By MYRON LOVE Professor Bryan Schwartz is the very model of a modern-day Jewish Renaissance scholar.  The  popular legal educator, passionate Zionist, and student of the Holocaust as an in-demand commentator on modern legal and constitutional issues has written or contributed to 34 books and over 300 publications in all – in a legal and teaching career that stretches back more than 40 years.  His works encompass legal and governmental issues as well as commentary on the entire gamut of Jewish life – from ancient times to the Holocaust to the current Jewish situation.
In addition to his work as an author, lawyer and academic (as a professor in the University of Manitoba’s Faculty of Law), Schwartz is also a poet, playwright, and songwriter.  And his literary output over just the past year reflects the full gamut of his interests and talents.
Since January 2023,  Schwartz has produced five quite different works.  His most recent  work is “It’s About Time:104 Dimensions of Time During Passover” – which readers can download for free on his website –sacredgoof.ca –   is a comprehensive overview of the Pesach holiday from a novel perspective.
In a series of  what used to be called “quick snappers”, Schwartz points out, for example, that Pesach actually combines two ancient Jewish spring festivals – the sacrifice of the first-born lamb and the first fruits of the harvest of the grain that was planted in the late fall or winter.
He groups his explanations and commentaries into  21 categories related to time.  The first group  – Cyclical Time – discusses Pesach’s connection to Purim preceding it and Shavuot seven weeks later.  He further explains Pesach in Israel and why, in Israel, only one seder is designated as compared to two in the diaspora, how the date for the first seder is officially determined, and what the rules are when the seders overlap with Shabbat. 
Other groups include an overview of Pesach’s place in different histories, Pesach within the family context, ritual, the Exodus in world history, Pesach and historical memory, the history of the Haggadah, the bringing together of past, present and future – and many more interesting explanations and fact.
The inspiration for “About Time: 104 Dimensions of Time During Passover”, Schwartz explains in his introduction on his website, came last year at Passover.  “I noticed that the text of the Haggadah contains some explicit references to time,” he noted on his website.
“We begin by thanking the Creator for separating the ordinary days from holy days,” he pointed out. “We are enjoined to tell the Passover story “as if” we were personally redeemed from that captivity. We experience, in the now, the coming together of families and communities…as the Israelites did on the night of Passover. We are invited at the end to proclaim, “next year in Jerusalem” – and with the cup of Elijah, think of a Messianic age beyond the present.”
At first, he wrote, he was aiming to write a single blog piece for The Times of Israel, an Israeli-based online newspaper to which Schwartz has become a regular contributor.  “Yet the more I looked, the more I found,” he noted.
‘The Jewish tradition is largely about taking a concrete starting point – like an episode related in the Haggadah or the egg on the Seder plate – and finding more and more ways to think about it. The saying is that the Torah has seventy faces. I did not expect to ever get to seventy dimensions of time in Passover, but here I am so far, with one hundred and four…so far.”
While this year, Pesach has now passed.  I would encourage interested readers to peruse “About Time: 104 Dimensions of Time During Passover” and print out sections that you might consider introducing into your seders next year.
“My aspiration,” Schwartz writes on his webpage,  “would be for the book, in some form or other, to become a familiar companion to the Haggadah as we re-experience Passover every year, For some readers, it might help to make everything old seem new again.”
Schwartz published two other books of note last year.  In January, he spoke about the themes in “Re-Enlightening Canada:  A Legislative Program for promoting Open, Democratic and Rational policymaking” (available on Amazon) in a question and answer session at the Berney Theatre, with Ruth Ashrafi, Bnai Brith Canada Regional Director for Manitoba, in which he discussed the ills plaguing today’s universities and recommended some solutions.
“When I began my teaching career (at the University of Manitoba Faculty of Law) over 40 years ago,” universities were places which encouraged freedom of expression, open dialogue and diversity of opinion,” he recalls.  “That is no longer the case.  DEI (diversity, equity and inclusiveness) as it has been developed over the past few years is antithetical to traditional liberal values and is, in particular, hostile to Jews because Jews, within the DEI context, are considered White and White people are considered bad.
“For Jewish students and faculty members, the University of Manitoba has become a hostile environment.”
Schwartz’s grim conclusion is that “Woke” ideology has entirely conquered most universities  and  that universities are not capable of reforming themselves. The only way they will be restored to a public space where diverse opinions are welcome and freedom of expression again flourishes, he says, is through strong government actions – a recipe for which he outlines in “Re-enlightening Canada”.  
’The program,” he explains, “is intended to appeal to reasonable people across the political spectrum. It is a proposal for how people of good faith in democracies can “reason together.” “It is intended to be a moderate and practical response to the ideological excesses of our time.”
The multifaceted Schwartz’s third project – completed last year, was his contribution to the second edition of “Humanity in Doubt”, the reflections of his late father-in—law Philip Weiss, a Holocaust survivor who built a successful furniture manufacturing business here and became a leader in Holocaust education in the schools.
Weiss died in 2008 at the age of 85.
This new, updated edition includes a eulogy by Schwartz and an afterword written by Frances Winograd,  one of Weiss’s daughters: “Furnishing an Identity” – based on her Master’s thesis in Interior Design, which places Weiss’s career in design in the context of the Jewish contribution to modernism.
Schwartz co-edited this second edition with his daughter, Lainie (who work at Yad Vashem), and John Richthammer.
Both “Humanity in Doubt” and “ReEnlightening Canada” are available from Amazon or Schwartz’ website – bryanpschwartz@gmail.com
Readers may also be interested in checking out Schwartz’s latest compilation of 24 songs – entitled “The Sacred Goof”- which you can listen to for free online.  Schwartz points out that “The Sacred Goof” is a follow up to “Consoulation: A Musical Meditation,” a  Jewish-themed musical that successfully premiered at the Gas Station Theatre several years ago.   The author/composer hopes to both bring back Consoulation as well as see a production of “The Sacred Goof” in the next year.   
An illustrated booklet (with illustrations by Maren Amini) with all the lyrics – can be purchased online by typing in the album name.
Then there is Schwartz’s “Online Dispute Resolution in the Time of Covid”, which is part of a trilogy that he is overseeing, as Co-Editor in Chief of The Manitoba Law Journal,  on how the Canadian legal system adapted during the COVID period, and how many of those innovations will bel enduring
Schwartz is available for group presentations.