like other Jewish communities, is
organized through a mixture of territorially and
nonterritorially-based institutions. Local political units are,
with some modifications, used as the basis for the organization
of local Jewish communities throughout the world. At the same
time, the ideological and functional divisions in the Jewish
community, real or putative as they may be, also provide
significant points for organization, as do particular functions
and some common interests, which are then linked to the
territorial community through some common mechanisms.
The territorially-based organizations such as the local Jewish
federations, originally called community councils, a name which
persists in some cases, are invariably the most comprehensive
ones, charged with providing direction for the community. The
ideological, functional, and interest-based organizations such as
the synagogues or the social services agencies generally touch
the more personal aspects of Jewish life. These two bases of
local communal organization are recognizably distinct as such,
but the specific units of organization are usually demarcated
much less distinctly.
Because of the nature of the Jewish community, the
territorially-based organizations do not necessarily have
clear-cut boundaries. This situation is not a particular problem
with Jews because Jewish political culture views boundaries from
a West Asian rather than an Anglo-American perspective. For
Jews, the world is divided into oases and deserts rather than
into clear-cut territorial plots. Every oasis has a clear core
and a shifting periphery as it fades into the desert at the
shifting edge of the watered area, which changes with changes in
the internal water supply of the oasis. The desert, in turn,
belongs to nobody or everybody. Thus the periphery can expand or
contract without significantly changing the character of the
core.
Both Jewish law and Jewish political organization are structured
in this way. For traditional Jews, law consists of a hard,
immutable core (the Torah), surrounded by layers of interpretive
applications, each of which becomes bonded to the original over
time, expanding the whole corpus. Thus, Jewish culture has come
to look upon law as requiring a fixed core of observance with
room for interpretation at the peripheries. Jews are bound to
but not bounded by their law. Its observance is a personal
responsibility reinforced by verying degrees of community
expectation and pressure. Both clearly reflect the situation in
the land of Israel and the Middle East as a whole.
Anglo-American institutions, on the other hand, took form in
well-watered countries, where lands are divided by fixed
boundaries that serve as receptacles. Status is determined by
who is inside a particular set of boundaries and who is not.
Normally, there are no lands outside boundaries in the
Anglo-American world. For Anglo-Americans then, the core is far
less important than the fixed boundaries.
The components of the Jewish polity follow the Jewish pattern.
Even when diaspora Jewish communities are erected in fixed
boundary systems, they tend to be fuzzy at the periphery and more
clear-cut at the core, particularly in an age of voluntary
affiliation. In many respects, the local territorial communities
are simply aggregates of Jews in particular cities or, since
suburbanization, in the metropolitan areas that embrace the
cities that once contained the community.
Much the same pattern prevails with regard to ideologically-based
organizations. By and large the ideologies of the late modern
epoch have lost their power to attract. Once powerful Zionist
movements survive as political parties, vehicles for individuals
to obtain leadership positions in the Jewish community, or by
performing specific tasks within the community. Organizations
representing the non-Zionist secular ideologies hardly survive at
all. The "oasis" pattern describes their reality.
The religious movements have fared better, particularly a
resurgent Orthodoxy, only to further emphasize the distinction
between core and periphery. While the core of Orthodox Judaism
has grown extensively, it is still true that, outside of Israel
and the United States, relatively few members of Orthodox
congregations throughout the world are seriously Orthodox. This
is even more true of the Conservative and Reform movements
everywhere (except perhaps Israel). They are built around even
smaller cores of serious Conservative and Reform Jews with large
masses of more casual members attracted to their respective
congregations by location, habit, family and friendship patterns,
if not by historical or geographic accident. Except for those
core groups, congregational members are less interested in their
synagogue's ideological affiliation than in how well it serves
their personal religious needs.
In the Orthodox camp, where ideology takes traditionally
religious forms, ideological groupings have succeeded in
maintaining themselves and their ideologies in organized form.
Indeed, throughout the world a new ideologically militant
Orthodoxy has emerged, using a new network of yeshivot as their
nuclei. As yet these represent small if vital minorities within
the Jewish people. Their vitality already has given them a
weight beyond their numbers, but one would be hard put to say
that they have reideologized the community, especially since at
present their organizations are nurtured within the larger
framework rather than being able to reshape that framework.
For the polity as a whole, ideologically-based organizations have
had more success on a worldwide or countrywide basis where the
absence of comprehensive territorial institutions has been
marked, than on the local plane. All told, however, modernity
emphasized the territorial over the nonterritorial elements
wherever given half a chance and to reduce ideologically-based
organizations to functional specialists responsible for specific
tasks.
A major result of this has been to limit the powers of the
countrywide organizations in the diaspora and to make the primary
locus of decision-making for those communities local. The
Canadian Jewish community is something of an exception to this
point, combining as it does strong local communities that are
heavily involved in maintaining a relatively strong
organizational network. What emerges is not a single pyramidal
structure, not even one in which the "bottom" rules the "top" as
is sometimes suggested on the organization charts. There is no
"bottom" or "top" except on a functional basis for specific
purposes (if then). This absence of hierarchy is the first
element to recognize in examining how Jews make their
institutions work.
In the context described above, the institutions and
organizations of the Jewish polity group themselves de facto in
five major spheres of public activity: (1)
religious-congregational, (2) educational-cultural, (3) external
relations-defense, (4) communal-welfare, and (5) Israel-world
Jewry .
Religious-Congregational Sphere
Contemporary synagogues provide the immediately personal and
interpersonal ritual-cum-social functions demanded by the
community and, in Canada as in the United States, do so primarily
through highly independent individual congregations. The
congregations have a monopoly of those functions locally; the
North American synagogue confederations and rabbinical
associations, seminaries and yeshivot, mostly in the United
States, maintain a parallel monopoly of the countrywide
community's organized religious and halakhic concerns.
Locally, the congregations may be supplemented by a rabbinical
court and a kashrut council, in Canada supported or under the
auspices of the local Jewish community federation. In the larger
communities there are also Orthodox institutions such as yeshivot
or branches of the Lubavitcher movement, that serve (and try to
develop) special constituencies. In addition, there may be
intercongregational regional organizations and councils of
rabbis.
In Canada, the three great North American synagogue
confederations of the Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform
movements, plus a smaller one for the Reconstructionist movement
and various subsidiary leagues within the Orthodox community
embrace most of the permanent synagogues. However, because every
congregation is independent and self-contained under the law --
the private preserve of its members -- there is no need for it to
be a member of any larger body if its members choose not to be.
Hence some congregations are independent and others are nominal
members of the countrywide bodies. Consequently, the latter have
little power aside from that of professional placement. Every
congregation, no matter how committed it may be to its movement,
hires its own rabbinical staff under its own terms, in what
amounts to a free market situation. The controlling power of the
individual synagogues in the religious-congregational sphere in
Canada means that a large share of Jewish activity -- involving
nearly half the total internal expenditure of Canadian Jewry --
is raised and managed outside any broader communal
decision-making system.
The religious-congregational sphere is in the curious situation
of, on one hand, being a powerful influence on all Jews, yet
unable to mobilize many more than half of them at any given time
in any formal relationship to religious institutions. Membership
in synagogues or congregations is voluntary and if one chooses
not to affiliate with some religious body, one is simply not
affiliated. Canadian Jewry has a relatively high rate of
synagogue affiliation and, over a lifetime, approximately
three-quarters of all Canadian Jews will have been affiliated
with a synagogue at some time or another.
In pre-modern times, all Jews were doubly bound by halakhah and
by the social pressure of the community to be substantially
observant. Today the binding force of halakhah on any other than
a voluntary basis has mostly disappeared except in Israel, where
it has been reduced to the area of personal status. So, too,
social pressure no longer prevails except among people who choose
to be part of subcommunities of observant Jews. Otherwise, the
character and extent of linkage with the religious-congregational
sphere is a matter of individual choice, ranging from
congregational affiliation to being part of a Jewish community in
which the religious dimension is built in. The only issue in
which all Jews may be subject to some kind of binding
decision-making is in determining Jewishness itself, that is to
say, "who is a Jew," where, because of the influence of Israel,
the decisions of its authoritative institutions on this question
are authoritative for the Jewish world as a whole.
Educational-Cultural Sphere
Although the educational-cultural sphere can be defined clearly,
the institutions that function in it are among the most
independent in the Jewish world, and, as a result, the sphere is
extremely fragmented. This is partly for substantive reasons.
Because education is what it is, the principal vehicle for
socialization of new generations, it obviously must reflect the
range of ideological presuppositions of the current generation.
Once the Jewish people ceased to be homogeneous and ideologies of
Jewishness began to multiply, so too did the educational vehicles
for their expression and transmission.
The institutional divisions of modernity also contributed heavily
to further fragmentation even where ideological differences did
not come into play. Thus, for example, one can expect
differences in educational approach between Orthodox and
non-Orthodox, not to speak of the divisions between religious and
nonreligious or Zionist and non-Zionist education which emerged
during the latter part of the modern epoch. But there are also
divisions within each camp based on institutional interests. Even
synagogues of the same movement try to maintain their own schools
for reasons of institutional self-preservation, which may or may
not be valid but are perceived as vital.
There is also an environmental factor of importance. Part of the
Jewish drive for emancipation included the drive for the right of
entry into the educational systems of the host societies. Thus,
for many, Jewish education was relegated to supplementary
education and no more. With the decline of emancipationist
expectations, there has been a return to the notion of providing
comprehensive elementary and secondary education and, to some
extent, tertiary education as well, through day schools or
yeshivot. Canada has been a leader in this effort.
This has led to the development of two parallel and usually
separate systems of Jewish education -- a network of day schools
and another of supplementary schools. In Canada, most day
schools are integrated within a communal system; even the
independent schools receive support from the local community
federations. Even so, local boards of Jewish education
principally provide technical services and support and some
subsidization, but rarely function as the guiding hand of an
integrated system. The few exceptions are notable, in both their
educational achievements and their professional quality.
Post-secondary Jewish educational opportunities in Canada are
limited. Its few traditional yeshivot tend to be on a secondary
level and it has no rabbinical seminaries or independent Jewish
teacher-training schools. The Jewish studies programs that
exist, including teacher training programs at McGill and York
Universities, are located in non-Jewish institutions. Most are
university-level in name only since they emphasize elementary
courses to serve their clientele.
Adult and continuing education is the province of all the
aforementioned bodies plus individual synagogues and various
organizations serving their members or using adult education to
increase membership, for example, Hadassah and B'nai B'rith. The
local federations have emphasized leadership development as a
form of continuing education.
The difficulties of Jewish educators are increased by the fact
that there is no longer a clear-cut understanding of what should
be the content and goals of Jewish education. For many synagogue
schools and even some day schools, their primary purpose is
religious education in the narrowest sense, the transmission of
"synagogue skills" to enable the next generation to function
within the context of the North American synagogue. In other
schools, much of Jewish education is secular in orientation based
on an equally limited Hebraism, with language skills monopolizing
the Jewish curriculum. There are those schools which emphasize
the study of classic rabbinic texts as the be-all and end-all of
Jewish study and those whose emphasis is on Jewish history and
literature, with a number of variants within each group.
Moreover there are serious conflicts over the amount of time to
be allocated to Jewish study. Whether in relation to day schools
or supplementary schools, Jewish studies at the post-secondary
level or whatever, students and their parents are principally
interested in acquiring the general education needed to pursue
successful careers and Jewish education is distinctly
supplementary. Not only have the hours per week spent in
supplementary schools declined, but even in day schools, the
amount of time allocated to Jewish subjects in those schools is
often quite limited.
Thus Jewish education and Jewish educators are caught in the
middle in more ways than one, torn between their aspirations and
the tasks thrust upon them, their self-esteem and their status in
the larger realm of Jewish life.
Jewish cultural activities are even more fragmented than
educational ones, if that is possible. They are also more likely
to be privately sponsored and financed. Jewish public support
for cultural activities is minimal, to say the least, although
Congress is more concerned with supporting cultural activities
than are most of its counterparts in other countries. In part
this is because of the low level of Jewish culture among diaspora
Jews with the possible exception of a few limited circles, and
partly because in North America support for cultural activities
in general is considered more a matter for private rather than
public concern by society as a whole.
Most local support for Jewish culture comes from private
foundations or through the synagogues and Jewish community
centers, which may sponsor book fairs, art exhibitions, literary
evenings, and the like. Countrywide, Congress traditionally has
provided support services for cultural activities and some
stimulus for them.
External Relations-Defense Sphere
The focus of this sphere has shifted under the changing
conditions of Jewish history. For modern Jewry, external
relations and defense were confined to representation of Jewish
interests before non-Jewish governments and, later, community
relations efforts to improve relations with non-Jews. Because the
principal common concern of the newly emancipated Jews and later
modern Jews in general was to promote good relations with the
governments of their host societies, in order to secure full
civil and political equality these representative bodies soon
became the dominant organizations in their communities. They
attracted the highest status leadership (who in any case would
have been the ones called on to represent the Jewish community to
the non-Jewish world) and set much of the communal tone. The
Canadian Jewish Congress (its different name in part reflected
the influence of North American thinking) is exceptional in that
it took on a broader governance role, especially in the education
and cultural sphere, from the first.
Communal-Welfare Sphere
Until the 1970s, the communal-welfare sphere was simply another
functional grouping among several in Canada, even though the
various Jewish social service and welfare agencies plus the
Jewish community centers had confederated within Jewish community
councils or federations up to a generation or more earlier.
Today, the sphere is the locus of the principal government-like
institutions of the Jewish polity and its countrywide and local
arenas. Its principal institutions are usually the framing
institutions for community organization in each arena, if not the
focal points.
The emergence of the communal-welfare institutions in this new
capacity was the result of a nearly generation-long struggle in
the Jewish community. It reflected the change in Jewish
priorities generated in part by the increased integration of Jews
into Canadian society but, most importantly, by the rise of
Israel. Even earlier, it became apparent that community
relations alone could not meet the challenge of anti-Semitism,
that it was necessary to provide massive funds for resettling
Jewish refugees and rebuilding Eretz Israel as a haven for them.
This gave fund-raising an even higher priority than before and
strengthened the instrumentalities of the communal-welfare sphere
responsible for raising the needed money.
The linchpin of that transformation was an alliance between the
Yishuv in Eretz Israel, later carried on and formalized by the
state, and the federation movement in North America to give
fund-raising the dominant role in pro-Israel activities. David
Ben-Gurion, first prime minister of Israel and architect of the
strategy, made this alliance for both practical and political
reasons. Practically, he saw that the Zionists did not have the
capability of raising money in the way that the "non-Zionists"
did, and Israel needed the massive support that only the latter
could provide. Moreover, because United States Zionism was
dominated by the General Zionists, a rival political party, he
did not object to cutting them out of a potential power base.
This was not precisely the case in Canada. There the United
Israel Appeal remained part of World Keren Hayesod (established
by the WZO in 1920), and the Zionist movement, through the
Canadian Zionist Federation, remained a more important communal
vehicle in another sphere (see below). The convergence of local
and Israeli needs only strengthened the trend to emphasize
non-Zionist instrumentalities in the diaspora after the
establishment of the state. The community relations
organizations could not withstand this new force. Although
Canadian Jewry stayed within the Keren Hayesod framework, the
boost to the federation movement ultimately had great
consequences for it as well.
Parallel to the federations' increased fund-raising role was the
development of a Jewish civil service, which found its principal
place in the federations and their agencies. The Jewish social
welfare institutions were among the first to move from voluntary
to professional staffing. Thus, when service apart from social
work began to emerge as a communal need, it is not surprising
that it was given into the hands of professionals as well as
volunteers. The first of these professionals were drawn, for the
most part, from the cadres of social workers who had become
agency heads in the social service sphere. Others drifted into
the field from other professions. All told, a small group of
pioneers emerged to build the federation movement and in the
process forge a new profession.
As the federations expanded, their need for a civil service grew.
During the first half of the postwar generation, members of that
civil service were recruited from the aforementioned sources, but
in the latter half, schools of Jewish communal service were
developed, some independently of the federations, others under
federation stimulus, all in the United States, to provide a
senior civil service trained specifically for the North American
federation world. The result further strengthened the
communal-welfare sphere as the locus of the framing institutions
of postwar North American Jewry.
All this has enhanced the central role of the federations locally
and given them a real claim to being the umbrella organizations
of their communities. The key to the growth of the power of the
local federations is that they have become the major fund-raising
bodies on the North American scene. Even though money and
influence are not necessarily correlated on a one-to-one basis,
there is unquestionably a relationship between the two. Locally,
as agencies become more dependent upon the federation for money,
they are more likely to be included in the ambit of federation
planning and policy-making.
The Canadian Jewish community had already been brought into the
orbit of the American federation movement, and Jewish welfare
federations had been established in almost every major Canadian
community during the 1930s. Nevertheless, Congress, with its
local branches, remained the principal framing institution of
Canadian Jewry. Then in the late 1960s and early 1970s, mergers
were negotiated between Congress branches and the largest
federations. Locally the federations became the principal
framing institutions, while Congress retained community relations
and cultural functions countrywide.
This led to the strengthening of the United Israel Appeal of
Canada as an independent Canadian body. Though remaining
formally a part of Keren Hayesod, it began to function more like
the United Jewish Appeal because it had the backing of the
federations. This was followed by the establishment of the
National Budgeting Conference, functioning out of the Canadian
office of the Council of Jewish Federations, which is the vehicle
for the local federations in Canada to allocate funds for
countrywide projects. Canada also followed the American pattern
of professionalizing its Jewish civil service with the same
results.
"Games" and "Complexes"
Each of the five functional spheres may be considered a "game" in
the framework of Jewish life, and the organizations and
institutions relating to each, a "complex" surrounding each game.
There is an indefinite and fluid number of games, depending on
how the "cake" is cut in any particular circumstance; all,
however, are based on the five functional spheres. The games may
be subdivisions of those spheres or they may link more than one
sphere. Thus, for example, the communal-welfare and Israel-world
Jewry games are linked at some points into one
communal-Israel-world Jewry "supergame." Furthermore, there are
hospital games in the communal-welfare framework in which a
particular hospital can be a separate game. The contents or
boundaries of a particular game-and-complex can and do shift. It
is possible for operational purposes to decide that an activity
is a game in itself or to treat it as a part of a larger game.
All activities in the community can be viewed and analyzed in
relation to these games, however delimited.
There is little shifting of participants from sphere to sphere,
except where two or more spheres are linked in a supergame. Those
serving the Jewish community in professional capacities (rabbis,
communal workers, Jewish educators) shift least. Lower echelon
volunteers may shift but are rarely involved in more than one
sphere or game at a time. Important voluntary leaders can and do
shift from game to game with greater ease or are involved in
several games at once. In a particular sphere or game there may
be considerable overlapping or revolving of leadership.
Because the games and complexes involve local, countrywide, and
world-wide "players" simultaneously, they are major vehicles for
integrating leadership across all the arenas. There are few
countrywide or edah-wide games not based on local leadership
wearing other hats, except among the professional charged with
daily operating responsibilities. Thus the system of games and
complexes reinforces the local basis of Jewish life even as it
integrates Jewish activity from hometown to Jerusalem.
The five spheres originally began as relatively separate in their
functioning but have since grown together inexorably. This
reflects the contemporary human condition in which everything is
becoming increasingly dependent on everything else. In an age of
growing complexity, the possibility of separating institutions,
activity spheres, or jurisdictions has become increasingly
limited in every part of the world, and the Jewish people is no
exception.
If in particular local and countrywide arenas there remain
exceptions to this rule, they are idiosyncratic. The
communal-welfare and Israel-world Jewry spheres have come to
embrace progressively the external relations-defense and
educational-cultural spheres. Some spheres may be more connected
with others in the countrywide arena than in some local
communities, but all are increasingly connected in every arena.
The future, then, requires an approach to Jewish life that is
comprehensive and looks for consequences, anticipated and
unanticipated, rippling through the system whenever action is
undertaken in one or another of the spheres.
Notes
1. Louis Rosenberg, "Some Aspects of the Historical Development
of the Canadian Jewish Community" and Chronology of Canadian
Jewish History (Montreal: Canadian Jewish Congress, 1959); Stuart
E. Rosenberg, The Jewish Community in Canada (Toronto: McClelland
and Stewart, 1970-71); B.G. Sack, History of the Jews in Canada,
trans. Ralph Novek (Montreal: Harvest House, 1960); A.J. Arnold,
"Jewish Pioneer Settlements," The Beaver, (Autumn 1975), pp.
20-26; M.M. Lazar and Sheva Medjuck, "In the Beginning: A Brief
History of Jews in Atlantic Canada," Jewish Historical Society of
Canada, (Fall 1981), and Jews on the Fringes: The Development of
the Jewish Community of Atlantic Canada, Occasional Papers of the
International Education Center (Halifax, Nova Scotia, 1983);
Jonathan D. Sarna, "Jewish Immigration to North America: The
Canadian Experience (1870-1900)," Jewish Journal of Sociology,
vol. 28, no. 1 (June 1976), pp. 31-41; Erna Paris, Jews: An
Account of Their Experience in Canada (Toronto: Macmillan in
Canada, 1980); Harry Gutkin, Journey into Our Heritage: The Story
of the Jewish People in the Canadian West (Toronto: Lester and
Orpen Dennys, 1980).
2. For an understanding of that phenomenon, see Frederick Jackson
Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York: Holt, 1921);
Walter Prescott Webb, The Great Frontier (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1952); Ray Allen Billington, America's Frontier Heritage
(New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966); Louis Hartz, The
Founding of New Societies (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World,
1964); George Wolfskill and Stanley Palmer, eds., Essays in
Frontier in World History (College Station: Texas A & M
University Press, 1983).
3. For a full exposition of this thesis, see Daniel J. Elazar,
The Metropolitan Frontier: A Perspective on Change in American
Society (New York: General Learning Press, 1973).
4. William Metcalfe, ed., Understanding Canada (New York: New
York University, 1982); J.M.S. Careless, ed., Colonists and
Canadians (New York: St. Martin's, 1971); D.G. Creighton, A
History of Canada: Dominion of the North (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1958); H.A. Innis, The Fur Trade in Canada, rev. ed.
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1956); A.R.M. Lower,
Colony to Nation (New York: Longmans, 1958); E.W. McInnis,
Canada: A Political and Social History (Toronto: Holt, Rinehart
and Winston, 1969).
5. Arnold, "Jewish Pioneer Settlements"; Lazar and Medjuck, "In
the Beginning" and "Jews on the Fringe"; Paris, Jews; Arthur
Chiel, The Jew in Manitoba (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
1961); Arthur D. Hart, ed., The Jews in Canada: A Complete Record
of Canadian Jewry (Toronto: Toronto Jewish Publications, 1926);
Stephen Speisman, The Jews of Toronto (Toronto: McClelland and
Stewart, 1979); Louis Rosenberg, "Some Aspects of the Historical
Development of the Canadian Jewish Community"; Joseph Kage,
Immigration and Integration in Canada (Montreal: Jewish Immigrant
Aid Services, 1966).
6. Elazar, The Metropolitan Frontier and Cities of the Prairie:
The Metropolitan Frontier and American Politics (New York: Basic
Books, 1970).
7. Hartz, The Founding of New Societies.
8. Morton Weinfeld, William Shaffir, and Irwin Cotler, eds., The
Canadian Jewish Mosaic (Toronto: J. Wiley, 1981).
9. Daniel J. Elazar, "The Jews of Quebec and the Canadian
Crisis," Tefutsot Yisrael, vol. 15, no. 2 (April-June 1977), pp.
7-11.
10. For a fuller discussion of the generational rhythm, see
Daniel J. Elazar, "The Generational Rhythm of American Politics,"
American Politics Quarterly, vol. 6, no. 1 (January 1978), pp.
55-90 and "Generational Breaks" in Nissan Oren, ed., When
Patterns Change: Turning Points in International Politics (New
York and Jerusalem: St. Martin's Press and Magnes Press, 1984).
For the application of the thesis to Jewish history, see Daniel
J. Elazar, The Constitutional Periodization of Jewish History: A
Second Look (Jerusalem: Center for Jewish Community Studies,
1979).
11. Max Horkheimer and Samuel H. Flowerman, Studies in Prejudice
(New York: Harper and Brothers, 1950); Bruno Bettelheim and
Morris Janowitz, Dynamics of Prejudice (New York: Harper and
Brothers, 1950); John Higham, "Social Discrimination against Jews
in America, 1830-1930," American Jewish Historical Society, vol.
47, no. 1 (September 1957), pp. 1-33 and Strangers in the Land
(New York: Atheneum, 1975); Lee J. Levinger, Anti-Semitism in the
United States: Its History and Causes (New York: Bloch Publishing
Co., 1925); Jacob Katz, From Prejudice to Destruction:
Anti-Semitism 1700-1933 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1980).
12. "Statistical Data on Intermarriage in Canada," Inter-Office
Information (Canadian Jewish Congress), no. 3886, October 16,
1975, p. 1.
