ABOUT THIS EPISODE
In 2024, two of the leading historians of Jewish Canada, Pierre Anctil and Richard Menkis, published In a "Land of Hope": Documents on the Canadian Jewish Experience, volume 1, 1627-1923, a landmark collection of primary sources. In this episode, Richard Menkis, who teaches at the University of British Columbia, chats with Jonathan Slater about the reader: how it came to be, its contents, uses, and its value for anyone interested in Canadian Jewish history. Menkis, the ACJS's Louis Rosenberg Distinguished Service Award winner in 2018, also discusses his circuitous path into Canadian Jewish studies, and the state of the field.
OUR GUEST
Richard Menkis is associate professor of Jewish history at the University of British Columbia. His recent publications include, with Harold Troper, More than Just Games: Canada and the 1936 Olympics (2015), and with Pierre Anctil, In a “Land of Hope”: Documents on the Canadian Jewish Experience, vol. 1 (2023). In 2018 he won the Association for Canadian Studies’ Louis Rosenberg Distinguished Service Award, and in 2023 the University of British Columbia’s Dean of Arts Award for “outstanding contributions to the Faculty of Arts.”
RECOMMENDED READING
In a "Land of Hope": Documents on the Canadian Jewish Experience, volume 1, 1627-1923, Richard Menkis and Pierre Anctil
The Champlain Society, publisher of In a "Land of Hope"
Richard Menkis's contributions to Canadian Jewish Studies / Études juives canadiennes
EPISODE ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Host: Jonathan Slater
Producer/Editor: Theadora Draper
Music: J.K. Bradley
Executive Producers: Joshua Tapper and David S. Koffman
Tête-à-tête: Conversations in Canadian Jewish Studies is made possible by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada’s Aid to Scholarly Journals program and the Israel and Golda Koschitzky Centre for Jewish Studies and J. Richard Shiff Chair for the Study of Canadian Jewry, both at York University.