Gerald “Jerry” Tulchinsky was born in Brantford, Ontario, on 9 September 1933 to Anne and Harry Tulchinsky. Growing up in the 1930s, he witnessed the Great Depression through the eyes of a child. Years later, he would tell his students at Queen’s University how his mother would leave bread and tea at the back door of the family home for unemployed workers who would travel from town to town in search of work. Anne’s compassion for working people seems to have imprinted on her son, who would go on to write movingly about working-class Canadians. In his 2016 piece “Nine Workers Died,” for example, Jerry draws his readers’ attention to a fire that broke out at Phillips Garment Factory on 19 January 1950 and ultimately claimed nine lives.

Upon completing high school, Jerry moved to Toronto in order to attend the University of Toronto, where he studied history, receiving his PhD in 1971. As a historian, he would become known for his influential histories of Canadian Jewry: Taking Root: The Origins of the Canadian Jewish Community, Branching Out: The Transformation of the Canadian Jewish Community, and Canada’s Jews: A People’s Journey. On occasion, Jerry’s two research interests—the working class and Canadian Jewry—overlapped. Such was the case in 2013 when University of Toronto Press published his biography of the late labour organizer and left-wing politician J. B. Salsberg.

In addition to being an author, Jerry was a beloved teacher. His teaching career at Queen’s University began in 1966, when he moved to Kingston, Ontario, with his wife, Ruth, and three children. At Queen’s, he taught courses on urbanization, the Jewish experience in North America, and the Holocaust. From 1999, he became director of Queen’s Jewish studies program, a position he held until 2002, when he became professor emeritus.

Jerry died on 13 December 2017, but his legacy is preserved, among other places, at the Ontario Jewish Archives. Documented in the Gerald Tulchinsky fonds are the historian’s research into the labour and garment industries in Toronto, Montreal, and Hamilton, as well as his notes about J. B. Salsberg.