Kay: Is eating meat antithetical to Jewish values?Wednesday October 31st, 2018
One of the most talked-about Jewish books of the season is Jonathan Neumann’s To Heal the World: How the Jewish Left Corrupts Judaism and Endangers Israel.
The book’s tone, as one can tell from the title, is muscular. The boldly stated theme is that tikun olam (to heal the world), a phrase used once in our liturgy and never given exegetical significance, is now, as interpreted by p...
Trump’s rhetoric didn’t cause this massacreTuesday October 30th, 2018
The Sabbath massacre in Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue was the deadliest attack on Jews in U.S. history, but it is not the first time Jews in the United States have been targeted for attack while at worship.
In 1960, a 16-year-old boy threw a bomb into a synagogue in Gladsden, Ala., but it didn’t explode. The would-be massacrist then shot and injured two people fleeing the bui...
KAY: “What’s in a Residential School’s Name?” – The Talk that the University of Winnipeg Club Didn’t Want Their Members to HearSunday October 28th, 2018
On Oct 23, the University of Winnipeg Club, a dining and social club, with membership open to all university employees, cancelled an Oct 25 talk scheduled as one of its “Hot Lunch Speakers Series”.
The deplatformed speaker is University of Manitoba Sociology of Education professor and Senior Fellow with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy, Rodney Clifton. The topic...
Canada is better for having the Post — and far more interestingSaturday October 27th, 2018
The birth of the National Post 20 years ago had a profound impact on our national conversations about politics, the economy and our swiftly evolving culture. The Post was meant to be a journalistic disruptor, and it accomplished that goal.
Long before I joined the Comment section as a weekly contributor in 2003 — indeed, for months before the Post’s official launch — I was ac...
KAY: Elizabeth Warren’s DNA test – mocked by Trump and rejected by the CherokeesSunday October 21st, 2018
Elizabeth Warren seems to have definitively thrown her political hat into the 2020 presidential ring. As of now, she’s out there front and centre.
Elizabeth Warren seems to have definitively thrown her political hat into the 2020 presidential ring. As of now, she’s out there front and centre.
One thing she knew she had to deal with proactively was the issue of her alleged Cherokee...
Did #MeToo activists target a top Canadian prof for his blunt lessons about Islam?Friday October 19th, 2018
McGill University, my grad school alma mater, has, in my opinion, acted dishonourably in a recent and unusual case of tenure denial to a brilliant and popular professor.
When I learned of Ahmed Fekry Ibrahim’s story, I was fortunate to receive a remarkable trove of evidence: his supporting documents for a defamation lawsuit he launched this summer against a student and a professor in his...
A few ‘toxic’ anti-male women are derailing the validity of #MeTooWednesday October 17th, 2018
According to a survey in the latest Economist magazine, the effect of the #MeToo movement has been to elevate Americans’ skepticism over sympathy for victims. Among other findings, the survey notes that between November 2017 and September 2018, while the perception that false allegations of sexual assault are a greater problem than unreported or unpunished sexual assault remains a minorit...
An Academic Mobbing at McGillTuesday October 16th, 2018
Editor’s note: More than 200 pages of supporting documents have been gathered by Professor Ibrahim for use in a defamation lawsuit he is engaged in against a student and a colleague. These documents include both the Minority and Majority Reports issued by the Departmental Tenure Committee, student testimonials and affidavits, as well as a variety of departmental communications involving P...
KAY: Should Brett Kavanaugh have stepped down after being confirmed, as Jordan Peterson suggests?Monday October 15th, 2018
Some Facebook threads I started by posting pro-Kavanaugh pieces ended up occupying a good part of my time last week. With comments split pretty evenly between sympathy for him and sympathy for her, the subject became a kind of gender Rorschach test for the #MeToo era.
What impressed me in these exchanges was the absolute faith invested in personal demeanour as a litmus test for arriving at mor...
Another school, another recording, another free-speech crisisThursday October 11th, 2018
The old adage has it that “a picture is worth a 1,000 words.” But, as former Wilfrid Laurier University teaching assistant Lindsay Shepherd showed Canadians last November, in academia 1,000 words — unexpectedly recorded — can paint a culture-capturing picture.
By now, the infamous interrogation Shepherd endured after exposing students to Jordan Peterson’s views on...
Kay: The view from the balconyWednesday October 3rd, 2018
As new members of a modern Orthodox congregation, the experience my husband and I had on the High Holidays this year was a striking departure from the previous 46 in a Reconstructionist synagogue. We’re rather old for such a dramatic change in affiliation, but, having recognized the need for personal Jewish renewal, we took the plunge.
We felt instinctively drawn to Montreal’s Shaa...
Diluting the meaning of ‘woman,’ to appease transgender activists, is misogynyThursday September 13th, 2018
In his writings on totalitarianism, George Orwell powerfully exposed the link between the manipulation of language and the erosion of individual liberty. Ideologues understand that linguistic control precedes, and is crucial to, political and cultural power. The novel 1984 illuminated the shame in being compelled — figuratively — to endorse the lie that two plus two is five.
For th...
The Villain in the Trans Mountain Fiasco – and Other Fiascos since 2004 – is the Supreme Court of CanadaTuesday September 11th, 2018
The Trudeau government was clearly taken by surprise at the Federal Court’s nullifying of their approval of the 1,150-km Trans Mountain pipeline expansion. Otherwise they would not have signed a deal with Kinder Morgan that explicitly stated any adverse court decisions would not be deemed to constitute a “material adverse effect” that could change the deal’s terms.
No w...
Weinstein worst example of common problem in film industryWednesday September 5th, 2018
I lunched last weekend with friends, both in the film business, one a successful documentarian, the other a producer. Naturally, the tsunami of sexual assault charges unleashed by the Harvey Weinstein affair came up for review. I asked if they had ever experienced Weinsteinian moments. Indeed they had.
Coincidentally, both involved bathrobes that “slid open” to reveal erect penises...
Pit bull lobby put on its heels by Quebec’s dangerous dog bill, CBC documentaryWednesday September 5th, 2018
In April, the Quebec government introduced Bill 128, which will authorize the province to prohibit any person from owning, breeding or acquiring “potentially dangerous” dogs, which includes pit bulls and Rottweilers, the two highest-risk dogs.
Impetus for the bill — and a similar one passed in Montreal — arose largely from distress over the June 2016 fatal mau...
We are ignoring a key part of ‘dying with dignity’Wednesday September 5th, 2018
Ing Wong-Ward is disabled, dependent on a wheelchair and afflicted with colon cancer, accompanied, for the past year, by a stubbornly persistent abdominal abscess. This seems a depressing scenario, but Wong-Ward presents as anything but depressed in her promotional article for palliative care in Saturday’s Globe and Mail, “Living — and dying — with dignity.”Wong...
Canada’s own little Stalins are making politically incorrect authors disappearWednesday September 5th, 2018
Stalin and his monstrous inner circle aren’t obvious fodder for humour, but the film The Death of Stalin is indeed hilarious, without sidestepping the horrors of that regime.Playing the role of Stalin’s vain and irresolute deputy Malenkov is actor Jeffrey Tambor, best known for his role as transwoman Maura in Amazon’s popular series, Transparent.Tambor was Hollywood’s...
The Yazidis are in danger of extinction and Ottawa’s stopped helpingWednesday September 5th, 2018
I’ll call her “Nada,” not her real name.Nada is a Yazidi woman from Sinjar, Iraq, now age 31. On Aug. 3, 2014, ISIL came for her people. The Kurdish Peshmerga, tasked with protecting them, fled, leaving them helpless. Nada and her two children — a boy, eight months and a girl, two — were separated from her husband and father-in-law, whom she never saw again.The ...
Gender studies don’t help us understand how dogs behaveWednesday September 5th, 2018
For the “dog days” of summer, a column about dogs and their social life.Last year, a certain Helen Wilson, claiming to hold a “doctorate in feminist studies” submitted a paper titled “Human reactions to rape culture and queer performativity at urban dog parks in Portland, Oregon” to the Journal of Feminist Geography.Turned out there was no evidence fo...
Kay: Is eating meat antithetical to Jewish values?
Wednesday October 31st, 2018
Trump’s rhetoric didn’t cause this massacre
Tuesday October 30th, 2018
KAY: “What’s in a Residential School’s Name?” – The Talk that the University of Winnipeg Club Didn’t Want Their Members to Hear
Sunday October 28th, 2018
An Academic Mobbing at McGill
Tuesday October 16th, 2018
