By 1931, Ben and Alice Edelson had been married for two decades and had seven children, but for years Alice had been having an affair with the married Jack Horwitz. On the night of 24 November, Ben, Alice, and Jack met at Edelson Jewellers to "settle the thing." Words flew, a brawl erupted, and Jack was shot and killed. The tragedy marked the start of a sensational legal case that captured Ottawa headlines, with the prominent jeweller facing the gallows. Through a detailed examination of newspaper coverage, interviews with family and community members, and evocative archival photographs, Monda Halpern's Alice in Shandehland reconstructs a long-silenced murder case in Depression-era Canada. Halpern contends that despite his crime, Ben Edelson was the object of far less contempt than his adulterous wife whose shandeh - Yiddish for shame or disgrace - seemed indefensible. While Alice endured the censure of both the Jewish community and the courtroom, Ben’s middle-class respectability and the betrayal he suffered earned him favoured standing and, ultimately, legal exoneration. Revealing the tensions around ethnicity, sexuality, gender, and class, Alice in Shandehland explores the divergent reputations of Ben and Alice Edelson within a growing but insular and tenuous Jewish community, and within a dominant culture that embraced male success and valour during the emasculating 1930s.

As a historical and religious term "diaspora" has existed for many years, but it only became an academic and analytical concept in the 1980s and ’90s. Within its various usages, two broad directions stand out: diaspora as a dispersion of people from an original homeland, and diaspora as a claim of identity that expresses a form of belonging and also keeps alive a sense of difference. Between Dispersion and Belonging critically assesses the meaning and practice of diaspora first by engaging with the theoretical life histories of the concept, and then by examining a range of historical case studies. Essays in this volume draw from diaspora formations in the pre-modern Indian Ocean region, read diaspora against the concept of indigeneity in the Americas, reassess the claim for a Swedish diaspora, interrogate the notion of an "invisible" English diaspora in the Atlantic world, calibrate the meaning of the Irish diaspora in North America, and consider the case for a global Indian indentured-labour diaspora. Through these studies the contributors demonstrate that an inherent appeal to globality is central to modern formulations of diaspora. They are not global in the sense that diasporas span the entire globe, rather they are global precisely because they are not bound by arbitrary geopolitical units. In examining the ways in which academic and larger society discuss diaspora, Between Dispersion and Belonging presents a critique of modern historiography and positions that critique in the shape of global history. Contributors include William Safran (University of Colorado Boulder), James T. Carson (Queen's University), Eivind H. Seland (University of Bergen), Don MacRaild (University of Ulster), and Rankin Sherling (Marion Military Institute: the Military College of Alabama).

Wherever they settled, immigrants from Ireland and their descendants shaped and reshaped their understanding of being Irish in response to circumstances in both the old and new worlds. In A Land of Dreams, Patrick Mannion analyzes and compares the evolution of Irish identity in three communities on the prow of northeastern North America: St John’s, Newfoundland, Halifax, Nova Scotia, and Portland, Maine, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These three port cities, home to diverse Irish populations in different stages of development and in different national contexts, provide a fascinating setting for a study of intergenerational ethnicity. Mannion traces how Irishness could, at certain points, form the basis of a strong, cohesive identity among Catholics of Irish descent, while at other times it faded into the background. Although there was a consistent, often romantic gaze across the Atlantic to the old land, many of the organizations that helped mediate large-scale public engagement with the affairs of Ireland – especially Irish nationalist associations – spread from further west on the North American mainland. Irish ethnicity did not, therefore, develop in isolation, but rather as a result of a complex interplay of local, regional, national, and transnational networks. This volume shows that despite a growing generational distance, Ireland remained “a land of dreams” for many immigrants and their descendants. They were connected to a transnational Irish diaspora well into the twentieth century.

The step-dancing of the Scotch Gaels in Nova Scotia is the last living example of a form of dance that waned following the great emigrations to Canada that ended in 1845. The Scotch Gael has been reported as loving dance, but step-dancing in Scotland had all but disappeared by 1945. One must look to Gaelic Nova Scotia, Cape Breton, and Antigonish County, to find this tradition. Gaelic Cape Breton Step-Dancing, the first study of its kind, gives this art form and the people and culture associated with it the prominence they have long deserved. Gaelic Scotland’s cultural record is by and large pre-literate, and references to dance have had to be sought in Gaelic songs, many of which were transcribed on paper by those who knew their culture might be lost with the decline of their language. The improved Scottish culture depended proudly on the teaching of dancing and the literate learning and transmission of music in accompaniment. Relying on fieldwork in Nova Scotia, and on mentions of dance in Gaelic song and verse in Scotland and Nova Scotia, John Gibson traces the historical roots of step-dancing, particularly the older forms of dancing originating in the Gaelic–speaking Scottish Highlands. He also places the current tradition as a development and part of the much larger British and European percussive dance tradition. With insight collected through written sources, tales, songs, manuscripts, book references, interviews, and conversations, Gaelic Cape Breton Step-Dancing brings an important aspect of Gaelic history to the forefront of cultural debate.

Over the two decades following the Second World War, the policy that would create "a nation of immigrants," as Canadian multiculturalism is now widely understood, was debated, drafted, and implemented. The established narrative of postwar immigration policy as a tepid mixture of altruism and national self-interest does not fully explain the complex process of policy transformation during that period. In The Least Possible Fuss and Publicity Paul Evans recounts changes to Canada's postwar immigration policy and the events, ideas, and individuals that propelled that change. Through extensive primary research in the archives of federal departments and the parliamentary record, together with contemporary media coverage, the correspondence of politicians and policy-makers, and the statutes that set immigration policy, Evans reconstructs the formation of a modern immigration bureaucracy, the resistance to reform from within, and the influence of racism and international events. He shows that political concerns remained uppermost in the minds of policy-makers, and those concerns – more than economic or social factors – provided the major impetus to change. In stark contrast to today, legislators and politicians strove to keep the evolution of the national immigration strategy out of the public eye: University of Toronto law professor W.G. Friedmann remarked in a 1952 edition of Saturday Night, "In Canada, both the government and the people have so far preferred to let this immigration business develop with the least possible fuss and publicity." This is the story, told largely in their own words, of politicians and policy-makers who resisted change and others who saw the future and seized upon it. The Least Possible Fuss and Publicity is a clear account of how postwar immigration policy transformed, gradually opening the border to groups who sought to make Canada home.

In the wake of Europe's so-called refugee crisis in 2015 and 2016, even traditionally open countries such as Sweden and Germany adopted hostile policies on refugees, closing borders and linking refugees with terrorism and threats to national security. Once deemed taboo, uncharitable conduct towards those in need has become increasingly acceptable, and even desirable, throughout the Western world. From Righteousness to Far Right follows nineteen months of ethnographic fieldwork with a grassroots NGO in a small Swedish village, where over one hundred refugees were housed. Through an embedded, anthropological study of day-to-day life in refugee resettlement, Emma Mc Cluskey examines how increasingly antagonistic and xenophobic policies concerning refugees gained legitimacy. Arguing that existing approaches to critical security studies inadequately address the textured, contradictory, and often resistant practices of everyday life within societies, Mc Cluskey re-gears securitization theory along anthropological lines and shifts the focus of the investigation onto the quotidian realm, where much of the controversy over migration and security plays out. A provocative and original political statement on today's increasingly conservative society, From Righteousness to Far Right presents an astounding new perspective on the recent refugee crises and the acceptance and normalization of far-right and securitarian politics.

Starting with the first steps on Canadian soil in the eighteenth century to the present day, Faces in the Crowd introduces the reader to the people and personalities who made up the Canadian Jewish experience, from the Jewish roots of the NHL’s Ross trophy to Leonard Cohen and all the rabbis, artists, writers, and politicians in between. Drawing on a lifetime of wisdom and experience at the heart of the Canadian Jewish community, Franklin Bialystok adds new research, unique insights, and, best of all, memorable stories to the history of the Jews in Canada.