Meet Emerson Swift Mahon: Canada’s First Black Jew

Emerson Swift Mahon, born a Christian, left his native Grenada for Canada in 1912 in search of higher education and harboring a deeply-felt interest in Judaism. Two years later, he enlisted in the Canadian army to fight in World War I, and there met a Jewish chaplain named Herman Abramowitz. Eiran Harris writes:

Mahon persuaded Rabbi Abramowitz of his sincere desire to convert, and after a lengthy course of instruction in the intricacies of Judaism, an appropriate test of knowledge, and a religious ceremony, Rabbi Abramowitz signed the conversion certificate.

After the war Mahon settled in Winnipeg and graduated in 1929 with a science degree from the University of Manitoba. . . . Unfortunately, the Depression forced him to accept a job as a sleeping-car porter with the Canadian Pacific Railway. . . . In Winnipeg, Mahon joined Young Judaea, a Zionist youth organization, and quickly rose through the ranks. His work on the railway enabled him to organize chapters throughout Western Canada as well as to photograph every synagogue between Winnipeg and Vancouver.

Mahon also became proficient in Hebrew and Yiddish: “on the way to synagogue on Saturday mornings, it was quite common to observe Mahon urging his children, in Yiddish, to hurry along.”

Read more at Canadian Jewish News

More about: Canadian Jewry, Conversion, History & Ideas, West Indies, World War I, Zionism

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF