For less than $100 you can save someone — a family member, a university student, a wayward stranger — from becoming an antisemite.
That is, someone who’s hostile or prejudiced against Jews because they’re Jews, in the way that racists are hostile to Black people. No reason, really. They’re Black, is all.
This is actually a big public health issue. Antisemites spread a disease that is more infectious and deadly than COVID ever was. While COVID has killed 7 million people, antisemitism killed 6 million Jews in the Holocaust, plus millions more from antisemitism’s earliest days in the 5th century.
When I speak of antisemites, I don’t mean someone who doesn’t like particular policies of the Israeli government or its leaders (I think Bibi Netanyahu is a dreadful Prime Minister), or someone who doesn’t like a particular Jew because, for example, she’s a jerk and drinks too much.
No, I’m talking about the folks over at Hamas whose main goal in life is to wipe every single Jew from the face of the earth. By implication, this includes people who support not just the goals of the Jews, but their very right to exist. For Hamas, genocide of the Jews is not a bug, but a feature of their society and a fundamental principle of their Charter. In the same way, using women and children as human shields, or hospitals, mosques and schools as ammunition depots aren’t the acts of some overly-enthusiastic members. They are the central tenets of Hamas’ entire military strategy, as are raping women, murdering babies and chopping off heads.
So antisemitism may also be a big mental health issue.
The West isn’t exactly full-throated in its denunciation of Hamas’ genocide. This week, the Presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT all evaded the question: “Does calling for Jewish genocide violate your universities’ rules around bullying and harassment?”
In this regard, Hamas is much like the Nazis, though Hitler’s gangs at least kept their plans secret for the extermination of all Jews, all Blacks, all Asians, all gays, all…..well, anyone who wasn’t of pure Aryan blood. It took 10 years for the world to wake up to Hitler’s horrific end-game.
Not so with Hamas, who were the first to flood social media with videos of the slaughter they wrought on October 7.
I learned this about the Nazis by reading a new book by University of New Brunswick professor Jason Bell called Cracking the Nazi Code.
This is the first holiday gift, at $29.95.
It’s about a Canadian academic and spy, Winthrop Bell (no relation) who served with Britain’s MI6 in the days following World War I. The Brits wanted someone to learn more about a fringe group headed by a rabble-rousing lightweight called Adolf Hitler. Bell grew to be Europe’s top spy because he got ahold of the secret Nazi documents detailing their plans for global domination which he sent back to the head of MI6.
But as we know, Europe failed to face the reality of this shocking information, possibly because it was so shocking, and failed to act on it.
I then started reading a Canadian classic, None is Too Many: Canada and the Jews of Europe 1933-1948, written in 1982 by Harold Troper and Irving Abella and whose audio version is read by Abella’s wife, Rosie.
This is the second holiday gift, at $39.95.
None destroyed the myth that Canada welcomed immigrants and refugees. It called out the backdoor antisemitism of Prime Minister Mackenzie King, the future Governor General Vincent Massey, and the director of Ottawa’s Immigration Branch, Frederick Blair, for working feverishly to keep Jews fleeing certain death by the Nazis from entering Canada.
Between 1933 and 1939, Blair’s office allowed fewer than 5,000 Jews into Canada. Compare this with over 200,000 let into the US, and 20,000 into Mexico. After the war between 1945 and 1948, the year Israel was founded, the Immigration Branch accepted only 8,000 Jewish Holocaust survivors. Said Abella and Troper: “That record is arguably the worst of all possible refugee-receiving states”.
Many Canadians knew of their government’s diligent efforts to keep the Jews out. They too failed to act. (An unintended good effect of this policy is that, when None is Too Many was published, Canada’s then immigration minister, Ron Atkey, read it and was so disturbed by its revelations that he immediately authorized the admission of 50,000 ‘boat people’ from Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia into the country).
Meanwhile, our view of America is that it really wasn’t involved with the Holocaust. But that too has been called into question, namely by Ken Burns in his three-part PBS series aired in 2022, The US and the Holocaust. which connects antisemitism to the race laws of the southern states.
This is the third holiday gift, and it’s yours for just $14.99.
Many Americans knew, and by the end of World War II, every American, Canadian, and Western European knew how closely the Jewish religion and race had come to being erased from the face of the earth. And yet…..only a thimbleful had raised a finger to help.
It’s no wonder Toronto’s Jews feel the silence of their non-Jewish friends is deafening.
So, you can buy all three of these holiday gifts for a total of $84.89. In doing so, maybe you can head off a future antisemite, or cause a current one to pause. Or give yourself this gift. Lifelong learning benefits us all.
I realize these gifts involve two things that many Canadians don’t find attractive these days: reading and history.
But unfortunately, if we want to learn how the future can turn out, the best way is to learn what brought us to that future.
Fortunately, if shockingly, it’s right in front of our eyes.
Meanwhile…
1. Loving listicles. They’re the TikTok of the printed page. Check out 52 things I learned in 2023 plus 30 useful principles. Among them is the Serial Position Effect where we tend to remember the beginning and end of things rather than all the stuff in the middle, like marriages.
2. It’s complicated. In fact, the world’s most complicated language is Navajo, spoken by fewer than 170,000 Indigenous Americans in Arizona and New Mexico. Navajo’s “hopeless maze of irregularities” is so indecipherable to outsiders that the U.S. Marines used it as a form of military code in World War II.
3. “The doctor won’t see you now”. The OECD this week reported on the quality of primary medical care across its 38 member countries. It seems that not having a family doctor is an especially Canadian quality of health care. As The Globe and Mail reported: “In Norway, every resident is automatically assigned a family doctor. Patients in the Netherlands have access to primary care 24 hours a day through a network of after-hours care. And in Britain, newborns must be registered with a local medical practice within six weeks of birth.”
4. I was slow to be a Swiftie. Taylor Swift had lurked like a harmless wildfire in my mind. Until I read the reports on the economic effect of her 52-city live tour, the first ever to earn $1 billion plus. Then a seriously stodgy Rosedale friend said he went to see her three-and-a-half hour concert film, The Eras Tour, at his local Cineplex, and raved over it. Then our 9-year-old grand-daughter dragged us to see it and….oh my….oh gosh….what is this?! As of December 13th, you can see that film online. Oh, and The Wall Street Journal has nominated Swift as 2023’s Person of the Year. Two days later, so did Time.
5. One of the world’s 10 best commercial directors…..is Toronto’s Jason van Bruggen. He’s the only Canadian to make the list, with this spot for Adidas that won the Grand Prix in Cannes.
Speaking of great moving images, here’s a short film made entirely of AI images. Rest assured, nothing you see in it is real.
For more reality, check out this 23-minute kitchen drama on how a budding chef is pushed to his limits at a Michelin restaurant.
6. Drink and be driven. Here are some very special trains. And….an alternative future for when I grow up, plus what does the trick for old dogs? And speaking of aging gracefully, old buildings look different in the lens of history. Finally, can you learn synesthesia?
7. Musk’s infamous interview. Here it is, with F-word supplied. But his full interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin is much more interesting about the world’s richest man. As is Scott Galloway’s blog, Mammon, on what it all means.
8. What’s with the Saudis and their giga projects? As The Guardian notes: “The Saudi crown prince is creating wildly ambitious projects masterminded by renowned architects, curators and designers. The upshot is either progressive modernisation or image-laundering, depending who you ask.” Here are three of them: Wadi AlFann, a land art park in Saudi Arabia, the Red Sea Project, a giant tourist destination, and The Line, a smart linear city.
9. Trauma stings. Is that why healing takes so long? And when there is no healing, sadly the end can be suicide, which reached record numbers in America last year. Men 75 and older had the highest suicide rate at 44 per 100,000 people, double that for people 15-24. Firearm-related suicides become more common with age and Americans have 361 million guns and 341 million people.
10. Amazing music performances on BBC. It’s the Beeb’s 100th anniversary, so what better way.
11. What I’m liking. There’s no better feeling than discovering an unknown author who becomes a massive best-seller, and…..and then, a year later, a hit TV series called Slow Horses is made out of his books. Thus it was that, in the dark days of 2020, I would go for long walks at our cottage, not so much for exercise, but so I could listen more to Mick Herron and his spy series, Slough House, about a group of incompetent and over-the-hill MI5ers, led by the delightfully hateful Jackson Lamb. Imagine my frisson of delight to learn that not only would all 12 books in the Slow Horses series be televised, but that Jackson Lamb would be played by Gary Oldman. Season 3 began last week on Apple+.
12. What you can be liking. Readers of the OG blog get a 10% discount on tickets to the live, family holiday show, Slava’s Snowshow at Toronto’s Elgin Theatre from Dec. 22 to 31. All dates. All times. All sections. Raved The NewYork Times: “My heart leapt! Induces waves of giggles.”
To get your tickets, go to Ticketmaster and enter promo code RAMSAYSNOWS10 into the “Unlock” field in the top right area of the Seating Map screen before selecting your seats to ensure the discount is applied.
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YOU NEED TO TAKE A TRIP SOMEWHERE. BUT WHERE?
This is not an argument for travel, which Mark Twain claimed is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness. You’re way beyond that.
This is a pitch for travelling with Jean and me and our friends who are oddly like you. In other words, familiar people and unfamiliar places.
Next year we’ll be travelling a lot. Some readers are confused with all the e-mails on these trips (sorry about the deluge). So here they all are, in chronological order, with links to all the details you need to learn, think about and join. And of course if you have any questions, just e-mail me at bob@ramsayinc.com
● February 25 to March 9 – Lindblad Expedition from Fiji to Tahiti.
● May 29 to June 5 – Northern Italy Under Sail, aboard the Sea Cloud II.
● June 7 to 13 – Hiking in the Alta Valsesia in the Italian Alps.
● August 23 to 29 – Kayaking off Vancouver Island
● Sept. 2 to 9 – Lindblad Expedition to the Great Bear Rainforest in BC.
● We’re also organizing a trip to the top of the world with Weber Arctic in the summer of 2025. Click here to book your trip.
We’d love to have you join us.
Bob & Jean