Ramsay Cook

The British Empire/Commonwealth, earlier a staple of Canadian historical writing, has fallen out of fashion. That partly reflects the adjournment sine die of the once acrimonious debates about Canada’s place in an empire on which the sun was said never to set. Neville Thompson’s new book is both an attempt to revive a neglected historical subject and an account of one man’s effort to prevent the…

The history of right-wing nationalism and anti-Semitism in Quebec, particularly in the interwar years, has been the subject of much research, critical writing and angry controversy in the last couple of decades. Although Esther Delisle was certainly not the first historian to take up this delicate subject, her Le traître et le Juif: Lionel …

But the stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself —Leviticus 19:34 Among the virtues of Philip Roth’s The Counterlife is its exploration of Jewish identity and anti-Semitism. Larry Holmes, one of Roth’s zanier creations, knows that he is a Jew but leaves Israel asking plaintively: “How can there be Jews without baseball?” Nathan Zuckerman only discovers that he is a somewhat minimalist Jew when faced with the prejudices of his new English mother-in-law in “Christendom.” “Can’t there be a Jewish variety of Englishman?” he asks…