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Quebec, and more particularly the city of Montreal knew, from the first stages of the Conquest, the cohabitation of several communities or groups promoting different religious values. If the Lower Canadian State legislates to reconcile these divergent interests, it is especially the courts which were brought to arbitrate the religious plurality. Confronted with religious claims, the Montreal jurisdictions build a legal corpus laying the foundations for religious tolerance, as well as the beginnings of legal neutrality.

Keywords: interfaith dialogue and engagement, public square, Theological bioethics, interfaith-interdisciplinary dialogue

Chaim Kruger (1877–1933) was born in Lithuania, educated in Lithuanian yeshivas, and became a personality of some importance in the Montreal Jewish community after his emigration to Canada in 1907. He was a rabbi, a rosh yeshiva (teacher of Talmud), a shokhet (kosher slaughterer), and, not least, a mainstay on the journalistic staff of Montreal’s Yiddish newspaper, Der Keneder Adler, from 1921 to 1933. At the Keneder Adler, he contributed to nearly every section of the newspaper. Kruger translated into Yiddish the wire service reports of items of national and international interest for the front page. He wrote thousands of articles under his own name as well as several pseudonyms on a wide range of subjects including extended series of articles on Judaic studies, Canada–US relations, economics, and ecology on the editorial and op-ed pages. He edited the newspaper’s weekly children’s column as well as its daily advice column. Not least, from 1927 to 1933, Chaim Kruger published no fewer than ten serial novels in the Keneder Adler under the pseudonym “Hyman Zinman.” None of them was ever published in book form. This article will briefly survey all of Kruger’s serialized novels, and examine one, Der Froyen yeger (The Stalker of Women), in greater detail. It will attempt to situate Kruger’s novelistic oeuvre in the context of the publication of scores of such serialized novels in the North American Yiddish press in the early twentieth century as well as in the context of attitudes toward popular Yiddish literature (shund) during that period.

Keywords: Chaim Kruger, Yiddish journalism, Yiddish literature, Serialized novels, Montreal, Keneder Adler

AbstractThe nineteenth-century German homosexual rights movement adopted the rhetoric of the “emancipation of the flesh,” which had its roots in Romanticism. Friedrich Schlegel's Lucinde (1799) promoted the emancipation of the flesh by calling for a strong female sexuality that would help overcome the tyranny of the conventional bourgeois family. Karl Gutzkow's controversial novel Wally (1835) harked back to Schlegel as it championed the emancipation of Jews as well as women. Heinrich Hössli, author of Eros, the two-volume apology for male-male love that appeared in 1836 and 1838, clearly read the journals in which the controversies about Wally played out. He and subsequent activists in the homosexual rights movement, particularly Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, drew on these radical Romantic calls for sexual emancipation.

AbstractThis paper examines the collective self-images of Israeli literary translators, assuming that their desired idealized personae are no less effective than their actual performances in regulating the “rules of the game” in their field. In view of translators' popular image of ‘invisibility' and ‘submissiveness,' my argument is that translators are compelled to make intensive use of self-promotional discourse in their endeavor to establish their profession as a distinctive source of cultural capital. The present analysis is based on around 250 profile articles and interviews, reviews, surveys of translators and other reports in the printed media from the early 1980s through 2004. Three main self-images emerge from this self-presentational discourse: (1) The translator as a custodian of language culture; (2) The translator as an ambassador of foreign cultures and an innovator, and (3) The translator as an artist in his/her own right.

Keywords: symbolic capital, translators' self-images, self-presentation, literary translators, self-promotional discourse

This introduction presents a new collection of essays examining the role of conversion in early modern English drama. Together, the contributions demonstrate how the theatre served as a space for dramatizing the political, theological, and psychological complexities of identity transformation. With case studies ranging from city comedy to colonial propaganda, the volume emphasizes conversion’s entanglement with race, gender, and performance. Drawing on recent scholarship, the authors highlight drama’s unique capacity to stage conversional doubt, sincerity, and dissimulation — establishing theatre as both a site of ideological reinforcement and a medium for interrogating the limits of belief and belonging.

Keywords: drama, conversion, theatre

While the Reform and Conservative Jewish movements have made a concerted effort to welcome transgender Jews in the last twenty years, transgender congregants are often shunned by Orthodox rabbis and synagogues in the United States. Studies about Orthodox Judaism’s relationship with transgender identity often focus exclusively on Talmudic justifications for the acceptance or rejection of transgender Jews, ignoring the increasingly sizeable effect that secular politics has on the American Orthodox community. To address this gap in the academic understanding of transgender Jewish issues, this analysis takes a more holistic approach to the issue of transgender acceptance in Orthodox Judaism by (1) assessing the potential for the acceptance of transgender Jews in ultra-Orthodox and Modern Orthodox Jewish communities in the United States using halakhic rulings on intersex and transgender issues and (2) tracing the potential effects of the American political landscape on the Orthodox community’s acceptance of transgender identity.