Since the earliest years of the twentieth century Jewish women writers have addressed key issues facing Canada in imaginative ways through their creative work. Publications by Jewish women writers in the twenty-first century utilize all genres – drama, fiction, non-fiction, and poetry – to develop their ideas and stories. Sub-genres run the full gamut, from science fiction to creative non-fiction. Many of these writers have worked as journalists or teachers; most have balanced writing with caring for their children and doing part-time work, often in creative writing programs. They write about their lives and the lives they see around them in their families and on the streets. For the most part, these Canadian artists do not seek to effect socio-political change through their work; rather, they articulate and elucidate varied experiences of living within Canadian realities. They are, at the same time, deeply interconnected with other places and other times.
The authors in this collection, Jewish women living in Canada, reveal the intense and vibrant literary engagement that exists not only in Montréal and Toronto but throughout the country. Just as J. J. Steinfeld in Prince Edward Island represents isolation from the mainstream, so Isa Milman, Ruth Simkin, Méira Cook, and many other Jewish Canadian writers are similarly situated outside major cosmopolitan centers. The diversity of subjects and styles echoes and illuminates a series of diasporic identities and sensibilities not only within Judaism but also within Canada, providing resounding testimony that this former colony remains a series of regional identities commingled with multiple cultural identities. Refracted within the heterogeneity of Canadian literary production by Jewish women are ever-elusive regional, national, and religiocultural identities. This corpus thus reflects a lived sociocultural pluralism, sometimes represented within a single person, and sometimes one that is dissonant with an official policy of integrated multiculturalism.
Source: Caufield, Catherine. 2021. "Twenty-First Century Jewish Women Writers in Canada." Shalvi-Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women. Brookline, MA: Jewish Women's Archive. jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/twenty-first-century-jewish-women-writers-in-canada.