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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Purim

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

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Exhibitions

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

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

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

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

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Live Events

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

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

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

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

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Learning

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

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Miscellaneous Musings

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

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

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Lara

This past September, the world was in shock when the House of Commons gave a standing ovation to 98 year-old Yaroslav Hunka, a former member of the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS, a volunteer unit known as the Galicia Division. The rapturous applause from politicians came during a visit from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy—to show solidarity with Ukrainian nationalism during its war with Russia. But many Canadians failed to understand that a significant number of Ukrainian nationalists during the Second World War fought alongside Nazis. 

While Prime Minister Justin Trudeau immediately apologized and Speaker Anthony Rota swiftly resigned four days after the scandal, the damage was done. Jewish groups around the world condemned Canada, and many wondered how such a glaring error could be made.

Unfortunately, there’s an uncomfortable truth that must be acknowledged: Canada’s history of complicity in allowing Nazi-linked Ukrainian groups to go unpunished. There are known monuments in Canada commemorating these military divisions and the government has allowed in hundreds of Nazi war criminals, who haven’t been extradited and tried in criminal court. 

To understand how Canada got here, I spoke with Bernie Farber, the founding chair of the Canadian Anti-Hate Network and past CEO of Canadian Jewish Congress—he is also the son of Holocaust survivor Max Farber—to discuss the topic. 

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How many known Nazi monuments do we have in Canada? 

There are at least two cemeteries, one in Edmonton, Alberta and one in Oakville, Ontario, which has a cenotaph commemorating the Galicia Division. One Nazi monument is too many. The very fact we even have this is more than a stain on our country. There were hundreds of thousands of young Canadian men and women who fought and lost their lives fighting against Nazism and the fact anyone would want to celebrate those Nazis today, as we say in Yiddish, a shande (disgrace).  

How did they come to be erected? There’s a bit of a complicated history. 

That’s right, Ukraine has a complex history and an even more complex history with Jews. People have to understand there was a time when relations between the two groups [Ukrainians and Jews], from the late 1400s to the early 1700s, were fine; some of the greatest Yeshivot in the world, learning centres of Judaism, arose in Ukraine. And, for the most part Jews did their business and Ukrainains did theirs. But by the 1800s that dissipated and Jews became the target of choice in Ukraine, Poland, and Russia—antisemitism became rampant in Eastern Europe. At the same time, Ukraine’s borders had always bounced around. Their borders changed during the Austro-Hungarian Empire and then later during the Soviet Union.They have always yearned for a national state not under the yoke of anyone. 

Flash forward to the late 1930s and 1940s, when Nazism became prevalent, many Ukrainian nationals, not the majority but a large minority, saw an opportunity under Adolf Hitler to become a free and independent Ukraine. Why they would think that is beyond my understanding but that’s what they felt. There were Ukrainian SS divisions, notably the Galicia Division, which had thousands of Ukrainian nationals whose job often involved guarding death and concentration camps, as well as fighting Polish people and the allies under the Nazi flag. After the war, they came to the U.S. and Canada. But these Ukrainians didn’t call themselves Nazis, they said they fought for Ukrainian nationalism and that’s how they got into the country. Possibly thousands came into Canada. That’s how these monuments were erected in these cemeteries commemorating the division they fought for. 

So these Ukrainian nationalists who fought with Nazis have been walking among us? 

There are very well known members of the Ukrainian Canadian community who were members of the Galicia Division, including the former president of the University of Alberta, but this all came to light many years ago. In 1985 there was the Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals in Canada, also known as the Deschenes Commission to determine how many Nazis came into Canada and how many could be dealt with. The Galicia Division, which was found to be a criminal division by the Nuremberg trials after the war, was named under the tribunal as a Nazi division. Here in Canada, the Deschenes Commission was convinced that collectively the division didn’t fall under the definition of war criminals, noting that some might have been involved. We [the Canadian Jewish community] always thought this was a strange and unfortunate finding by Justice Deschenes especially given the Nuremberg finding, and as a result many went unpunished.

After the House of Commons gave that unfortunate standing ovation to the former Galicia Division soldier, Canada’s Immigration Minister Marc Miller said, “Canada has a really dark history with Nazis in Canada. There was a point in our history where it was easier to get [into Canada] as a Nazi than it was as a Jewish person. I think that’s a history we have to reconcile.” What do you make of that statement? 

Potentially many Nazi war criminals came into this country. Deschenes found at least 200 Nazis with blood on their hands. Only one Nazi war criminal was extradited from Canada to Germany, his name was Helmut Rauca, and he was responsible for killing more than 10,000 Jews in Lithuania. It took the RCMP 35 years to find him. It’s a strange, bizarre, and sad story. He was sent to West Germany and died in a prison cell never seeing a courtroom. Canada has a dark history, which the minister alluded to, and we have to come to grips with it. Writing about it is one way, but the government has to come to terms with it as well and make a public statement and apologize. We haven’t seen any apology. They’ve never acknowledged Canada’s lack of interest in going after Nazi war criminals. It’s not a dark secret anymore. 

What work is being done to remove the statues?

Not a thing, zippo, and why? They happen to be on private property. The local cemeteries are owned by the Ukrainian National Committee, and so far they don’t seem moved to remove them.  

Could the Canadian government help in some way? 

They could help in the sense of moral suasion, and the Prime Minister could be more forceful in saying these statues must come down; that they urge the Ukrainian community to do the right thing. We’ve never heard from any prime minister about this, even though these statues came to light some time ago. No one took any steps to do the right thing. 

Some Canadian institutions have taken down statues of figures who they believe to be complicit in the genocide of Indigenous peoples in Canada. It shows that it can be done. 

Genocide was perpetrated against Indigenous people of this land, and one of the greatest villains is our first prime minister John A. Macdonald. It’s hard for us to think about [this history] but in some places statues are coming down such as Ryerson and a few others. If we can start facing our own history and doing the right thing, surely the Canadian Ukrainian community can do the same thing, especially with the crimes this division is associated with. I also have a strong personal connection here, because it is highly possible the Galicia Division were guards and executioners at Treblinka where my entire paternal family were murdered.

What work can be done to ensure Canadians are aware of this history and to apply pressure to get rid of the statues? 

In some ways it started. In Ontario and Alberta, where those two monuments are, both provincial governments have mandated Holocaust education in high school. That is hugely important because education is the key. We have nothing else but education and if kids don’t know about it how will they know what to do about it? A 15 year-old now would have no idea about the Galicia Division, they would have no idea what you’re talking about. It will be a work in progress to be sure. It’s time that with everything else going on, we stop honouring Nazi murderers not just because they murdered six million Jews, but because non-Jewish Canadians fought to ensure Nazism never takes hold in this country. How sad would our fathers and grandfathers who fought in the war be if they were to see these monuments still around in 2023, knowing these war criminals are being honoured on a daily basis. 

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This interview has been shortened and edited for clarity and length.

On October 22, 2023, Paula Goldhar (née Lwowski) and Rose Lipszyc (née Handelsman) convened in the Learning Lab at the Toronto Holocaust Museum (THM) to share their testimonies and to celebrate their friendship.

Paula was born in Kielce, Poland in 1924, the youngest of eight children. She was seven when her family moved to Łódź. Her childhood days were spent schlepping between her public school and Bais Yaakov, and going to the movies. “Whenever there was a Shirley Temple movie” in particular, “I had to go. I begged and I pleaded until they took me. Sometimes I pretended I was Shirley Temple.” 

Rose, on the other hand, was a little bit of a wild child. She could be found running on the cobblestones on Grodzka Street or defending herself against those who dared to tease her about her freckles. No one could have predicted that a few years later, Rose’s freckles would have been the least of her worries. 

In 1940, the Germans forced Rose and her family out of their home. In October 1942, the Germans rounded up Rose and her family and took them to the town square in Bełżyce. Her mother and two brothers were deported to concentration camps and murdered. Rose lost approximately 50 family members during the Holocaust. She survived the war with her aunt, living under a false identity. In 1947, Rose attempted to illegally enter the former British Mandate Palestine. However, the British intercepted the boat she travelled on and interned her in Cyprus. In 1948, the British finally granted her entry into Israel. Rose married another Holocaust survivor, Jack Lipszyc, in 1949, and they immigrated to Canada in 1952. She worked in the McGregor Sock Factory and had three children. In 2021, Rose received the Order of Canada for her dedication as a Holocaust educator.

In 1942, Paula and her older sister were deported to the Skarżysko-Kamienna forced labour camp to work in an ammunition factory. In 1944, Paula was forced to work in another factory in Częstochowa, Poland. The Soviet Army liberated her on January 16, 1945. Following liberation, Paula and her sister found their brother in a nearby camp. The siblings stayed together in Poland until 1946, when they moved to Linz, Austria, and then to a displaced persons camp in Bavaria. Paula’s aunt sponsored her immigration to Canada, and she arrived in Toronto in 1947. She met her husband Yitzchak Goldhar in 1948 and like Rose also had three children.

Sometime after, Rose and Paula met when they separately joined the same bowling league. From strikes and spares, a friendship blossomed and evolved. Trips to Florida or Muskoka were planned; card games were won and lost. 

In between bragging, and rightfully so, about their grandchildren and great-grandchildren’s smarts and accomplishments, Paula and Rose sat down with THM’s director of marketing and communications, Michelle Fishman, to expand on the friendships that afforded them the strength to survive the Holocaust, why education is our strongest resource against antisemitism, and how there is nothing quite like a good friend.

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I want to start with what seems like a simple question, but over the past two weeks it is probably one of the most difficult to ask: Rose, how are you doing?

Rose: I thought this is going to be a fun and enjoyable [conversation about] memories of our lives together in Canada and how we try to educate children of what happened to us. The hatred is spreading again. And this is painful to me. I find it very difficult. But we have to go on, so let’s have some fun for a change.

I know it’s a difficult and challenging time and bringing a little light here today will be helpful. Paula, how are you doing?

Paula: Today, I’m okay. But most of the days over these past two weeks have not been good for me. I see the Holocaust again. Everything comes back. It brought back memories of when the Germans came into Łódź, where I lived. The army didn’t bother us until the SS came, about a week or two later. A lot of Jewish people decided to run to Russia, those were the lucky ones because the majority of them survived. We stayed and we waited. My father said moshiach will come; my father waited for moshiach but he never came. And I’m watching TV now and reading every article in the National Post. There was one article yesterday I wish I would not have read because they depicted what Hamas did. 

You both had individuals who were instrumental in helping you make it through the Holocaust. Paula, can you tell us how being with Rivka, your older sister, throughout the war and the time in the camps helped you survive? 

Paula: The last words I heard my mother say to my sister as we were walking away was “Look after her, look after her,” and she did. And I looked after her too. We helped each other. If you had somebody with you, you had a better chance of surviving. So my sister survived with me. We were together the whole time. My brother was married and his wife was sent away the day we were liberated. She was sent away and wound up in Bergen-Belsen, and my brother was crying. It was a bitter cold day. After six months my sister-in-law came back, it was a miracle she survived Bergen-Belsen, and she was lucky she worked in the kitchen.

I came in ’47 and I brought them [all] over in ’48, and a year and a half later my brother passed away suddenly, at age 37. I lost my faith I have to say, because of what I saw, what I lived through, but they [my siblings] continued theirs.

Rose, how did being with your aunt help in your survival?

Rose: There were actually three people that helped me survive. First and most of all, my mother. On the road to Sobibor, she decided there was no chance for us if they took away the able-bodied in 1942 and left the women and children to walk to the train station. She realized that we are going to our death, and she quietly threw away everything I carried, looked me straight in the face and said, “My dear child, we don’t have a chance, we are going to our death. But you might have a chance. I don’t believe the whole world has gone mad, there’s going to be somebody somewhere that’s gonna help. And you have to run, please run. I can’t.” So she pushed me off the road. I had a six-year-old brother and she couldn’t leave him alone. She died the same day in Sobibor with my brothers. My father, I have no idea where he died. I ran all day long to the Polish farm she must have mentioned.

My aunt was my mother’s youngest sister and she took me on. The Polish farmer gave us the birth certificates of his daughters. I went to Lublin and met up with my aunt and we both took on a different identity. I remember going through the Polish [checkpoint], they were checking us out. I was a youngster, quite undeveloped at 13, and they said as a child that they’re not going to take me to Germany. But my aunt said, “If she doesn’t go, I don’t go.” So they took me to Germany to work in a factory. That day my aunt became my sister. She was eight years older than me, only 21 at the time, and she took on a wild kid. Nevermind, it wasn’t easy. I got myself into trouble a lot of times.

Rose, at liberation you were left with very little family and loved ones. What did it mean for you at that time to have the support of friends and your aunt?

Rose: It was the most important thing. She was everything to me. But interesting enough, I didn’t understand the horror completely. If you wanted to talk to one another, we were so afraid, we used to go on a field and she used to say, “Do you think we’re going to survive?” And I said, “My mother told me so.” Actually it was funny, she was the adult and I was the youngster, and somehow she believed me. In a way I helped her, in a way we helped each other. It was a relationship that we didn’t even have to talk, we just looked at one another and we understood what one meant. It was a tremendous relationship. I like this friendship too, although we come from completely different backgrounds. I come from a more progressive Jewish family and she comes from a very religious home, but somehow it never mattered did it? No, it didn’t matter at all. We both have the same love for reading. We like to discuss politics and it’s a very nice relationship. She’s calm, I’m a little hyper. 

I remember once we were sitting at bowling and I was very quiet. And one of the girls came over and said, “Rose is there anything wrong?” I said, “No, I just spent two days with Paula.”

When settling in Toronto, Paula this one’s for you, how did having other survivors around you when you came to Toronto aid in your ability to continue?

Paula: I came alone. I was 22 years old. I was single. You can only bring over a brother or sister, [someone] very close, but I was a niece. So my aunt and uncle brought me over, there was a lawyer that could arrange those things, they were like my parents to me. So he made papers that said I was born instead in 1930, which made me five years younger. I sent away the papers to the consulate when we were, at the time, in Germany. It took about six months. When I arrived the whole family was down at Union Station to see what a Holocaust survivor looked like. And I didn’t know anybody. I was scared. I was two weeks on the boat worrying about coming to a bunch of strangers: Would they like me? Would they accept me? Well, they happened to be wonderful to me. I met my husband about a year or two after. We needed people around us because we were alone. Friends became like family. So I had a bunch of new friends. And then when I met my husband he was the most wonderful gentleman. 

There’s a picture of your husband, Yitzchak, in the “Life in Canada” gallery.

Rose: Mine too. Mine too. 

Paula: I got so emotional. A friend called me over and he said, Yitzchak is in this picture. Without planning it, both me and my husband made it into the museum for generations and generations to come. My great-grandchildren, one day they will come to this museum and say, These are really my ancestors, I can’t believe it. They won’t be able to believe. 

Rose, you were a driving force in Paula becoming a speaker here at the museum. Why did you think Paula should become a speaker?

Rose: It took me two years to talk her into it. There was such a small group of Polish Jewish people representing us and not too many of the Polish people were speakers. And she was from Poland and I was from Poland, and I started talking to her [about it] and she listened to me for a change.

We’re so glad that you talked her into it. Paula, what’s your version of the story? Why did you start speaking here?

Paula: It took me a while to speak. I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to continue, that I’d break down, that I’d cry, but it’s amazing how as you get older you get stronger. People ask me: Do you hate the Germans? I said I don’t walk around hating anybody. I can forgive but I can never forget. If you hate somebody then you’re not yourself, you cannot be happy, you’ll always think about that person that you hate. It stands in front of you, it blocks other things. I have a husband. I have children. I’m going to bring them up living a peaceful, quiet life without any hate. 

When I watch television now, I am so worried about the situation. The hostages are the biggest problem. There are about 200 of them. I saw on the National Post the front page has tables and 200 empty chairs waiting for the hostages for a Shabbat dinner. When I saw that it broke my heart. I don’t cry too often, but I must say in the last two weeks, I cried. I cried quite a few times.

I think a lot of people have seen that image and it’s definitely something that is indescribable and unthinkable on so many levels. I know Rose shares your sentiments and the idea of hatred. 

Rose: It’s like a nightmare coming back to haunt us, a terrible, terrible nightmare, to me it feels like a cloud has covered the sky and I’m waiting for the sunshine. We thought the last years of our life were going to have joy and pleasure where I could enjoy my children, my grandchildren, and my great-grandchildren. Give us the time, let us live for God’s sakes. What do they want from us? Let them choose somebody else for a change. It is like hell coming back. I get busy with something and a moment later I feel that stone on my heart. And I can’t for a minute remember why and then it comes back to me. It’s hell. Well let's hope it's going to come to peace, let’s hope they find a way, let’s hope people stop hating each other. I don’t understand why they hate each other all the time, why there’s so much hate and so little love.  

I think being here and learning together is hopefully contributing to that idea of hope and education creating change. 

Rose: One day at a time. One school at a time. And we should try and spread the idea of how terrible hate is. It destroys the people who hate because they lose total control of what’s right and wrong.

I think that you’ve educated thousands with your stories.

Rose: We tried our best. What made it so interesting to me is the response that I used to get from the children. I think that convinced me that I’m doing the right thing. 

A young man once told me: “I’ve listened to a lot of speakers and I’ve heard a lot of stories and I’ve read a lot but nobody brought the dead people to life like you did.” I then realized I’m doing something very important—I brought my mother, my parents and my aunts to life, they were among us. So I really appreciate those years. It actually made a life for me [after my husband died]. And thank you, Michelle, you were a great help all through the years. And all the volunteers that used to help us, thank you very much.

Now more than ever it seems we need some wisdom from our survivors who have faced genocide and have overcome such tragedy. Usually I would phrase this final question as what is your message to future generations, but in this current climate I want to ask what is your message to this generation.

Paula: Tolerate everybody. Love people for who they are. Every person born on this earth has a right to live in peace and happiness. Be tolerant. 

Rose: She took all my words away. That’s what I always thought. Because you might be surprised by how much you can learn from other people if you give them a chance. Open up your mind and your heart and you will be surprised.

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This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Synagogues are all abuzz with preparations for the High Holy Days. As Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur quickly approach, many in the Jewish community gather to attend services and participate in events. The New Year is one of togetherness and many synagogues in Toronto have a wonderful array of programming to engage young Jews and young families, as well as long-serving congregants. Niv reached out to many synagogues in the city and compiled responses from those who responded. Take a look at the plentiful offerings for the Jewish New Year.

Holy Blossom Temple  

My favourite part of this sacred season is the opportunity it grants us for introspection and renewal. It serves as a spiritual checkpoint in our lives, urging us to pause, reflect, and take stock of our existence both on a deeply personal level and as a community. It’s a time when we engage in a soulful examination, assessing our actions, values, and intentions over the past year. We acknowledge where we may have “missed the mark” or fallen short of our ideals.

This process of self-reflection and teshuva is not just about dwelling on our mistakes; it’s a chance to embrace the journey of self-improvement and growth. Rosh Hashanah inspires us to strive towards becoming our best selves, to seek forgiveness, and to make amends where needed. It’s a reminder that we are all works in progress, capable of positive change and transformation.

For those kehilah curious folks who would like a taste of our community, I am happy to highlight our B.Y.O.C. (Bring Your Own Crumbs) Taschlich. It is a wonderful way to meet our rabbis and cantors in a more intimate setting. Please join us at the Don River, Glendon Campus of York University Entrance, Saturday, September 16, 4:30 p.m. to symbolically cast off our sins and regrets of the year past and prepare ourselves for the good year ahead. Come hear the shofar, explore the easy trails, and enjoy the outdoors together. All are welcome. You bring your crumbs, we’ll bring something sweet to share! If you are interested in joining us for Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur services or some of our many study sessions, please reach out at tbaruchel@holyblossom.org and I will be happy to get you connected.

Engaging younger generations is a priority at Holy Blossom. This year, I joined the team as their first Director of Outreach and Next Gen Engagement; my rabbinate is focused on actively listening to young professionals and young families, ensuring they feel seen, heard and supported. This is a year-round endeavour but at this sacred season we offer a Yom Kippur morning prayer experience tailored for those in their 20s and 30s. For those with children, we have a range of offerings for different ages and stages. To learn more about our flexible membership models for young adults and young families, please reach out at tbaruchel@holyblossom.org.

From our littlest blossoms to our wisdom generation, there are opportunities to connect with our tradition in meaningful ways. We’re committed to creating a vibrant, inclusive community that resonates with the aspirations of our younger members, ensuring our traditions continue to thrive.

-Rabbi Taylor Baruchel

First Narayever Congregation

Rosh Hashanah is the time of year when Jews come out in the greatest numbers of the year to participate in synagogue life. It lifts my heart to know that these days remain important and precious enough that Jews who follow  different levels of observance,hold varied beliefs about God and  prayer, and about Israel, choose to come out on these days.

Narayever is very excited to once again be offering High Holiday services at both the Miles Nadal JCC (MNJCC) and in our newly renovated shul on Brunswick Avenue. We are also offering family services in the MNJCC theatre and a new initiative—a special outdoor family service on  Robert St. Field on the second day of Rosh Hashanah. At the MNJCC we are introducing a new machzor (Lev Shalem), a new seating arrangement, and stimulating adult education that we hope will appeal to attendees of all ages.

-Rabbi Ed Elkin

The Annex Shul

I love the invitation to begin again. In our daily liturgy we acknowledge the world is created anew in each moment, and on Rosh Hashanah we might be able to feel that more fully. We have the opportunity to move in a different, more aligned direction. Returning to alignment is the practice of teshuva, which the High Holy Day season is all about.

Annex Shul is doing all of our services outside in Bickford Park again this year. The beauty of the day and gathering together shimmers more, for me at least, when we can see each other’s faces in the sunlight, feel the breeze and weave our yearnings and prayers in with the grasses and trees, insects and birds, in the life-filled park.

Our community is run and shaped by Jews who are under 40, so we are building a community that works for us. We are making ongoing decisions about what is meaningful in our tradition today and I think that the decisions we come to point us in compelling and grounded directions.

-Rabbi Aaron (he/him), Spiritual Leader

City Shul

City Shul is dedicated to making the sacred High Holiday Day moments more accessible and engaging for our younger generation, enabling them to make a meaningful connection to our community and traditions, and fostering a deeper connection to Jewish heritage.

We offer separate programs for teens and middle school-aged individuals during all of our High Holy Day services. This year we will offer these younger members of our community active involvement through Torah study and Israeli poetry, connecting them to the themes of beginnings and conflict resolution, all through hevruta and Pardes text practices.

For several years now post–mitzvah kids have had aliyahs on Rosh Hashanah,so the whole community can celebrate their achievement; teens have been invited to volunteer in various capacities; and university students have been offered aliyahs to welcome them back home.

While we are together, over the holidays, we will be announcing our plans to foster a teen group in the year ahead—a program of fun, friendships, celebrations and learning, with opportunities for leadership development and tikkun olam.

This Yom Tov, City Shul teens take charge of our annual Yom Kippur food drive. They have designed a poster to publicize the drive, are distributing food donation bags to neighbours, family and friends; and have signed up to receive food donations and thank donors. Their contributions count towards volunteer hours required by high schools.

Young people who join City Shul for the High Holy Days will have a great opportunity to become a part of a community of our younger congregants and to join us in conjuring and making plans for youth group activities in the year ahead.

Danforth Jewish Circle

Rosh Hashanah is considered the birthday of the world, a day in which we celebrate the day that all of this was born. What a beautiful reason to gather together: to sing, pray, nosh, learn, and hear the shofar! But it also could be seen as the day of the world’s conception. Seen in this light, we might ask ourselves “What is yet possible? What might yet become in this new year?” Just as the world is pregnant with possibilities, so too are our lives. What is working and should continue in the new year? What changes might we try to make so that our hearts, minds, bodies, and spirits are more in alignment? This is an awe-some time of year to turn inward and turn to community, to explore what is possible.

There is so much happening at the Danforth Jewish Circle (DJC)  over the High Holy days. We have musical and spiritually uplifting Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur services in our sanctuary, engaging children’s services and programming, spirited teen programming, a dawn Rosh Hashanah service at Evergreen Brickworks,and this year we are particularly excited about a new offering on Yom Kippur afternoon called Music and Meditations. It’s a two-hour block of time (4–6 p.m.) to simply sit in our sanctuary (and maybe close your eyes) as some of our incredible community members offer their musical gifts on this most sacred day.

I want to highlight what a gem the DJC is to the Toronto Jewish community. As a joyous, inclusive, accessible, inspiring Circle, we are helping to create a fresh, progressive vision of Jewish community, learning, and spiritual practice in downtown Toronto. This certainly extends to the High Holy Days where every soul who walks through the door (or joins online) is seen and loved.

On both Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur we run a family service from 8:30 until 9:15 a.m. that is filled with songs, stories, surprises, and the shofar (on Rosh Hashanah). We also offer youth programming (interactive service plus activities) from 10:00 a.m. until 12:45 p.m. and teen-specific programming at 11 a.m. Each of these pieces is facilitated by our experienced and amazing team of educators. And new this year, we’re welcoming post- b’nai mitzvah teens to join our adult volunteer choir on the bimah on Rosh Hashanah morning to help lead our community. Our youth programs throughout the High Holy Days are led by our teens, under adult mentorship and guidance.

The DJC remains committed to making High Holy Day and general membership accessible to all. Both students and folks under 30 have FREE membership to the DJC, and there are sliding scales for all other categories of membership ( new families, first year of membership, single parents). Our services are engaging and topical, relevant and inspiring. The music and melodies we sing bridge traditional and contemporary so there is something for everyone to love. Our Rosh Hashanah day two study session,  led by Rabbi Ilyse Glickman,will explore anger in ourselves and in our world—adults of all ages can no doubt relate. Come one, come all, experience this radically welcoming community.

—Rabbi Ilyse Glickman (she/her)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The biggest night in Hollywood is celebrating Jewface. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Judaism exists in this contrast.

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

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

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

Rabbi Mark Glickman’s sermon is from a Shabbat service on October 13th. The information said in his sermon does not reflect the constantly changing information that has occurred over the last two months.

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When my wife Caron and I were in Israel last February, we went with a couple dozen of my colleagues to a small cluster of communities near the Gaza border called Sha’ar Hanegev. Our hosts there welcomed us at the local community centre and showed us into a meeting room. Over tea and cakes, we had the chance to meet Ofir Libstein, the mayor of Sha’ar Hanegev.

Mr. Libstein shared with us something of what life was like for him and his neighbours living in that troubled corner of the world. He spoke about the Palestinians on the other side of the border and acknowledged that, while some people in Gaza certainly wished him harm, he was confident that most of the Palestinians there were just like him—people with husbands, wives, children, and friends, just trying to live their lives as peaceably as they could.

Last Saturday, Hamas terrorists murdered Ofir Libstein in a firefight at Sha’ar Hanegev.

Saturday, October 7, was the deadliest day in the history of the Jewish people since the Holocaust. These are the pictures of just some of the victims.

The terrorists murdered more than 1,300 people in Israel. But that number—1,300—hides so much. They were old, and they were young, they were married and they were single. They had families, they had partners, they had friends. Many were non-Jews living or working in the Jewish state.

“He who destroys a single life,” the Talmud says, “is considered to have destroyed a world.” In Saturday’s violence, 1,300 lives came to a sudden end at the hands of terrorist evildoers. We mourn their deaths; we pay tribute to their lives. About 250 others were taken hostage, and we pray for their safe return.

We are here tonight to celebrate Shabbat. And we are here to grieve. And we are here to reflect. And we are here because we need one another. And we are here in search of God’s comfort and guidance. When you kill one Jew, you injure the Jewish heart. And we are here to nurse our wounded heart together. It was Israelis who were attacked on Saturday, but, as Yehudah Amichai’s poem notes, the diameter of that bomb extends much farther—even to here in Calgary and beyond.

As your rabbi, I’m supposed to comfort you at this juncture but I’m finding that difficult because right now I need comforting, too.

This is a moment that calls for moral clarity on the part of the Jewish people. Israel was attacked by terrorists. Old and young were slaughtered—men, women, and children. The killers went to their victims’ homes, to their town centres, and to a music festival, and they filmed their multi-pronged pogrom so they could brag about it to the world as it happened and afterward.

There are those who blame Israeli policy for these attacks, arguing that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and its treatment of Palestinians somehow paved the way for the horrors of last Saturday. Yes, there has been longstanding conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. But when you and I are having a dispute, however nasty my own behaviour might be, you don’t come to my home and kill my family. Such a response is never called for, it’s never “understandable,” it’s never a result of previous mistreatment. Accusations that Israeli policy brought this on are simply attempts to blame the victims, and to excuse unconscionable acts of terror. It is a perspective that we should refute at every possible opportunity.

There are those in the media who refer to the perpetrators of this violence as freedom fighters, and as people struggling for peace, who act on behalf of the rights of their people. That terminology is wrong—the perpetrators were terrorists. People who are fighting for national liberation don’t attack concert-goers. People who want peace in their land don’t murder peace activists. Those who want a better world for their people don’t commit brutal acts of terror.

Let’s be clear. Like many of us, I’m opposed to the occupation. Like many, I dream of a state for the Palestinian people just as we Jews have. And I, too, am horrified at some of the ways Israel has treated those who live in Gaza and the West Bank. But none of this—none of it caused this week’s carnage.

“Yes, but the occupation,” some people say. “Yes, but the corruption of the Netanyahu government. Yes, but . . .”

For the murder of infants, there is no “yes, but.”

For the slaughter of innocents, there is no “yes, but.”

For taking the elderly and the wounded hostage in a war zone “yes, but” has no place.

Let’s remember that although these attacks targeted mostly Jewish Israelis, Jews are not the only victims of Hamas’s terror. Hamas has caused great suffering on the part of Palestinians. Israel ended its occupation of Gaza in 2005, and soon afterward, Hamas took control of the area. It was a moment of such promise when Israel gave Gazans their autonomy. But Hamas squandered foreign aid in a morass of corruption. Hamas quashed their political opponents, often violently. And now, Hamas has brought the wrath of the IDF upon Gaza's citizens. Hamas has Jewish and Palestinian blood on its hands.

Let us hope and pray that, in the heat of war, Israel is able to remember this as it engages in the crucial task of defending itself against terrorism. There are more than two million people living in that little Gaza strip. There is no electricity, and Israel, who maintains external control of the area, has turned off access to food and water. The only way out might have been through Egypt, but Egypt hasn’t opened the door.

This is Shabbat B’reishit, when we Jews read the opening verses of the Torah. As I was reading the portion this week, my eyes were drawn to the story of Cain and Abel. Cain, according to the Torah, was history’s first murderer—the first person who rose up against their fellow human being and took their life. In this case, it was the life of Cain’s brother, Abel.

In 1981, Israeli poet Dan Pagis wrote about the aftermath of this murder from the perspective of Cain and Abel’s mother, Eve.

The poem is called “Written in Pencil in the Sealed Railway-Car,” and Pagis is using the story of Cain, Abel, and their mother Eve as an allegory for the Holocaust. A section of the poem reads:

here in this carload
i am eve
with abel my son
if you see my other son
cain son of man
tell him that i

I invite you to reflect for a few moments on these words. Eve sits in a railway car with the body of her murdered son. Her other son is Cain, Son of Man, Kayin ben Adam, Cain Son of Adam. She searches for him, but he is far, far away. And she wants to say something to him, she wants to share what she is thinking and feeling. But when it comes time to put words to what is in her heart, she falls into silence. She writes a message, but she can’t finish the thought.

There are no words.

Adonai oz l’amo yitein. Adonai y’vareich et amo vashalom. May God grant strength to our people, and may God bless our people with peace.

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The sermon has been shortened for length and clarity.

Cringe. When I asked my teenage daughter how she would define it, she replied, without missing a beat: “You saying the word ‘cringe.’”

As a parent of teens, my guiding philosophy is that whatever I say or do will be embarrassing, so I may as well embrace it. This is especially true when it comes to music. I embrace the fact that I sing “Rasputin” while cleaning out the fridge for Passover, and that my internal High Holy Days playlist includes Dar Williams (“Sometimes I see myself fine/sometimes I need a witness/and I like the whole truth/but there are nights I only need forgiveness”—really, it doesn’t get better than that).

Surprisingly, some of my taste is having a moment, as is evident by the appearance of the Indigo Girls classic, “Closer to Fine,” in the Barbie movie (kids, take note: I restrained from singing along in the theatre just for you). So, I felt very seen by Lydia Polgreen’s recent New York Times article “Why is Everyone Suddenly Listening to a Staple of My Angsty Adolescence?” According to Polgreen, the Indigo Girls are easy to dismiss as cringe, with “a kind of pathetic attachment to hope, to sincerity, to possibility.” But then, she suggests, this is exactly what we need.

We know we live in challenging times. I’ve been a rabbi for over 20 years now, and preparing sermons every Elul gives me some perspective: we always live in challenging times. There is always a crisis, and the world always feels like it is ending. Still, after a summer of smoke-filled skies, this September feels more apocalyptic than most. What is there for us to say? What is there for us to do? Polgreen writes:

You can respond to these circumstances with fatalistic cynicism. Or you can meet them with a sense of possibility, grounded in reality, loosely tethered to something like hope.

To me, this is what the Indigo Girls are all about. Sincerity coupled with wisdom, which is a recipe for something durable: solidarity. A sense that we are in this together. The Indigo Girls are great. Cringe but true. That’s because the kernel of who we are is cringe. That is what it means to be open to the world. To be open to the possibility of a future different from who you are now. When we are young, we feel that way because we don’t know any better. Eventually you get to a place where you know all the ways it can go wrong and feel open anyway.

This is the heart of the High Holy Days. Vulnerability and hope. Loving and losing. Showing up, even when it’s hard. Falling down and getting back up, again and again and again.

Rabbi Alan Lew wrote a wonderfully-titled book that I often turn to this time of year, This is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation. One of his key insights is that the High Holy Day season actually begins with the memorializing of the destruction of the Temple on Tisha b’Av and ends with sitting in the sukkah, our temporary home on Sukkot. If we take these days seriously, Lew says we realize that “our heart is always breaking, and the gate is always clanging shut . . . the houses that we live in never afford us real security. Their walls and roofs are never complete—they never really keep us from the world or from harm.” But knowing this is what lets us really live. In Lew’s words, “The illusion of protection falls away, and suddenly we are flush with our life, feeling our life, following our life, doing the dance, one step after another.”

Seriously cringe. But this time of year, I encourage all of us to embrace it.

The Canadian Jewish community has great strength in tradition. Many people, at least in Montreal where I live, go to the same synagogues their parents were married in and that their grandparents founded. There is a profound beauty in continuity and connection but it sometimes comes with a cost. We don’t always seek out the places that are the best fit for us in terms of community or spirituality; we don’t always go where we can bring our whole selves. Wherever you may be over the High Holy Days, I encourage you to make the experience mean something. Be authentic. Be vulnerable. Embrace the cringe.

Just please don’t show this article to my kids.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What do you hope people take away from this exhibit? 

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

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This interview has edited for clarity and length.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You also write about your relationship to Florida.

There’s a lot of Florida. 

How does it inform your work? 

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

Not just alligators.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Canadian filmmaker, Rebecca Snow’s most-recent release, The Boy in the Woods is making waves in North America and internationally. 

The film is based on Maxwell Smart’s 2022 memoir of the same name. As a child, Smart survived Nazi rule by hiding in the woods in Poland and details his experience in the book. The two main characters in this film are a young Max played by Jett Klyne, and Yanek, played by David Kohlsmith, the other boy who hides in the woods with him.

The film screened in the Industry Selects program at the Toronto International Film Festival this past fall, and has since screened at more than 30 festivals worldwide, has won audience choice awards, best film awards, and a best director award. 

I sat down with Snow over Zoom to celebrate the success of the film, to find out more about the project, and the real-life story that inspired it. Warning: spoilers ahead.

‍How did you get involved with the project and come to know Maxwell?  

I made a documentary in 2019 for History Channel called Cheating Hitler: Surviving the Holocaust. It is a feature-length documentary about three survivors on journeys to retell their stories and get answers about what had happened to the people around them. One of those survivors was Max. He had already written The Boy in the Woods, and working with him on Cheating Hitler made me realize that the documentary was just the beginning. His story warranted a retelling in a narrative film. I first raised it [the project] to him at Yad Vashem between takes for the documentary, and here we are now.‍

What was it like going from documenting his life and history as a work of non-fiction to adapting his story as a work of narrative fiction?

It’s the first time I’ve done fiction. My background is in documentary, so I’m very used to writing scripts for that genre, but I had never written a narrative script before.

I spent a lot of time with Max interviewing him for the documentary. The guilt and trauma he still holds around his friendship with Yanek and how he tragically died, is apparent. I knew that was something we had to explore dramatically. I didn’t have to stray from the true story because it’s all there. It’s a real roller coaster. Holocaust survivors often say it’s down to a series of small miracles that they survive and I wanted to get that sense throughout Max’s story. 

Was the film a collaborative process with Maxwell?

He left it entirely in my hands. He was extremely trusting and generous with his time, and I would occasionally go back and ask him questions. When I wrote the script I knew his story so well and I had read many testimonies by other survivors.  

At first, I was very nervous to show Maxwell the script. I made sure to show it to him before we went into production, and he loved it. I expected him to want to change little things, but he was very open. I think it’s partly because he is an artist himself. Maxwell is an abstract impressionist artist and so he understands that in order to speak to and entertain an audience, you can do certain things [that deviate from exact events] and still get the truth out because of how you’re telling the story.

What is the distribution plan for this film? Have you been able to screen it at festivals in and outside of Canada?

I’ve gone to a lot of festivals and most theatres have been packed. Maxwell comes with me when he is able, we went to the Miami Jewish Film Festival together where Maxwell received a standing ovation.

It’s rewarding to hear from audiences during the Q&As, and see how moved everyone is by this story. I’m always relaying these experiences for Maxwell and I take a picture of the audience so I can send it to him. He’s been carrying the weight of this story, and all of the stories of the people around him who didn’t survive, for 80 years. He knows—through the memoir, the documentary, and now this film—people are finally seeing his story and bearing testimony to the people who didn’t survive. It’s huge for him.

Everything originates with Maxwell’s story. My producers said they have never had a funding process go so quickly and smoothly. We got all the funders in place because everyone read the script and said this is a story we need to be telling.

What was it like working with kids as your main actors?

It was amazing! It was my first feature and people tell that joke around becoming a director of fiction: “Make sure your first film doesn’t have kids, or babies, or animals.” And we had kids and babies and animals galore. It was wonderful working with kids, and Jett and David are extraordinary actors. Off camera, they became like brothers, and I think that is visible through the chemistry we see on screen. 

Initially, I was worried about how we were going to find a 12-year-old kid to carry this film because he’s essentially in every frame. I got a bunch of tapes from different actors to read for the role and I thought that Jett was possibly our Max. I’d done callbacks with him, but I wanted to meet in person before I cast him. I wanted to see him in the woods, so we met in Stanley Park, in Vancouver, amongst the trees. The way he was leaping around and exploring, excited, and he was exactly Max’s age, he was just perfect. People have said to me at festivals, “Gosh he really reminds me of a young Timothée Chalamet.” Physically and in terms of acting chops. That’s a real compliment.‍

What are your most memorable moments from filming?

The one that stands out to everyone on set was when Maxwell came to visit and met Jett in person. He lives in Montreal and we were shooting in North Bay so that was a big moment. We didn’t tell Jett that Maxwell was coming so it was a surprise, and he was just blown away to meet the real Maxwell in person. 

That day we happened to be filming a very emotional scene between Max and Yanek. Jett was very caught up in the emotion of the scene and found it very hard to come out of the intense sadness that he had invoked in his acting, so I asked if he wanted to see Maxwell. And Jett ran over to him and sort of fell into his arms and they were just weeping together. Maxwell, who had been watching the monitor, said, “You just became me. I just watched you become me.” He is so blown away by Jett’s performance.

‍Don’t miss The Boy in the Woods now streaming on Apple TV and Paramount+. You can also catch it on Video on Demand on Google Play/YouTube, Cogecoex Store, Bell, Rogers, Shaw, and Cogeco.

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This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

In 2021, I embarked on a journey to preserve and celebrate a beloved piece of American Jewish history by starting my podcast, The Borscht Belt Tattler. Born and raised in Toronto, my family and I would schlep down to the Catskills every few years throughout my childhood, spending a week at Kutsher’s Country Club, in Monticello, New York. To my young eyes, it seemed like a typical resort. It wasn’t until adulthood that I truly appreciated the rich cultural history and the significant impact the Borscht Belt had on American entertainment and Jewish culture.  

At its peak, the Borscht Belt boasted over 500 resorts and thousands of bungalow colonies, each bustling with vibrant Jewish life. The food, laughter, entertainment, and most importantly the sense of community I experienced during those summers has stayed with me after all these years. I wanted to share these cherished memories and stories with others to keep the spirit of the Borscht Belt alive for future generations. 

Today, none of the resorts remain open, but the spirit of the Borscht Belt lives on. This is evident in the efforts to establish the future Catskills Museum and the annual Borscht Belt Fest, which I attend each summer. These events and institutions help preserve the rich cultural heritage of the region.

Over the past three years, The Borscht Belt Tattler has allowed me to connect with over 100 guests. We’re the only podcast that chats with people who worked in, played in, lived in, and loved the Borscht Belt, and we get down to the heart and soul of these places by chatting with the people who made it so special. Through these in-depth interviews and personal anecdotes, I’ve learned so much about the rich tapestry of experiences that made the Borscht Belt memorable. Together, we’ve been able to keep these memories alive, ensuring that the legacy of the Borscht Belt continues to thrive. 

On May 30, 2022, I interviewed Florida-based Mark Kutsher, the son of Helena Milton Kutsher, whose family owned and operated Kutsher’s Country Club for over 100 years. Their family’s club is where my love for the Borscht Belt started. Journey back to the Catskills with us in this excerpt from our conversation. And I hope to see you at the Borscht Belt festival next year!

How did your family get to the Catskills?

In 1901, five Kutsher siblings—two brothers, three sisters—and the rest of the family arrived at Ellis Island and settled into New York City.

What ultimately happened is my great uncle Max and his wife Rebecca and my grandfather Louis Kutsher bought property. They were working in the garment industry but they knew this wasn’t exactly what they wanted. It was a stop gap. They were from a farming background, back home in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and when they raised enough money they bought a 200 acre farm outside of Monticello, New York and started farming and quickly taking in borders. That site, which they purchased in December of 1906 and started operating in 1907, is the same spot where the hotel grew and stayed until we sold it in 2013. We were one of the early settlers in the Catskills, especially Jewish settlers. And we were surely the last Catskill hotel in the mountains, unfortunately. 

If you were speaking to someone who has absolutely no idea what the Borscht Belt was like, how would you describe it to them?

These hotels evolved and they were, to a certain extent, self contained. So you were amusing people during the day.

In the earliest days, they did things like my great-grandfather Max did, who played the fiddle. They’d know the songs and would sing along. They would do mock marriages. Men and women reverse roles, so the groom is the woman and the bride is a man dressed appropriately. And for whatever reason, it amused them to death. That was a real activity. When I was a kid in daycare we recreated a mock marriage. You see me walking down the aisle in this one picture, and I’m the father of the bride. You had people who ran around and acted crazy and created activities on the fly. But you had lots of different things. We had special activities for women where our director of athletics was teaching how to shoot foul shots.

Entertainment at night grew exponentially over the years. You can dig into any period and it looks a little different, but it all evolved as we grew a little larger and more sophisticated.

Who were the people that came to the Borscht Belt? 

People who are your best guests and your regulars, they’re like part of your extended family and they bring their family with them. They come often and you’re always doing special things for them. The vast amount of our people came from the greater New York area. So it was New Jersey, Long Island, New York suburbs. But we did a lot of business out of Philadelphia and a lot out of Boston, Montreal. We didn’t do much out of Toronto

How did you deal with unhappy guests?

We always would have a general manager that had to be very people oriented and could really take care of problems. Because you have so many moving parts, my theory was always that if we could make most of the people happy, we would be very successful.

There’s always people that fall through the cracks. Some people are just cranky, but some people have legitimate issues. If someone was really unhappy, they would end up in my father’s office. And when they’d sit in his office and talk to him, one way or another, they walked out happy. My father was the kind of guy you just listened to because he had a commanding presence. Once he wasn’t handling those issues anymore, those people would end up in my office. I’m there to solve their problems. A way to make them happy is to say that we see your problem, we feel your pain, and this is what we’re going to do for you. And I have to tell you those people, the ones who had those experiences and you really take care of them, some of them became our best guests. Give them that little extra attention. That’s what people appreciate. You don’t feel that when you go into a big chain hotel. We’re a family-owned property where we’re there, we’re accessible. We eat all our meals in the dining room. Look, you try to take care of the customers. You learn from what they’re telling you because you can always be better.

When you think about all the different hotels, what set Kutsher’s apart? Athletics was a huge part of the hotel’s history. 

Every one of the hotels up in the Catskills was a reflection of the ownership. These hotels were not all the same. I mean, they did certain things that basically were the same. The Concord would have a big bar scene and a big single scene, and another one could be trying to entertain seniors. My father really felt that the direction of our hotel should be family and sports. He loved sports. He had been an athlete and we got involved early on. Basketball was a big deal in the Catskills in the late 40s. Interestingly enough, in the early NBA, a lot of its members were Jewish.

It’s amazing. 

In 1950, and this was purely happenstance, we had guests at the hotel who came to see him and said our son is a basketball coach and we think he would be a wonderful fit in your hotel. That was the Auerbach family. My father met Red [an American basketball coach]. They hit it off immediately. This is 1950. He's not even with the Celtics at that point. He’s in Washington. And my father hired him as our director of athletics. He coached the basketball team. We started to build that up and then we got into boxing, which started in 1954. The first boxer who trained with us was Ezra Charles. At that point, he was a former heavyweight champion. He was going to be fighting Rocky Marciano, the undefeated heavyweight champion, who also was training at Grossinger’s. We hosted many training camps over the years. We had Tony DeMarco, Archie Moore, Floyd Patterson. 

Kutsher’s sat on 1,500 acres, and had 400 hotel rooms, a theatre, a nightclub, kosher restaurants, condos, two bungalow colonies, two camps, 18-hole golf, a health club, racquetball, shuffle bar, ice skating, two pools, tennis, the list goes on. What was your favourite place? 

I would pick the golf course. It was a symbiotic relationship between all these businesses. And it helped us, as a hotel, to sustain ourselves as things changed within the industry. We have these bungalow colonies and they carry memberships for the summer. At some point we had built a larger nightclub and we could hold them [the clientele]. We could bring in outsiders.

Bring in bigger entertainment. 

Yes.

I remember drinking my first Shirley Temple in that nightclub, and watching the people dance on stage. I thought that was so cool, but my parents were very shy and reserved, so I never went up to dance. I also want to mention the entertainment and the people who came there because in 700 Sundays, Billy Crystal talks about Kutsher’s. This is back in 2005. He brought the show to Toronto and I remember feeling this thing in my heart the second he talked about jumping in the car and going to Kutsher’s. My dad grabbed my arm with this excitement and we’re like, “Oh my God.”

He would talk about the fact that, you know, he went into the nightclub. The old nightclub, the palestra nightclub, and he saw the entertainer on stage and somewhere in his young head, he said, “This is great. I can do this. This is what I want to do.” It actually was a pivotal moment in his life. We had Billy at the hotel about three times. 

I have two Kutsher urban legends to confirm. When Jerry Seinfeld was performing at the hotel, was that when he was waiting to hear about the Seinfeld pilot that he was filming? 

The last show he did, I’m with him backstage after and I said, “So what do you have planned?” He wasn’t a big household name at that point. I thought he was a terrific young comedian.

How did the audiences like him? 

He always did well. I would always make sure that him and Crystal had a younger skewed audience because our crowds changed at different times of the year. And so, I’m talking to him and he says, “Well I’m not sure I’ve got this pilot. I’m waiting to hear about whether they're going to make it or not.” They did the pilot, they loved it, and—

Yada, yada, yada.

Exactly. 

Joan Rivers also came to perform.

Joan always did great. She was with us over decades. There were times where we would reach out at the last minute because something happened somewhere and she would jump in.

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The interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

As the summer heat winds down and you take those last vacations, you might be in need of a travel companion. Here are 10 of the year’s best books so far, in no particular order, for your summer reading pleasure.

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Greta and Valdin by Rebecca K. Reilly

This novel follows an absolutely hilarious Vladisavljevic family in New Zealand as they try to get their professional and personal lives together. Valdin and his sister, Greta, are queer 20-somethings trying to navigate love, life, heartbreak, and coming of age in the Internet era (dating apps and social media profiles galore). They also navigate family dynamics with their Russian father, Maori mother, older brother, and younger nephew. The best part of Reilly’s writing is the joy her characters exhibit at being queer, Maori, Russian, and Jewish! It’s also a great way to learn about modern New Zealand society. And though there is always love between the family members, like every family, it is a messy and imperfect one. This is a sharply written book as the commentary on racism, classism, ableism, and other prejudices are cleverly woven through and pack a punch. As proven in the wit behind one of my favourite lines: "I don't really feel like anything these days, just a beautiful husk filled with opinions about globalism and a strong desire to go out for dinner."

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The Safekeep by Yael Van Der Wouden

The Safekeep was marketed as a historical thriller, yet through its exploration of the relationship between its two central characters, Eva and Isabel, it reads more like a meditative examination of the treatment of Jews in the Netherlands before and during World War II. The year is 1961 and Isabel lives alone in the Dutch farmhouse her family bought during the war to flee Amsterdam. When her brother’s girlfriend, Eva, comes to stay with her (against Isabel’s will), she is forced out of her shell and reckons with both her attraction to Eva and the complex history of her family and their farmhouse. The story is an excellent reminder of how easily humans can turn on, or towards, each other.

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Women, Life, Freedom ed. Marjane Satrapi, translated from the French by Una Dimitrijevic

Satrapi is the author and illustrator of the well-known graphic novel Persepolis and brings audiences a new graphic novel centring on the incredibly brave acts Iranians are committing in the face of countless injustices following the murder of Mahsa Amini. The graphic novel goes into the history of protest movements in Iran and provides important context on the issues facing the country. I learned so much about social media, youth movements, and the history of protests in Women, Life, Freedom. It is hopeful but not naive, making it a necessary read in today’s world.

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Worry by Alexandra Tanner

If you’ve ever had a parent spout conspiracy theories or if you’ve ever been a little too invested in that tradwife online, Worry is for you. Jewish sisters, Jules and Poppy, move in together in New York following Poppy’s mental health struggles and subsequent time spent living at home with their parents. The move to Jule’s place was supposed to be a temporary fix while Poppy looked for a job and her own apartment, but a year later she’s still there. We witness the hilarious and sometimes toxic relationship between the sisters and their mother, who spirals down a multi-level marketing and Messianic path. This book captures the way you sometimes treat family because you trust they’ll always be there, even though everyone has a breaking point. And though the book isn’t plot driven, the hilarious writing will keep you engaged. A sisterly Gen-Z dramedy with something for everyone, it’s the very definition of “no plot, just vibes.”

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James by Percival Everett

Hot off the success of last year’s film adaptation of his novel Erasure, Percival Everett is back with a brilliant subversion of the classic Huckleberry Finn, this time from the perspective of enslaved character Jim, also known as James. This is a quick, engaging read, and if you don’t remember the details of Huckleberry Finn, that’s okay. Everett does a wonderful job of tying in plot points from Mark Twain’s novel while weaving in his own story. James is a hard-hitting look at how insidious racism is, and how non-Black readers are often disinclined to think beyond the portrayals of Black characters in our society. Everett has already cemented himself as a literary genius, and with this work he cements his status even more.

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Her Side of the Story by Alba de Céspedes, translated from the Italian by Jill Foulston

Following the translation of de Céspedes’s Forbidden Notebook last year, the much longer and in-depth Her Side of the Story was released in English. Originally written in 1949, the novel follows Alessandra, a young woman coming of age in pre-fascist Rome. As she examines her own family and community through the lens of a budding feminist, we see the rise of Mussolini, World War II, and the fall out of the war in Italy. The text remains a fascinating and relevant portrait of womanhood and how the personal is political. 

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City of Laughter by Temim Fruchter

This is one of the most delightfully Jewish novels of recent memory. The brilliance of this book rests in how queerness becomes a path to freedom. The story revolves around Shiva who, at the loss of her beloved father, is forced to confront her difficult relationship with her mother, Hannah. Her mother, who is withholding, doesn’t understand why Shiva is so interested in the family’s history in Poland. She also isn’t supportive of Shiva’s relationship with a woman. As the story progresses, the reader learns that the troubled mother-daughter relationships are borne out of intergenerational trauma. Three generations of Jewish women become the basis for an exploration of Jewish folklore, history, and culture, especially when Shiva goes to Poland to explore both Jewish history and her own family’s past life in a shtetl. 

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You Dreamed of Empires by Álvaro Enrigue, translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer

For fans of postcolonial literature, prolific Mexican author Álvaro Enrigue, has created an irreverent and creative reimagining of Cortes’s conquest of Moctezuma’s empire in modern day Mexico City. The ending is satisfyingly anti-colonialist but also devastating because it exposes what could’ve been. The power of this book rests in the slow dismantling of the Spanish; the defiance of hegemonic power is subtle but effective. With a sprawling and diverse cast, Enrigue is able to showcase a range of perspectives on Spanish colonialism in Mexico, as well as the many fates of people during that period.

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Broughtupsy by Christina Cooke

This short novel is a tender and raw look centred around Akúa, who lives in Vancouver and goes back to her home country Jamaica—a place she hasn’t returned to since her mother’s death 10 years prior. Now, under tragic circumstances again, she visits her sister following the death of their young brother to sickle cell anemia, the same disease that took their mother. Through Akúa’s perspective, and the memories she revisits of her mother, the reader learns of how Jamaica has changed in the last decade. At first, the nonlinear storytelling threw me off, but once I realized there was a pattern to how the text flowed back and forth through time, I was able to keep up, and ended up finding that Cooke did a great job balancing the past and present. We see the discrimination and racism Akúa faced when first immigrating to Texas and then Vancouver, and how her father worked hard to give them a caring family after the death of their mother. This is a beautiful and devastating look at a family fractured by migration and grief. 

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Martyr! By Kaveh Akbar

Novels written by poets can be divisive—sometimes their poetic stylings translate well to prose, and sometimes the text becomes overwrought. Kaveh Akbar, luckily, is a master of prose as well as poetry. Martyr!’s protagonist, Cyrus, grows up in the Midwestern U.S. with his single father, after his mother was killed by the American military. The book is based on a real event, where the U.S. Navy shot down an Iranian passenger plane in 1988, but the characters and details have been fictionalized. The presence of the U.S. empire hangs heavy over him because of this, but so does the concept of death. On the cusp of adulthood, Cyrus’s father passes away, triggering his need to make his own death meaningful. The novel’s nonlinear narrative gives us glimpses of his parents’ youth and Cyrus’s dream scenarios with celebrities, historical figures, and family members. These moments offer interesting insight into Cyrus’s unconscious, the kind of imagining we have when we are desperate to reconnect with lost loved ones or need to make meaning out of the unimaginable. Martyr! is a tragic, moving, and hopeful look at the dimensions that make up a life, even when you wrestle with death.

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Special Mention: Book of Queens by Pardis Mahdavi

Book of Queens was published in 2023, but it flew under my radar and I didn’t pick it up until 2024, so I wanted to mention it here, especially if you’re looking for a narrative nonfiction read. This book is about the legacy of incredible women in Iran and Afghanistan who live in caves and ride bareback on ancient horses in some of the toughest mountain terrain. The author’s Iranian grandmother, Maryam, came from a long line of mounted women warriors and started bringing women facing abuse and domestic violence to join their community. Maryam’s story eventually intersects with Louise, an American who married an Iranian aristocrat. Together, Maryam and Louise help save this ancient horse breed and continue the legacy of Maryam’s ancestors. These women formed an alliance and fought the Taliban for decades before 9/11. It’s an incredible true story that more of us should know.

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

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Repose explores ties of family, vulnerability, and healing. A floating canopy of MRI brain scan drawings resembling a cloud-like jellyfish, or strange balloons, are connected by cords to my child, resting below, an embodiment of Jewish ancestry. My grandfather, an Orthodox Jewish immigrant from Galicia, studied Kabbalah and led prayers in Ontario in the 1940s. In Kabbalah, God’s attribute, Malkhus (Sovereignty, from the Hebrew root Melech, “king”) correlates to the allegorical colour blue in teachings of the Sefirot (Divine Emanations) by Rabbi Joseph Tzayach (1500 C.E.). Letters from the Hebrew alphabet are part of the shapes and motifs of Repose. Some individual brains resemble the Hebrew letter, ס (samekh), the first letter in סוף (sof), the word for end. This is a nod to the Kabbalistic concept ein sof, (there is no end) to what will always exist and has always existed. The cords spell shalom  שלום, which means peace and is used in everyday language to say hello and goodbye. 

Repose was created for the In Two Places exhibitions from June until August 2022. They took place at The Brighton Storeroom in Barbados and the Satellite Project Space in London, Ontario, with a catalogue by Joscelyn Gardner, Patrick Mahon and Allison Thompson. Printed at Open Studio by Pudy Tong, Repose was also exhibited along with visual art by Quentin VerCetty, and Gustavo Artigas in the Art in the Time of Healing: The Importance of IBPOC Arts in Planetary Renewal at Daniels Spectrum for CPAMO’s Gathering multimedia arts festival in December 2021. 

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“Sephirot” is the first poem to appear in English from Leonor Scliar Cabral’s poignantly ironic collection Erotica of Old Age, which has been translated from the Portugese by Alexis Levitin.

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In a lost sphere there is a paradise
Awaiting me I don’t know when
And I must clamber through the withered
branches of the apple tree.

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The wild entanglement of my white hair
hides a world of dried-up thorns,
where I sought out a paradise of figs,
of apples, and of pomegranates.

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I am lost, but my dream is not,
and my cracked, torn flesh moans
these final drops that feed
what is already gone.

I am descended from two Esthers. 

My paternal great-grandmother, Esther, was born in Russia. After being forced out of her homeland due to pogroms, she found herself in what is now Belarus. She later married Elias and they moved to Budapest, where it was safe for them, even during World War I. She raised her four children, including my grandfather, Izso. Esther lived with him and his wife, Shari, after becoming widowed. 

During the Nazi occupation of Hungary, Izso died. Esther, Shari, her children, and other family members were taken to a ghetto, a brick factory outside of Budapest. They were left outdoors without food or protection from the elements and were eventually loaded into cattle cars and taken to Auschwitz. My father was separated from the women, who clung together to help Esther walk—her legs swollen from the days on the train. 

The women were immediately taken to the gas chamber. 

On the first day of my father’s internment, he learned that the women were slaughtered. After the war, my father found out his brother Rudy had been killed. My father visited the synagogue in Újpest years later. His entire family was on the memorial.

I look a lot like Esther, I share her curly dark hair, the same nose, the same chin. 

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My maternal grandmother, Esther, was born into an Orthodox family in what is now Slovakia. Her father Morris had 13 children. 

Esther’s husband, Jakob, was from Ukraine and in the Czech military. After World War II started, he moved his family, which included three children, to Bratislava. But in doing so, he "went AWOL," and fearing he'd be arrested as a deserter, they moved to Budapest. The family lived there for a few years before the Nazi regime arrived in Hungary. At that point, Jakob told his family he had to leave, and paid the Swiss to protect the building where his family was hiding. Grandma Esther and my mother were captured in Budapest while out getting food. My grandmother stood up to the Nazi soldiers and told them she had two more children at home, and she wished to get them so they could all go together. They went back to their building and weren’t forced to leave just yet. 

After some time, they were captured and taken to a ghetto. They were part of Eichmann’s last march, and while many people were taking valuables, hoping they could buy freedom, Esther smuggled food within their clothes and made the children carry heavy blankets, items that would keep them alive on the march. 

My grandmother kept her children’s spirits up by singing to them, praying with them, encouraging them to stick together and to be brave. While others died, they marched on, ending up in a satellite camp near Mauthausen. By the time they arrived, the three children were all sick, but Grandma Esther managed to convince the commandant to allow them to live with her. She worked in the kitchen, cooking for the German soldiers, and smuggled crusts of bread and raw potato peels back to her children. They survived together and were sent to a displaced persons camp in northern Germany. 

My parents met during this time; my dad was in a displaced persons camp in Bavaria and my mom worked for the American military as an interpreter. Though they were married without rings, an American officer bought my mom a dress (she later traded it for a tablecloth—she was practical). 

Once they immigrated to the U.S., arriving in NYC, they lived together in a studio apartment. 

My Grandma Esther lost all of her siblings that remained in Czechoslovakia except one brother and one half sister. She cared for her brother, who lost his wife and children in the camps. Her half-sister ended up in Sweden after the war. My grandma helped bring her to the U.S. so they could be together. 

Esther was a devout Jew. She prayed every day, many times a day. She had incredible posture. She didn’t suffer any fools. She gave tzedakah, she planted trees in Israel, she visited Israel and got to pray at the Wailing Wall. She lived until 69, the age I am now. 

It was her who taught me how to cook, how to grow vegetables, how to sew by hand, how to embroider, and how to make jewellery. I could always count on her, I could always go to her with my troubles. 

Looking back on her life, largely spent in exile, I can’t help but see the parallels between her and Queen Esther. Like Queen Esther, she was a prisoner. Like Queen Esther, she risked her life by standing up for what she believed in. Her bravery inspires me.

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The Haggadah has always been an object that sparked creativity. For centuries Jewish artists have been inspired by the rituals of the Seder, the conversations of the rabbis, the objects and animals in the songs, and the season of spring. I am one in a long line of artists who have used the Haggadah as the diving board to plunge into the visual sea. What started with a few plagues and some ancestors, soon blossomed into collages about all aspects of the text.

The artwork below stems from my self-published book the Collage Haggadah.

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