Barbara Kay
Barbara Kay | |
---|---|
Born | 1943 (age 80–81) |
Nationality | Canadian |
Alma mater | |
Occupation | Columnist |
Spouse | Ronny Kay |
Children | 2, including Jonathan Kay |
Relatives | Anne Golden (sister) |
Website | http://www.barbarakay.ca |
Barbara Kay (born 1943) is a columnist for the Canadian newspaper
Early life and education
Kay was born in 1943 to an "intensely patriotic" American mother from
.Kay's paternal grandparents and four of their children emigrated from Poland to Canada in 1917. They settled near a synagogue congregation of immigrants from Poland where they found a supportive Jewish immigrant community. Her grandfather bought and sold "junk from a horse-drawn cart" to Yiddish-speaking customers, and although the family was poor and Zaide never learned English, they never felt "isolated or despised".[2] Although only one of Kay's father's siblings went to university, all of them "ended up solidly in the middle class. Barbara Kay's cousins, including the girls, were "university educated" and had successful, prosperous careers.[2] One of Kay's sisters is Canadian public administrator Anne Golden.
Barbara Kay and her sisters grew up in
Kay studied at the
Kay is married to Ronny Kay.[5] They have two children including journalist Jonathan Kay.
Career
Kay began her journalism career as a book reviewer. During the 1990s, she joined the board and writing staff of the revived
Kay held a residency on CBC's Because News for nineteen months from 2016 to 2017 as a "token" and only conservative on a panel of liberals.[7][8] She was removed from the panel allegedly because of "her views on the misappropriation of Indigenous cultures."[7][8]
Kay briefly left the National Post in 2020, citing increased editorial scrutiny of her columns, but returned a few months later.[9][10]
Affiliations
Kay was on the Board of Governors of the conservative
Topics
Pro-Israel
Kay is on the advisory board of the
In a 2017 article, "Kay vs Kay", mother and son, Jonathan Kay, explore generational differences in their relationship to Judaism. To Barbara Kay, by 2017 anti-Zionism was "rooted in anti-Semitism". She describes those "who are aligned with the hard left" as "anti-Zionist and supportive of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions(BDS) movement", with the worst of these "confined to university campuses." To her this is a "serious concern globally". She was dismayed that a German court "found that the Muslim firebombers of a synagogue in Wuppertal were not guilty of a hate crime because they had been motivated by anti-Zionism and events in the Middle East."[2] Jonathan Kay, wrote that "Barbara is stuck in a time warp and seems to think we still live in the era when Svend Robinson, Antonia Zerbisias and Naomi Klein are still loud and influential voices in the arena of Canadian foreign policy...The idea that Canada's intelligentsia is a seething mass of anti-Zionist agitation is about 15 years out of date...the issue of Zionism has so totally consumed Jewish advocacy groups in the West, that it has created what is, in effect, a spiritual faith unto itself, complete with its own forms of excommunication, liturgy and revealed truth."[2]
Feminism
While Kay acknowledges that the feminism of the 1960s had "worthy ideals" of empowering women, she wrote in 2004 that the feminist movement had been "hijacked by special interest groups nursing extreme-grievance agendas". "Angry lesbians" and "man-haters" renounced heterosexuality, "traditional marriage, and parental influence over children". "Radical Marxist/feminists" dominated Women's Studies on campus".[14]
Honour killings
Writing for the National Post, Kay offered the opinion that honour killing is not strictly a Muslim phenomenon and that it is enabled by factors including sexism, dowries and a lack of a dependable legal system. Nevertheless, Kay says that the murders are a Muslim phenomenon in the West, where 95% of honour killings are perpetrated by "Muslim fathers and brothers or their proxies". Kay warns that females do not dissent as one might expect either: The women may describe victims of honour killing as having needed punishment.[15]
Anti-communism
Kay traces her anti-communism to the mid-1950s when her family, like many other Canadian families, considered building a "well-stocked bomb shelter" in preparation for a nuclear attack from the Soviet Union. Kay who was a young teenager at the time was "existentially" shaken by the possibility of that a "monstrous totalitarian" communist regime might attack the "freedom-loving West".[1] Her hatred of totalitarianism and communism was fueled by a "positive exposure to capitalism" and by books that she read, such as George Orwell's Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon (1940), Ayn Rand's Anthem (1946), and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962). In the 1960s Kay, who was by then a married graduate student at McGill University in Montreal in the 1960s, took no interest in campus politics or indeed any extra-curricular campus life.
Kay's husband Ronny was born in China in 1944. The most enduring memory from his childhood was the sight of liberating American soldiers in Jeeps rolling through the streets of Shanghai.[1] Ronny Kay was passionately pro-American and aggressively anti-communist.[1] When his family immigrated to Canada, he was nine years old and only spoke Russian and English. His parents, who only spoke Russian at home until 1960, and had relatives living in Russia, became part of the Russian immigrant community in Montreal, Quebec. He learned English at school.[1] His "hatred of Communism was implacable, absolute, more visceral" than [Kay's]. Kay and her husband were newly weds attending McGill University as graduate students in the early 1960s when the Quebec nationalist group Front de libération du Québec (FLQ), a "small violent group" "high on Marxist, revolutionary cant" began detonating dozens of bombs targeting English-speaking Québécois.[16] While doing his MBA, her husband was co-editor of the McGill Daily along with Patrick MacFadden, who Kay described as a "militant Irish firebrand" and "more or less a card-carrying Communist". In contrast, her husband "whose Russian heritage had opened a privileged window on the realities of Soviet triumphalism, was a Reagan-style "evil-empirist" avant la lettre."[17]
Identity politics
In an article in which she compared contemporary
In her article about Sarina Singh, published just before Kay participated in a July 2018 panel discussion on free speech organized by Singh, Kay described how Singh had left her job as social worker, where she had worked for twenty-two years in a shelter, and broke with feminism. Singh who had been a "social-justice warrior", an "ardent feminist" who worked in social work, a "field dominated by feminist premises", became a "free speech champion". Singh refused to "see the world through the lens of ideology, identity politics or political correctness".[20][Notes 2]
Free speech
In her May 2017 article, Kay defended
Controversies
In 2006 she
In 2007, she wrote a column titled "Not in my backyard, either" in which she criticized
In 2013, Kay published an article sympathising with
In 2018, Kay received criticism for comments she made in a National Post column about the perpetrator of the
Kay was criticized for citing a
Personal life
Barbara and Ronny Kay have a son, Jonathan Kay, and a daughter.[citation needed]
Publications
- 2012: Unworthy Creature: A Punjabi Daughter's Memoir of Honour, Shame and Love, Freedom Press Canada, ISBN 978-0-98127-676-2.
- 2012: Acknowledgements: A Cultural Memoir and Other Essays, Freedom Press Canada, ISBN 978-0-98816-917-3.
Notes
- ^ Marxism–Leninism, in its most narrow definition—where Karl Marx's and Vladimir Lenin's theories were redefined by Joseph Stalin in the late 1920s—was established by Stalin as the ideology of the Communist International and the Soviet Union. See Allan Bullock and Stephan Trombley's 1999 publication, The New Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought.
- ^ On her website Archived 2018-08-04 at the Wayback Machine, Singh described the reasons for leaving social work in April 2017 as "due to stress related to the insufferable neo-cultural Marxist postmodernist agenda that has taken over all aspects of the social work profession. An ideology which views the world through the lens of the oppressed and the oppressor. An ideology which dispenses any notions of objective truth or morality and now dictates policy and law in our legal, educational and political institutions. Workers are compelled to kowtow to a very limited narrative that is rooted in radical feminism and failure to do will have professional consequences."
- Mount Royal College's Widdowson, a co-author (along with her husband) of Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry: The Deception Behind Indigenous Cultural Preservation (2008) was invited by Lindsay Shepherd's newly-formed Laurier Society for Open Inquiry(LSOI) as part of their "Unpopular Opinion Speaker Series" to give a speech
References
- ^ a b c d e Kay, Barbara (2013-03-30). "Memories from a city under siege". National Post. Archived from the original on 2018-07-27. Retrieved 2018-07-26.
- ^ a b c d e "Kay vs. Kay: Has Canada been Good for the Jews?". Other. July 13, 2017. Archived from the original on July 27, 2018. Retrieved July 26, 2018.
- ^ a b Cheney, Peter (2004-03-13). "Shouts and whispers". The Globe and Mail. Toronto. Archived from the original on 2016-07-27. Retrieved 2018-07-27.
- ^ a b "Official bio". 2012. Archived from the original on 2014-08-11. Retrieved 2014-08-22.
- ^ "An Evening with Barbara Kay!". Free Thinking Film Society. 2013-11-01. Archived from the original on 2016-03-04. Retrieved 2014-08-22.
- ^ Goldsbie, Jonathan (2017-08-14). "A Growing List Of People Who Have Cut Ties With The Rebel: Still not as many as you'd think!". Canadaland. Archived from the original on 2017-09-22. Retrieved 2018-07-28.
- ^ a b c Kay, Barbara (2017-05-27). "Barbara Kay: A lone academic dares to challenge accepted narratives about Canada's residential school system". National Post. Archived from the original on 2021-02-04. Retrieved 2018-07-26.
"Widdowson sees the TRC as a sort of therapeutic enterprise that often does little to pursue objective truths. One of its methods, for instance, has been to rely on the "unquestioned use of oral histories in documenting the effects of these institutions," even though these testimonies may not be representative or reliable".
- ^ a b Lefebvre, Melanie (2017-06-02). "The Racist Rhetoric Barbara Kay Champions As 'Courageous'". Canadaland. Opinion. Archived from the original on 2018-07-28. Retrieved 2018-07-26.
I read the book by the academic who maintains that residential schools were a good idea.
- ^ Goldsbie, Jonathan (July 24, 2020). "Barbara Kay "Stepping Away" From The National Post Longtime columnist blames increased editorial scrutiny". Canadaland. Archived from the original on July 25, 2020. Retrieved July 24, 2020.
- ^ National Post View (2020-10-23). "NP View: A 'safe space' for controversial opinions". The National Post. Archived from the original on 2021-02-04. Retrieved 2020-10-23.
- ^ "Board of Governors - The Prince Arthur Herald" Archived October 8, 2011, at the Wayback Machine, "The Prince Arthur Herald", 2011. Accessed October 12, 2011.
- ^ a b c Kay, Barbara (2007-11-21). "The college campus: Anti-Semitism's last North American refuge". National Post. Archived from the original on 2018-07-27. Retrieved 2018-07-26.
- ^ a b Kay, Barbara (2007-11-28). "Taking Back the Campus". National Post. Archived from the original on 2018-07-27. Retrieved 2018-07-26.
- ^ Kay, Barbara (2004-03-17). "Ivy League porn leaves me cold". National Post. Archived from the original on 2018-07-27. Retrieved 2018-07-26.
- ^ [Continue calling ‘honour killings’ by its rightful name, Barbara Kay, September 21, 2011, Full comment, National Post.]
- ^ "The Globe and Mail: Series – Pierre Elliott Trudeau 1919–2000". Archived from the original on 2008-01-18. Retrieved 2008-04-20.
- ^ Kay, Barbara (2008-03-08). "Irwin Cotler, 44 years later". National Post. Archived from the original on 2018-07-28. Retrieved 2018-07-26.
- ISBN 9780313262463.
- ^ Kay, Barbara (2018-05-08). "We've forgotten how bad Communism was. Identity politics reminds us". National Post. Archived from the original on 2018-07-28. Retrieved 2018-07-26.
- ^ Kay, Barbara (2018-07-10). "One woman's journey from social-justice warrior to free-speech champion". National Post. Archived from the original on 2018-07-28. Retrieved 2018-07-26.
- ^ "Indigenous ceremony and community protests held on campus in response to LSOI event". The Cord. 2018-05-21. Archived from the original on 2018-06-21. Retrieved 2018-07-28.
- ^ Widdowson, Frances (June 1, 2017). The Political Economy of 'Truth and Reconciliation': Neotribal Rentierism and the Creation of the Victim/Perpetrator Dichotomy (PDF). Annual Meeting of the Canadian Political Science Association, Ryerson University. Canadian Political Science Association (CPSA). Archived (PDF) from the original on July 28, 2018. Retrieved July 28, 2018. Ryerson University
- ^ "2006-08-009". Conseil de Presse du Québec. Décisions. 2007-03-04. Archived from the original on 2021-02-04. Retrieved 2018-07-26.
- ^ Kay, Barbara (2007-07-10). "Not in my backyard, either". The National Post. Archived from the original on 2015-09-24. Retrieved 2014-08-22.
- ^ Kay, Barbara (2008-02-08). "Un-Canadian and un-Jewish". National Post. Archived from the original on 2021-02-04. Retrieved 2018-07-26.
- ^ Kay, Barbara (2010-07-28). "The fanatics within". National Post. Archived from the original on 2018-07-27. Retrieved 2018-07-26.
- ^ Kay, Barbara (2013-06-20). "Serena Williams was right the first time". The National Post. Archived from the original on 2013-06-24. Retrieved 2014-08-22.
- ^ Kay, Barbara (2014-02-28). "Rape culture and the delusions of the feminist mind". The National Post. Archived from the original on 2014-03-01. Retrieved 2014-09-03.
- ^ "Comments on Wente's Rape Denial column". The Tyee. Archived from the original on 9 March 2014. Retrieved 10 March 2014.
- ^ "Barbara Kay: The agony of an attack without explanation, and the pain of chaos". nationalpost.com. April 24, 2018. Archived from the original on February 4, 2021. Retrieved February 4, 2021.
- ^ "The Responses to Barbara Kay's Racist National Post Article Are Spot On". North99. April 25, 2018. Archived from the original on July 27, 2018. Retrieved July 26, 2018.
- ^ a b c Goldsbie, Jonathan (2018-07-26). "Barbara Kay Quotes Neo-Nazi To Justify Attack On Trans Identity: The line, which she and others have misattributed to Voltaire, was originally penned to justify criticism of Jews". Archived from the original on 2018-07-26. Retrieved 2018-07-26.
- ^ Strom, Kevin A. "All American Must Know the Terror That is Upon Us". America First Books. American Dissident Voices. Archived from the original on 2015-11-10. Retrieved 2015-08-05.
- ^ Adriaans, Eric (2018-06-14). "Panel Discussion: Bill C-16 Controversy". Toronto: Rights and Freedoms Institute. Archived from the original on 2018-07-27. Retrieved 2018-07-27.
External links
- Barbara Kay's page at the National Post