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Gerald Tulchinsky, Canada's Jews. A People's Journey.

Article Excerpt
Gerald Tulchinsky, Conodo's Jews. A People's Journey (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2008)

CANADA'S JEWS IS the product of Gerald Tulchinsky's life-long immersion in Canadian Jewish life and Jewish history. The book is both an update of and a replacement for his two-volume Jewish history, Taking Root and Branching Out, issued in the 1990s.

This successor work is a thorough (500 pages of text) and masterful survey of 240 years of organized Jewish community life that covers everything from class conflict in the clothing industry to the mentality of immigrant Holocaust survivors.

The book is grounded in traditional Canadian historiography, but because it incorporates newer social history, the book can be viewed as a comprehensive synthesis of newer and older history writing. Older accounts of the histories of immigrant groups tended to focus on institutions and to laud prominent ethnic community leaders. While Tulchinsky builds on this earlier foundation, he combines it with a rich body of recent scholarly work focused on social history.

There's another, more important way in which Tulchinsky's book reflects Canadian historiography and national history. The themes of the book are the major staples of traditional Canadian history writing--French-English dualism...

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