But they could’ve been seen as refugees, based on motives and experience, as they fled pogroms in Eastern Europe. That community, in Toronto, is described in a lovely, loving new book by the late Michael Mandel: The Jewish Hour. He focuses on weekly radio shows in Yiddish, in Toronto — in 1938 there were three competing “Jewish Hours” — and on local newspapers from the 1930s to the 1950s. The papers were in Yiddish, but helped integrate their readers by covering Toronto events, unlike the dominant New York Yiddish press, which was devoured here. You could say they were white, unlike today’s minorities, but in ways they were viewed as non-white.

Source: thestar September 23, 2016 09:56 UTC