Culturally Jewish

Earlier this month, 18 Canadian theatre companies—including the world's largest queer theatre company, Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, based in Toronto—joined a cultural and academic boycott of Israel, in solidarity with Gaza. It was just the latest evolution in a trend that has been particularly noteworthy since Oct. 7, 2023, when the North American arts community turned sharply against pro-Israel and Jewish artists in all fields, noteably theatre, film, literature, poetry.

The progression has led us here. After years of isolation, there is more hunger than ever for proudly Jewish art, with calls for increased Jewish arts grants and...

Daniel Pelton hadn't felt much of a musical connection to his Jewish heritage before Oct. 7. But after reality changed for Jews around the world—including his hometown of Calgary—Pelton decided to learn more about both the Holocaust and its artistic representations. He read The Tattooist of Auschwitz, which inspired him to adapt the tattoo numbers used in the book—34902-32407—into musical notes, using their 12-tone counterparts.

The result evolved into a 11-minute epic, which Pelton supplemented with two other tracks to create a new trio of songs, released on Jan. 27 for the 80th anniversary of the libe...

When Adam Wolfond was in his primary school years, the public education system wasn't giving him the support he needed as a nonverbal autistic student. So his mother, Estée Klar, along with other educators and allies, created their own kind of classroom, where neurodivergent kids could feel more free to learn in their own ways, pacing around the room or sitting in bean bag chairs. For Wolfond, using a text-to-speech device, he was finally able to respond in full sentences at his own pace—and discover his own poetic voice.

This month, he is debuting an art...

Erez Zobary spent a long time downplaying her Jewish identity in her music career. Her earlier work—a blend of R&B, pop, soul and jazz—dealt with issues relevant to her audience of largely twentysomethings: love lives, quarter-life crises, feeling stuck and aimless. It may not be surprising, then, that a woman whose songs so often looked inward would eventually turn to her heritage. As she tells Culturally Jewish, The CJN's arts and culture podcast, her songs began feeling increasingly disconnected from who she really was, and she wanted to try something drastically different.

The result is E...

After Wendy Litner's mother passed away, Litner was surprised that she still heard her voice—felt her presence, even, looking over her shoulder... often judging her. The feeling inspired Litner to write a new web series called My Dead Mom, released on Crave earlier this month.

The show gives a modern, distinctly feminist twist to the stereotype of a Jewish mother ceaselessly nagging her daughter. And, as Litner explains on the latest episode of Culturally Jewish, it's less about saying goodbye than accepting the evolution of a relationship with those who've passed on.

Also in th...

This podcast is a proud media partner of Jewish Futures, a day-long arts and culture salon for Jewish arts workers, hosted by the UJA Federation of Greater Toronto on Nov. 24. The 2024 program emphasizes networking, communal learning and the exploration of Jewish artistic identity, providing a foundation for building resilience and leadership for Toronto’s Jewish cultural community. Learn more and get your tickets here.

Joseph Landau didn't grow up speaking Yiddish—but something about the language compelled him. Whenever he spent time with his grandfather, Landau would ask him to translate certain words, slowly building a vocabulary. He j...

Last month, The CJN Podcast Network debuted its first original fiction podcast, Justice: A Holocaust Zombie Story. The seven-part audio drama is a work of subversive Holocaust education designed for the digital age, with many of its gruesome facts grounded in truth. Any shock value from merging zombies with Holocaust education was a deliberate attempt at turning heads, particularly among younger, non-Jewish audiences.

That's according to the show's creator, Michael Fraiman—who also produces _Culturally Jewish—_and sits in the guest chair for the first time. He and Ilana Zackon were invited by the Toronto Holocaust Museum to r...

Jacob Samuel has a couple references to his Judaism in his stand-up routine. In the past, whenever he brought it up, it usually created a moment of tension before a laugh. But in the year since Oct. 7, especially in his hometown of Vancouver, he's noticed a shift. It's harder to talk about his Jewish identity onstage. He brings it up later, or takes out a couple jokes if the laugh isn't big enough.

Yet Samuel, who won a Juno award for his debut comedy album in 2021, is determined to keep telling audiences he's Jewish. As he tells...

Arnie Lipsey has spent decades working in animation. But on the side, years ago, he began painting on canvas, using archival family photos for inspiration. He began colourizing and adapting them, eventually reinterpreting them entirely through a modern lens. That often resulted in jarring, traumatic scenes quietly unfolding behind his smiling family members: spiralling tornados, fiery trains, even the barbed-wire fences of a concentration camp.

The result is an unsettling, engrossing new series of 30 paintings in a new series on display at the Museum of Jewish Montreal until December 2024. The Past Is Before You blends fond memories...

When Tuesdays with Morrie was first published in 1997, it elevated Jewish author Mitch Albom to a level of literary stardom that reverberated beyond the book world. The story—which detailed Albom's frequent visits with his former professor, Morrie Schwartz, who was dying of ALS—has since been adapted into a TV movie and an off-Broadway production in 2002 before a New York City revival earlier this year.

And now, a new staging is bringing this two-hander play to the Winnipeg Jewish Theatre—starring The CJN's own arts podcaster, David Sklar. David took a few moments out of rehearsal to sit...

You may have heard Talia Schlanger's voice on CBC Radio or NPR, where she has spent years hosting music programs and interviewing artists. Somewhere, in the back of her mind, she was taking notes, planning for her own eventual leap into the music industry—a leap she finally took this past February, with the release of her debut album, Grace for the Going.

But while she credits her years as a broadcaster as helping with her creative process, as she admits on The CJN's arts podcast, Culturally Jewish, she was surprised at how unprepared she would be wh...

At the onset of the Holocaust, after Maxwell Smart's family began being targeted and killed in Nazi-occupied Europe, he became separated from his mother, who made one final request of her young son: "Please run away." He did as he was told. He ended up spending one and a half years living in the cold, desolate woods of Eastern Europe, meeting and making friends with other young Jews until liberation.

As one of Canada's best-known living Holocaust survivors, Smart—who moved to Montreal after the war—has told his story many times before to schools, museums and jour...

Danila Botha wants you to know something about her writing: it's not autobiographical. She pulls ideas and themes from real life, from the media and history, from current affairs and what she sees in the world. She is not personally a glitter-strewn closeted lesbian Orthodox woman, nor is she a drug addict who once met Anne Frank in a dream. But these are the kinds of concepts—distinctly Jewish stories with shades of halachic heterodoxy—that are packed into Things That Cause Inappropriate Happiness, her new collection of short stories, released April 2024.

Botha joins The CJN's arts podc...

When Jaclyn Grossman was an 18-year-old opera student, her teacher heard her soprano voice and informed her she'd sing the music of Richard Wagner. Grossman didn't know much about the German composer, but quickly fell in love with his music. She was not particularly phased by the fact that Wagner was infamously antisemitic, included offensive Jewish stereotypes in his works, and is even de facto banned in Israel.

Years later, she began researching operas written by Holocaust victims and survivors. She co-founded the Likht Ensemble to perform their works and toured the continent singing these nearly forgotten...

During the pandemic, David Sklar—an actor, playwright and co-host of The CJN's arts podcast Culturally Jewish—wrote a theatre script called Vial. The plot focuses on a college professor who feels conflicted when one of her far-left-wing Jewish students writes an extreme essay about Israel; the professor, who starts off adamantly pro–free speech, begins to reconsider her stance when the essay sparks wider outrage and fierce debates on campus and beyond.

In 2023, a colleague of Sklar's—a drama teacher at Dawson College, a CEGEP in Westmount, Montreal—reached out to see if Sklar had any unpublishe...

On December 1, 2023, Charles Officer passed away at age 48. The award-winning filmmaker was revered in the national arts community, having directed documentaries such as Invisible Essence, about the cultural impact of The Little Prince, and The Skin We're In, a film adaptation of author Desmond Cole's popular essay on racism in Canada. His movies were purposeful and personal, tackling topical issues with incisive commentary and deep research.

The 2024 Hot Docs film festival in Toronto will be commemorating Officer's life with a tribute screening of his 2010 film Might Jerome on May 4, including a Q&A panel with some of...

Irena Gut Opdyke was a Polish nurse who, during the Second World War, was forced to become a housekeeper for a high-ranking German officer. At some point, she was offered the chance to save a dozen Jewish lives. She agreed, hiding them in a space nobody would think to look—in the German officer's basement.

Later honoured as a Righteous Among the Nations, Irena's story is not very well known. But a group of Quebecois filmmakers is about to change that. Irena's Vow, being released in theatres across Canada on April 19, is a historical drama that marks a...

When a member of the Jewish community in London, Ont., recently decided to go through with medical assistance in dying (MAiD), it sent shockwaves through the tight-knit community. Some were angry and confused, others were sympathetic and supportive—and others felt mixed emotions, including the father of Jordi Mand, a playwright and screenwriter. Mand discussed the topic extensively with her father (and then her brother, and others), and soon came to realize how controversial the idea of medically assisted death was within Judaism.

The emotional scenario set the stage for her latest play, In Seven Days. It te...

On March 5, the biggest comedy festival in the world, Just for Laughs, announced it was cancelling this year's events in its hometown of Montreal and filing for bankruptcy protection. The news shocked international comics and local Montrealers—but Andy Nulman, who co-founded the festival in 1985 and spearheaded its expansion through the 1990s, wasn't entirely surprised. Though he took a step back from the company in 1999 and left entirely in 2015, he'd been hearing of JFL's financial troubles in the media, just as most in-person events had taken a hit since the pandemic.

And yet, as he recounts on Cu...

Eric and Erin Warner's grandfather lived to the admirable age of 103. And in that time, the Jewish immigrant to Canada saw Toronto change in innumerable ways, from the migration of Jews out of the Ward and Kensington Market to mass communication shifting from the radio to the internet. It's a life's story that Eric, who's worked in music promotion and production since he was a teenager, wanted to tap into—in part to help his own young children understand where their family came from.

He roped in his sister, Erin, to sing on the album, and his lo...

Seth Zosky is a massive fan of Kanye West. He owns the shoes, has heard all his songs, and—as a drummer—dove deep into Kanye's innovative use of the retro 808 drum machine. So when Kanye started coming out as an unhinged antisemite in 2023, making ridiculous comments on podcasts and social media about Hitler, spouting conspirary theories and tweeting about going "death con 3 on Jewish people", Zosky was heartbroken.

He decided to transform his emotions into a new production. Working with his close friend, the rapper CJ Capital (who is not Jewish, but also a major Kanye fan...

Ari Gross has never written a comic book before. But when he decided to try making one, he found his background came in handy. A machine learning engineer by day with a background in data science, Gross completed his PhD on the history and philosophy of science and technology—a perfect fit for writing a comic that brings 20th-century Toronto and Kabbalistic ideas onto the printed page. Add in the math required to map out a comic book by word count per panel, then panels per page, and you have a passion project that's coming to fruition after years of...

On Jan. 9, a group of Jewish Hollywood entertainers—among them David Schwimmer, Amy Schumer, Debra Messing, Jason Alexander and Michael Rapaport—published an open letter, signed by hundreds of Jewish media industry professionals, that slams the Motion Picture Academy for ignoring Jews in its "Representation and Inclusion Standards", unveiled in 2020. The standards call for representation from underrepresented groups throughout the cast and crew of film and TV productions, clearly defining "underrepresented groups" in a list of identities that include Asian, Indigenous, Hispanic, Hawaiian, LGBTQ+, women and people with cognitive or physical disabilities—but, notably, not Jews.

The open l...

On January 2, the Belfry Theatre in Victoria, B.C., announced it is cancelling a forthcoming production of The Runner, a one-man play—created by a non-Jewish theatre artist—that tells the story of an Orthodox Jewish volunteer who decides to help a young Palestinian woman instead of an Israeli soldier.

The decision to cancel the production came after weeks of protests from anti-Zionists, including graffiti sprayed on the theatre's walls and a disrupted public meeting that was set up to facilitate a community dialogue about the play.

While The Runner is still set to run as p...

If you've heard of Gila Münster, who bills herself as "Toronto's cross stitching, cross-dressing Jewish American Princess," it's probably because of her drag queen storytelling events. After the height of the pandemic, she began partnering with public libraries across Southern Ontario, hosting story hours for children to supplement nighttime performances.

Then came the protests.

In the summer of 2023, for the first time in her life, protesters began showing up outside libraries where she was scheduled to perform. Around the same time, Münster found herself at the centre of a city-wide debate, as she be...

Ruth Rakoff had only written one book before, a memoir based on her cancer diagnosis. That was in 2010. Two years later, her brother David Rakoff—an acclaimed writer and storyteller—died of Hodgkin's lymphoma.

That traumatic period, in part, inspired her to spend nearly a full decade writing her second book, Untethered, a novel published in Sept. 2023 by Cormorant Books. In Untethered, two siblings branch off into different Jewish worlds, one marrying into an ultra-Orthodox community while the other tries to fend off depression on a kibbutz, eventually reuniting to confront their shared generational trauma during a time...

The story of Chiune Sugihara has become relatively well known among the Jewish community. The Japanese diplomat, known as "Japan's Schindler", wrote transit visas for thousands of European Jews, helping them flee Nazi persecution and the concentration camps. Among the many families saved by Sugihara visas was the Bluman family, which wound up in Vancouver, B.C.—but the story didn't end there. Even two generations later, the family's trauma still lingered, just as Sugihara's own children and grandchildren suffered from the aftermath of the Second World War.

Those cross-generational stories, and their empathetic parallels, form the sp...

When Niv Shimshon woke up to the horror of what happened in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, he immediately contacted his friends and family back in his home country. The Israeli-born photographer—who moved to Canada 10 years ago, now living in Hamilton with his wife and two young children—could only donate a bit of money to his family's kibbutz and offer words of support.

Feeling helpless, he decided to take action. He began contacting Jewish and Israeli photographers across Israel and North America, inviting them to contribute to a fundraising project, wherein they would sell prints of their work...

It's no secret that the arts industry—theatre, film, music, visual arts, dance; pick your favourite—is mostly filled with left-leaning individuals. Unfortunately for Jewish artists, that means the arts community is also largely anti-Zionist (or pro-Palestinian), and given how big a role networking and affiliations play in booking gigs and landing shows, publicly voicing opposing political views can risk their friendships and careers.

It's a tightrope upon which many Jewish artists have to balance every day. But in times like these, with Hamas and Israel engaged in a bitter war that's resulted in thousands of innocent live...

In Matthew Jocelyn's ideal world, audiences would look at upcoming programming from the Koffler Centre of the Arts in Toronto and ask, "Really? The Koffler is doing that?"

Ruffling feathers isn't new for the artistic leader, who spent 28 years in France, where he worked in some of the nation's top opera houses and was awarded as a Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters. After returning to Canada, he took the helm at Canadian Stage, Canada's largest not-for-profit theatre company, which drew mixed reactions and a minor outcry from supporters expecting a more traditional direction for...

Sarah Segal-Lazar's momma never actually wanted her to be a doctor—nor did becoming an artist really shock her. But the Canadian musician and actor nonetheless drew inspiration from that common trope, where the offspring shunts the professional expectations of their parents, to write the hilarious theme song to The CJN's arts and culture podcast, Culturally Jewish.

Not that the jingle is Segal-Lazar's biggest achievement this calendar year. She just released her latest album, Valleys, a folksy, emotional record that bounds between foot-thumping country bar tunes and delicate odes to broken relationships. The Montreal-born musician and actor wr...

Most Canadians have never heard of Fanny "Bobbie" Rosenfeld, a woman who left early 20th century Russia and wound up in Barrie, Ont., where she cultivated her love of sports into Olympic glory—including a gold medal.

In some ways, hers is a standard turn-of-the-century Jewish immigrant story, portraying a woman who succeeded by sheer force of will in a new country against her traditional parents' wishes. On the other hand, it's an unconventional tale, given her pioneering feminist attitude and how few people today even know Bobbie's story—including in her hometown of Barrie.

But...

There's a certain type of Jew, usually Ashkenazi, sometimes Israeli, with a mop of curly hair, an acousitc guitar and an affinity for marijuana, who will inevitably love bands like The Grateful Dead and Phish. Those groups are collectively known as "jam bands", which play lengthy, musically complex songs, often in concert, always with a hefty reliance on improvisation.

Once synonymous with psychedelic drugs, the jam band scene has gone mainstream in recent decades—and for a myriad reasons we'll dissect on today's episode of Culturally Jewish, Jews are buying front-row tickets.

This summer, the As...

When Bobbi Goddard travelled to Mexico in February 2020, she planned on staying just a couple months. But when the pandemic began, locking down borders and economies, she was happy to stay longer, practice Spanish and catch an opportunity to kickstart her dream career as a country music singer.

It wasn't the first time she'd chased a dream—and accomplished it. Born in Kindersley, Sask., she grew up in the Northwest Territories, Medicine Hat and Calgary before converting to Judaism (and moving to Israel for a stint, teaching herself Hebrew) and ultimately winding up in Mexico. She's currently on...

Jacob Balshin didn't take a conventional route to stand-up comedy. The Thornhill native majored in philosophy before working a string of random jobs—at Pizza Pizza, a pet store, Costco, Bulk Barn—all while honing his craft. Now he's releasing his debut comedy album, 30 And Breathing Funny, which he recorded in downtown Toronto on his 30th birthday, filled with stories of dates, drugs and dentists, all delivered in his giggly deadpan style.

After that, David Sklar sits down with director Kevin McKendrick in Victoria, B.C., about their new show, The Guardsman, by Ferenc Molnár, and the s...

One day, after Shaina Silver-Baird graduated from theatre school, the rabbi from her bat mitzvah called her up to ask her if she'd be a cantor for an upcoming wedding. Silver-Baird was not religious; she didn't go to synagogue, speak Hebrew or understand exactly what she was getting into. But she agreed. Years later, from that experience, a web series was born: Less Than Kosher, which premiered at the 2023 Toronto Jewish Film Festival and is now streaming on Highball TV.

The digital series follows Viv, a flailing pop star who, like Silver-Baird, winds up singing cantorially. Underscoring...

When Jeff Rothpan moved to the United States decades ago to pursue comedy as a career, he couldn't imagine he'd one day be working with some of his idols, including Steve Martin and John Cleese. But that's where life took him, and since then, he's written for internationally recognized ventriloquist Jeff Dunham, Canadian model Pamela Anderson and the TV show Roast Battle Canada, for which he was nominated for Best Writing at the Canadian Screen Awards.

Rothpan joins to chat about his lengthy career, including how he made the leap stateside and how Israelis—and Muslims—have reac...

Among the first major massacres of the Holocaust infamously took place in Babyn Yar, Ukraine, where Nazis murdered more than 33,000 Jews in 1941. Today, the harrowing site—when not under fire by invading Russian forces—is a rising tourist attraction, not just for its historical significance, but also a mesmerizing new synagogue and memorial that was completed 80 years later, in April 2021. Designed by international architect Manuel Herz, the synagogue literally unfolds like a pop-up book, celebrating life, optimisim, creativity and the Jewish literary spirit.

The story of the synagogue, from its historical origins to its construction and completion, is n...

When Lisa Rubin, artistic and executive director of the Segal Centre for Performing Arts in Montreal, caught Prayer for the French Republic in New York City last year, she walked out of the theatre certain of one thing: she had to put this show on.

She knew it wouldn’t get a long run on Broadway, overshadowed by Tom Stoppard’s Leopoldstadt next door, and few other theatre companies would pick up a three-hour-long family drama with a large cast, heavy Jewish content and a mandate to discuss the many faces of antisemitism. But for her and the...

In March 2023, Alison Darcy and Joseph Shragge, the co-artistic directors of Scapegoat Carnivale, a theatre company in Montreal, debuted their latest work, Vertip. The show is about a puppeteer who uses stereotypical puppets, based on old Eastern European traditions, including a money-grubbing Jewish loan shark named Zyhd. One day, Zyhd comes to life—and starts demanding money.

It's a different approach to tackling antisemitism, and not one that all audiences have been comfortable with. As Darcy and Shragge explain in the debut episode of Culturally Jewish, people aren't sure whether they should laugh along with the jokes or...