Miracle At The Forks The Museum That Dares Make A Difference The Canadian Museum For Human Rights

Canadian businessman and philanthropist Izzy Asper wanted to build a museum that would make a difference -- that would help educate visitors about human rights issues, all with the aim of making the world a better, more humane place. He shared this vision with Moses (Moe) Levy, the Executive Director of the Asper Foundation, and gave Levy the mandate to make the museum happen. This book recounts the fourteen-year project of building a world class museum in Winnipeg, the story of those who lobbied, donated money, volunteered time, and fought to make the museum happen. The story of the building of the museum, this book is filled with full colour photography and celebrates the official opening of the museum on September 20, 2014. The Canadian Museum for Human Rights was created as a joint partnership of the Asper Foundation, the Government of Canada, the Province of Manitoba, City of Winnipeg and The Forks North Portage Partnership. It is the first new national museum created in Canada since 1967, and it is the first new national museum ever to be located outside the National Capital Region.

On July 18, 2000, Israel "Izzy" Asper, the renowned Canadian businessman and philanthropist, first discussed his idea of building a human rights center in Winnipeg. He wanted to educate visitors about human rights issues and make the world a more humane place. Filled with full-color photography and exquisitely designed, Miracle at the Forks recounts the 14-year ordeal of making Izzy Asper's dream a reality. It recounts the financial and political challenges of building a world class museum in Winnipeg, an objective that was made all the more difficult by Asper's death six months after the public unveiling of museum's plans. It is a story of passion and sheer will, about Moe Levy's determination to see Asper's grand idea come true, of Gail Asper's fortitude and unflagging drive to make sure her father's most cherished project became real, and of the countless others who lobbied, donated money, volunteered time, and fought to make the museum happen. Acclaimed writers Peter C. Newman and Allan Levine also tell the story of the international competition to find an architect to design the building, and of Antoine Predock, one of the finest architects in the world who dared build an audacious museum.

Canada’s recent sesquicentennial celebrations were the latest in a long, steady progression of Canadian cultural memory projects. Unbecoming Nationalism investigates the power of commemorative performances in the production of nationalist narratives. Using “unbecoming” as a theoretical framework to unsettle or decolonize nationalist narratives, Helene Vosters examines an eclectic range of both state-sponsored social memory projects and counter-memorial projects to reveal and unravel the threads connecting reverential military commemoration, celebratory cultural nationalism, and white settler-colonial nationalism. Vosters brings readings of institutional, aesthetic, and activist performances of Canadian military commemoration, settler-colonial nationalism, and redress into conversation with literature that examines the relationship between memory, violence, and nationalism from the disciplinary arenas of performance studies, Canadian studies, critical race and Indigenous studies, memory studies, and queer and gender studies. In addition to using performance as a theoretical framework, Vosters uses performance to enact a philosophy of praxis and embodied theory.

In this definitive and meticulously researched account of the Jewish experience in Canada, award-winning and critically acclaimed author Allan Levine documents a story that is rich, accessible, often surprising, and epic in its scope. Relying on an abundance of primary sources and first-hand documentation and interviews, Seeking the Fabled City chronicles the successes and failures, the obstacles overcome and those not conquered, of a historic journey and the people who travelled it. Seeking the Fabled City is a story that unfolds over 250 years--from the decade after the conquest of New France in 1759, when small numbers of Sephardic Jews of Spanish and Portuguese descent arrived in British North America, through the great wave of Russian and Eastern European Jewish immigration at the turn of the twentieth century, to the present, in which Canada's large Jewish community, no longer hindered by the anti-Semitism of the past, is free to flourish. This is a chronicle of a people that takes place at hundreds of locales across the country--mainly in the large urban centres of Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, and Winnipeg, but also in west coast and maritime villages and tiny prairie towns--in a riveting drama with a cast of thousands. Relying on an abundance of primary sources and first-hand documentation and interviews, Seeking the Fabled City chronicles the successes and failures, the obstacles overcome and those not conquered, of a historic journey and the people who travelled it.

"The present thesis will outline a decolonial politics of genocide recognition that attempts to reprioritize the material conditions of settler colonialism over the debate surrounding the CMHR's use of the term genocide. The debate over Indigenous genocide(s) at the museum has functioned as a discursive trap, maintaining an epistemological break between Canada's settler colonial past and its settler colonial present. While the debate over Indigenous genocide(s) will be addressed in detail, such a debate functions to highlight the inherited asymmetries of power shared between the state, museological institutions, and Indigenous peoples." --

#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Two starcrossed magicians engage in a deadly game of cunning in the spellbinding novel that captured the world's imagination. • "Part love story, part fable ... defies both genres and expectations." —The Boston Globe The circus arrives without warning. No announcements precede it. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not. Within the black-and-white striped canvas tents is an utterly unique experience full of breathtaking amazements. It is called Le Cirque des Rêves, and it is only open at night. But behind the scenes, a fierce competition is underway: a duel between two young magicians, Celia and Marco, who have been trained since childhood expressly for this purpose by their mercurial instructors. Unbeknownst to them both, this is a game in which only one can be left standing. Despite the high stakes, Celia and Marco soon tumble headfirst into love, setting off a domino effect of dangerous consequences, and leaving the lives of everyone, from the performers to the patrons, hanging in the balance.