Review of "Double Threat: Canadian Jews, the Military, and World War II" by Ellin Bessner

Ellin Bessner's Double Threat: Canadian Jews, the Military, and World War II makes a compelling contribution to our understanding of how this country's diverse Jewish population responded to the cataclysms of the Second World War and the genocide of European Jewry.The central tenant of the book is that Canada's Jews did their duty, outstandingly so, during humanity's darkest years, overcoming both Nazism abroad and antisemitism at home.From a wartime population of 168,000, 17,000 Canadian Jews served and 450 were killed.Double Threat personalises this tremendous effort, introducing us to many of these men and women and venerating their sacrifices.The book's singular focus on those in uniform overlooks alternate Canadian Jewish reactions to the conflict, but it will serve as an essential touchstone for others who wish to further explore Canadian Jewish military history.The narrative touches on virtually every campaign and service capacity, contextually structured around the Canadian Jewish community's dual goals of defeating Nazi Germany and decisively securing the full rights of citizenship.Canadian Jewish leaders, primarily represented in the book by the Canadian Jewish Congress (CJC), firmly believed that an exemplary community war record was key to obtaining equality.Coming to the aid of European Jewry was the other central factor in the Canadian Jewish war effort, but this was hardly a concern of the government or much of the general public and the book spotlights the shameful persistence of antisemitism in the military.The narrative first confronts contemporary canards that Jews were not enlisting in the "appropriate" numbers.Even as recruiters routinely rejected exceptional applicants, numerous Canadian Jews changed their names and kept their religion a secret just to get into the fight, especially in 1939-40.The army was comparatively open to Jewish enlistment, though, as Bessner explains, 6,000 determined volunteers eventually made the Royal Canadian Air Force the most "Jewish" branch of the military.Double Threat is particularly valuable on what was unique about Jewish service.It includes a section on what religious adherence Jewish volunteers decided to record on their identification discs-a question of paramount concern in the confrontation with genocidal evil.Victory

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