Like Everyone Else but Different
The Paradoxical Success of Canadian Jews, Second Edition
A timely analysis of the possibilities and challenges of multiculturalism as seen in the iconic case of Canada’s Jewish community.
Description
Liberal democratic societies with diverse populations generally offer minorities two usually contradictory objectives: the first is equal integration and participation; the second is an opportunity, within limits, to retain their culture. Yet Canadian Jews are successfully integrated into all domains of Canadian life, while at the same time they also seem able to retain their distinct identities by blending traditional religious values and rituals with contemporary cultural options. Like Everyone Else but Different illustrates how Canadian Jews have created a space within Canada’s multicultural environment that paradoxically overcomes the potential dangers of assimilation and diversity. At the same time, this comprehensive and data-driven study documents and interprets new trends and challenges including rising rates of intermarriage, newer progressive religious options, finding equal space for women and LGBTQ Jews, tensions between non-Orthodox and Orthodox Jews, and new forms of real and perceived anti-Semitism often related to Israel or Zionism, on campus and elsewhere. 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, this 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.
Reviews
"This updated and revised edition of Morton Weinfeld's sociological study of Canadian Jews is most welcome. If Weinfeld's book was vital in 2001, it is even more so today. This foundational study is exceptional for its tone [and] especially valuable for its incisive analysis of contemporary trends. Meticulously documented and accessibly written, it is scholarship at its best." The Canadian Historical Review
"An outstanding analysis of Canadian Jewish life today, written with verve and humour and accessible to all." Gerald Tulchinsky
"There should be a book like this for any and all groups that make up Canadian society. Meanwhile, read this one. You will laugh a little, think a lot, and learn why no one will ever write the last word on the Jews of Canada – though Morton Weinfeld comes close." Desmond Morton
"Undoubtedly the most important study of Canadian Jewish life in a generation." Harold Troper