Alexandria Fanjoy Silver, at The Blogs

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Oct 4, 2024, 1:22 AM

Nobody Wants This Either

I started watching Nobody Wants This with some trepidation, I’ll admit. From my cousins texting me to tell me how much they like it, to reading people’s analyses of the negative stereotypes of Jewish women presented in it, I...

Sep 26, 2024, 11:38 PM

The October 7th Playlist

On October 6th, I was in Orlando. It was the kind of bad day that existed before we understood what the term ‘bad day’ could really mean. We had landed the night before and Air Canada had left my...

Sep 20, 2024, 5:56 PM

An Education For Death

Gregory Zeimer, a teacher at an American school in Berlin before the Second World War, took it upon himself to study Nazi education, and published a book during the war about it entitled “Education for Death.” Its basic premise...

Sep 10, 2024, 1:44 PM

Let my right hand wither

The Tuesday after labour day weekend is always a big deal for educators; after a summer away, we go back to school. Everyone highly anticipates meeting their students, getting the year started right, wanting them to know how excited...

Sep 1, 2024, 11:56 PM

The pain of losing something that was never ours

I am a fan of Hamilton, to put it lightly. But there was one song that always bothered me. In the refrain from “It’s Quiet Uptown,” it constantly describes the death of a child as “unimaginable.” It was always...

Aug 30, 2024, 8:05 PM

The Inversion of Cause and Effect

I’m a high school teacher in Toronto, so this week is “classroom set up” time. When it comes to studying history, for me, memorization isn’t the point. That's just teaching you what to think instead of how to think....

Aug 2, 2024, 12:49 AM

The Curious Phenomenon of Secondary Antisemitism

Last night, I was speaking to a dear friend of mine who is completing her doctorate at NYU and she expressed how two colleagues of hers stopped speaking to her immediately after October 7th. Not when the war began,...

Jul 30, 2024, 11:28 PM

The posthumous death of Anne Frank

A mural of Anne Frank wearing a keffiyeh in Bergen, Norway, painted by the anonymous artist Töddel, July 2024. (Courtesy of Töddel via JTA)

Whether it's vandalizing her image or claiming her as a Hamas supporter, the inversion of Holocaust history is profound and grotesque

Jul 24, 2024, 12:44 AM

The Moral Conundrum of UNRWA

Since Biden’s long-anticipated announcement that he was dropping out of the 2024 Presidential race, attention has focused on Kamala Harris as the presumptive nominee. As someone who follows basically every Jewish influencer on social media, the furor surrounding whether...

Jul 3, 2024, 12:42 AM

French Jews’ Paradigm of Uncertainty

The French election represents a new paradigm of uncertainty for the Jews of France: that of there being legitimately no good options that represent a safe future. For as long as Jews have been accepted members of societies, they’ve...

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About Me

Dr. Alexandria Fanjoy Silver has a B.A. from Queen's University, an MA/ MA from Brandeis and a PhD from the University of Toronto (all in history and education). She lives in Toronto with her husband and three children, and works as a Jewish history teacher. She writes about Jewish food history on Substack @bitesizedhistory and talks about Israeli history on Insta @historywithAFS.

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