by Matthew Friedman | Apr 15, 2022 | Essays, Features, Jewish Life
Beth Cole had not yet decided whether or not she would make a brisket for the Passover Seder this week. “I was going to bring the brisket, but I think I’m going to do a roast chicken, because I have to cook for, like, ten people,” she says. Besides, it isn’t her...
by Matthew Friedman | Sep 2, 2021 | Essays, Features, Jewish Life
YidLife Crisis, an award-winning online comedy series featuring fast-talking Montreal funnymen Jaime Elman and Eli Batalion has 20,000 loyal subscribers on YouTube and 17,000 followers on Facebook. The bilingual struggles of the pious, often flawed, but always loving...
by Matthew Friedman | Nov 10, 2019 | Features
Sol Littman stood up in the back row to harangue the audience at a panel discussion on online hate at the Canadian Jewish Congress’s annual conference in Montreal. It was 1995, and the neo-Nazi propaganda efforts of Jason Smith, Greg Raven, Milton Kleim and...
by Matthew Friedman | Nov 2, 2019 | Features
Milton Kleim surprised me. I had been writing about online neo-Nazis, antisemites, and Holocaust deniers for the Montreal Gazette for quite a while when I met him, and I had thought I had it all figured out. They were skinhead louts like Jason Smith, sleazy...
by Matthew Friedman | Oct 27, 2019 | Features
“I don’t talk to Jew journalists,” Ernst Zundel shouted into the phone before slamming the receiver down on its cradle. Mere text does little to capture the moment. You have to imagine the rage in the voice of Canada’s most notorious Holocaust denier, spoken in...
by Matthew Friedman | Oct 19, 2019 | Features
The first hint was a swastika and an SS symbol hastily spray-painted on a plywood barrier outside a building site on Newark Avenue in Jersey City. It was November 12 2016, the weekend after Donald Trump was elected president of the United States. Something was...