Niv

Since 1983 the National Council for Jewish Women of Canada, Toronto (NCJWC-Toronto) has tried to ensure that the vulnerable in our community can celebrate Passover with a food-filled Seder. With help from social agencies, food banks, volunteers, students, and donors, their Passover Food Drive has served over 75,000 food boxes to residents in the Greater Toronto Area.

The NCJWC-Toronto is a storied organization with 128 years of service and counting. Their programs support Jewish women diagnosed with cancer, victims of human trafficking, and, as established through their food drive, food insecurity.

This year marks the first time the organization will be partnering with Reena for their Passover initiative. Robin Gofine, NCJWC-Toronto’s executive director, noted that the partnership came out of necessity because they needed more space to accommodate boxes due to high demand. Additionally, Reena’s ethos aligns with theirs.

Reena “provides housing, programs and employment services for individuals with Autism and other developmental disabilities, mental health challenges, and other diverse health needs.” They, like NCJWC-Toronto, want to “get the job done,” Gofine emphasized, “and serve the vulnerable.”

The contents of the boxes are nutritionally balanced and selected with thought and care to provide Seder essentials: matzah, matzah meal, candles, oil, jam, chicken soup mix, gefilte fish, and something sweet.

Preparations for this year’s drive began in November, and the packing of boxes lasted from March 23 until April 1. Gofine is the only member of staff. The whole drive, she shared with me over Zoom, is organized and implemented by volunteers. Volunteers supervise the shipments, pack boxes, and will be the ones delivering the boxes on April 6.

I spoke with Gofine and NCJWC-Toronto’s chair, Shelly Freedman, to listen to their remarks on community togetherness during this time of year, the power of volunteerism, and what the future of the NCJWC-Toronto holds.

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How have things changed because of and since the pandemic for the food drive?

SF: Before COVID-19, on the day we would do deliveries out of our old building there would be cars lined up around the street just waiting to get boxes and a school bus full of kids who were going to help. But after COVID-19, a lot of those people are much older, and a lot of people who had been volunteering for years are now at an age where the boxes are heavy. They do weigh about 23 pounds.

RG: Last year we needed more help with deliveries, and so I approached someone with a large following on a WhatsApp group. I told him we needed help and 50 cars showed up and they finished the job.

SF: All these people were younger. They were 40 year olds and they brought their kids because they were tuned into this guy.

RG: Even though this is a legacy organization that’s been around for 128 years and the Passover food drive is 42 years old, we are evolving as an organization, and we are learning new methodologies and taking advantage of the benefits of social media. We want to encourage the young people and newcomers in our community to feel a sense of responsibility for caring for other Jewish people, which I think is always important, and it's particularly important at this time.

With the cost of food and living increasing, has the amount of boxes you deliver increased too?

SF: We were doing about 1,800 boxes before COVID-19. Last year, after the war, we got a lot of people, a lot of Israelis, on our list who’d come to avoid the war and JIAS sent them to us. 

How many boxes do you estimate will be delivered this year?

RG: Around 2,300, but people always come up out of the woodwork. Normally, the bulk of the referrals come from social service agencies, but when people call us and say, I need help, we ask them to have an email sent to us by a rabbi, somebody who knows their situation, or a social service organization that they may be affiliated with.

Reena joins you as a partner this year. What are some of the ways they will be involved in the process?

RG: We encourage volunteers to write a personal note and include it in the box, so that when people receive the box, they also get a card with a note.

SF: A lot of times the kids do that, and they just sign their name in their scribble and then the recipients put them on their fridge. This year, we gave a lot of the cards to Reena people, and they’re colouring them in for us. They’re also helping us make candles. So because the holiday spans a week and there’s all the Yom Tovim, we supply them with little tea lights in a bag with a bracha to light the candles for all the nights. We have two or three student groups, a group of volunteers from the council, our L'Chaim group, and we also have Reena doing some as well. They're also going to be doing some packing and helping us with setup and other things. There's a lot of participation by Reena people, which is new for us, but we're looking forward to it.

RG: Moishe House is also a new partner this year, and they’re also going to be helping us out with the packing. They’re coming out with a large group. It really is a true community-wide endeavour.

Have there been surprising moments over the years that have demonstrated to you the impact of this initiative?

RG: Three years ago, my first year here, I got a request to deliver a box in the Jane-Finch corridor. It was in a hostel, and it was for a young woman who called us and said, My parents have kicked me out of our house, and I was found on the street, and now I'm in this hostel. I don't have any food for Passover. Can you help me? So we brought her a box of food. The girl was probably in her teens and she had no support, but somehow she was put in touch with us.

What do you envision you’ll be needing, whether it’s for the NCJWC-Toronto or just for the Passover Food Drive, in the years to come.

SF: There will always be the need for Passover food. I can’t see something like that changing. As far as what the organization needs, like any organization today, it needs new, fresh ideas and fresh blood and younger people willing to take time to do it, which I understand, in their lives and in our lives, is difficult. There’s been a bit of a resurgence of retired women, and they have fantastic experience in the workforce, but we are trying to initiate younger groups and to make them aware of us.

RG: Ensuring we pass this project to the next generation and that the next generation will take responsibility to make sure the needs of our community continue to be looked after. Ongoing financial support, because this project cannot happen without that. I’m also interested in looking at, more broadly, the issue of food insecurity for this organization and what are the opportunities beyond Passover that are effective in addressing food insecurity. What else can we do in this area to address community needs? And how can we do that, and what’s worked here that we can apply to address needs and fill gaps in community beyond Passover.

What does it mean to you to be doing work like this at the NCJWC-Toronto and to give back to the community during Passover?

SF: Different volunteers over the years have been doing this. A lot of people in council are very familiar with this project and they come back every year and help out. For me, it’s a real sense of satisfaction that all these people can share in the Seders, can all have the opportunity for the mitzvot, and that the recipients’ Passover isn't limited by their financial situation because they’ll have everything they need for a Seder.

RG: When I sit down at the Seder and I read, All who are hungry, let them come and eat. All who are in need, let them come celebrate Passover with us, I have this moment of: look what we just did. So for me, it breathes real meaning into the purpose of the holiday. And also, as the professional lead in a Jewish women’s organization, I'm in awe of the power of these women, this legacy of women from Shelly backward, who take on this responsibility with grace and passion, and don’t get ruffled. Every challenge that comes their way they get the job done. As a Jewish woman, I feel privileged as a professional to have the opportunity to support their work. 

SF: This organization has been built by wonderful, intelligent, resourceful women for decades.

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This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Happy spring, Niv readers! With Passover coming up next weekend and warmer weather approaching, hopefully it’s the beginning of a season of positivity for all of you. Let’s get into the upcoming events in Toronto over the next few months.

FILM

Toronto Jewish Film Festival

The forthcoming festival will take place from Thursday, June 5 to Sunday, June 15, 2025, so stay tuned for announcements about this year’s programming, which should come in early May. Snag your Flex Pass before May 11 to get a discount.

In the meantime, you can attend National Canadian Film Day on Wednesday, April 16. Film festivals and organizations participate in this event annually, screening films for free across the country. The Toronto Jewish Film Festival is screening the newly restored classic Sunshine at 6:30 p.m. at Cineplex Cinemas Varsity and VIP. Please note that while tickets are free, registration is required. Oscar-winning director István Szabó’s Sunshine takes place in the mid-19^th century onwards, telling the story of three generations of the Jewish-Hungarian Sonnenschein family. Ralph Fiennes plays the protagonist, supported by a large ensemble cast with Rachel Weisz, John Neville, and Jennifer Ehle. Beware: this is a three-hour epic.

Hollywood Exiles

If you’re anything like me and have a love for film soundtracks, then this event will likely be of interest. Miklós Rózsa was a Jewish Hungarian-American composer who moved from Hungary to Paris to London and finally to Hollywood amidst the Second World War, eventually finding a path for himself scoring movies. Koffler Arts is presenting Hollywood Exiles with the ARC ensemble (Artists of The Royal Conservatory), who will perform his music at Mazzoleni Hall, at TELUS Centre for Performance and Learning (The Royal Conservatory). Purchase tickets for $40 here. 

The Miles Nadal JCC is also hosting a screening of Alain Resnais’s 1977 film Providence, which Rózsa scored. Toronto Metropolitan University professor Dr. Owen Lyons (School of Image Arts) will introduce Rózsa and the film. Register for tickets here.
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JEWISH HISTORY & LEARNING

Threads of Spadina: Our Interwoven Stories

Toronto has a rich Jewish past and Spadina is perhaps the best street to explore this history. On Sunday April 27, you can explore the neighbourhood’s rich tapestry of characters and locations. This morning walk will reveal a whole new world to you, guiding you around a neighbourhood where seamstresses, tailors, bagel shops and pushcarts used to dominate; allowing a peek back in time to when Spadina was the heart of Toronto’s Jewish community.

Judaism 101

Feel like you need a refresher on your Judaism? This class runs on Thursdays from May 1 until June 19, and is welcome to Jews and non-Jews. The eight-week course takes place on Zoom and will cover everything from Shabbat to synagogue to spirituality. If you have any questions, please contact LaurenS@mnjcc.org.

Lishma‍

Lishma is a community of learners mostly in their 20s and 30s who enjoy delving into Jewish wisdom and scholarship. Regardless of your knowledge level or background, you are welcome to join. Each semester has three classes running side by side, and this spring, one of the lecture series is titled Riding the Chariot: Psychedelic Jewish Mysticism and the Fringes of Consciousness, which will run on Wednesdays from April 23 to May 28, 7–9 p.m. The name alone is enough to intrigue me!

Holocaust Remembrance

On now at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) is AUSCHWITZ. Not long ago. Not far away. The exhibit costs $13 in addition to the ROM entry fee (though it is free for ROM members). Use the code MNJCC at checkout for 15 percent off your ticket fee.

This exhibit arrived just prior to the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz (January 27, 2025) and it will leave Toronto in September 2025. Incredibly comprehensive, featuring survivor testimonials, historical documentation, first-hand accounts by emancipating forces, and more than 500 original objects, this exhibit contains distressing content and is not recommended for children under the age of 12. However, care has been taken to ensure that there are no gratuitous depictions of violence. 

Alternatively, you can gain a deeper understanding with a private guided tour in partnership with the Toronto Holocaust Museum (THM).

THM is also hosting a community commemoration on April 23 with a number of local Jewish organizations. This will mark Yom Hashoah V’Hagvurah, the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day. As part of the commemoration, THM will look back on the 80 years that have passed since the Holocaust, contemplating how survivors and their descendants honour the memories of the families who were taken.

Jewish& is also partnering with THM for a special event honouring interfaith, multi-faith, and multi-heritage individuals and families on May 7. Rabbi Denise Handlarski (Toronto Rabbi and author of The A–Z of Intermarriage) will guide a discussion on history that honours different perspectives.This will be a welcoming and open space for individuals in interfaith relationships, assisting Jewish individuals grappling with painful topics on their own, and their partners, who may be unsure of how to broach these issues.‍

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MUSIC‍

Jewish Music Week‍

This annual event is coming up quickly! From May 18 until May 25, you will be able to hear Klezmer, Cantorial, Israeli, Sephardic, Yiddish, Holocaust, Middle Eastern, Jewish Broadway, Jewish Opera, Jewish Classical, Jewish Jazz, Jewish Country, and more. I didn’t even know some of those genres, like Jewish Country music, existed; but I’m certainly interested. This year marks 13 years of the festival—their Bar Mitzvah Year! Program guides come out after Passover, so join the mailing list to make sure you don’t miss them. If you want to get a sense of the festival, you can check out last year’s program here.‍

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COMEDY AND LIVE EVENTS‍

From June 7 until June 15, the Harold Green Jewish Theatre is presenting Estelle Singerman: Summer Night, With Unicorn. If the title sounds mysterious and mystical, that’s because it is; this play is about the relationship between an eccentric older woman (Estelle) and an emotionally absent middle-aged man (Warren). Because she is so reclusive, Estelle is worried that no one will say Kaddish for her when she passes, and has thus decided that Warren will take on the job. Surrealist, with magical realism reminiscent of Hasidic folktales, this play features a journey of life and death, faith and peace. Written by David Rush and directed by David Ferry, you can purchase tickets here. ‍

Have you ever heard a better title for a comedy series than Laugh my Tuchus Off? These shows will spotlight some of the comedy circuit’s rising Jewish stars, as well as a number of veterans in the industry. Curb your Enthusiasm actor Iris Bahr, Canadian legend Colin Mochrie, and Tik Tok viral sensations Eitan Levine and Raanan Hershberg are just a few of the comedians you can see.  ‍

‍SPOTLIGHT ON: NIV COFOUNDER ORLY ZEBAK‍

Most importantly is a Friday evening featuring one of your favourite Niv cofounders, Orly Zebak! Orly has been taking part in stand-up comedy for the past few months, and on Friday, April 18 at Free Times Café, you can see her perform live. You can expect laughs, good vibes, and delicious food and drinks. The evening features some great comics from across Toronto, including headliner Monica Gross.‍

Orly did not sponsor this post. ‍

‍AND LASTLY

I think this next event counts as Passover-adjacent because it has to do with cooking! And for an Arts & Kvetch sorely missing Passover content, that needs to count for something. The Prosserman JCC is presenting Eden Eats: An Exclusive Culinary Experience on May 12, where Eden Grinshpan will discuss Middle Eastern and Mediterranean-inspired meals. Be sure to check out her new cookbook Tahini Baby. It will be too late to put the dishes into practice for Passover, but there’s always next year’s High Holidays!  

Koffler Arts’ current exhibition was created by Toronto-born and Brooklyn-based artist Elana Herzog and curated by artist Jessica Stockholder. The installation was made using wallpaper designed by the artist, with paint, textiles, and metal staples. These materials, gathered through years of collecting and thrifting, are reassembled and transformed through Herzog’s work. Herzog’s exhibition surveys her 35 year career, and reflects themes that interest her, including sustainability, history, tradition, individualism, and sensuality.

You can view the solo exhibition until Sunday, May 11.

If you are trying to figure out what day to catch the exhibition on, I recommend Sunday, April 27, as Kurdish-born multi-disciplinary artist Roda Medhat will be giving a gallery talk on the exhibition and Herzog’s career as a whole.

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I feel as though I need to mention pickleball at least once in every article I write, so here is the requisite acknowledgement. If you still haven’t managed to pick up the sport, despite its popularity, perhaps you would like to join the MNJCC’s Intro to Pickleball Clinic. This beginners workshop runs every couple of weeks, and will help you with skill building, basic rules, and scoring. You’ll also get to practice in friendly matches, and instructors will show you fundamental techniques and footwork. If you get hooked on the sport (as everyone else has, apparently), you can also take part in the MNJCC’s Intro to Pickleball Course, as the next one starts on May 10.

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Happy Passover to all!

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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Every year I feel conflicted on the morning of Erev Pesach. My Abba, a firstborn, usually goes to minyan at shul to attend a siyyum to obviate the obligation to fast as part of Taanit Bechorot, the Fast of the Firstborns. The fast commemorates that while Egyptian firstborns were killed in the final plague, Israelite firstborns were saved. But as a girl, my community growing up never pushed for me to attend a siyyum; I didn’t hear conversation about if women needed to fast. 

Even now, as I don’t fast on minor fast days for health reasons, I have continued to feel guilt about never making it to a siyyum on the busy day preceding the first Seder. Even after I embraced gender-egalitarian mitzvah-observance, I have found myself unable to change this routine. This is related to a broader ambivalence I hold about Makkat Bechorot (the plague of the firstborn): Did it include women? What are the stakes to assuming only Egyptian men versus all Egyptian firstborns were killed? Does egalitarianism necessitate assuming more death? Rabbi Dr. Gail Labovitz, in a thoughtful and comprehensive dvar Torah addressing just this question, asks:

Do I really want to insert women victims into the suffering of Egypt, so that I can feel equal in my experience of redemption or my sense of being consecrated to God alongside my husband and other first-born men? 

In exploring this question, Labovitz quotes the Shulchan Aruch and Rema on the subject:

הבכורות מתענין בערב פסח בין בכור מאב בין בכור מאם ויש מי שאומר שאפילו נקבה בכורה מתענה: (ואין המנהג כן)

Firstborns fast on Erev Pesach, whether they are the firstborn of their mother or the firstborn of the father; and there are those who say that even a firstborn woman should fast. (Rema: And the custom is not thus.) (OH 470:1)

As Labovitz puts it, this text “encodes the tension” between two conflicting ideas. The Mishnah Berurah here, explicating the Rema’s statement that it is not the custom for firstborn women to fast, says that:

“שהתורה לא נתנה קדושת בכורות לנקבה לשום דבר” 

“The Torah does not give the sanctity of the firstborn to women in any respect.” Just as women are not considered firstborns for any other ritual purpose, they do not have the requirement to fast as firstborns. However, in explaining the opinion that women should fast, the Mishnah Berurah writes that:

“שמכת בכורות היתה גם עליהן כדאיתא במדרש”

“since the Plague of the Firstborn also happened to them, as is explained in the midrash,” women should fast.

The Mishnah Berurah is referencing a rich midrashic tradition here. In many locations, the Rabbis attempted to expand the population who was struck down by the last plague, including women. Shemot Rabbah 18 is one place where this midrash appears. 

הַנְּקֵבוֹת הַבְּכוֹרוֹת אַף הֵן מֵתוֹת, חוּץ מִבִּתְיָה בַּת פַּרְעֹה, שֶׁנִּמְצָא לָהּ פְּרַקְלִיט טוֹב, זֶה משֶׁה, שֶׁנֶּאֱמַר (שמות ב, ב): וַתֵּרֶא אֹתוֹ כִּי טוֹב הוּא.

The firstborn females also died, except for Batya the daughter of Pharaoh, who found she had a good (tov) advocate: this is Moshe, as it is said, “and she saw that he was good (tov).”

While according to this narrative, the scope of death is dramatically widened, there is a person who is saved from it: Batya, who rescued Moshe from the Nile and raised him. Because of this relationship, this midrash teaches, she was saved. The Bach (Rabbi Yoel Sirkis), a commentator on the Tur, cites the Agudah, saying that:

אף נקבה בכורה תתענה, וראיה מבתיה בת פרעה דאהני לה זכות משה

Even female firstborns should fast, and there is a proof from Batya the daughter of Pharaoh, who had for herself the merit of Moshe.

Here, the midrashic addition of Batya’s rescue becomes the centre of the proof suggesting that women should fast. It is the salvation of one particular woman that suggests that all others died; and then, in reverse, that all Jewish women were saved. 

In a stunning Senior Sermon, my friend Rabbi Mary Brett Koplen draws our attention to a woman who in many ways is the opposite of Batya, the Egyptian princess. She points out that in the verses about the Plague of the Firstborn, the Torah makes visible a figure we would otherwise not have noticed.

וַיֹּאמֶר מֹשֶׁה כֹּה אָמַר ה כַּחֲצֹת הַלַּיְלָה אֲנִי יוֹצֵא בְּתוֹךְ מִצְרָיִם׃ וּמֵת כׇּל־בְּכוֹר בְּאֶרֶץ מִצְרַיִם מִבְּכוֹר פַּרְעֹה הַיֹּשֵׁב עַל־כִּסְאוֹ עַד בְּכוֹר הַשִּׁפְחָה אֲשֶׁר אַחַר הָרֵחָיִם וְכֹל בְּכוֹר בְּהֵמָה׃

Moses said, “Thus says the LORD: Toward midnight I will go forth among the Egyptians, and every first-born in the land of Egypt shall die, from the first-born of Pharaoh who sits on his throne to the first-born of the slave girl who is behind the millstones; and all the first-born of the cattle.”

Koplen moves our focus to the enslaved Egyptian woman “who is behind the millstones.” She points out that this woman, like the Israelites, was marginalized and enslaved in Egypt.

If we ever thought we were the only slaves in Egypt, if we ever thought we were the only people who have ever suffered unjustly, Exodus 11:5 comes to teach us, gently, we were wrong. This Egyptian mother who wakes to find her firstborn dead is perhaps the person in Egypt that the Children of Israel would have related to most closely. She is our co-slave. Set to the same menial tasks one workstation away, we would have talked with her—told stories of our growing children, walked the same way home at the end of the day. Even though we relate to her, our empathy does not protect her. In this moment, God is saving us. God is not saving her.

Even as we ourselves were redeemed, this woman and her pain went unaddressed, unanswered. 

When I think about the kind of egalitarianism I want, I don’t want an egalitarianism that places me only alongside men and the most powerful and exceptional of women. I don’t want to share only in the experiences of those who knew with certainty they would be saved by God. I don’t want my liberation to necessitate imagining more death into the story of the Exodus than is already there. 

I want a feminist egalitarianism where I can be with women who cry out in pain, where there are no steps that those who are vulnerable must take to earn their fullest lives. I want an egalitarianism that pushes me toward solidarity with the woman behind the millstone. I want an egalitarianism that craves less pain rather than more.

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This piece originally appeared as "Bo: Firstborns" on Rabbi Avigayil Halpern's Substack Approaching.

I distinctly remember choosing my Hebrew name. 

Unusual, as baby namings always happen when you’re a newborn but I was the third child in my family—the last born—and as a result some rituals and expected milestones fell to the wayside. I only learned to ride a bike when I was 15. 

I was five years old; watching The Prince of Egypt in the basement of my childhood home—the movie was my favourite (who am I kidding, I still love that movie and watch it every time Passover rolls around)—when my mom walked down the stairs and asked me what I wanted my Hebrew name to be. 

I told her I wasn’t sure. 

“What would you like it to be?” she responded. She needed to know for my enrollment in Hebrew school. 

I couldn’t believe I was allowed to choose my own Hebrew name. I stared back at the TV, and looked at the cartoon characters I loved so much. I instinctively said, “Tzipporah.” She's Moses’s wife and I thought she was beautiful and strong.

“Tzipporah,” my mom repeated. She nodded with confirmation that it was a great choice. 

The name coincidentally fits in with the Hebrew names of my parents—my mother’s is Yocheved, Moses’s mother, and my father’s is Aaron, Moses’s brother. We were the ancient family incarnate! But in all seriousness, it felt serendipitous.  

Apart from what was featured in The Prince of Egypt, I didn’t know much about Tzipporah. I loved how in the film she was strong-willed and pushed Moses to be the leader he was meant to be. While she was at his side, she didn’t feel subservient to him. I saw her as Moses’s guiding light, walking in step with God; helping Moses navigate uncertain terrain. 

When digging deeper into Tzipporah’s story, she’s mentioned sparingly in the Book of Exodus, but when she is mentioned her bravery shines. She’s the daughter of Jethro, the prince and priest of Midian and is not of Jewish ancestry—nevertheless, she helped Moses continue Jewish lineage. 

While the movie takes liberties with Tzipporah’s story, I believe it captures her spirit. 

In the Midrash, when Moses arrives in Midian and tells Jethro he’s fleeing from Pharaoh, he is thrown into a pit and left to die of starvation. But Tzipporah sympathizes with Moses and brings him food for 10 years. Finally, when he is released, he asks for Tzipporah’s hand in marriage, for she showed tremendous kindness in keeping him alive. 

Another Midrash reading says that when Moses first arrives in Jethro’s home, Tzipporah immediately feels a deep love for him and asks her father if she could marry Moses. 

There is another story where Tzipporah saves Moses again. When Moses, his wife and children leave Midian for Egypt, one night while they are staying at an inn, an angel of God comes to kill Moses as he had not circumcised their newborn son. Quickly, Tzipporah performs the circumcision and Moses is saved. 

These ancient stories show a woman full of courage. It’s no surprise that my younger self was drawn to her—I’ve always loved learning about independent and fearless women in history, making their mark in a male-dominated world. I was most interested in school material that focused on feminism, and always loved learning about the female biblical characters in Hebrew studies. 

Tzipporah’s name in Hebrew translates to bird—an image of freedom and hope. How fitting in the story of Exodus and how fitting in my own life, to be guided and encouraged by this ancient name to continue in the fight for causes that I hold dear in my own life. To fight for a better understanding of what it means to be Jewish, and to fight for gender equality and dignity for all people. In a world that endlessly wishes to divide us, it’s more important than ever to call on these core values that are also inherently Jewish values. As we sit down with loved ones for the Seder this year, let us reflect on how we as Jews can seek a more inclusive and compassionate world. These are ancient teachings that we must uphold, and I thank Tzipporah for showing me the way.

During a cold night in New York City in December 2024, on Motzei Shabbat, I was rushing from downtown to attend a call for shmira (guarding of the deceased body). It is my first call of tahara (ritual washing), within weeks of completing training at Hebrew Union College to join the first-ever Reform Community Chevra Kadisha of New York City—a group of community volunteers that prepares Jewish bodies for burial.

I wanted to immerse myself as a nonbinary, Queer Jew into an ancient tradition while serving in a welcoming denomination. Historically, in other denominations, such as Orthodoxy, I would be erased, deadnamed, and misgendered if I was the deceased, and be excluded from receiving the ritual practice of tahara. Typically, when reciting prayer or psalms scribed centuries ago, I don’t feel connected spiritually, emotionally, and mentally, because the words aren’t mine, they’re written by cisgender men who wouldn’t have made room for my spiritual voice. That’s why I want to insert myself and my authentic voice into these rituals to make them more inclusive.

My chevra kadisha asks for a $180 donation to support its efforts, as well as buying ritual supplies, but doesn’t turn anyone away if they can’t afford it—which is fair compared to other denominations that have hefty fees. Most orthodox shmira personnel receive payment, whereas we are volunteers.

Before I headed into the Plaza Jewish Community Chapel (PJCC) in the Upper West Side—having just wolfed down a soup and grilled cheese sandwich before wading through the crowded train to get to my destination—I took a deep breath, and gave myself a hug for all I was about to experience. 

Joshua, the friendly funeral director, greeted and showed me through the side door, as the main entrance was closed for Shabbat. Despite my fear of being profiled as a Jew of Colour, who dresses alternatively, I was graciously welcomed by volunteers and staff at PJCC. I was sporting sweatpants and an oversized sweater with sleeves that extended over my hands. 

I made my way downstairs to where the bodies were preserved. Some were in caskets, others in coffins, and some in the fridge. It felt surreal to perform shmira for an unknown, elderly Jewish woman. All I knew was that I had an obligation to serve, to perform a generational Jewish rite of passage by paying tribute and sitting with the deceased’s body while their neshama (soul) ascended to heaven. Although I wished to have a biography, Hebrew name, and related details about the deceased from my chevra kadisha, it wasn’t necessary for me to do the mitzvah of tahara—I felt that I had to do this ritual at least once in my lifetime, to respect the cycles of life. I hope that when I pass I’ll be buried and turned into a tree that’s decorated, so generations from now, people can point and smile in admiration, saying, “that’s the Je’Jae tree.” 

After finding my seat in the chapel basement, I realized I didn’t know the proper prayers or tehillim (psalms) to recite to honour the dead. I tried for the first few minutes to remain calm, but I was feeling lonely and down—my thanatophobia was acting up, knowing I was inches away from a dead body. Ironic, I know. But learning this type of practice can only prepare you so much for the ritual practice in-person. I felt scared and triggered thinking of my own future rite of passage; to go from standing with a beating heart to one day laying in a casket, lifeless. I began to panic about not recalling what to do ritually. I googled it on my phone and asked my former rebbeim of proper approaches to shmira. 

An Orthodox cousin from Jerusalem sent me a WhatsApp to help me figure out the gematria (numerology) of the deceased’s name so I could find any hidden meaning or message. After spending some time reciting prayers from my heart, I reached out to my hometown’s local Chabad rebbetzin Nechama Duchman. She texted: “It's a spiritual time, we are connecting to the neshama as it arises.” Another WhatsApp message, from a trans Jew from Eshel (Queer Orthodox Jewish NGO), said “We start saying tehillim from the beginning.”

I was beautifully supported by rabbis from across denominations: Renewal, Reconstructionist, Modern Orthodox, Litvish and Chabad. 

Although I recited some of the psalms I still didn’t feel connected to the text. Compared to my Orthodox upbringing, I always believed in personal prayers from my own words and heart. I closed my eyes and contemplated the deceased, without any photos of her. 

Finally, when I heard from Naomi Less, spiritual cofounder of Lab/Shul, who recommended I register for tahara training, I felt comforted. She said: “Does it help at all to think you’re enabling someone’s body not to be alone?” I gave a huge sigh of relief. I was able to relate to that. She further instructed me while I was still on my shift to sing or hum a melody that would console. 

During this ritual, I learned that if you’re not ready to do tahara, shmira is a pre-step. It’s amazing what will happen when you ask Jewish leaders in your rolodex about having any doubts in spiritual practice—there’s so much wisdom from folks who are willing to help. I reached out to rabbis I haven’t spoken to in years. No one decent turned me away. When doing tahara, there’s always a Roshei (head) Taharei who will be a guide and be supportive through all the brachot and steps. Even after I trained I felt nervous and forgetful, but it was okay, it’s important in these moments to have compassion for yourself.  

More religious denominations and some families have a gender preference, asking for males to take care of a male deceased family member and females to take care of the female deceased family member. There’s a lack of TGNCI folks (trans, gender nonconforming and intersex) Jews signing up for tahara. Hopefully one day there will be a TGNCI cohort of volunteers who can bring trans sensitivity and gender neutral brachot for Trans Jews who have passed. Chevra kadishas need all the gentle hands, and caring hearts, to commit to this timeless tradition, to ensure nobody is left behind. 

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You can reach out to Kavod V’nichum for Jewish end of life rituals and practices. 

Italy was an exciting trip for my family. It was the perfect way to end the summer, and as a history major, I was eager to absorb a new wealth of culture. 

My family of four was excited to venture east and enjoy a thrilling trip abroad. Being Massachusetts natives, our exposure to Italian culture had been limited to Boston’s infamous North End and old recipes from our Italian family friends, who seemed to perpetually endorse and admire their ancestral stronghold. My parents, my sister, and I grew increasingly more excited as the weeks progressed toward our departure date.

Unexpectedly, the greatest historical lesson of our trip came not from ancient ruins but from a small, intimate workshop. Midway through the week of travel, we boarded a boutique cruise in Venice, which turned out to be the pinnacle of our voyage. We soon learned that Leora Raikin, founder of the David Labkovski Project—a nonprofit teaching communities about the Holocaust through the artwork of survivor David Labkovski—was hosting an interactive art workshop on board, and my sister and I promptly signed up. 

When we arrived at the workshop, the space was filled with women of all ages—from my teenage sister to retirees who had been travelling Europe for months. We each took a spot in the sunroom of the ship, a venue with windows on every wall, and collectively directed our attention to the front of the room. Leora began with an introduction to David Labkovski’s work, explaining his background, history, and her familial connection to him. We were then instructed to choose one of Labkovski’s artworks that resonated with us and to paint in a way that reflected our interpretation. 

Labkovski’s art is a masterful pursuit of emotion. Each work holds a story, offering a glimpse into the past and into the artist’s own memory. Throughout his life, Labkovski documented his experiences through transformative art. Born in 1906, the Lithuanian–Jewish artist gained recognition with his poignant paintings that captured the Holocaust and its effects on the Jewish people. The turbulent events of the 20th century left a lasting impression on Labkovski, whose artwork serves as a moving testament to the horrors he witnessed while imprisoned. Born in Vilnius, Lithuania, Labkovski began his artistic studies at a young age. He later attended the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris after graduating from the Vilnius Academy of Art. However, the start of World War II and the Nazi occupation of Lithuania halted his career. 

Like many other Jewish people in the region, Labkovski was subjected to antisemitic persecution during the war and witnessed the atrocities of the Holocaust. The tragedy had a profound effect on his family, psyche, and physical being. He relocated to Israel after the war, where he continued his career. His paintings depict the suffering and resilience of the Jewish people during and after the Holocaust, capturing the agony, loss, and survival. Scenes from the ghetto, concentration camps, and the aftermath of the Holocaust are among his most well-known works.

A few weeks after our return to Boston, my sister and I couldn’t stop talking about our meaningful experience at the workshop and how it reshaped our understanding of Holocaust education. Seated comfortably in our childhood home in the heart of Cambridge, Massachusetts, we found ourselves deep in conversation, reflecting on our time abroad and the lessons that stayed with us.

Chloe, a dedicated high school sophomore, shared her thoughts with curiosity and thoughtfulness. As a history major with a keen interest in policy and anthropology, I found myself reconsidering how history is taught and internalized. When I asked my sister how she now felt about our education on the Holocaust growing up, she remained quiet, lost in thought. 

She remained quiet, patting our family dog, but I could tell she already had an answer—perhaps from pure intuition, or maybe because I’ve known her all her life. 

“It’s complicated,” she said at last. “I had always felt as if I had a good grasp on it, that is, until I was able to truly interact with these histories. It’s one thing to learn about something. It’s one thing to read about it, even to watch films and documentaries; but when you’re physically at a location or doing an activity connected to an atrocity like this, it’s a completely new experience.” 

We both recalled our first visit to the Anne Frank House Museum during our last trip to Amsterdam in July 2022. I added, “Being in a stimulating environment where you are directly connected to a historical event is a lesson like no other.” 

Chloe: “Exactly. When you’re physically connecting to something, like we did with David Labkovski’s artwork in Italy on board the riverboat, it really links you to another person through what they have left behind—in this case, Labkovski’s art.” 

“History feels so far away, until an experience like this brings it right to your doorstep,” I said. 

My sister and I both agreed that learning about the horrors of the Holocaust through this painter—while on a cruise—felt strangely disorienting.

“How would you describe where we were and our circumstances surrounding the workshop?” I asked, already forming my own answer. 

Chloe: “I would say it’s ironic, in a way. If that’s the right word. To engage in and discuss something so devastating in the most privileged environment.” 

“I completely agree,” I replied. “I think that’s the perfect way to describe the feeling of it. But I have been ruminating on it for a while, and I wonder how our reaction to that question or idea would have been if we were in a different setting.” 

Chloe: “Yes, like when we were talking about school. I learned a great deal, but this was my first experience forming a deep connection to this, outside of visiting the Anne Frank House. I think we reacted more intensely because we were in a privileged setting, but that doesn’t take away from the workshop at all. The contrast between the content and the location sparked a strong reaction.” 

“Do you think using art as a tool for learning would be beneficial in schools?”

Chloe: “Yes, it can be hard to focus in a school environment. The fact that I was able to truly engage and connect while in a vacation mindset is definitely a good sign that this method is effective.” 

“Why do you think that is?” I asked, unsure of her response for the first time.

Chloe: “Because you are connecting to it. People are taking their perspectives and projecting them onto his artwork.” 

“What drew you to the painting we chose? What changes did you make while composing your painting? I remember choosing it because of the colour; I recall so many of his works being drained of colour, but this one felt so vibrant and alive.” 

Chloe: “I would agree, the colours definitely made it more lively. But honestly, I remember being drawn to it because there was no single focal point. There were multiple elements instead of just a portrait or a scene with one focus. The painting had two figures in the foreground, standing amidst mountainous regions. The watercolour hues of blue and green blended together, creating a serene yet complex atmosphere that drew me in.”

“That’s an interesting perspective. Speaking of perspectives, did any of the other participants surprise you toward the end of the workshop? Was there a specific story or person that moved you?” 

Chloe: “Yes, actually. There was a woman who mentioned being reminded of her father. Without getting into much detail, she shared a really personal and touching story about a memory she had of him. I think that only further shows that this method of teaching history—creating a connection through art—works.”

 “I couldn’t agree more. I remember that woman as well. Even though it wasn’t a story directly related to the Holocaust, she was moved by Labkovski’s paintings. I also recall hearing stories from women who had direct ancestral ties to the Holocaust or World War II in general. It’s incredibly moving to have the chance to connect with such raw, versatile art. As time goes on, generations grow further disconnected from this history, and connecting to it in an emotional way ensures it lives on.” 

While Labkovski may not be as widely known as some other Holocaust artists, his work remains a powerful testament to the human capacity for both cruelty and resilience. His paintings continue to serve as important historical and artistic documents, reminding us of the need to remember and learn from the tragedies of the past. 

This experience completely altered my understanding of the pursuit of education. What I now see is a vital and necessary generational “call to action.” Without personal connections and attachments to these emotive histories, there is a great risk of mindlessly forgetting and overlooking the past. There is undoubtedly a personal responsibility to educate oneself; we cannot wait for the opportunity to be educated. Without acknowledgement and remembrance, we risk the possibility of history repeating itself.

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. 

Poet, fictioneer, and professor, Aaron Kreuter, is delving into his first fiction novel with Lake Burntshore. It will be out with ECW Press on April 22.

Lake Burntshore is narrated in the third person, and focuses on the staff and surrounding peoples living within the tight community of Camp Burntshore during the summer of 2013. With a protagonist in Ruby, the narrator dives between characters and relationships like the swim staff dive effortlessly into the water. However, trouble begins after camp life is threatened when five staff are fired within the first week. The fired staff are replaced by five Israeli soldiers, which causes the camp to consider the conflict in the Middle East and its parallels to the neighbouring Indigenous land. Throughout their eventful summer of 2013—the soldiers’ arrival, romantic entanglements, and marijuana hijinks—Ruby and her peers struggle to identify exactly what it is that makes Jewish summer camp a life-altering experience.

During the course of an hour, I spoke with Kreuter over the phone about his inspiration, and writing process. While Kreuter’s and my exciting conversation about maps didn’t make the cut for this interview, it is worth mentioning that Lake Burntshore begins with two detailed and cogent maps that help readers live alongside the characters and campers at Kreuter’s fictional Camp Burntshore.

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In Lake Burntshore, there are moments when the narrator speaks with certainty and then there are other times when the narrator speaks with a sense of discovery. How strict are you with the rules of omnipotence regarding the narrator’s learning?

It depends on what’s going on in the novel. Different chapters have different structures and textures to them. There’s the chapter early on called “Ruby/Stolow,” which is from their two perspectives. Other times the narrator does change points of view. In all of my writing, I’m obsessed with community and belonging. As anyone who spent time at sleepover camp knows, the four to eight weeks you’re there, it becomes a sort of micro society.

I have a theory that writers write through a lineage of who they grew up reading. Your characters read widely, from books by Mordecai Richler to Ursula K Le Guin. Which books or authors most heavily influenced you when creating Lake Burntshore?

I didn’t discover Le Guin until my mid or late 20s and, when I did, she completely changed my life, not only because of the way she writes but in the way she imagines other possibilities. Le Guin embodies in her novels the idea that a better world is possible, a different world is possible. When I read Le Guin, it suffuses my body and mind with how we can live differently and better in an ethical sense. I hope my novel could have that effect on readers as well. Le Guin has this famous line that all human power can be resisted by humans. I think that’s a beautiful way of looking at it. I see it in her, in her fiction, and is definitely one thing I want to try and do with my own fiction.

A lot of Ruby’s favourite authors happen to be authors I also deeply love, especially Le Guin and Mordecai Richler. I definitely see myself writing in conversation with Richler who is, to my mind, still the foremost chronicler and satirist of the Canadian Jewish experience. The other two books Ruby has with her at camp are the collected works of Grace Paley, the anarchist feminist, Jewish American short story writer and poet; and work by Frantz Fanon, which speaks to her politics.

You craft a musical in the novel called Tel Aviv! Can you tell me more about it?

In the world of the novel there’s a very famous and successful play called Tel Aviv! It is a musical dramatization of Theodore Herzl’s fascinating novel The Old New Land, which imagines a thriving Jewish collective in Palestine from the vantage point of 1902. Tel Aviv! is sort of like the Zionist Hamilton. The staff put on a version of Tel Aviv! in the novel. Inventing this play, and imagining how it functions in the Jewish diasporic world really allowed me to look at themes of ideology and belief and the power of art to confirm or sway ideology and belief.

How would you define the narrative of Lake Burntshore, and what is your overall opinion on the concept and essentiality of plot?

One of the ways that the narrative manifests in the novel is that it takes place over a single summer, so the novel is temporally, and geographically, bounded by those eight weeks. I knew from the very beginning I wanted the novel to be in two basic parts, which mirrors or parallels the two traditional sessions of a Jewish summer camp. Did you catch that both parts have 18 chapters?

Oh my gosh, I didn’t.

That’s part of the plot too, the structure of the novel. From my camp experience, there’s always a difference between the first session and second session. And I sort of wanted to bring that into the narrative. Tom, the camp owner, actually thinks about that, he thinks about how the second session is sort of smaller and looser and more informal. I wanted that in the plot too. I see two main movements in the narrative. First is the inciting incident where more staff than normal get kicked out for smoking pot and Brett, Tom’s son, convinces Tom to bring in five Israeli soldiers to act as counsellors and staff (which happens at a fair number of summer camps throughout Canada and the U.S.). And so that change of having these Israeli soldiers at camp, we’ll be seeing how Ruby, who’s anti-Zionist and an activist at her university, is unsure and unhappy with how that’s going to affect the camp. Then coming to the fore of the narrative in the second half is Brett’s plan to buy 10,000 acres of the Crown land around the lake for the camp, which, by rights, is the traditional territory of the Black Spruce Anishinaabe First Nation, who lives next door. Ruby attempts to stop that from happening.

I’d like to ask you more about Ruby’s relationship with her best friend Seema. In the letter Ruby writes to her she lists the reasons she will miss camp: “The stories, the myths, the rituals, the rhythms . . .The meals . . . The sense of unified purpose . . . Hanging out with your cabin after dinner, the cool night air, anything and everything possible.”

That quote is from when Ruby apologizes to Seema, who’s Palestinian, for some tensions that they had as pen pals throughout the novel. I think it’s really important that Ruby, this young Jewish Canadian, is describing this phenomenon, Jewish summer camp, to her Palestinian best friend through letters.

Thinking about the above quote, when writing a book, one lives with the characters, and some characters do stay with us forever, but never as fiercely as when one is in the process of writing. What do you miss most about being in the process of writing Lake Burntshore?

I miss a lot of it. I miss that summer, the summer of 2013 on Lake Burntshore, this place that I half made up from experiences and also from what I’ve read and seen—just being on this journey of discovery and activism and the fighting for what you think is right, which is what Ruby and Etai do in the novel. I talk a lot to my students about the concept of novel vision, which is when you’re so deep into working on a longer fictional project that everything in your life, everything you see and experience and read, gets filtered through the novel. This is my sixth book, but it's my first novel, and I really, truly experienced that novel vision, where my whole life was subsumed by the novel and by this camp. I'll definitely miss that. I'll definitely miss thinking up different ways of describing the lake and its moods. Having characters interact in different ways, in different parts of the geography of the camp. In fact, I haven’t truly left the camp or these characters behind because the project I'm working on now (and I'm almost finished) is a cycle of short stories that exists in the Lake Burntshore universe. Some of the stories have characters from the novel. Others have an entirely new cast of characters. But since I finished the novel, I’m still moving in the world. I wasn’t fully ready to let go of the characters yet.

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This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

No fruit says “spring is here” to me more than rhubarb, which has been a favourite since childhood. Here I combine the tart stalks with another seasonal fruit—juicy, sweet strawberries. Both fruits are the perfect accompaniment to make a sweet-tart topping for mini cheesecakes. The tartness sets off the richness of the cake. 

The festival of Shavuot marks when the Torah was given by God to the Jewish people on Mount Sinai. It’s also customary to eat dairy foods on the holiday. 

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Mini Cheesecakes with Rhubarb and Strawberries

Makes 12

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INGREDIANTS

Cheesecake recipe

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6 (3 1/4 ounce total) whole graham crackers

6 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted

1 cup plus 2 tablespoons sugar

24 ounce brick-style cream cheese softened

2 large eggs, beaten

2 teaspoons vanilla extract

1 teaspoon lemon juice

1/4 teaspoon salt

1/2 cup sour cream plus 1/4 cup for topping

12 thin slices of strawberry

Chopped mint leaves, optional

Directions

1. Line a 12-hole cupcake or muffin tin (or set 12 foil cupcake liners on a sturdy baking sheet).
2. Put graham crackers in the food processor until they turn into fine crumbs (well crushed but not powdery). You can also put the crackers in a sealed plastic bag and crush with a rolling pin. 
3. Place crushed crackers in a medium bowl. Stir in melted butter and 2 tablespoons of sugar. Press crumbs into the bottom of the cupcake liners.
4. Cut the cream cheese into 1-inch chunks and set aside.
5. In a large bowl combine sugar, eggs, vanilla, lemon juice, and salt. Beat with an electric hand or stand mixer on medium high until light and lemony in colour (2 minutes). Add cream cheese chunks in batches, beating on medium high until they’re incorporated before adding the next batch. 
6. Once all the cream cheese is incorporated add 1/2 cup sour cream. Beat again on medium high until the mixture is very smooth (3–4 minutes). 
7. Divide cheesecake batter between the 12 liners.
8. Place 1/2 teaspoon of rhubarb and strawberry topping on top of each cheesecake. (Return remaining topping to the refrigerator until needed.) Use a dinner knife to swirl the topping through the batter.
9. Heat oven to 375 degrees Farenheit.
10. Place cheesecakes in the oven. Bake for 20–25 minutes until the centres of the cheesecakes are a bit loose and jiggly and the tops are puffed up. They will still be pale. 
11. Turn off the oven and open the oven door, leaving cheesecake to rest inside for 30 minutes. Transfer to a wire rack until completely cool. Refrigerate for at least 4 hours or overnight. (Can be made up to 4 days in advance if kept refrigerated and several weeks prior if kept in the freezer. If freezing, defrost in the refrigerator before serving.)
12. Serve chilled (or remove from the refrigerator 20 minutes before serving). Remove liners if desired. 
13. The tops of each will have fallen, making an indent. Fill each indent with 1 teaspoon of rhubarb and strawberry topping and 1 teaspoon of sour cream. Add a strawberry slice. Garnish with mint.

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INGREDIANTS

Rhubarb and Strawberry Topping

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3 1/2 cups chopped fresh rhubarb or 12 ounce frozen, chopped rhubarb (do not defrost)

2 teaspoons water, or as needed

2 cups chopped fresh strawberries

1/2 teaspoon vanilla

Sugar to taste, optional

DIRECTIONS

1. Place rhubarb in a saucepan over medium heat with water (do not use water if fruit is frozen). Cover. Cook until very soft, stirring often, adding just enough water if needed so rhubarb does not stick to the pan or burn. 
2. Stir in strawberries and vanilla. Continue to cook covered until the strawberries are soft. Taste and stir in sugar to taste if desired. Leave the cover off. Stir. Let any liquid evaporate. Remove from heat and let cool for a few minutes.
3. Puree by hand or with a blender. Cool completely before using in the recipe. Can be made up to 3 days ahead and kept refrigerated. Bring to room temperature before using. Use any extra topping on ice cream or other desserts. 

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Notes

• Add sugar to taste while cooking the fruit for a sweeter topping.
• Substitute a sturdy gluten-free cookie for the graham crackers if desired. 
• Do not substitute tub, soft or whipped cream cheese for the solid brick style. 
• For the smoothest cheesecake filling make sure the cream cheese is totally softened.

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.

“To make this cake,” Elisabeth said, “all you have to remember is six: six eggs, six tablespoons of sugar, six tablespoons of flour.” 

She held up her thumb, and added her forefinger, then her middle finger as she listed each ingredient. 

“No milk?” 

“No.”

“No butter?”

“No.”

“Not even baking powder?”

“No. Add chocolate, if you want. For Passover, you can use potato flour.”

“Amazing!”

“But you don’t like it.”

“I do! I do like it!” 

“You’re hardly eating anything.” 

This was my signal to take another helping, and I gladly did. “Amazing,” I repeated, between bites of evidence that her formula worked every time. 

Soon, it was time to clear away the dishes and lay out Elisabeth’s manuscript. Working together this way was not new for us. Long ago, she had been a student in one of my creative writing classes. Eventually she became an editing client, and soon after that, a friend. Recently, she had asked me to help her assemble some of her essays for publication. Week after week we sat at her gleaming dining room table, going through my latest edits. This collection would be “just for the family,” she told me, and she planned on publishing it herself. It could easily have found a home with an established press, but self-publication gave her control over the timeline, and that was important. She was over ninety years old. 

This was Elisabeth’s second book. The first, And Peace Never Came, was published by Wilfred Laurier University Press when Elisabeth was in her mid-seventies. It was a memoir of her experiences in Nazi-occupied Hungary and her post-war journey through several countries until she finally made a home in Toronto. Writing it demanded tough choices. Elisabeth told me she did not want to “hurt the reader” by being too blunt about her worst experiences. She wrote about losing her family and friends at Auschwitz, but somehow managed to do it with delicacy. The book is remarkable not just for what it says, but for what it leaves out. Even her daughter’s murder is not talked about directly. She writes instead about the kindness a friend showed in carving a trinket out of scrap metal to commemorate the child. Elisabeth may have protected her readers, but she couldn’t protect herself from reliving her painful memories, and she writes about that, too. The book is as much about the aftermath of trauma as about the experience itself.

In the manuscript of her second book, I saw fragments of the stories she had brought to the creative writing course I taught at a Toronto seniors’ centre in the eighties. Elisabeth said very little in the classes, but her body-language spoke of inner turmoil. Week after week she would sit with her hands in fists, occasionally using one hand to help the other open and flatten on the table before the fists somehow returned. Whatever she was going through inwardly, Elisabeth always looked wonderful. Each blouse or sweater was complimented by a scarf knotted at the neck, a crisp blazer, and impeccably chosen nail polish and lipstick. All of this was in keeping with her meticulous selection of words and phrases. She was the only one I stayed in touch with after I left the seniors’ centre. Upheavals in my life meant I had to let go of the patchwork of writing-related jobs that never quite paid the bills. Another teacher took over the classes, but I worked privately with Elisabeth on the first stages of And Peace Never Came. From there, our friendship evolved. There was something we understood about one another, as writers. I didn’t share her traumatic past, but—like her—I agonized about having anyone read my work. It took years to even consider submitting anything for publication.

Slowly, I built up my courage, and two decades later, Elisabeth was there to see my first book published. I was fifty-two. The book was a memoir, and I felt terribly exposed. It was the scariest experience of my life. From the time it was accepted until months after it launched I woke up in the middle of the night with a pounding heart. I burst into tears at the slightest provocation. I couldn’t get lost in my feelings, though, because I had a book to promote. There were seminars on self-branding, workshops on pushing myself past my comfort zone to get attention. I always seemed to be online in those days, haunting blogs, social media feeds, and websites for mentions and reviews. I was a middle-aged woman, but a newly published writer, and the whole process dragged me back to feelings I thought I had left behind twenty years before. As a perpetually single thirtysomething, I had flirted and primped and waited by the phone, wishing I could afford to play hard to get. No one really wanted me, and there was no space for my mixed feelings when I had to do all the pursuing. 

Elisabeth invited me over one afternoon, I thought, for a friendly cup of tea, but this was a professional visit. We sat with a copy of my memoir, Outside the Box, on the coffee table in front of us and—in a tone I can only describe as severe—she praised the book. She spoke carefully, likely as carefully as she had read it. I owed it to her to listen with equal care. Elisabeth’s considered words reminded me of my responsibility. I had a story to tell. I didn’t have to let go of my dignity, but I did have to believe in my own work. 

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For Elisabeth’s second book, I did some light editing, and helped with the practicalities of self-publishing at a time when she could not get out into the world anymore. She paid me, which caused a tussle because I wanted to give her my labour as a gift. She would not hear of it. The cheques were bigger than the invoices. The result was that I worked so hard to get it right I could barely see straight. I still made mistakes. 

Visit, eat, clear the dishes, work. Whenever she had the strength and energy, that is. We were lucky to get three good weeks in a row, then two. Then came a time when the routine disintegrated and her beloved helper, Magda, would call and say Elisabeth was having a good day, and could I stop by? Yes, I could. I must. The book provided a focus for our visits, but there was another reason for our time together, and we both knew it. She was saying goodbye.

The Holocaust had stolen from Elisabeth the chance to have an adult relationship with her parents. I think that losing them early had made her especially attentive to her own children and grandchildren, and friends, including me. She had seen so much, suffered so much in her long life, yet here she was, week after week sitting across from me, the embodiment of resilience. Somehow, I never felt my own worries and dilemmas were trivial in comparison to hers. She had a way of asking questions that made me feel that in the wake of the inhumanity she’d experienced, it was more, not less important for her to listen attentively, more, not less important for me to make good choices and be true to myself. She often reminded me it was okay to be tough, to say no, and sometimes even to walk away from relationships when my time and energy were at stake. I clung to every piece of advice she gave.

But most of her life-lessons were concealed in housekeeping and grooming tips. I had always believed that in order to look good, I had to feel good, but my mood seldom justified a nice outfit. Elisabeth taught me it was the other way around. Sloppy dressing was simply not an option, unless I cared to endure a withering comment. Soon I began to notice a pattern. With a freshly ironed blouse, a dash of lipstick, my problems always felt more manageable. One day, when I tucked her tiny frame under my chin for a hug, she drew back and told me I needed a magnifying mirror. “You do not want to look at it, but you must,” she said. It was the best editing advice anyone has ever given me.

She always asked me what I was going to cook over the weekend. Subtly reminding me not to leave things until the last minute, she extolled the virtues of make-ahead quinoa salad. She warned against using a blender to make chopped liver. “If you cook it properly, you just need the back of a fork.” And there was the cake, with its three simple ingredients, which I never made. And then she was gone.

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Passover, 2024: I decided to make Elisabeth’s cake.  

Why now? Peace had finally come for Elisabeth in 2016. I had missed her every day since she died, but this year, I wanted even more keenly to bring her memory close. I was about to send another book out to publishers, and being in my sixties didn’t make me feel any more mature about it. This was my third book, but I was hardly a household name. I was bracing myself for a succession of rejections and radio silences. If and when my book came out, I would once again be in the position of striving for attention while internally cringing at the exposure. Why bother? I thought. Who cares what I have to say? I wished I could see Elisabeth, hear her calm, measured advice but mostly just sit at her table, sharing a meal and some conversation. She was as much a part of my writing process as I had been of hers. 

That’s when I thought of her cake recipe. Of course, I remembered it perfectly. Six. Six. Six. What could go wrong? But I realized—yes, only then—with a carton of eggs staring accusingly at me on the counter, that the list of ingredients was not all I needed to know. Elisabeth had not told me how. I asked Google, or tried to. What to call this creation? “Six-egg cake?” Hundreds of recipes showed up. “Three ingredient cake.” Yes! It’s a real thing, a type of sponge cake that has been eaten all over Europe since medieval times. But these recipes only brought new questions. To separate the eggs or not? When and how to add the flour? What kind of beater to use, how hot to make the oven? Was it different for the potato-flour version? Would potato starch make more sense? None of the recipes I found online called for so little in the way of dry ingredients. To make the cake as light and evenly textured as Elisabeth’s would call for years of practice. This was no simple cake. 

It looked gorgeous in the oven, rising in a golden dome. Then I watched it slowly crumple as it sat on the counter to cool. I’d left it until the last minute, of course. There was no time to make another one. I decorated it with strawberries and took it to the Seder. To deflect attention from the sunken mess, I read aloud a passage from And Peace Never Came. It was a section that took place in the work camp where Elisabeth was sent after her stay in Auschwitz. The women in her barracks were flea bitten, freezing, and starving, but at night they sat around sharing recipes, invoking a time when they presided with dignity over their family kitchens. Elisabeth recorded the recipes on stolen scraps of paper, and a friend created a cover. At a time when everything had been taken from them, they still found a way to create. 

That night at my friend Shoshana’s Seder table, I discovered a new dimension to what, for me, was a familiar section of the book. The women’s recipes did not include any “method.” In Elisabeth’s words: “Hungarian recipes don’t direct every movement because the culture assumes cooks know.” The ingredients may be simple, but you have to figure out the rest for yourself.

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Everyone loved the passage from the book, and a serving of fruit salad made the cake mostly palatable, though I noticed a few blobs of unmixed flour found their way discreetly to the shelter of napkins. 

“Elisabeth would have been so proud of you,” Shoshana said. 

I laughed. “Are you kidding? She would have told me it was terrible. She would have told me to try again.” 

Maya Bernstein’s poems are from a manuscript-in-progress called The Woman of Valour that explores the inner thoughts and experiences of a modern eshet chayil, or woman of valour. It is a portion from chapter 31 of Proverbs, and is traditionally sung before Shabbat.

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‍The Woman of Valour Sings Psalm 145‍

A Psalm of Praise:

Blessed are those who bless God
Continuously
Devout. But behind
Every God is a Woman of Valour,
Frying potatoes in a spitting
Greased pan, wanting to know
How to be slower to anger, more
Infinitely patient, how to remove
Jelly stains from tablecloths, oil stench from

Kerchiefs. It’s written, “The Almighty
Lord is near to all who call,” but it’s the quiet
Mother, the reliable, tiptoeing woman, who is
Needed. It’s she who hears  
Open-mouthed cries, whispered
Prayers. She who delivers and fulfills. With her

Quill, she sketches faithful fantasies in circles,
Rends ancient versions of her foremothers’
Secrets, places them at the proper time on her
Tongue. Truthful, she adds a binding
Under the spine. Coats it with an enduring
Varnish until it hardens into a book.
Wintertime, in the garden, she marks a tree with an
X, and buries it in the frozen ground. Then, she shoulders her
Yellow bathrobe, brews a cup of mint-leaf tea with lemon
Zest, takes a long hot bath, and opens her palms forever and ever.

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‍The Woman of Valour Cleans for Passover 

Don’t eat in the car!
If we have to escape, it
needs to be clean for  

Passover. Yellow
daffodils. Cheerio.
crumbs. Magnolia

blossoms. Under couch
pillows: pretzels, a Post-it
with a private prayer.

I make batch after
batch of pesto in the small
Kosher for Passover

Cuisinart. Eggs are
a symbol of birds, birth,
blight. We eat them hard

boiled. I wade through the sea
of single unmatched socks,
found in drawer after drawer.

My Passover salt
shaker is twice the size of
my regular one.

One is not required
to search for bread in places
bread should not be found.

A woman who cleans
for Passover is cracked,
bound, mocked by jasmine air.

The Woman of Valour is Like Hadasa, Also Known As Esther

I wait like God waits, wild,
panting. Like Hadasa,

also known as Esther,
I use my lips to slip inside

the palace, that world of men-
ace, where guards grip sticks.

Behind me there’s a figure watching you
gaze at my cocked brow, my erect

hat flap. Right pinkie raised as if for tea,
my horse has seen a thing or two or three—

of course your eyes are fixed on me.

Mildred Faintley’s translation of Rachel Blaustein’s poem “Rachel,” from the Hebrew, was first published on Nasty Women Writers.

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Rachel

The voice you recognize in my songs
is hers, as surely as the blood in my veins
flowed in hers, my far fore-mother,
it flowed in hers, the same.

Any house seems small,
all indoors has the feel of a trap.
I’m never at ease in a city,
never understood the appeal of an address.

What can I say, except that I came
from that same Rachel whose scarf fluttered free
as a nomad’s banner in desert wind?

I always know where I’m going,
don’t need sign or map or even street
to keep to the path that’s mine alone.
My legs remember, my feet repeat:
Rachel!
—as she went then, so now I go.

My grandparents had always dreamed of living in Israel and then the Holocaust took that away from them. Moving to Israel was about fulfilling their dreams and making my own as an artist.

Every day I am inspired by the rich beauty that grows in this sunny, dry desert climate. The riotous colours of the cypress trees, Jerusalem stone, Bougainvillea, and the terracotta roofs. I try to capture all of that in my artwork. I hide lovebirds on domed roofs, hang laundry in the windows, pomegranates on balconies, and often have music notes hovering over my cities.

The following digital, papercut-inspired works fuse my aesthetic interests to commemorate the journey of our ancestors during Passover.

‍Please enjoy, in the comfort of your comfiest chair or at your kitchen table or in your bed, Michael Wiesenberg’s crossword of Hebraic Things. Simply save the image on your computer and try to solve it via screen or by printing the sheet. Warning: Do not scroll down too far below, the solutions are there.

Well, what are you waiting for, kick back, relax and whip out your pencil!

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‍This is your final warning. Continuing to scroll will bring you to the solutions.

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