Museums have long been at the forefront of public engagement with the history and memory of the Holocaust. But as the possibilities of technology for discovery and learning about such an emotionally fraught subject expand, and the question of what the Holocaust has to teach us remains as thorny as ever, at museums old and new the goals of that public engagement are undergoing serious revision.

Yasmine Lucas, an anthropologist at the University of Toronto, has written widely on the ways in which Holocaust museums in North America—their curators, advisors, funders, and visitors—are navigating this moment. She takes a particular interest in the Montreal Holocaust Museum, which is preparing to open a more modern and interactive exhibit inside a new building in 2027. Lucas joins the podcast to discuss the role of the twenty-first-century Holocaust museum, how curatorial decisions respond to the reality of a dwindling survivor population, and the changing needs and demands of visitors in a climate of political and social divisiveness.

For more, check out Lucas's recent essay, "Dimensions in Testimony: On Revamping Holocaust Museums," published in the spring 2025 volume of Canadian Jewish Studies / Études juives canadiennes. And "Holocaust Sublime: The Naturalization of a Feeling," also from 2025, in Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies.

Also, don't miss "Studies Show," a new collaboration between CJS / Éjc and Scribe Quarterly, the magazine of The Canadian Jewish News, designed to introduce academic reseach about Canadian Jewry to a wider readership!

This episode was produced and edited by Theadora Draper. Original music is by J. K. Bradley. Our executive producers are Joshua Tapper and David Koffman.  

Please visit the website of the Association for Canadian Jewish Studies to learn more about its work, how it supports the research and study of Canadian Jewish life, and how you can contribute. The Association for Canadian Jewish Studies is based at the Israel and Golda Koschitzky Centre for Jewish Studies at York University, in Toronto, ON.

For updates about the Association for Canadian Jewish Studies, sign up for its newsletter. If you have comments or thoughts about our podcast, please email us at acjs@yorku.ca.

In the second half of the twentieth century, approximately twenty thousand Jews emigrated from North Africa to Canada. Most of them were from Morocco, and most settled in and around Montreal. Yolande Cohen, a historian at the Université du Québec à Montréal and herself a Moroccan Jewish immigrant to Canada (via France), has spent much of her career collecting and analyzing narratives of this migration—its motivations, its traumas, its memories.

Cohen is the author of two new books, Moroccan Jews in France and Canada, and Migrations postcoloniales des Juifs du Maroc: Vers le Canada et la France, both published in 2025, and she joins the show to discuss not only the difficult histories she traces in her work but also the ways in which those histories have been received, challenged, and often ignored by Canada's Moroccan Jewish community.

You can learn more about Cohen's personal journey in a bilingual essay she wrote for Canadian Jewish Studies / Études juives canadiennes back in 2024. And don't forget to check out the ACJS's new digital archive of the Canadian Jewish Historical Society Journal (1977-1988), also mentioned in this episode!

This episode was produced and edited by Theadora Draper. Original music is by J. K. Bradley. Our executive producers are Joshua Tapper and David Koffman.  

Please visit the website of the Association for Canadian Jewish Studies to learn more about its work, how it supports the research and study of Canadian Jewish life, and how you can contribute. The Association for Canadian Jewish Studies is based at the Israel and Golda Koschitzky Centre for Jewish Studies at York University, in Toronto, ON.

For updates about the Association for Canadian Jewish Studies, sign up for its newsletter. If you have comments or thoughts about our podcast, please email us at acjs@yorku.ca.

Political extremist, fascist agitator, marginal crank? Adrien Arcand, the Montreal-based journalist and publicist, was one of mid-twentieth-century Canada's most notorious antisemites. Known as the "Canadian Führer," Arcand has long been viewed, in scholarship and public memory, as the leading exemplar of Quebec antisemitism from the 1930s through the 1950s, and one of the greatest ontological threats to Jewish life in Canada in those decades.

But what do we actually know about Arcand's influence? Tyler Wentzell, a historian of far-right extremism in Canada, takes up this question in a forum published in the fall 2025 volume of Canadian Jewish Studies / Études juives canadiennes. In "Rethinking Adrien Arcand in Historical Context," Wentzell looks specifically at Arcand's reception in English-language newspapers from 1929-1940; his collaborators in the forum, the historians Pierre Anctil and Simon-Pierre Lacasse, examine the Montreal Yiddish press and postwar Quebec's Catholic hierarchy, respectively.

In this episode, Wentzell sits down with host Jonathan Slater to discuss one of the forum's guiding questions: What does a history of Arcand that looks beyond his inflammatory words and activities, to how he was received (and challenged) in French-Catholic, Jewish, and English Canadian communities, tell us about the history of hate in Canada and the ways in which diverse groups have found solidarity in confronting extremism?

Click here to read "Rethinking Adrien Arcand in Historical Context." You can also read the forum, in complete French translation as "Repenser Adrien Arcand dans son context historique," here. Also check out Wentzell's related article, "Scenes of Berlin: Fascism and Anti-Fascism in Toronto during the Summer of 1938," published in CJS / Éjc in spring 2023.

This episode was produced and edited by Theadora Draper. Original music is by J. K. Bradley. Our executive producers are Joshua Tapper and David Koffman.  

Please visit the website of the Association for Canadian Jewish Studies to learn more about its work, how it supports the research and study of Canadian Jewish life, and how you can contribute. The Association for Canadian Jewish Studies is based at the Israel and Golda Koschitzky Centre for Jewish Studies at York University, in Toronto, ON.

For updates about the Association for Canadian Jewish Studies, sign up for its newsletter. If you have comments or thoughts about our podcast, please email us at acjs@yorku.ca.