About us

To read an issue of Parchment is to hold in your hands a world as dynamic as the Canadian Jewish community itself. Literature is where we best sit with our contradictions and discomforts, where we experience private, intimate empathy. Since the first Jewish texts set on parchment, we have been able to find those moments of reprieve in a faith and culture that embraces questions through language and storytelling.

Parchment champions Canadian Jewish writing that is diverse in its aesthetics and national in scope. We welcome writers and readers to join us in creating a place where, replete with our blessed differences, we can gather over writing and art that nourishes and challenges. We are seeking literary work—non-fiction, fiction, reviews, translations, liturgy, interviews, poems, cartoon—that celebrates curiosity and ignites conversation.

Parchment was founded in 1992 by poet-physician Shel Krakofsky. In 1996, literature professor Adam Fuerstenberg took over as editor, with an editorial board consisting of scholar Michael Greenstein, librarian Bernard Katz, and writers Seymour Mayne and Ken Sherman. The journal published riveting fiction and poetry, as well as essays, reviews, and translations. It featured established voices alongside emerging writers and thinkers who would help shape the future of Canadian Jewish literature. Literary scholar Ruth Panofsky became editor in 2010 and published volume sixteen four years later. Since then, without consistent institutional support, the journal has lain dormant. Until now.

Published by the Association for Canadian Jewish Studies, a national, charitable-status scholarly society devoted to expanding and enriching Canadian Jewry’s self-knowledge, with support from the J. Richard Shiff Chair for the Study of Canadian Jewry at York University, and under the editorial leadership of Orly Zebak, Parchment is poised to resume its role as a hub for Jewish literary energy in Canada. ‍