Niv

Cari Kozierok has always done impactful work in the Jewish community, and beyond. For many years she was an executive director at two synagogues in Toronto, often organizing prominent speakers to come and talk to congregants about pressing issues in our society. But she increasingly felt that the work wasn’t as impactful as it could be. That’s why seven years ago she joined Ve’ahavta, a Jewish humanitarian organization dedicated to promoting positive change in the lives of people of all faiths and backgrounds who have been marginalized by poverty and hardship. 

The organization has various programs to offer some relief for those experiencing homelessness. Their Mobile Jewish Response to Homelessness is an outreach van program that provides immediate assistance by visiting several locations, which include encampments, in downtown Toronto and Scarborough every night to deliver essential supplies such as food, sleeping bags, harm reduction kits and clothing. Staff also provide referrals to access housing, mental health and addiction treatment, and other resources. Another key part of the organization are the pre-employment programs to match people with jobs and work experience, allowing them to live independent lives full of dignity, Kozierok told me.

I spoke with Kozierok over the phone to discuss how Ve’ahavta faces the growing challenge of homelessness in Toronto, how Jewish values are put into action, and what motivates her to keep showing up every day in a field of work that is relentless and often, thankless. 

If you feel inclined to give during the holiday season consider donating here.

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What attracted you to Ve’ahavta? 

Ve’ahavta stood out as one of the rare spaces in the Jewish world that focuses on putting Judaism into tangible action. 

Is the organization focused on homelessness amongst the Jewish population or is the help far-reaching? 

Our mandate is that we are a uniquely Jewish organization designed to serve all faiths and backgrounds. We’re not like other Jewish organizations that evolved to serve the greater population due to government and corporate funding requirements such as JVS Toronto and Jewish Immigrant Aid Services (JIAS). We were always conceived as a Jewish organization serving all faiths and backgrounds; stemming from the Torah edict, you shall love your neighbour and stranger as you love yourself, as you were once strangers too. It’s really digging into empathy as a commandment of the Torah because we know what it feels like to be lost and alone [as a people] so we care for those among us by providing services for all people.  

We also have Jewish members of our community donate or volunteer, so they can action these deeply held Jewish values. I say it’s “doing Judaism” rather than just “talking Judaism.”

Homelessness has gotten worse post-pandemic—how are resources strained? What are your biggest concerns? 

Prior to the pandemic, the country had begun to let in quite a large number of refugees and in 2019 that put a significant strain on available limited resources to the traditional Canadian homeless population. And then we had the pandemic where people left shelters in droves and lived in encampments all over the city and had no services available. It was a dire situation with a bunch of efforts made to rapidly house folks and be innovative, like converting hotels and repurposing apartment buildings [to create more housing for the homeless].

Then in the post-COVID world when the country let in newcomers again, we entered into this refugee crisis where, if you remember last year, churches were taking in refugees [because they had nowhere else to go]. Today we see a huge increase in need and demand for services from both our mobile outreach van, which services people currently experiencing homelessness, and our pre-employment programs where we’ve had 2,100 people apply for 300 program spaces. The demand is crazy and around 70 per cent of folks in those programs are refugees.

When facing such a significant need with limited resources, how do you see the future of this type of work?

I wish I had something lovely to say to you, but it’s dreary, it’s not a great outlook. During the pandemic, I thought, “Wow, the pandemic may be the best thing to ever happen to the homeless population” because many people seemed to think about the people that don’t have a home to quarantine in, and it raised the level of awareness. Politicians and policy-makers pledged money from the federal government for rapid housing and modular housing projects. I thought maybe it was a turning point. But, here we are. Services are being retracted and those rapid housing projects haven’t taken off and all the money hasn’t been spent because there is so much red tape in building projects. Encampments are growing and shelters are full. We call shelters every night and we can’t get people into beds. When the shelter tells us to call in a couple of hours that means that person is sleeping outdoors tonight. 

In the seven years of doing this work, is this the worst you’ve ever seen the homelessness crisis? 

I guess I would have to say it’s the worst because the numbers just keep going up. What’s compounding it is the issue of a tainted drug supply—drug dealers that prey on the homeless population to create addicts and slaves [to the dealers] to feed a habit. We have a toxic drug supply where people don’t know what they’re taking so they’re overdosing and dying on the streets. On top of that, Premier Doug Ford is closing safe consumption sites that help keep some of those people alive. It’s not a good situation. 

It seems like it’s a hard field of work to find hope in.

We focus so much of our growth plans on our pre-employment programs where we’re seeing a lot of success. We see what role we can play to prevent homelessness by getting people off social assistance and earning their own money. As a Jewish organization, it’s a Jewish value that dignity comes from the ability to provide for yourself. People often say you can’t survive on a minimum wage job in Toronto, but social assistance is a sentence into a deep and hopeless poverty cycle that people can’t break out of. Ontario Works, which is our welfare program, has people bringing home less than $9,000 a year to live on in Toronto. The poverty rate is $24,000 and minimum wage is $35,000, so they’re living above the poverty line; it’s by no means sitting in the lap of luxury but it’s not $9,000 a year. 

We’ve just managed to secure 660 spots in our pre-employment programs over the next three years, up from 300 spots. It’s ambitious but we were at 50 spots in 2018 and up to 300 by 2024, so I feel confident we can do it. But it’s always about the money, we need the money to grow and that’s the challenge for us.  

Are there any success stories from the pre-employment programs that stick out to you? 

There are so many, but there was a woman who graduated from one of our programs in 2021. When she came to Canada she had survived domestic abuse and difficult situations, and was living with her three children in a hotel room during the pandemic. She applied for our program and couldn’t believe she got in. She said it completely changed her life. She got a job, lives in a house, and wants to go back to school to become a psychologist. Because of this program she became an empowered woman. I love her story because it highlights the effectiveness of the program. People are applying in droves and we can’t accommodate all of them. It reminds us about the need for us to grow because if she never got into the program she’d still be sitting, trapped in that hotel room with no path forward.

How do you stay motivated in this line of work? Because it’s incredibly draining and exhausting when facing so many obstacles. 

It all comes back down to our why and what is our purpose here. Rabbi Tarfon says it’s not our job to complete the work but we can’t quit doing it either, we don’t have to complete and fix the whole world but we also can’t stop doing this work. This is the why, of why we do it. My hope is one day Ve’ahavta is obsolete, but until that time, I’m driven by the ultimate goal in Jewish charity, which is to help people live an independent life and to take dignity and pride in themselves. This is the ultimate goal and we must keep growing the organization to provide this to as many people as possible. 

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This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Happy December, everyone! With the first night of Hanukkah landing right on Christmas Day, and running through New Year’s Eve, it’s sure to be an extra festive holiday season. The last time this occurred was in 2005!

First up, an event with a memorable title—From Dysfunctional Families to Dirty Knickers: A Herstory of Jewish Women’s Comics. Writer and graphic novelist Dr. Sarah Lightman will give a lecture discussing the careers of Jewish women comic artists. Dr. Lightman’s work sheds a spotlight on women cartoonists and illustrators whose works have often been overlooked. Join the conversation on Zoom simulcast, or register to receive the recordings. The cost to attend is $10.

This event doesn’t take place until March, so you have time to prepare and read Dr. Lightman’s graphic novels in advance. You can also stop by the Miles Nadal JCC gallery in March to view the visual art exhibit In Mint Condition: Jewish Women In Comics, in honour of International Women’s Day.

HANUKKAH

On Sunday, December 22, celebrate the festival of lights with a family-friendly event at the Prosserman JCC. At Chanukah House, you can look forward to arts and crafts, making your own gelt, photo opportunities, entertainment, a dreidel competition, candle lighting, sufganiyot decorating, and a full-on latke bar. What more could you want at a Hanukkah event? Purchase your tickets here, at $14.06 per person or $43.85 for a group of four.

This time of year is dark, dreary, and depressing, so illuminate your Hanukkah with light and laughter at Jewish Comedy Festival’s Menorah Madness. On the second night of Hanukkah (December 26), make your way to Comedy Bar West for an evening of Jewish hilarity. This event will feature all of Toronto’s finest up-and-coming Jewish comedians, including Brandon Zakkai, Matt Render, Brooklyn Mike, Jaime Glassman, Ronen Geisler, Mozie Elmaleh, and Max Guttmann. Purchase your tickets now while the early bird sale is still on.

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SYNAGOGUE SCOUTS

If you’re on the hunt for a hall of worship that feels right for you and your family, register for Synagogue Scouts. From now until the end of March, the Jewish& group at the MNJCC will be scouting out synagogues throughout Toronto and bringing you behind the scenes. Find out what each congregation can offer and how they are welcoming diverse and interfaith people into their spaces. Check out this handy schedule below, and attend whichever meetups are of interest to you! Register for the sessions here.

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MUSIC

This holiday season, join cantorial student Shira Bodnar as they lead a Hanukkah song workshop with Jewish& on Sunday December 22. Music is an integral part of many aspects of Jewish life, and these songs will be well known to some, and brand new to others. Whatever your familiarity level is with Hanukkah music, this is the perfect opportunity to discover more about each piece. The cost to join is $10. Sign up here.

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Care to pick up that musical instrument that you put down all those years ago? The Miles Nadal is hosting multiple musical ensembles that you can participate in.

On Wednesday evenings from January to March, if you play violin, viola or cello, you can reconnect with your musical skills and fellow musicians by signing up for the Adult String Ensemble. This group has performance opportunities and you must be able to play at minimum a Royal Conservatory of Music Grade 3 level. I myself joined a local orchestra after not playing my violin for many years, and I’ve found it really rewarding. 

If that’s not up your alley, perhaps a Klezmer Ensemble? With this group, you can develop both your musical playing expertise and arranging skills, all while learning more about Klezmer musical traditions. Individuals are welcome to join regardless of musical background. These meetings also run on Tuesdays from January to March.

If you are new to either ensemble, make sure to contact Gretchen at GretchenA@mnjcc.org before registering. The cost to join for the semester is $190 per group.

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FILM

Cinephiles, assemble! Popular Toronto film critic Adam Nayman is about to make your Monday afternoons more exciting with his series on Jewish directors. The course will explore the works of Fritz Lang, Otto Preminger, Barbra Streisand, Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker, and Todd Haynes. The program costs $60 and runs weekly from Monday, January 13 to February 10. Drop-ins are also welcome ($16 per class). Over the course of these lectures, Nayman will discuss Jewish-American filmmakers whose work defined much of recent cinema, using film and archival materials, and biographical texts. Learn about five key filmmakers and dive into the social and artistic aspects of their work, and how their Judaism was expressed within their films. This series is presented in partnership with the Toronto Film Society.

Attendees are welcome to join in-person, on Zoom simulcast, or can register to receive the recordings.

Perhaps lectures about film aren’t as good as watching the real thing—in that case, check out the film The Conspiracy, screening on Thursday January 23 at the Al Green Theatre.  In this documentary, writer and director Maxim Pozdorovkin investigates 250 years of anti-Jewish hate, how it started, and how times of uncertainty give rise to anxieties in marginalized populations. This film screening is being held in honour of International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

If you are unable to attend this screening in person, you can register to receive the streaming link. The cost is $10.

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‍PODCASTS

I’m a big audio person—almost half of the books I read are in audiobook format, and I subscribe to about a dozen podcasts. Recently, some of the podcasters I listen to have stopped producing new episodes, so I’ve been seeking out new content. I’ve found two Jewish podcasts that I enjoy, The Dybbukast and Jewish Heretics.

The Dybbukast was created by theatre dybbuk, an unconventional theatre company whose projects blend various artistic mediums. The company explores the rich world of Jewish history, and the resulting works feature performance, dance, poetry, and music. Each one of theatre dybbuk’s residencies bring arts and educational engagement to communities throughout North America, and they recently held one in Toronto, in partnership with Kultura and the Prosserman JCC (Niv was a promotional partner!).

Theatre dybbuk started their podcast in 2020, and the episodes dive into the question of what artistic texts can divulge about the times in which they were written, and what they reveal about contemporary society. The Dybbukast includes performed readings, as well as interviews with artists and scholars. You can listen to episodes on their website, YouTube, or any podcast app.

My second recommendation is the Jewish Heretics podcast, created by the Winchevsky Centre, or United Jewish People’s Order (UJPO), a Toronto-based secular Jewish centre that has a focus on social justice. A new episode comes out every month or two, so it’s a low commitment subscription, and there are interviews with fascinating people, including scholars, artists, and activists. You can listen to their podcast on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or on YouTube.

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If I haven’t offered you enough suggestions to fill your free time this winter, here’s a handy spreadsheet of all of the upcoming Hanukkah events hosted by local synagogues and Jewish centres. The list includes Hanukkah parties, potlucks, song workshops, and more.

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For the readers out there, holiday romance novels have become more and more popular, and we’re finally seeing some Hanukkah-themed additions to the genre. I can’t vouch for these personally as I haven’t read them, but if The Matzah Ball sounds like your cup of tea, here is a whole list of books that are similar!

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Have a happy Hanukkah, holiday season, and happy New Year!

I’m from Vancouver and have been venturing to Saskatoon every summer since 2015, where I built a seasonal window washing business (a long story in its own right). When I spend the summers there I often go to Chabad of Saskatoon and have become a good friend of Rabbi Raphael Kats. He is the one who told me about Edenbridge, a historical Jewish farming colony in Saskatchewan.

During a Shabbat dinner at the rabbi’s house, the topic came up about how I never had a bar mitzvah as a kid growing up in Israel. He suggested that we go visit Edenbridge together and do a “grown up” bar mitzvah in the synagogue.

At the time, I was vlogging about my adventures on the road as a travelling window washer, in my other Youtube channel called Van Man. One of my videos documented that first trip with the rabbi. 

Since then, I returned to Edenbridge in 2019 with my brother, and again in 2022 with a friend, to film a more substantial documentary about its history.

As a heritage site, Edenbridge is unique because it’s rare to find historical pioneer colonies settled only by Jews. There are a few others in Canada, but none of them have such a well preserved historical synagogue, and in my opinion, none are situated in as beautiful a setting as Edenbridge, which makes it one of a kind.

It has a special place in my heart because of the magic I feel when I go there. There’s a melancholic atmosphere, but it is also a beautiful place. You can almost feel the presence of the pioneers who founded it. The ghostliness of the site is palpable. The location is so hidden that no one ever goes there and many locals don’t even know it exists, so every time I visit, I have the place to myself. When it comes to Jewish heritage sites, Edenbridge is Canada’s best kept secret.

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Niv is celebrating its four year anniversary! During this time, the magazine has promoted and supported the voices of more than 100 writers and artists, aiming to uplift the Jewish community and highlight its diversity, strength, and immense talent. Members of the Jewish community that have worked closely with Niv, signed our yearbook, offering their thoughts on what the publication means to them, and how important it is to have an inclusive Jewish space that celebrates all forms of Jewish expression.

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_{As a cantor serving a congregation in the United States, Niv has been an invaluable way to stay connected to the Canadian Jewish people. Covering a wide range of topics—from culture to theology—and featuring voices from Jews of all backgrounds, Niv creates a space where everyone can see themselves reflected and learn about the diverse experiences within our community. I am honoured to be a contributor to Niv, sharing my perspective on Jewish life. Mazel Tov Clarrie and Orly on these remarkable four years, and here's to many more to come! — Cantor Ella Gladstone Martin}

_{I love Niv! The team leads with care, kindness, and curiosity and has created a community hub that is fun and thought-provoking. I'm always so excited to get the next issue of Niv in my inbox. It's one of the most special pieces of mail I receive. — Laura Chapnick-Klein, Director of External Relations at Koffler Arts}

_{When I first came across Niv, I was instantly excited by the content and the playful nature of the platform. After meeting Orly and Clarrie, I was blown away by the talent and commitment of the small team. I was thrilled to collaborate with them on the Jewish Futures: An Arts and Culture Salon in 2023 and I'm grateful for their contribution to the event. I can’t wait to see where the next four years take them! — Sam Mogelonsky, Director, Arts, Culture & Heritage, UJA Federation of Greater Toronto}

_{As a writer of humorous stories that most always involve my dysfunctional Jewish family (is there any other kind?), I discovered Niv early on. I continue to appreciate each issue along with the professionalism that Clarrie and Orly bring to Niv’s readers along with the publication of some of my stories that hopefully foster a touch of levity into the weight and depth of current antisemitism in America. — Naomi Weiss} 

_{Happy birthday, Niv! Thank you for being a space to celebrate the fullness of the Jewish experience, ask big questions, and expand ideas about Jewish identity. To many more years of connecting through stories! — Rebecca Ostroff} 

_{Our family has had three different experiences courtesy of Niv. It all began with my daughter Rita, who has Down syndrome and had recently published a book and became an artist. We had a great interview and an article published in the early days of Niv about Rita's art. This article has been really useful to show to others who want to learn about Rita. Next I wrote an article about the Timmins Purim Ball that was a feature of this Northern Ontario Jewish community in bygone days. My mother's family lived there so that was the connection. That connection then led to my meeting artist Meichan Waxer whose family also came from northeastern Ontario. I reached out to her after reading her article about Jewish communities in the north. As a result of this, I was able to contribute to an art installation at FENTSTER Gallery. My grandmother's flour container from her kitchen cabinet features prominently in the exhibit. She would have been amazed to see her flour container on display in downtown Toronto. So thank you for giving us this opportunity. I'm interested to see what adventures await in future issues. — Helen Winkler} 

Niv readers! I hope you’re ready, because the next month or so is chock-full of Jewish arts and culture events. Purim and beyond, I’ve got you covered!

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Purim

Purim 2024 is approaching in a few short weeks! The most unique event I’ve come across is Four Faces of Purim: Drag Makeup Mastery, on Wednesday, March 20, 2024. This is a free online drag makeup workshop organized by LGBTQ+ at the J. So if you’ve always wanted to learn how to apply drag makeup, now is your chance. Boy Vey and Josie are ready to help.

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Exhibitions

Most of the events mentioned in this article are catered toward people who want to attend events rather than participate in them. However, if you are the latter, there is a call for art from the Miles Nadal JCC. They are seeking pieces to include in an August exhibition called L’dor v’dor (from generation to generation). 

The call asks for work that explores the question: “What lessons, values, rituals or stories have we learned from our elders and what do we want to pass down to our children?” Submit your artwork by April 30, 2024 and visit mnjcc.org/visualarts for more information on guidelines, criteria, and submission forms. 

Meanwhile, the Lower Library, located at the University of Toronto’s Massey College, has an exhibition on now that is showcasing nine different Hebrew fonts from the Balinson collection in metal and wood types. A Printer’s Voice: The Balinson Jewish Type Collection is curated by acquisitions specialist Leona Bromberg. Visit in person or check the site regularly to see when the digital edition appears. The exhibit offers a rare example of local Yiddish tangible heritage, as the fonts were originally used from 1911 and onward at a print shop in Hamilton, Ontario. This was the home of Hamilton’s only Yiddish-language newspaper Yiddishe Shtime de Hamiltoner (Jewish Voice of Hamilton). Check out page 11 of this online visual guide to learn more about the newspaper and the remarkable man behind it, Henry Balinson, after which the typeface is now named.

The Ontario Jewish Archives, Blankenstein Family Heritage Centre (OJA) is the largest repository of Jewish life in Canada, and this year the organization marks its 50^th anniversary. Since 1973, the OJA has been gathering, preserving, and sharing the stories of Jewish life across the province. Join the celebration this spring as new collections are revealed each week, showcasing a variety of organizations, individuals, and events from over 170 years of Jewish history in Ontario. Many of the collections are still locked online, and there will be 50 collections in total, to represent 50 years of the Jewish community’s history.

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Live Events

On Trans Day of Visibility (March 31), LGBTQ+ at the J and the OJA will present The First Jew in Canada: A Trans Tale, written and performed by American author, poet, playwright S. Bear Bergman. The story takes place in 1738 when sailor Jacques LaFargue, a young transgender man, left France to start a new life in Canada, settling in what is now Quebec City. The play reveals “his largely untold story, embroidered onto the bones of nine verifiable facts about his life and existence, and interwoven with the modern experience of a trans and Jewish immigrant to Canada three hundred years later.”

The play promises to take “its audience on a stubbornly Jewish journey of optimism, faith, and joy—including the joy and affirmation of finding an ancestor you never knew you had.” 

To learn more about what is known about LaFargue and his life in Canada visit this site. Tickets are $18 and you can purchase them here. 

Lastly in the events category, if an evening of laughter sounds like something you need right now, grab your tickets to see Talia Reese, an Orthodox stand-up comedian who will be visiting the Prosserman JCC on March 14. She’s been featured on The Wendy Williams Show and Sirius XM. You can purchase tickets for $39.

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Learning

The Lishma Jewish Learning Project just wrapped its current semester, which includes classes on mitzvah and pleasure; the history of Israel and Palestine—which provides a foundation for out-of-the-box thinking about the future of the region and its inhabitants—and on finding meaning in the Book of Job. If you’re curious to try a course, you’re already able to sign up for the next one. The class begins on May 1 and runs through to June 5 at Holy Blossom. It’s not clear what the next semester will focus on, but if the previous series is any indication, you’ll be in for interesting discussions. Stay tuned to their website for more information and register for the next course! 

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Miscellaneous Musings

I follow Katherine Bogen, a young Jewish scholar, on social media, who recently joined Dr. Hani Chaabo on his podcast, Super Humanizer, to discuss resistance, healing, and activism. The podcast is just one way of unpacking the Israeli and Palestinian conflict, and this particular episode was a beautiful, empathetic conversation that might be of interest. 

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It will be a few months until my next article, so if you’re hunting for activities to enjoy, check the Kultura Collective event calendar. And don’t forget to mark your calendars for this year’s annual Toronto Jewish Film Festival, from May 30 until June 9.

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Lara

I was over the moon when I heard Kristen Bell and Adam Brody would be starring opposite each other in a new Netflix rom-com Nobody Wants This. It was the Veronica Mars/Seth Cohen love story I never knew I always wanted, and to top it off, Adam Brody would be playing a young, progressive rabbi—reflecting the experiences of clergy like myself. Then, the trailer dropped.

Brody’s character, Noah, was introduced as the “hot rabbi”: good-looking, approachable, athletic, and sex-positive, which challenges preconceived notions about Jewish clergy. While Noah embodied a modern, complex “nice Jewish boy,” each of the women around him felt like one-dimensional caricatures, rooted in antisemitic and misogynistic tropes. 

I watched the series with an open mind, hopeful these female characters would develop beyond their promo portrayals. No such luck. 

Bell’s character, Joanne, is a non-Jewish, fun-loving, sex-and-relationships podcaster who falls for Rabbi Noah’s charm. She’s presented as vibrant and carefree, in direct contrast to Noah’s sister-in-law Esther, who is depicted as nagging, abrasive, and—worst of all, it seems—brunette. While Esther is clearly beautiful, intelligent, and an excellent mother, the series does little to celebrate these qualities. It instead leans heavily on her role as the stereotypical stick-in-the-mud Jewish wife. This dynamic is made explicit when Noah breaks up with his long-term Jewish girlfriend and begins pursuing Joanne. Noah’s friend remarks, “We love fun, but do we end up with fun?” To which Noah’s brother chimes in, “Yeah, have you met Esther? She’s not fun. That’s why I married her.” 

With Esther embodying the stock character Jewish American Princess, Noah’s mother, Bina, steps in to perpetuate the Jewish mother stereotype. Like Esther, Bina is written with little nuance. Just when Joanne thinks she’s won over her boyfriend’s prickly mother, Bina leans in mid-hug to whisper, “You’re never gonna end up with my son.” In the final episode of the season, Bina and Esther stand facing the audience, Bina scowling like a cartoon villain while Esther schemes, “Those fucking sisters have got to go.” What gets completely glossed over, however, is that Esther’s anger is entirely justified. Moments earlier, she discovers that her husband is seemingly having an emotional affair with Joanne’s sister. Rather than delve into Esther’s pain, the show reduces her to a bitter antagonist. 

One bright spot is Rabbi Shira, a mentor of Noah’s, who stands out as funny (blonde!) and welcoming to Joanne in ways that most other Jewish characters are not. Unfortunately, her warmth is overshadowed by the show’s overwhelmingly negative portrayal of Jewish women. Even minor characters perpetuate this pattern, like a congregant of Noah’s who scolds Joanne for loitering outside and demands she leave the premises. In my three decades of regular synagogue attendance, I have never seen anyone—other than a security guard—tell someone to leave. On the contrary, in my experience, it is women who go out of their way to welcome newcomers. 

Ironically, the show does a good job of illustrating the low grade antisemitism Jewish men face, even as it reinforces harmful stereotypes against Jewish women. Non-Jewish characters repeatedly express surprise at Noah’s attractiveness, as if his being Jewish and a rabbi should preclude him from being handsome—a sentiment I’ve heard uttered in real life, including by the DJ at a rabbinic student’s wedding. In one scene, Joanne’s sister texts her, “He’s cuter than I expected; he doesn’t look that Jewish.” Later, Joanne’s mother exclaims, “Oy vey! A Jewish Rabbi!” before gushing, “I had no idea you were so handsome. I mean, you look just like Billy Joel.” As Joanne is quick to point out, the two look nothing alike. It’s a common experience for Jewish people: being compared to Jewish celebrities with whom we share little-to-no resemblance. It’s a subtle microaggression, but one that reminds us of the narrow lens through which Jews are often viewed. 

The show isn’t all bad. I binge-watched the series in a week. It captures the beauty of Jewish traditions like Shabbat, and the holiday’s lesser-known counterpart, Havdalah. And the scene where Noah is swarmed by congregants after Friday night services (including by a proud mom who wants to show him her son’s student film: “a documentary about the history of documentaries”) is particularly relatable. 

When I asked my female Jewish friends for their thoughts, not all shared my critiques. One rabbinic colleague argued, “I know these women!” It’s true that many of us know overbearing mothers or abrasive relatives. But in real life, those same women might work tirelessly for their families or devote their lives to charity. Nobody is as one-dimensional as the Jewish women in Nobody Wants This. Perhaps the saddest consequence of these stereotypes isn’t the inaccurate messages they send to the outside world, but the impact they have on our own self-image, shaping how we see ourselves and judge each other. In university, a non-Jewish classmate once half-jokingly called me a “JAP.” A few months later, as I prepared to go on Birthright, I caught myself worrying about being surrounded by “JAPs” on the trip. Instead, I met an incredibly down-to-earth group of Jewish peers. I was ashamed to have let the preconceived notions of outsiders cloud my view of my own people. I pray that season two pulls back the layers of Bina and Esther to reveal the humanity beneath their harsh exteriors, just as we get to see with Joanne and her sister. We deserve representation that shows the complexity of Jewish life—flaws and all, but goes beyond the “JAP” stereotype. 

Season one ends with Noah torn between his desire to become senior rabbi of his congregation and his feelings for Joanne, who does not want to convert to Judaism. Just this year, Hebrew Union College—the American Reform seminary where I was ordained—made the controversial decision to allow clergy to intermarry. Interfaith relationships involving Jewish clergy is a fascinating premise for a TV show and offers a ripe opportunity to showcase the vibrancy and complexity of Jewish life. I only hope season two rises to the challenge. Because either way, millions of us will be watching. 

With a hometown that never felt like mine, in which I’d always felt like an other, I had left Central Florida as soon as I could, heading north and claiming my outsider bona fides by coming out to my family within days of arriving at college (I’d known my preferences since I was seven; why wait another week?). 

And in the early years of my career, as someone not identifiably queer unless holding another woman’s hand, I made sure to list my internship with a lesbian magazine on my résumé, not wanting to take a job where all of me wouldn’t be welcome. But as my friends sported rainbow necklaces and pins, I could never quite bring myself to join in. I was out to my family, colleagues, and friends. I knew who I was. Why did I need to broadcast my sexuality to strangers? Yet last year, in the long months following October 7, I found myself drawn to make another piece of my identity public for the first time.

In December of 2023, as streetlights cast shadows through my windows, the question “Am I Jewish enough?” clanged in my head as I cruised the virtual aisles of online jewellery departments, looking for my first-ever Star of David pendant. The Magen David, or Shield of David, was derived from the Seal of Solomon and once seen by both Muslims and Jews as a mystical emblem of protection. Only in more recent centuries did it come to be known as the Jewish star, a distinctive symbol of Jewish identity. 

My screen became a constellation of bookmarked possibilities: Art Deco stars, deconstructed stars (aren’t those just two triangles?), rustic “stars for men,” and stars encrusted with diamonds or a variety of birthstones.

All the while, that question—“Am I Jewish enough?”—echoed with each click. 

It was the question I’d heard most often from those hoping to join Yetzirah: A Hearth for Jewish Poetry, the literary nonprofit I’d founded a year earlier.

They weren’t observant, my correspondents often said, and didn’t belong to a temple or keep the Sabbath. Many had a partner who wasn’t Jewish. One wrote with guilt of her love of bacon; another, that her family had just hosted a kosher Christmas dinner. They wrote of being “half-Jewish”—and of their one Jewish parent being “the wrong one.” 

Until very recently, I’d lived an almost entirely secular life and my new immersion in Jewish communities was still not only surprising but surreal. My own question rose up to meet theirs: “Who was I to render a verdict on another Jewish person’s ‘enoughness?’” Their feelings of being an outsider were only too familiar.

In the Florida of my childhood, televangelist megachurches loomed beside the highway and classmates returned from Vacation Bible School to skip through the halls arm in arm, belting out hymns whose words I could never quite catch. High school was faux-grunge Christian rock shirts, church lock-ins, and promise rings. Yet one marker of who was in and who wasn’t never changed: The small crosses of silver and gold glinting from the pedestals of countless tanned clavicles. It felt not only othering but hard for me to parse; what message were they trying to send?

Yet this question of enoughness returned with such frequency I came to think of it, with no small dash of bitter irony, as The Jewish Question. Ironic, of course, because the question echoes the paradoxical la question juive that circulated after the French Revolution before migrating to Germany as die Judenfrage, a query popular with 19^th century antisemites and then resurrected with a vengeance by the Nazis: What was to be done with these pesky Jews who stubbornly insisted on being Jewish?

Among the Nazi’s many answers were the Nuremberg decrees, the so-called racial schema for identifying, segregating, and ultimately trying to eliminate Jews. They didn’t care whether you were a blond, high-ranking German citizen who regularly attended church. With even a single Jewish grandparent, you were a Mischling, a mix-ling, a mongrel. 

If those who detest us feel such confidence in telling us who we are and why we are worthy of their contempt, why can’t we ourselves feel confident claiming and celebrating this heritage?

In my correspondents’ question was exclusion and pain. As people, as poets, being Jewish mattered to them—whether in terms of religion, culture, heritage, or texts—and due to a variety of gatekeeping, they now felt dispossessed of their right to claim and explore this part of themselves.

I responded that as one who tends to find my deepest spiritual connection through the study of sacred texts, writing, and community, and rarely attends synagogue, I’d wondered whether I was Jewish enough to start a Jewish organization. But a wise friend, who is a Presbyterian minister, suggested that these doubts might make me an even better person to found a group whose mission includes providing community for Jews of all identities and ideologies. Then when people come to me with similar doubts, she said, as a fellow outsider, I can welcome them with sincere empathy. 

Since October 7, with national news coverage given to authors uninvited from events after speaking out in support of Palestine, the emails and calls I’m now receiving are from Jews who feel they are being more quietly cancelled. 

They have been uninvited from events, asked to step down from professional literary roles, had the publication of articles delayed, quashed, or even retracted. Yet much of what is perceived as possible cancellation is harder to pin down. Was that sudden slew of rejections for their overtly Jewish poems because the poems were Jewish or simply because an editor didn’t like them? Should they scrub evidence of Judaism from their bios, or bother sending poems to a journal who’d shared a petition that refers to “Israel” and “Israelis” in scare quotes, as though the state and its nine million inhabitants are just a fiction?

Poets called to say they are not attending readings and conferences for fear of confrontation. We speak of family and friends in danger in Israel, of our heartache for the dead and displaced in Gaza. I can hear the exhaustion in their voices and my own.

With so much anger and self-righteous certainty, with so much screaming past each other, facile answers are what we’re drowning in, what we’re being drowned out by. 

But then I closed my laptop on all those possible stars and walked out under a crisp winter sky. The way I’m learning best these days is by getting offline and out into the world. My personal political thoughts are complicated and often contradictory and would make for a lousy slogan or tweet. The messy, beautiful business of actual, real-time human interactions grants the space necessary to be curious and hash out nuance, as well as the freedom to discover new things, admit I’ve been wrong, and even change my mind. Around me, the sidewalk was busy with people running errands beneath strands of Christmas lights. We smiled as we opened each other’s doors. The air smelled of cinnamon and pine. 

Less than a year later, analyzing this time, the FBI will release its “2023 Crime in the Nation Statistics,” noting significant Increases in anti-Jewish (63 per cent), anti-Muslim (49 per cent), and anti-Arab (34 per cent) hate crimes in the U.S.—many people attacked and even killed because they dare to wear a yarmulke or keffiyeh. Yet as a straight-passing woman not easily identifiable as a Jew, I have the benefit of deciding when and with whom I share these facets of my identity. 

The commandment to care for the stranger is found no fewer than 36 times in the Torah, the most repeated command in that text, often paired with the conjunction “because you were once strangers in a strange land.” We are living in a period that calls on us, now more than ever, to try and reach across divides, a care that we must also extend to the parts of ourselves that feel like strangers, the outsider aspects we haven’t entirely let in.

Following October 7, as the question transformed from “Am I Jewish enough?” to “Is any Jewishness too much?,” I began to see that my dismissal of crosses and rainbow paraphernalia, of people proudly signalling parts of their identity, came from a place of both privilege and ignorance. 

Though most days my only adornment was a running watch, the search for a Star of David felt increasingly important—this need for a clear visible marker of this invisible yet vital facet of who I am. The pendant that finally felt like mine was two intertwined triangles composed of silver cables. The braiding speaks to the connection I feel to those who came before me, of the beloved friends and colleagues Judaism has brought me, and wider interfaith connections: I’ve received spiritual direction from my friend the Presbyterian minister; joined a national Black-Jewish Bible study group composed of rabbis and Black Christian clergy (I am the lone poet); taught workshops on using poetry to explore the sacred, classes in which I’ve learned from participants who are former nuns, practicing Buddhists, lapsed Catholics (who can’t stop writing about Catholicism), and clergy of various denominations; and have a regular walking date with a dear friend who’s an Episcopal priest. Each interaction is an opportunity to share new ways of seeing the world and together build new bridges of connection between our different traditions.

Proverbs says that when you open yourself to wisdom, these teachings “are a graceful wreath upon your head, a necklace about your throat.” Jewish sages have parsed this to mean that wisdom is not only something we study, it’s something we do.

The garland on our heads indicates that wisdom starts in the mind: The more we devote ourselves to learning, the more expansive our thinking and more open we become to the perspectives of others. But if it stops there, that abstract, unused knowledge is like treasure gathering dust in an attic. It is the second part of the proverb that guides us to action. We must allow knowledge to move from our heads to our throats, where we can alchemize it into words suffused with our own queries and experiences. And how better to do that than in the company of others?

I step outside now with this symbol at my throat, aware of it speaking even as I walk silently down the street. I acknowledge the possible confrontations it might provoke. Yet I wear this star as an affirmation to other Jews I meet, so that we might each feel a little less alone, and as a welcome for anyone who might join me in civil conversation, an invitation to breathe together for a moment and share our questions.

What does it mean for a community to be truly inclusive? When does the celebration of diversity become more than just lip service? The conversation around diversity and inclusion has become more prominent in recent years, yet it often encounters a paradoxical tipping point. While many communities, including the Jewish community, express a strong commitment to diversity, this enthusiasm can wane when faced with the need for significant changes to longstanding practices and norms. The journey from diversity as a principle to diversity as a lived reality is fraught with challenges, particularly for marginalized groups within the Jewish community—such as Black, Brown, and queer Jews—who often feel pressured to conform to dominant cultural norms.

Their burnt offerings and sacrifices shall be welcome on My altar; For My House shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples.  — Isaiah.56.7

Conversations surrounding racial diversity often reveal a paradoxical tipping point: a moment when initial enthusiasm for diversity gives way to resistance. This phenomenon is not unique to any particular community, and the Jewish community is no exception. While diversity is often celebrated in principle, the commitment can falter when it necessitates challenging the status quo or implementing substantial changes to ingrained practices and norms.

Within the Jewish community, marginalized groups such as Black, Brown, and queer Jews frequently face implicit or explicit pressure to assimilate into the prevailing Jewish culture. This assimilation often involves conforming to dominant cultural norms, traditions, and practices that have historically marginalized and excluded diverse expressions of Jewish identity.

To truly foster inclusivity and honour the richness of Jewish diversity, we must transition from a model of assimilation to one of genuine inclusion. Rather than expecting marginalized individuals to mold themselves into a predetermined framework, we must actively expand the tent to encompass and celebrate the full spectrum of Jewish identities.

Expanding the tent necessitates a multi-faceted approach. First and foremost, we must ensure that leadership, educational materials, and communal narratives reflect the diverse experiences and histories of the Jewish people. This means integrating the stories, traditions, and perspectives of Jews of colour, LGBTQ+ Jews, and other marginalized groups into the mainstream Jewish narrative.

Additionally, developing and adopting inclusive religious practices and rituals is crucial. This involves rethinking how services are conducted, the languages used, and the symbols and rituals that are emphasized to ensure that they resonate with and include diverse identities.

Fostering a sense of belonging and ownership among marginalized individuals is paramount. This can be achieved through affinity groups, inclusive programming, and community dialogues that address issues of race, gender, and sexuality within the Jewish context.

Education and advocacy also play a vital role in dismantling systemic barriers to inclusion. Educating the broader community about the importance of diversity, addressing unconscious biases, and advocating for policies that promote equity and inclusion are essential steps toward fulfilling the prophetic vision of an inclusive and welcoming community.

The concept of expanding our communal tent aligns with the wisdom of our tradition. The prophet Isaiah speaks to the inclusivity and expansiveness of our community: “Enlarge the site of your tent. Extend the size of your dwelling. Do not stint. Lengthen the ropes, and drive the pegs firm (Isaiah 54:2).“

The above verse encourages us to make room and expand our spaces and boundaries to include those who have been on the margins. It is a call to embrace diversity and to create an inclusive community that reflects the fullness of our shared heritage.

By expanding the tent and embracing the full spectrum of Jewish diversity, we not only enrich the Jewish experience for all but also uphold our core values of justice, equity, and collective responsibility. Instead of merely paying lip service to diversity, we must actively engage in practices that genuinely reflect the diverse realities of our community. 

This entails a commitment to dismantling systemic barriers, fostering inclusivity, and celebrating the richness that diverse identities bring to our shared heritage. Only then can we truly create a vibrant, resilient, and inclusive Jewish community that thrives on the strength of its diversity.

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“A House of Prayer for All Peoples? Confronting the Tipping Point of Diversity” originally appeared on Rabbi Sandra Lawson's Substack.

The biggest night in Hollywood is celebrating Jewface. 

At this year’s Oscars, Maestro, Bradley Cooper’s biopic about the acclaimed American Jewish conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein is nominated for seven awards. Tonight, on March 10, millions of viewers will tune in to watch this past year’s venerated films, with many blissfully unaware of the public scrutiny that has plagued Maestro.

When film images were first released last year of Cooper sporting an exceptionally large prosthetic nose to look more like Bernstein, Maestro has garnered considerable controversy. An uproar rose on the Internet, with one social media user saying, “This isn’t about making a non-Jewish actor look more like Leonard Bernstein; it’s about making a non-Jewish actor look more like a Jewish stereotype.”

The stills prompted and revived the conversation around Jewface—who can play Jewish characters? And when non-Jews play Jews, can they wear prosthetic noses? 

After the onslaught of negative public opinion, Bernstein’s children released a statement saying they supported Cooper’s depiction of their father, and that Bernstein wouldn’t have minded the prosthetic, which quieted the qualms until the movie’s release. 

When I first saw the side-by-side images of Cooper playing Bernstein and Bernstein, it was clear that Cooper’s profile was exaggerated. I felt a sense of unease. Why did he need to change his face at all? He looked enough like the young Bernstein, face intact. When he plays the older Bernstein, the makeup department can age his face, but why make Cooper’s nose bigger than it is? 

Cooper defended the makeup choices, saying in an interview with CBS Mornings, “it’s all about balance. My lips are nothing like Lenny’s and my chin. . . . It just didn’t look right” without the prosthetic.

There were also critics and fans who didn’t understand why Cooper’s portrayal of Bernstein garnered such a polarized reaction. Other actors have donned prosthetics before to look more like the real-life person they’re inhabiting such as Nicole Kidman playing Virginia Woolf in The Hours, Gary Oldman playing Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour, and Austin Butler playing Elvis Presley in Elvis, to name a few.

It’s important to place Cooper’s Bernstein in the context of Jewish history. There’s a long and troubling history of Jewish caricatures and stereotypes that have followed Jews for decades. The most insidious was during the Second World War when Nazi propaganda showed Jews with hooked noses, dehumanizing and vilifying the Jewish people. It’s a painful part of Jewish history and can be triggering for Jews to see non-Jews don prosthetic noses. 

Cooper’s intentions were pure, but his ignorance about Judaism prevails in this situation. If capturing the physical look of the real life characters was paramount for Cooper, why did Carey Mulligan who plays Bernstein’s wife Felicia Montealegre not wear any prosthetics when she was younger? Why does she look enough like Montealagre, but Cooper doesn’t look enough like Bernstein? It should be noted that there was upset over Mulligan’s casting as Montealagre was a Chilean-American actor born in Costa Rica–Mulligan isn't of South or Central American descent. 

What struck me when watching the film is there’s only one scene that mentions Bernstein’s Judaism, when his mentor the Russian-American conductor Serge Koussevitzky says, “To a Bernstein they will never give an orchestra. But a Berns?” and continues to discuss the difficulties of being a Jew in the business. If the film didn’t wish to explore his Jewishness, why perfectly depict his Jewish features? Bernstein is one of the most famous American composers and conductors of the 20th century and there is no doubt in my mind that he faced prejudice climbing the elitist classical music ladder, defending himself against the antisemitism that came his way. None of that is investigated in Maestro. His Judaism is explored in the periphery and that is what I take sincere issue with in the film. 

If non-Jewish actors want to play Jews they must take time to understand the religion and culture, and immerse themselves in the rich, resilient, and beautiful community they’re trying to depict. The answer isn’t putting on a prosthetic nose. But the Academy chose to celebrate that choice; telling the world that Jewface is acceptable and permissible. And that message sets a troubling precedent.

The coming of spring, and our festival of Passover, brings with it a feeling of renewal.

There is a prevalent theme in Judaism that even on your happiest occasions you remember loss—and even in those moments of loss, you look for joy and renewal. There is this constant notion that in life we can hold sadness and happiness at the same time, that one begets the other. 

It is the reason you smash the glass at a wedding or leave a corner of your new home unfinished. Even on our most joyful occasions, these traditions remind us of the pain and destruction our people have faced in the past.

Similarly, when someone dies, we say “may their memory be a blessing” because there is this incredible idea that in those moments of profound loss we have to carry on living and find what gives us joy and hope.

Spring is exactly that pivotal season. We move from the cold and dark of winter to a rebirth of our earth and the real hope and excitement of new life blossoming. The days are brighter and warmer with unfurling leaves, colourful blooms, and gorgeous birdsong.

It is in this season that we sit around the Seder table and recount our Passover story. The moment when the Red Sea parts and makes way for the Israelites to cross, before the water returns and drowns the Egyptians, brings with it the thrill of redemption.

But even in this moment of celebration, when the Jews were freed from slavery, God (in the Midrash) scolds the angels for singing, because God’s creatures are dying. At the same time, God doesn’t tell the Jewish people off, as there is a recognition that even in moments of loss one still has to be glad for the things that are.

During the Seder—while we talk of freedom throughout—the food we eat is the salt water of tears, the charoset of cement, and the maror of the bitterness of slavery.

Again, even in our moments of happiness, we also remember pain and loss. The Seder is designed this way to make us think about the responsibility of what being free really means.

Judaism exists in this contrast.

You only know what loss is because you’ve loved. You only know what loneliness is because you’ve had friendships. You only know the value of life because there is death.

Our challenge is to continuously notice and appreciate the sparks of hope and the moments of joy in the everyday.

For us, as Jews, acknowledging these contrasts shouldn’t only come once a year on Passover but every week on Shabbat. This affords us the ability to take time to reflect on both our sadness and our joy.

Leonard Cohen’s world, as French writer Christophe Lebold notes in his biography of the late artist, is “uniquely his own yet a lot like ours . . . where men step into avalanches and saints fall in love with Fire.” For 435 pages, Lebold’s Leonard Cohen: The Man Who Saw Angels Fall, out now with ECW Press, will have you immersed in this world rife with spirituality, artistry, and desire.

On November 4, Lebold spoke at an event at Holy Blossom Temple paying tribute to Cohen’s legacy and celebrating the release of his book. He gave a talk that speaks of what makes Cohen’s world what it is, in all its complex and glorious flickers of light and all its shades of darkness. 

The following is an excerpt from that presentation, and takes us to Leonard Cohen— a man whose flame and legacy cannot be extinguished. 

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Leonard Cohen attempted to be all Jewish heroes at once. Like Abraham, he has crossed the world and tried to be home everywhere and remain a stranger everywhere, like David he has written Psalms and seduced women, like Jacob he has struggled with an angel, in his case, a dark angel of depression, and like Ezekiel and Isaiah, he has reminded us that God sometimes wants it darker. You know the lines: “You want it darker/We kill the flame.” But like another Leonard and another Jewish hero called Lenny Bruce, who Leonard Cohen had seen live on stage in New York, he also reminds us that sometimes the quickest way to feel the sacredness of all things, to feel the sacredness of God, of women, of poetry, of language, is to desecrate those things. Leonard was also keen to show us that God’s world was also a place of pure comedy, and that God indeed had, as we know, a great sense of humour.

A spiritual poet is someone who writes about spiritual matters and someone who uses certain forms: prayer, confession, teaching theological speculation. But I believe a spiritual poet is also someone who fosters spiritual insight. The spiritual poet provides a spiritual landscape where the audience’s inner life, the audience’s secret life, the audience's life with the absolute can unfold and thrive. 

On the cover of my book, Leonard Cohen is caught on a train that is going 150 miles an hour. Maybe he has just seen the angels fall. Anyway, he lights up a cigarette. Five minutes of his life will go up into smoke. But doing this, he offers a little Holocaust to the Lord. He offers five minutes of his own life, but he also sets fire to the world. And he sets fire to our spiritual imagination, like a spiritual poet does. 

Inspired by the Torah, inspired by Isaac Luria, but also inspired by existentialism and Christianity and later by Zen Buddhism, Leonard Cohen’s vision on life is based on three ideas: We are broken and so is the world and so our societies and so is God himself. But in our case, brokenness is a holy state because it opens us to love and light. Second, we are not at home, and we cannot be. We are pilgrims and passersby who need to rebuild the hospitality of the world on a daily basis, and who need to dissolve the barriers that separates us from our hearts, from others, and from God. And you do that with a poem. You do that with an embrace. You do that with a song. Idea number three, our hearts are on fire, and like Joan of Arc, we must accept to live in the flames until we are purified and ready to give ourselves to true love, a love that connects us to everything, to a partner, to God, to a sunbeam, to a smile, or to a traffic jam.

In other words, Leonard Cohen’s vision: we are not at home, we are broken and we burn, points to the necessity of a fundamental act, the act he pursued his whole life, the great reparation, the mending of the heart, the mending of the world, the mending of God. In other words, the great Tikkun. Now, how do you repair the world? How do you repair the great brokenness that inhabits all things and that keeps coming back? Well you create something that is not broken. That’s what you do. And in the case of Leonard, it’s little nigunim, little waltz melodies that go around in circles and define a great space of consolation—that’s not broken. Or you write little poems, four-line stanzas, six-line stanzas, eight-line stanzas, little poems that say things like “It’s four in the morning, the end of December/I’m writing you now just to see if you’re better.” Or little things that say, “Everybody knows that the boat is leaking/Everybody knows that the captain lied/Everybody got this broken feeling/like their father of a dog just died.” That’s not broken. Or little things that say, “So come my friend, be not afraid/We are so lightly here/It is in love that we are made/In love, we disappear.” I mean, how beautiful can poetry become? I always tell my students, if you understand those lines, you don’t need to know much else.

Or you create concerts that are a spiritual experiment, and you reinvent the crooner as a spiritual teacher and the high priest as a troubadour. You take audiences on a journey through the dark night of a soul with a view to bring them to a space of illumination and enlightenment.

I had the privilege to spend a little time with him. I don’t mean to suggest that I loved him the best. I don’t mean to suggest in any way that I was a longtime friend (although we wrote to each other for a few years) or a member of his close entourage. But for a few days, we had a very intimate relationship, and we were best of buddies, and we were two little Buddhas trading stories and wisdom for a few days. This man took his role as a Cohen, very, very, very, very seriously. He knew his mission was to serve as an intercessor, to bring the love of the community to God, and to bring the love and blessing of God to the community. He just did it like a poet in an unconventional fashion, being also aware that the priest in him was also an unrepentant sinner and a joker who saw life as a cosmic joke and who saw the law of gravity that makes us fall as a sign of God’s sense of humour. But Cohen he was.

When I had published the first version of this book in French about 10 years ago (the book has changed a lot since) he had sent me a medal with a signature sign of the two intertwined hearts and on the flip side of it there was engraved the Birkat Kohanim. I still have it, of course, and it’s a very precious talisman that I cherish that gives me a lot of strength. As you know this Cohen was deeply heterodox, to say the least, he had once defined religion as his favourite hobby, and although he evidently remained a resolute and proud and unrepentant Jew to his dying day, a poem that he wrote in 1990 says, “Anyone who says/I’m not a Jew/is not a Jew/I’m very sorry/but this decision/is final.” So although he was a resolute and unrepentant Jew, he also considered that other traditions needed to be explored. He saw this as a little spiritual exile in Babylon that he had to go on, on a regular basis. And his travelling, therefore, was not just from one city to the next or one Suzanne to the next, but also from one tradition to another tradition. As you probably know, his first book of poetry was called Let Us Compare Mythologies, and he was faithful to that program his whole life. So this practicing Jew who was reading the Kabbalah to the end of his life in his living room, also had a secret shrine to the Virgin Mary in a cupboard in his kitchen, and together we offered Japanese incense to her with Buddhist salutations. And two days before, he had invited me to the opening of a Sabbath.

He just loved paradoxes. And he loved going from one tradition to the next. It was very sensual to him. I believe that each tradition enriched his relation to the absolute and his sense that every moment was sacred, but also that every moment was transient and ephemeral, and therefore beautiful beyond relief.

This was a man who, when I spent time with him in the last year of his life, had reached, evidently, a very high degree of realization, a very high degree of enlightenment, a very high degree of emancipation, a very high degree of proximity of God, whatever you want to call it. At that stage, he was looking death in his eyes. He negotiated the coming of the inevitable with grace, a sense of humour, and no fear at all. And there emanated from him an incredible warmth, a very powerful energy of love. 

In the book, I say that “all it takes for me is to close my eyes and I can still feel the warmth of his presence.” And that is true. In Zen, there is allegedly a state of spiritual enlightenment where you can manifest your awakening in the smallest acts, how you lift a coffee cup, how you tell jokes, or how you recite a poem. Just by the way you move you manifest enlightenment. And I believe that there is an old Hasidic saying that says that if you don’t understand a Tzadik’s teaching, you can just watch him tie his shoelace. When I was with Leonard, he was wearing slip-on shoes, so there was no chance of that. I could not see how he tied his shoelace, but I can testify that there was a grace in everything he did, however broken he was. A beautiful master, a beautiful loser, and every moment that I spent with him was a beautiful, little Leonard Cohen moment.

Adam Wolfond’s video installation What if My Body is a Beacon for the World? will be open to the public at Koffler Arts from January 9 to 26. Curated by David Liss, the exhibit allows audiences to move through Wolfond’s world by showing how a member of the neurodivergent and autistic community, who is non-speaking and types to communicate, moves through the atmospheres that surround him.

The video, presented with dis assembly, the arts organizations he co-founded and co-directs with his mother, Estée Klar, an artist who has a Ph.D. in Critical Disability Studies from York University, has been two years in the making. But that’s not all the pair has been up to in the time leading up to the exhibit’s opening. Wolfond has published two poetry collections The Wanting Way and Open Book in The Way of Water, and just this month, dis assembly, which operates as a lab for neurodiverse artistic experimentation, was featured in Koffler Arts’ most-recent exhibit, Another Decade, showcasing Wolfond and Klar’s Covid Calendars and Poet Trees.

Wolfond is also enrolled in an individual masters program at Concordia University with a concentration on film, movement, and collaboration. He is the first non-speaking autistic person in Canada to attend university. One of his interests lies in, he shared with me, giving people the opportunity to understand, through artistic expression, that “making a ceaseless calm flow of patterns is the way I need to think.”

Klar has fought hard to open doors for her son and give him a platform for his work. She was the original blogger of The Joy of Autism and the founder of The Autism Acceptance Project (2006–2018). 

I had the pleasure of sitting down, over Google Meet, with Wolfond and Klar who spoke with me from their condo in Toronto. On one wall sits rows and rows of Wolfond’s prized bath toys, some of which are featured in Poet Trees. The collection is as kaleidoscopic and vibrant as their passion is for access and creation.

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I wanted to begin with what has inspired your work on neurodiversity. Can you tell me more about it?

EK: If your perception is intertwined with many things in the atmospheres it does result in different mannerisms and movements and tick-like movements. We learn how that reconfigures perception. And that’s a lot of the work that’s coming up in the video installation happening at Koffler Arts. We’re digging into that together.

And how do you support Adam in his endeavours? 

EK: Adam would not be able to type if he didn’t have an activating touch-support. When you have what’s called autistic catatonia, in clinical terms, you have trouble with your motor planning. While Adam can type a few words on his own, it’s hard to sustain that movement unless I touch Adam on his back. It’s activating a movement. He calls it a “grounding” or a “landing.” As a facilitator, supporter, and parent, I have to feel alongside them. Adam has taught me a lot about the mutual nature of support and care that I hope will still seep out into the community and shift the way that we support autistic people in Canada.

Have you seen any progress made in the field since you started?

EK: It has come a long way. We hear neurodiversity a lot more in our culture because it spans more than the autistic person or the autistic body. You can be neurodivergent and autistic. Lots of people who claim that they’re neurodivergent are not autistic. The fact that we can perceive differently, that we think differently, has really caught on, but it hasn’t caught on to the same degree we want in our educational systems, in academia. Adam is the first non-speaking autistic person in Canada to be at university, never mind a master’s degree. We had to work for that. We had to find people who were empathetic to our cause and fighting the forms that we’re supposed to abide with, and even our dissertation, I call it our dissertation because there would be no dissertation without Adam’s collaboration and input. I wasn’t allowed to put his name on the front of my dissertation. So what does that say about the quote, unquote, participatory methods in research creation? It’s really problematic. And then the Applied Behavioural Analysis therapy (A.B.A), which is called Intensive Behavioural Intervention in Canada, has people who are still promoting it, so it’s difficult. It’s a system that then never really changes. So from that side, there’s still a lot of work to do.

You are setting an example for others, and giving people who are going through similar situations the ability to see themselves in Adam and in you.

EK: That’s the hope with our artistic practices. We founded an artistic practice that was process oriented, experimental. Adam calls it “the rally,” the way we rally together, the way that Adam’s ideas can come forth, because it’s like a new form is being created in what Adam calls “languaging.” Going outside the lines of what’s expected. As a mom, I feel that’s been enriching for both of us.

How has it been working together over the years and what have you learned from each other?

AW: I have learned that I can offer more to research when I am leading the way it is done.

EK: I think we learn from each other. And Adam, you’ve said a lot about how we lead together. I’m here to support. So it does put me in a number of different roles. Yes, I am a mother. I’m a trainer of other people, assistants who support Adam’s work. I’m an academic doing this in the field. What other options really were there for us if we didn’t do this kind of work together? I don’t think I could have lived with putting him into some home or institution or school that was A.B.Aing him. It wasn’t feasible. How do you have to live? How do you need to live? Those were the questions that were always coming up and that’s how we got to this place.

In your poem, Adam, what does the line “I am the pace of my body, not language,” which also serves as the title, mean to you?

AW: I want it to be emphasized that language is a way to produce meaning, and I make meaning also in the ways I move with the atmospheres and that paces of things are as important as words, and the body says more things.

‍Since the formation of dis assembly, what has the organization and the art that has come through it taught you both?

EK: Improvisational artistic practice has honoured the processes that we invent with neurodiverse ways of living and expressing. We learn how to support and think alongside and with people.

AK: Making in ways other than normative meaning is a blessing that people need to hear about. And I hope many non-speakers like me can access communication and empathy. 

Shifting focus to Another Decade, I am interested in how the installation Poet Trees came together.

EK: Adam has these movements that settle his body. His body always has to move, and the weight of certain things are also very calming to the body. We were going on lots of walks during the pandemic and thinking a lot at that time about synesthesia and perception. I guess you can say the work is always about that. And so you see a lot of colours. You see, in Poet Trees, his Tabasco bottles that are woven in, some poetry is woven in, the rubber bath toys that he would tap or need to collect are in those trees, amongst other items that we had on hand, and that weaving or going around, around motion was feasible. The branches we would find on those daily walks are heavy. We would lug them back to our condo, where we worked. The weight of the wood, the colours, the sensory experience woven into it, is sort of how his poetry moves.

It’s interesting what affects us and how that crosses into our lives, and into the art we make, and into the stories we tell.

EK: As a mother and supporter, I’m learning. I’m still thinking about how to convey this different aspect of mothering: how I learn what is mutual, how I support outside of this neurotypical mothering that follows these developmental timelines and typical strategies, which hasn't been my life either.

I think there’s so many things we need to unlearn.

EK: If people are open to shifting the way we do things, or shifting the way we move from westernized forms of knowledge, it can be an exciting time too.

To shift, we need that openness. We need a lot more of making support visible. A problem in our culture is that we’re a very oralist society, so we prove our competencies through speaking. We think that competence is independent of any support. And so we problematize this kind of relation that Adam and I have, or that he has with his other assistive support workers. And we need to totally rethink and get away from that because we know that non-speakers and other disabled people are competent and have different views of the world, and we need to open that up.

I’m learning from this conversation too, and I also hope everyone is open to learning. In January, Adam’s exhibit will open at Koffler. What can we expect?

EK: We played with different types of cameras and used an endoscopic camera, a body camera, and Zoom recorders. The idea is to bring you into a more sensorial world, where detail comes at you, or things are blurred. It immerses and saturates the body that Adam uses. I think that pace and pattern are really important, and we’re thinking along with a lot of quantum theory.

Do you have anything you want viewers to take away with them?

EK: It’s the first ever such project by a non-speaking autistic person. And typically, many of the films with non-speaking autistic people in them are more narrative based. I'm not putting these films down, they’ve been very useful. The camera is focused on the autistic body. And being a critical disability scholar, I was thinking about the gaze, and I wanted the view from Adam outward, rather than looking at him. You don’t really see Adam in any of these video-based pieces. The only thing you see is some of his words will be projected on the screen, and his typing pace. Hopefully people will come away with a completely different experience of autistic perception and the way an autistic person can represent themselves.

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This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

This year, we were both honoured to serve as producers for What Do I Do with All This Heritage?, the first theatre show to explore the true stories of Asian American Jews through a series of monologues. Audiences of all heritages experienced the stories of a Vietnamese teenager balancing her Orthodox rules with a secret love of Korean pop music, a Chinese man converting to Judaism encountering hilarity while scheduling his own circumcision, a young Indian-American girl discovering her truest self through having a dual Jewish and a Muslim coming-of-age ceremony, and a Jewish adoptee from Korea returning to discover his birth-family in a surprising and unforgettable tale. Plus many more stories and a rollicking song!

This show was the latest production from The Braid, a Jewish story company that has pioneered the art of salon theatre. In that genre, a selection of autobiographical stories are curated around a theme and performed by a cast of actors dressed in black. With no sets or props, the word is what comes alive, firing the imagination and inviting audiences into the same enchantment that our prehistoric ancestors felt as they heard stories around the campfire.

What Do I Do with All This Heritage? touched hearts around the country, and included performances at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles and at the San Francisco Jewish Community Center, plus many other venues as well as two virtual shows for global audiences. It became the highest grossing initial box office run in The Braid’s 17-year history, and an East Coast tour is currently in the works.

But most importantly, like all of The Braid’s shows, it brought people together. “I cried and laughed so much and felt deeply seen,” raved Patricia Yu, an Asian Jewish patron. Asian American Star Wars actress Kelly Marie Tran raved about the “beautiful” music featured in the show, admitting she “fully sobbed.” Rachel Bernstein, an Ashkenazi Jew with Sephardi family, wrote in her opening night review for Hey Alma, “There is absolutely no question in my mind that this play will be meaningful for Asian Jews, but it will also be impactful for Jews of all backgrounds and those that are not Jewish.”

It’s because of this transformative power that we’re very excited that The Braid will be able to embody future works in a new physical space. Previously, our shows were hosted as pop-ups around the country (often in synagogues and JCCs, but also in museums, private homes, and even prisons). Located in Santa Monica, CA, but with live-streaming capabilities it will be both a local and a global home for Jewish stories. Living up to its motto of “leave no Jewish story untold,” we’ve both watched The Braid give stage to groundbreaking shows about LGBTQIA+ Jews, Latin Jews, Iranian Jews, Jews of Colour, Soviet Jews, Jews and Muslims, Israeli-Americans, and women rabbis. We’ve also seen it explore universal themes like food, forgiveness, and family. And in addition to our work on What Do I Do with All This Heritage?, we’ve both begun our respective journeys with The Braid through writing our own stories and via its NEXT Emerging Artists program. Even though The Braid is an almost two-decade old Jewish institution, it is constantly offering opportunities for fresh talent to share their creativity.

That’s why we’re so excited about the opening of this new physical space. The Braid will still keep its stories and shows travelling, but having an in-person home base means it can take even more chances on underserved voices and unique talents. Already there are plans for one-person shows about fatherhood from a Black Jewish comedian and another from a Uruguayan Jewish musician. And the new space will have its grand opening with a reprise of the Off Broadway hit Not That Jewish, first developed by The Braid, in which comedy legend Monica Piper offers hilarious and heartwarming true tales from her own remarkable life.

What all of these exciting shows have in common is the power of storytelling. “I love stories,” says Ronda Spinak, The Braid’s founder and artistic director. “They entertain, educate, inspire, and move us to action. They’re a portal to human connection. And right now, we need Jewish stories more than ever.”

We hope you’ll stop by the-braid.org and check out this warm and loving home for stories that’s helped each of us find our authentic voice. In fact, we hope you’ll not just consider checking out some of its theatrical offerings, but consider submitting a story of your own to The Braid for consideration for one of its shows. We each still remember the moment of seeing an actor give life to words we’d written about private and personal experiences we never thought we’d share, and the power of seeing the world embrace them. In a time that is so deeply divided, our stories brought people together. And that didn’t just make us feel good, it gave us hope. A hope we’d love to share with you all.

At the centre of the Koffler Arts dozens of plants on black metal shelving are illuminated by green and purple light. Pulled in by the beautiful flowers, you head toward the installation. But then you stop in your tracks. Beside each plant is its botanical name and meaning, and each one has a dark past. 

The plants’ names perpetuate societal prejudices against racial, cultural, gender, and social groups. The names for many viewers will prove shocking, as they read about “Wandering Jew,”“Jews mallow,” “Indian Chief,” “Gypsy Weed,” “Clitoria”—and those aren’t even the most offensive. 

Brazilian artist Giselle Beiguelman takes us into the world of botany and nomenclature—a system of naming things in a particular field—and it’s troubling history in a colonialist framework. Her exhibit, Botannica Tirannica now on display at the Koffler Arts in Toronto until October 20, shows us how plant names have been warped and imbued with oppressive language, and how reclaiming certain species of flora can bring back their original intended purpose. In Canada, that means bringing back medicinal purposes for plants used by Indigenous communities and celebrating “weeds” a non-scientific term used to weaponize against unharmful or misunderstood plants. 

Outside the gallery is the “Garden of Resilience” housing what are considered “invasive weeds” so that they grow together. Created in collaboration with Isaac Crosby, a Black and Ojibwa knowledge keeper, gardener and agriculture expert, the garden displays the plants’ problematic names, scientific names, and their original Indigenous names so that viewers can learn about their history and uses, to help revitalize Indigenous language and culture. 

I sat down with Beiguelman to discuss the process of making this exhibit and what she hopes viewers will take away with them after visiting the gallery. 

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You were inspired to create this exhibition after receiving a gift of a Tradescantia zebrina seedling, commonly called “Wandering Jew,” a name referencing the 13th-century myth that recurred in Nazi propaganda. What were the first thoughts that entered your mind when you heard the name of the plant? 

I was presented with a “Wandering Jew” from this man and didn’t know the popular name of this plant at the time, and I was totally in shock. I didn’t know the prejudice that was embedded in these (botanical) names. When I was on my way home, inside the Uber, I began searching up the plant on my cell phone and saw that it was true, the plant was called “Wandering Jew.” As soon as I got home I began searching antisemitism and scientific nomenclature (a system of naming things in a particular field) and it didn’t take me longer than 15 minutes to realize there was a broader problem. Those problematic names had been given to plants and were anti-Black, anti-Indigenous, anti-LGBTQ+, misogynistic, and prejudice against Romani people.

So was it after this discovery you delved right into the exhibit? I’m curious about the process of how you began to work on it. 

First, during COVID-19, I was looking online at the plants themselves and knew the exhibition would be a garden, to put all those plants together in the same place. It would be beautiful but at the same time reflect the same prejudices that many [marginalized] groups have been experiencing for centuries. This was one of the main ideas I had from the beginning. 

You also use artificial intelligence in video and images to create these reimagined hybrid plants by taking the datasets of these prejudicial plants. Out of it come these new plants breaking free of their oppressive names and histories. Was that also an idea from the beginning? 

This came about when I was doing my first experimentation with artificial intelligence using generative AI and deep fakes. In the colonial process there is a splitting of nature and culture; that nature must be conquered by their [Western] culture. What if we do this by going beyond the scale of nature with awful, common and scientific names—a eugenic methodology to create a Western ideal. There are similarities in AI methodologies. So I wanted to bring together these datasets of these prejudicial plants but to then go beyond the patterns [in the algorithms] to create these new hybrid plants born out of a prejudiced mindset. There were so many possibilities that were born, the result was very good. 

This exhibit was so educational for me, so many plant names have such hurtful and painful histories. So many were surprising, like the history of lavender being used in U.S. politics to describe the “perceived threat” of the LGBTQ+ community. Were there any stories that shocked you in particular? 

The shock came for me at the start, when I first came to understand how awful the scientific names are. I have a published dataset of 200 plants and there are 50 antisemitic names. There are plant names that erase the culture and history of Indigenous people. The amount of names that touch on the genocide of Indigenous people or enslavement of Black people is shocking. Learning of the plant called “dumb cane,” which was used by plantation owners to torture enslaved people (as it makes the mouth swell when eaten), while they forced people to work in the worst possible conditions, was just horrible. There was so much, and each region has their own specific words targetting different groups. In Brazil, many plants target women and Black people. In Germany, it's Jews and Romani people. 

This exhibit premiered at the Museu Judaico de São Paulo, Brazil in 2022 and has since traveled to Pakistan, Italy and now, Toronto. In each city, a garden is always curated. What was it like putting them together? 

We are the project of colonialism and it is referenced in our daily lives by the language we use because it signifies our practices. So the idea of reparation, or giving back to the original populations, was an important way to reflect, and these small gardens do that in a small way.  

The idea of a weed being a plant that wasn’t profitable or one that needed to be eradicated. It’s how many plants have been targeted. It’s not the main part of the exhibit but creates a strong statement for the exhibition as a whole. 

What do you hope people take away from this exhibit? 

We did the first mounting of the exhibit in 2022 and now we’re in 2024, the exhibit has never stopped and has travelled to all these different places. I want people to understand that prejudice never targets just one group. Prejudice comes in many forms and if people think the naming of these plants isn’t a problem, it is a problem. The identification cards for the plants aren’t just meant to inform you but shock you.

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This interview has edited for clarity and length.

In March, Jessica Jacobs released her third poetry collection unalone. After seven years at work, her retelling of Genesis arrived on bookshelves. In between Isaac and Sarah and Noah and Joseph, Jacobs weaves her own history, truths, and dilemmas.

Be it through unalone or previous collections, there is a ferocity and tenderness to her poems that make room for curious minds to settle into the known and unknown. In teaching, she makes room for her students by showing how to find the good in an albeit prickly world. In leading, she makes room by nourishing Jewish storytelling at Yetzirah, a literary nonprofit she founded that supports Jewish poets. With chapters springing up throughout the U.S., and hot off the heels of their second Jewish Poetry Conference, the impact of Jacobs’s hearth for poetry will be felt by emerging and established poets for years to come.

During our conversation, Jacobs said that Genesis “is there to mirror you in wherever you are in the moment” and in this moment, we meet Jessica Jacobs, poet, teacher, and community leader, at home in Asheville, North Carolina. ‍

Your first poetry collection, Pelvis with Distance, is centred on Georgia O’Keeffe, who is not God but a mystical-like figure, and your second collection, Take Me With You, Wherever You’re Going, is more memoir-based. How did they both lead you to write unalone? 

It’s funny, there are people in New Mexico who have truly built their lives around O’Keeffe in the way people build their lives around God.

When I went to New Mexico to write Pelvis with Distance, the experience of being in the desert and the research and experience of trying to write into a life and voice that wasn’t mine was very helpful when looking at biblical characters for unalone. To write that first book, I found a cabin in the high desert of Abiquiú, which is where O’Keeffe lived, and spent a month there alone. I wanted to be in the landscape and absorb it. I had a solar panel to power my laptop and that was the only electricity. There was no phone, no internet. My closest neighbours were five miles away. It was terrifying. We’re never alone like that in modern society. I was in my early 30s and really big questions came up because I couldn’t just drown them out with a movie on Netflix. I started to think about existential questions like, What does it mean to live a good life? What does it mean to live knowing you’re going to die?

And when I came back into the world, I was falling in love with the woman who for nearly the next decade would be my wife, which led to my second book, which asked: What does it mean to partner with someone and share your life with them? It was a practice in vulnerability, in trying to write even the more difficult parts of myself more honestly. If you’re going to immerse yourself in a religious text, that kind of openness is helpful.

In unalone, there are statements that inspire questions of morality for the reader and there are moments when you question morality. For instance, you write “It feels better to be kind / than right” and you ask “which is worse: to be guilty or powerless?” I don’t think either introduce questions that can be solved. Do you think they are supposed to be?

No, I don’t think they are. In a similar way, I couldn’t hand you the Torah and say these are the answers and be done. You need havruta [study partners]. You need to be in conversation with the text. You need to be in conversation with other people in the world. I’m grateful for being alive to these questions. Even if you never find a definitive answer, if you can sit down with someone and explore questions together and be in conversation, that’s when, to me, there’s intimacy and exchange that can alter you in significant ways.

How did working on the collection, over the course of seven years, change your relationship to these religious texts or even to God?

You asked how my relationship changed to the text—I had no relationship to the text. My relationship to the Hebrew Bible was through literature and literary allusions, but I had never really engaged directly with the texts at all. There is a mystical idea in Judaism that the Torah is a text without flaw. Yet the experience of sitting with a sacred text and approaching it as though it is perfect, was so hard for me. When I tried to read the Bible when I was younger, I would say it’s disturbing and patriarchal—which it is!—and then stop reading it. But to read it in a way that says if something feels bad, if I don’t understand it, then instead of setting it aside, I have to sit with the text long enough that it becomes my teacher, well that changed everything. That shift in relationship wasn’t easy. Yet, what I found was that the most disturbing stories for me, like the Akedah, The Binding of Isaac, led me to ask questions I wouldn’t have asked on my own, independent of the text. 

The way I think about God and where I see God is in connection—with a piece of text or a piece of music or a beautiful trail in the mountains while I’m out running—all of which can bring me in closer relationship to myself. But it’s also sitting down with a havruta or someone I deeply care about and having a beautiful conversation. To me, that’s God. When I think I am being my most authentic self, when am I in service to something more than just myself.

You’re inviting those connections in as well by being open to your surroundings.

We’re living in a world right now that is always telling us to pay attention, which means pay attention to the thing I want you to and ignore everything else. When you sit with something that is as mysterious as the Torah, you have to crack yourself open and try and stay in that receptive state. It changes my poems and also how I am with other people because it helps me be more alive to the possibilities of who they are. It’s been an astonishing experience. 

In unalone you also weave in the personal. Did you know that you would always include those experiences, for example, with or of your family, in conversation with Genesis?

When I first wrote Pelvis with Distance, it was accepted for publication with poems just in the voice of O’Keeffe and her husband Alfred Stieglitz. And I gave it to a dear friend, the poet Laure-Anne Bosselaar, who said, “Okay, these are lovely. Good job. Congratulations. But why did you write this book? Why did you care enough about this person to write an entire book about her?” I had written a very long essay about my time in the desert and about the fact that I realized halfway through writing the book that I was trying to learn how to be an artist and to be a woman and an artist. So I took that essay and kind of exploded it into prose poems that I wove throughout the O’Keeffe poems. I bring this up because it helped me learn that a reader needs a way into the text where she can see herself in relationship to the text and hopefully, even if you haven’t had the experience I’ve had, it will trigger a memory in you from your own life.

Quite close to when I started writing this book, my mother was diagnosed with what eventually became dementia. Even when I was thinking about something from Genesis, I found that I also needed to write about that experience of loss both to better understand it and to set some of that weight down on the page. So sometimes, in ways like that, parts of my life would insist themselves into poems.

You also write about your relationship to Florida.

There’s a lot of Florida. 

How does it inform your work? 

Working on my second book, I was irritated because I thought I was going to write love poems and all these Florida poems kept popping up. For me, Florida is childhood, foundational. I will never live there again but there’s a part of me that always will. I can also appreciate it much more now that I get to come and go as I please. In The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean she talks about how miraculous it is that anyone survives in Florida because the nature in Florida wants to eat you.

Not just alligators.

Nope. There’s a wildness there so weirdly hidden and tamed by concrete and neon and parking lots and mowed lawns—sinkholes, water moccasins, and, back in the day, malaria-laden mosquitoes. Yet, I always wanted to find the wildness. I was always the strange kid who was off in the woods getting attacked by bugs. I was a bit of a jock but I also loved words and wanted to know the world that seemed to be so much bigger and better than the one I saw in front of me. Books were what told me that one day it was going to be like that. A huge part of why I became a writer was so that maybe, one day, somebody who also feels kind of isolated and strange might find something I wrote and feel less alone. Which is why I want a poem, for the most part, to live in the concrete, sensual world. Wherever I am, I want to learn the names of the flowers and the mountains because I want there to be air someone can breathe in that poem.

Turning back to the biblical, I didn’t know about Sarah Bat Asher, the Torah’s first poet, until unalone. It was so exciting to learn about her. What was the moment you discovered her like and how did it make you feel against your own perspective of your life as an artist?

I loved learning about her because she could speak so beautifully she’d never taste death. Were that the case for any of us writers! One of the things that felt revolutionary when thinking about the legend, or the story of Sarah Bat Asher, is that because she doesn’t die she gets to go through history and be this link of continuity throughout incredibly important moments in Jewish history.  

Writing this book changed the way I think about time because it freed me from feeling stuck in this one historic moment. When you really immerse yourself in the Torah, you get to time travel—you get to wander around in the far past and also imagine yourself into possible futures. It feels like this really lovely unmooring from being temporally bound.

That’s the power of storytelling and language. Speaking of language, you deep dive into certain words and their meaning. For instance, about how the Hebrew word tayva can mean both ark and word. Is poetry and language an ark? Can it save people in the same way?

On my most hopeful days, I want to believe that is true. For instance, writing this book told me I needed a community that didn’t exist. Which led me to found Yetzirah. I think that Yetzirah, especially since this past October, has—I’m not going to say saved people—but I think it’s given people a tremendous amount of solace and companionship that they wouldn’t have had otherwise, allowing people in our community to feel far less alone. From October 7 through the end of the year, I was getting either a phone call or an email nearly every day from someone who felt scared and isolated. And because of Yetzirah, I could say to them, “Oh, you’re in LA, here’s someone I can introduce you to.” “You’re in Vermont, here’s someone nearby.”

Having been on tour since the book came out in March, it’s been inspiring to be in conversation with people around these poems, and I’ve also been teaching writing about spirituality and religion through poetry for the last eight years. Both of these experiences have offered beautiful moments of connection.

I come to these texts in many ways as an outsider. I come as a woman. I come as a queer person. I come as someone with no real religious background and, at the same time, this text is mine, this tradition is mine. I will find a way to allow it to speak in a way that nurtures me. So what I do when I’m having conversations with people around these poems or teaching these classes, and it’s often with people of many different spiritual traditions, is to share my experience with them as an invitation for them to find their own paths to connection. For so many people, religion is a place of great wounding and something they feel they have to walk away from because it’s done them so much harm. Yet they often share the lack this leaving has left in them. So we often explore the question, “What if you could take from this what you need and put the other stuff aside?” I think there’s some saving quality in that.

Do you find writers feel their Judaism is separate to their craft or even that they have to keep it separated?

I published my first two books and I never talked directly about Judaism. As someone living a very secular life, I didn’t think about it. Yet I can look back at those books and say they’re influenced by Jewish cultural concerns, even though I wasn’t aware of that.

We had a number of Modern Orthodox folks and Hasidic folks at both of Yetzirah’s Jewish poetry conferences, and as Judaism is an essential part of their lives, it’s also an essential part of their poems. Yet I don’t think a lot of secular Jewish writers often feel comfortable bringing those two parts of themselves—the Jew and the poet—together in a conscious or public way. Yet, after the shared week of our conference, many less observant poets said it gave them both a sense of permission and an excitement to approach Judaism more directly in their writing. 

The primary question I got in our first year was, “Am I Jewish enough to be a part of this?” Which was painful to me to feel the often harmful gatekeeping that had inspired such a deep sense of doubt and also hilarious because who am I to answer such a question?! As a large part of me had wondered if I was Jewish enough to found a Jewish literary organization, I was thankfully able to say to them, Hey, here I am. If you identify as a Jewish poet, then that’s more than enough; welcome. And we also invite friends from all traditions to join us for our public events.

In Judaism you have this gorgeous poetic tradition, as well as a tradition of wisdom and question-asking and wrestling with God. Poetry brought me back to Judaism. Judaism, in turn, has deepened and expanded my poetry. And my community, too.

In the proem you write, “Let us honour what we love / by taking it in.” What are the things you love most about Judaism and literature?

That’s like asking me who my favourite poet is! I love that there’s no original sin. We can be guilty but we’re not sinful. It makes repentance truly possible. We are Israelites (a translation of Israel is “one who wrestles with the divine”), we are Godwrestlers, we are not expected to passively receive these texts and toe the line, we’re expected to engage with them. And the idea that if you sit down to study Torah with another person, the Shekhinah, the presence of God, sits with you, is spectacular. 

And what do you hope people take in and love about the work you’ve built your life around?

If nothing else, if I could hand unalone to someone and pray they get something from it, it would be the urge to ask more questions, to ask big questions, to ask for what truly matters to them and to others. And to then, maybe, be moved to go to a text they hold sacred and spend the time with it necessary to take it in and let it change them. It might be scary and it might mean that you have to change your life in some significant ways, but if you’re asking questions from an honest, authentic place, in my experience, it’s going to be worth it.

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This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Standing in my eldest brother’s house in Montreal during my mother’s shiva, one thought kept going through my mind: Why were the walls slanted?

They weren’t, of course. I was just stoned out of my mind. And I could not figure out why the entryway to the living room looked like some kind of freaky trapezoid. Weren’t walls and ceilings supposed to form right angles?

I hadn’t intended to get baked. But I’m glad I did. It made the shiva—an ancient ritual that I had long assumed was intended to bring closure and comfort to the bereaved, but in the event brought me nothing but tsuris—easier to handle.

For one thing, my mother’s death caused my father to lose his mind, or at least his filter. 

When I stepped down from the podium at Paperman & Sons funeral home after delivering one of my mother’s eulogies, my father was standing in the aisle, propped up on the hiking sticks he uses as canes. I thought he had risen to embrace me. Yet after I hugged him, he looked at me and said, stone-faced: “You did very well . . . for a dummy.”

When I told a therapist friend what had happened, she offered the measured response one would expect from a trained mental health professional, “Oh my god, you must have wanted to punch him in the face!”

That came later; at the time, I was simply stunned. 

I shouldn’t have been. With friends and strangers, my father could be charming and gregarious. With his children, he was far more mercenary in his affections, more prone to mockery and sarcasm. I never knew what I was going to get from him, and though I was now a middle-aged man with kids of my own, his toxic outbursts invariably blindsided me—perhaps because I still could not help but hope for something different. Now grief had robbed him of all restraint, making him wildly unpredictable. I dreaded what might come out of his mouth next.

I was right to worry. The following day, the family gathered at my eldest brother’s home for dinner before the evening visitation session. My father hobbled in late, plunked himself down, and immediately launched into a vulgar joke. Sort of.

“I just got off the phone with my sister, and she wanted you all to know that you left some very important facts out of your speeches,” he said, betraying no sign of levity.

Oh no, I thought, a spoonful of carrot soup halfway to my lips. What now?

“First, your mother was the person who taught her how to use a squat toilet in Istanbul . . .”

“Okay, dad,” my brother said in the tone and manner of a man attempting to defuse a ticking bomb.

His mother-in-law was more direct. “Please, we’re trying to have a nice dinner here!” she snapped.

“This is my party!” my father erupted, his face contorted in petulant rage. 

At no point did he acknowledge that his sons, too, were grieving; that while he had lost his wife, we had lost our mother. As far as he was concerned, he wasn’t just the principal mourner; he was the only mourner—something he made clear when he tried to eject from the shiva a frail and elderly cousin who had once offended a long-dead relative. (“Grab her arm and get her out of here!” he hissed at me.)

Never before had I seen my father’s id slip its leash so completely, and I was so shocked by his behaviour that I couldn’t make sense of it. Instead, I felt a helpless fury welling up inside me toward the old man, who seemed intent on preventing the ritual from helping us all deal with my mother’s passing. 

Meanwhile, the constant influx of visitors was only making matters worse. I don’t do well in large groups, especially when they’re comprised of people I don’t know. Having left Montreal decades ago, most of the shiva guests—and there seemed to be no end to them—were either strangers or people whom I hadn’t seen in so long they might as well have been. Wading through that mob while dealing with the loss of my mother and the presence of my father was almost unbearable.

Enter the accidental stoning. 

I suffer from chronic foot pain, and my feet were now throbbing from all the standing I was doing during the visitation sessions. A few weeks earlier, I’d eaten a mild cannabis gummy back home in New York to see if it might help my condition but all it had done was given me a slight buzz. I mentioned this to my other brother, who suggested that I try one of the more potent gummies he had lying around. “These are strong,” he cautioned, handing me a bag of colourful, star-shaped edibles. “I cut them into eighths.”

No problem, I thought. I can do fractions!

Thus did I find myself in the basement, haphazardly carving up an ultra-powerful weed gummy using one of the blunt balsa wood knives that had been provided for hungry guests looking to schmear some cream cheese on a bagel. 

After eating the first morsel, I immediately began second-guessing my handiwork. Had that really been a full eighth? Probably not. A little more couldn’t hurt, I thought, hacking off another chunk; better too much than not enough! A couple more pieces later, I went upstairs and steeled myself for the arrival of the afternoon callers.

By the time the first visitors began wandering in, my brain was tingling, my body was numb, and I couldn’t understand why the walls were leaning inwards at those impossible angles. Perhaps it was because the entire room was spinning. I went back to the basement to lie down and see if that might help. No such luck. The bed was spinning, too. Back upstairs I floated, my feet barely touching the carpet.

I was relieved when, a few minutes (hours?) later, talking to some guy I hadn’t seen in 20 years, I was able to form complete sentences. By the time I got to the end of one, however, I could no longer remember how it had begun. At some point I made a comment about the political situation in Israel, and my conversation partner shot me a sideways glance through narrowed eyes. The most likely explanation was that I’d said something he hadn’t liked. But all I could think was, Can he tell I’m stoned? Can everybody tell I’m stoned?

Apparently, they could not. The next day, when I told my eldest brother and his wife what had happened, they burst out laughing. They hadn’t a clue I was wasted—perhaps because, despite remaining high for 10 hours, I hadn’t acted any weirder than usual.

Curious, my brother and I tried to figure out how much weed I had actually consumed. With the help of a digital scale and a proper knife, we estimated that I had ingested roughly 20 times the amount of THC that he occasionally took for medicinal purposes.

As we were slicing and weighing the gummy, my 19-year-old niece wandered into the kitchen and asked if she could try some.

“There is no safe amount of this you could take,” my brother said.

I’m sure there’s something in the Talmud about not getting fucked up at your mother’s shiva. But I haven’t read the Talmud in a long time, and getting frosted turned out to be a blessing: For the first time in days, I wasn’t angry at my father; I didn’t feel the urge to run screaming from the assembled masses; and, wonder of wonders, my feet didn’t hurt.

Shortly after I came down from my unintentional high, the shiva was paused for the Sabbath, then cut short by Yom Kippur. (Saved by the Day of Atonement!) My eldest brother and I recited the Mourner’s Kaddish at the Shaar Hashomayim synagogue a few times, and I flew back to New York.

More than a year later, I’m still pondering the events of that brief, intense period. 

I had assumed that a shiva was meant to provide the bereaved with a measure of emotional support. Yet, to my surprise, it turned out to be more a source of stress than of solace. 

This led me to wonder if the act of sitting shiva isn’t simply intended to ease our pain at the passing of a loved one, but is instead meant to help us navigate a major transition by reframing our perspective on the world of the living, regardless of how difficult that might be. My gummy overdose may have played a role in this, altering my consciousness at the precise moment when I most needed it. (There’s good precedent for this: Just a few years ago, archaeologists found evidence of ritual cannabis use at an ancient Israelite shrine in the Negev desert.) 

Whatever the reason, it was only when I had to confront the fact that my father had become my sole remaining parent that I was finally able to step back, see him for who he truly was and accept that he was never going to change. As epiphanies go, it was a tough one: I found myself grieving not only the loss of my mother, but also the loss of whatever illusions I had left regarding my father.

As difficult as this whole process has been, however, I’d rather have clarity than false hope. It took the death of my mother for me to bury my childish expectations of my father. Better late than never, as my mom would say.

Frann S. Addison shows us her incredible, whimsical collection of menorahs designed from unexpected materials to create wholly unique works. Fun, playful, and artistic, Addison's Judaica shows us the possibilities of Jewish ritual objects as pieces of art.

Domino Menorah

When I was able to find oversized wood dominoes with numbered dots one through eight, I knew that I wanted to create a unique folding menorah.  

Each of the painted wood dominoes displays the appropriate number of dots for each night of the celebration. The shamash, with no dots on the domino's front, elevates the ninth candle with a smaller game piece with nine dots. A strip of brass at the top of each, protects the wood from the dripped wax. All is connected with solid brass hinges, allowing this most unusual menorah to fold up for easy storage.

Green Leaf Menorah

A cloisonné enamel pedestal of colourful flowers supports the nine candles in their holders. An inverted copper pot from a doll house kitchen elevates the shamash, and eight green glass leaves dangle below as if moving in a gentle breeze.

My art seeks to reconnect modern Jews with their ancient, sometimes forgotten heritage. Bright and vivid creations reflect my passion, captivate the viewer, inspire the mind, and impart a sense of positive energy and hope.

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Hanukkah is the beautiful holiday of joy and the celebration of the festival of lights. Gathering with family, lighting the menorah candles, and watching the reflection of whimsical flames is an unforgettable tradition and experience.

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In front of the Kotel the power of our minds transcends its verbal expression. Our souls connect us with the universe, shaping a new, better reality.

“For My Father” is written by Leonor Scliar-Cabral and has been translated from the Portuguese by Alexis Levitin.

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Smoke in my eyes, a mist, a haze,

curtains of misfortune, harbingers,

disturbing the reflection in the water,

mirroring the palm trees as they sway.

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From Oswaldo Aranha, lovers on the run,

By obscure paths we reached the pond:

shoals of fish were gobbling down the crumbs

tossed in by absent-minded soldier boys,

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Indifferent to a soon-to-be Ophelia

bobbing among poplars and camellias

In search of pardon in the flowing waters.

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Where is the candle I must light, is it here?

Or maybe the menorah of one who waits

Will slowly come to flame in the third sphere.

I scream, you scream, will all scream for the signs as ice cream! Swirl around in these starry psychological assessments that match flavour with those signs that live as stars in our night sky. Get ready to scream the news to all who will listen and gift yourself, tender souls, friends, saviours, crushes, and/or lovers, scoops that’ll taste heavenly.

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