Allan Levine. Coming of Age: A History of the Jewish People of Manitoba
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Allan Levine. Coming of Age: A History of the Jewish People of Manitoba. Winnipeg: Heartland Associates, 2009. 511 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Glossary. Index. $ 42.95 hc. Coming of Age contains a vast collection of well-told stories, anecdotes, and contextual information. Chronologically ordered, it lacks a driving theme that unrolls, but this absence is no shortcoming for, opened anywhere, this book engages, informs, and entertains in effective, if not vigorous, prose. This latest effort by historian Allan Levine, author of ten books including some mystery novels, received the Book of the Year Award from the Manitoba Writers' Guild. Directed at a popular, rather than specialized, academic audience, this is the best history of a Manitoba ethno-cultural community that this reviewer has come across. Produced with editorial, archival, and financial assistance from the Jewish Heritage Centre of Western Canada, the lavishly illustrated narrative features some imaginative curatorial and creative image research mainly photographs of notable personalities and groups, but also of maps, documents, newspaper headlines, and advertisements. They convey a sense of place. Oversized and handsome, the book appears intended to adorn a coffee table, but it is much more than a showy visual volume. The author escapes the charge of reverential hagiography for, in addition, to pointing to commendable group and individual accomplishments, he shines light on a fractured community's cultural conflicts and religious divisions such as those between Orthodox traditionalists and socialist free thinkers. Levine catalogues the advances of the vibrant, enterprising, and perseverant Jewish community, but also identifies the foibles of some group members with shady, colourful pasts. Victims of culturally-sanctioned fears and prejudices--the poisonous Jew-hating sentiments of prominent Canadian thinker and Liberal leader Goldwin Smith will strike the reader--destitute Jewish pioneers and their cells of various intellectual movements united to combat the discrimination they faced. They sought acceptance and integration, but resisted assimilation; one group of schoolchildren at the turn of the twentieth century, for example, sang God Save the Queen in Hebrew. It is a comment on the evolution of Manitoba society and Canadian values that Levine teaches at St. John's Ravenscourt, Winnipeg's prestigious private university-preparatory school. Through most of its history, it would not have tolerated Jewish students or teachers. The story of Manitoba's Jewish community is one of numerical rise and decline, despite its accomplishments, contributions, and relative wealth. Levine speculates that the first Jew in Manitoba was the Hudson's Bay Company factor, a fellow named Jacobs, at York Factory in 1761. The first few Jewish settlers were German and British, but Russian Jews, desperate to escape pogroms and grinding poverty in the 1880s, quickly constituted the community's nucleus and accounted for its growth. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".