The Canadian Society for Canadian Jewish Studies (CSJS) was founded in Winnipeg, Manitoba in 2004 with the goal to promote and facilitate the development of Jewish Studies in Canada. The CSJS meets annually and is a venue for the presentation of Jewish studies education, research and information primarily for faculty members, graduate students, and independent scholars living in Canada (even though residence in Canada is not required for membership).

This year’s conference, its seventeenth, will meet on line May 9th – 12th, 2022, via Zoom. To register and receive the Zoom link, email Justin_Lewis@umanitoba.ca with CSJS in the subject line.

ZC affiliates will present at this conference:

1) Pierre Anctil, Université d’Ottawa (External Affiliate) will chair a French-language panel on Monday afternoon, May 9th. The panelists are Jonathan Bourgel (Laval), speaking on the Jewish identity of Herod the Great; Guadalupe Gonzalez Dieguez and Adam Mitelberg (Université de Montréal) on editing medieval Hebrew manuscripts; and Vicky Karali (SOAS, London) addressing antisemitism on the Greek internet.

2) Deidre Butler, Associate Professor, College of the Humanities and Director of the Zelikovitz Centre, and Betina Appel Kuzmarov, Associate Dean (Students and Enrollment) and Assistant Professor, Law and Legal Studies, Carleton, and Member of the Zelikovitz Advisory Board, will present “Kosher Divorce? When Canadian Jewish Divorce Isn’t Orthodox” on Wednesday afternoon, May 11. This is an excerpt of their current research: a larger ethnographic study of Jewish Divorce in Canada that includes women, men, adult children, activists and rabbis who have experienced Jewish divorce. Canadian Jews are overwhelmingly not Orthodox. Yet when non-Orthodox Jews divorce religiously, they engage with Jewish divorce through persistently Orthodox norms. All Jewish divorce, across denominations, proceeds in relation to, in conversation with, and in response to Orthodox praxis. Their paper explores how this disjunction in Canadian Jewish life is key to understanding the distinct Canadian experience of divorce.

Click here for the conference program.

For more information on the CSCJ, please visit http://www.csjs.ca/.