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Join actors David Sklar and Ilana Zackon as they schmooze with creative Jews of all disciplines, taking you behind the scenes of what matters most to Canada's Jewish arts community—and why our cultural representation matters.
41 Episodes
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Earlier this month, 18 Canadian theatre companies—including the world's largest queer theatre company, Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, based in Toronto—joined a cultural and academic boycott of Israel, in solidarity with Gaza. It was just the latest evolution in a trend that has been particularly noteworthy since Oct. 7, 2023, when the North American arts community turned sharply against pro-Israel and Jewish artists in all fields, noteably theatre, film, literature, poetry.
The progression has led us here. After years of isolation, there is more hunger than ever for proudly Jewish art, with calls for increased Jewish arts grants and community support. Here to echo those calls are two Jewish artists who have experienced these struggles in the last two years: Shaina Silver-Baird is a writer, actor and the creator of the TV series Less Than Kosher, and Hal Niedzviecki was the editor of Broken Pencil, Canada's magazine covering independent zine culture, which he abruptly closed after facing backlash from progressive activists to denounce Israel.
In this series finale of Culturally Jewish, The CJN's podcast covering Canadian Jewish artists, hosts Ilana Zackon and David Sklar sit down for a frank conversation and take stock of the last two years—while also expressing hopes for the future.
Credits
Hosts: Ilana Zackon and David Sklar
Producer: Michael Fraiman
Music: Sarah Segal-Lazar
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Daniel Pelton hadn't felt much of a musical connection to his Jewish heritage before Oct. 7. But after reality changed for Jews around the world—including his hometown of Calgary—Pelton decided to learn more about both the Holocaust and its artistic representations. He read The Tattooist of Auschwitz, which inspired him to adapt the tattoo numbers used in the book—34902-32407—into musical notes, using their 12-tone counterparts.
The result evolved into a 11-minute epic, which Pelton supplemented with two other tracks to create a new trio of songs, released on Jan. 27 for the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. To record the three works, Pelton teamed up with Calgary's National Music Centre and successfully applied for a grant to record with the "Violins of Hope", authentic violins once owned by Holocaust victims and survivors.
Hear all the three works and learn how he embarked on this journey on this week's episode of Culturally Jewish, The CJN's podcast spotlighting Canadian Jewish artists.
Credits
Hosts: Ilana Zackon and David Sklar
Producer: Michael Fraiman
Music: Sarah Segal-Lazar
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When Adam Wolfond was in his primary school years, the public education system wasn't giving him the support he needed as a nonverbal autistic student. So his mother, Estée Klar, along with other educators and allies, created their own kind of classroom, where neurodivergent kids could feel more free to learn in their own ways, pacing around the room or sitting in bean bag chairs. For Wolfond, using a text-to-speech device, he was finally able to respond in full sentences at his own pace—and discover his own poetic voice.
This month, he is debuting an art exhibition at the Koffler Arts Centre in Toronto, "What If My Body is a Beacon for the World?", running from Jan. 9-26. The exhibit includes video installations and projections, along with bean bag chairs and sticks laying around the ground, which are central to Wolfond's way of living and communicating.
Wolfond and Klar join Culturally Jewish, The CJN's arts podcast, to describe their artwork and journey to get here.
Credits
Hosts: Ilana Zackon and David Sklar
Producer: Michael Fraiman
Music: Sarah Segal-Lazar
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Erez Zobary spent a long time downplaying her Jewish identity in her music career. Her earlier work—a blend of R&B, pop, soul and jazz—dealt with issues relevant to her audience of largely twentysomethings: love lives, quarter-life crises, feeling stuck and aimless. It may not be surprising, then, that a woman whose songs so often looked inward would eventually turn to her heritage. As she tells Culturally Jewish, The CJN's arts and culture podcast, her songs began feeling increasingly disconnected from who she really was, and she wanted to try something drastically different.
The result is Erez, her new album, which dives deep into her Yemenite family history—specifically her grandmother's escape from Yemen to Israel as part of Operation Magic Carpet. Zobary joins the show to explain her process and backstory, and to share how she feels releasing an album with Middle Eastern musical flourishes, covered in Hebrew writing, just one year after Oct. 7.
Credits
Hosts: Ilana Zackon and David Sklar
Producer: Michael Fraiman
Music: Sarah Segal-Lazar
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After Wendy Litner's mother passed away, Litner was surprised that she still heard her voice—felt her presence, even, looking over her shoulder... often judging her. The feeling inspired Litner to write a new web series called My Dead Mom, released on Crave earlier this month.
The show gives a modern, distinctly feminist twist to the stereotype of a Jewish mother ceaselessly nagging her daughter. And, as Litner explains on the latest episode of Culturally Jewish, it's less about saying goodbye than accepting the evolution of a relationship with those who've passed on.
Also in this episode, co-hosts Ilana and David discuss their own history of using art to process grief and trauma, and give their biweekly round-up of Jewish art events across the country.
Credits
Hosts: Ilana Zackon and David Sklar
Producer: Michael Fraiman
Music: Sarah Segal-Lazar
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This podcast is a proud media partner of Jewish Futures, a day-long arts and culture salon for Jewish arts workers, hosted by the UJA Federation of Greater Toronto on Nov. 24. The 2024 program emphasizes networking, communal learning and the exploration of Jewish artistic identity, providing a foundation for building resilience and leadership for Toronto’s Jewish cultural community. Learn more and get your tickets here.
Joseph Landau didn't grow up speaking Yiddish—but something about the language compelled him. Whenever he spent time with his grandfather, Landau would ask him to translate certain words, slowly building a vocabulary. He joined WhatsApp groups that communicated in the language, sought out secular Yiddish-speaking communities and eventually began speaking Yiddish to his own young son.
That journey, not coincidentally, has dovetailed with Landau's musical career. As the driving force behind Yosl and the Yingels, Landau writes original songs—entirely in Yiddish—that blend jazz and folk melodies with classic klezmer motifs. Their debut EP, Zikhroynes, releases Nov. 15, 2024._
Landau joins the hosts of Culturally Jewish to discuss life in the Yiddish-speaking arts world, from the politics of klezmer retreats to the reaction of non-Jewish audiences across the city of Toronto.
Credits
Hosts: Ilana Zackon and David Sklar
Producer: Michael Fraiman
Music: Sarah Segal-Lazar
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Last month, The CJN Podcast Network debuted its first original fiction podcast, Justice: A Holocaust Zombie Story. The seven-part audio drama is a work of subversive Holocaust education designed for the digital age, with many of its gruesome facts grounded in truth. Any shock value from merging zombies with Holocaust education was a deliberate attempt at turning heads, particularly among younger, non-Jewish audiences.
That's according to the show's creator, Michael Fraiman—who also produces _Culturally Jewish—_and sits in the guest chair for the first time. He and Ilana Zackon were invited by the Toronto Holocaust Museum to record a live conversation about the show, its origins and its intentions, hosted on the night before Halloween.
Listings
Learn more about Jewish Futures, Toronto's day-long conference for Jewish arts workers, and register for the event happening Nov. 24
See what the Toronto Holocaust Museum is doing for Neuberger Holocaust Education Week 2024, including a conversation between Maclean's editor Sarah Fulford and author Tobias Buck
Show Credits
Hosts: Ilana Zackon and David Sklar
Producer: Michael Fraiman
Music: Sarah Segal-Lazar
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Donate to The CJN (+ get a charitable tax receipt)
Subscribe to Culturally Jewish (Not sure how? Click here)
Jacob Samuel has a couple references to his Judaism in his stand-up routine. In the past, whenever he brought it up, it usually created a moment of tension before a laugh. But in the year since Oct. 7, especially in his hometown of Vancouver, he's noticed a shift. It's harder to talk about his Jewish identity onstage. He brings it up later, or takes out a couple jokes if the laugh isn't big enough.
Yet Samuel, who won a Juno award for his debut comedy album in 2021, is determined to keep telling audiences he's Jewish. As he tells The CJN's arts podcasters on Culturally Jewish, that visibility is important, even with antisemitism on the rise. And getting people comfortable enough to laugh along with him is critical.
Samuel is will be hitting the road this month, performing in Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal before returning to B.C. for a headline show at the Chutzpah! Festival in Vancouver.
Credits
Hosts: Ilana Zackon and David Sklar
Producer: Michael Fraiman
Music: Sarah Segal-Lazar
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Arnie Lipsey has spent decades working in animation. But on the side, years ago, he began painting on canvas, using archival family photos for inspiration. He began colourizing and adapting them, eventually reinterpreting them entirely through a modern lens. That often resulted in jarring, traumatic scenes quietly unfolding behind his smiling family members: spiralling tornados, fiery trains, even the barbed-wire fences of a concentration camp.
The result is an unsettling, engrossing new series of 30 paintings in a new series on display at the Museum of Jewish Montreal until December 2024. The Past Is Before You blends fond memories and childlike innocence with a traumatic family story of escape from Nazi Europe. Lipsey joins The CJN's arts podcast, Culturally Jewish, to explain his process and share some of the real-life history behind the art.
Credits
Hosts: Ilana Zackon and David Sklar
Producer: Michael Fraiman
Music: Sarah Segal-Lazar
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Donate to The CJN (+ get a charitable tax receipt)
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When Tuesdays with Morrie was first published in 1997, it elevated Jewish author Mitch Albom to a level of literary stardom that reverberated beyond the book world. The story—which detailed Albom's frequent visits with his former professor, Morrie Schwartz, who was dying of ALS—has since been adapted into a TV movie and an off-Broadway production in 2002 before a New York City revival earlier this year.
And now, a new staging is bringing this two-hander play to the Winnipeg Jewish Theatre—starring The CJN's own arts podcaster, David Sklar. David took a few moments out of rehearsal to sit down with his director, Mariam Bernstein, to talk about the Jewish themes inherent to the story.
But before that, Ilana Zackon catches us up on her busy summer, which included a stop at the KlezKanada retreat in rural Quebec and the Ashkenaz Festival in downtown Toronto, and later offers up some nationwide arts listings, including a couple controversial films about the Middle East debuting at the Toronto International Film Festival this week.
Credits
Hosts: Ilana Zackon and David Sklar
Producer: Michael Fraiman
Music: Sarah Segal-Lazar
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Subscribe to The CJN newsletter
Donate to The CJN (+ get a charitable tax receipt)
Subscribe to Culturally Jewish (Not sure how? Click here)
You may have heard Talia Schlanger's voice on CBC Radio or NPR, where she has spent years hosting music programs and interviewing artists. Somewhere, in the back of her mind, she was taking notes, planning for her own eventual leap into the music industry—a leap she finally took this past February, with the release of her debut album, Grace for the Going.
But while she credits her years as a broadcaster as helping with her creative process, as she admits on The CJN's arts podcast, Culturally Jewish, she was surprised at how unprepared she would be when it came to the business side of things, such as marketing, grant writing and distribution.
Hear Schlanger describe her personal journey and Jewish identity—including the inspiration she drew from her grandparents who survived the Holocaust, and why she began wearing her Magen David necklace after Oct. 7.
Credits
Hosts: Ilana Zackon and David Sklar
Producer: Michael Fraiman
Music: Sarah Segal-Lazar
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At the onset of the Holocaust, after Maxwell Smart's family began being targeted and killed in Nazi-occupied Europe, he became separated from his mother, who made one final request of her young son: "Please run away." He did as he was told. He ended up spending one and a half years living in the cold, desolate woods of Eastern Europe, meeting and making friends with other young Jews until liberation.
As one of Canada's best-known living Holocaust survivors, Smart—who moved to Montreal after the war—has told his story many times before to schools, museums and journalists. Now it's the plot of a new film, The Boy in the Woods, which premiered in late 2023, and this month became widely available digitally on-demand through many streaming services.
Smart joins The CJN's arts podcast Culturally Jewish to share his story and feelings about bringing his story to the silver screen, while filmmaker Rebecca Snow explains how she met Smart and why she decided to make the leap from documentary to narrative film with such heavy subject matter.
Credits
Culturally Jewish is hosted by Ilana Zackon and David Sklar. Our producer is Michael Fraiman, and our theme music is by Sarah Segal-Lazar. We’re a member of The CJN Podcast Network. To support The CJN and receive a charitable tax receipt, please consider a monthly donation by clicking here.
Danila Botha wants you to know something about her writing: it's not autobiographical. She pulls ideas and themes from real life, from the media and history, from current affairs and what she sees in the world. She is not personally a glitter-strewn closeted lesbian Orthodox woman, nor is she a drug addict who once met Anne Frank in a dream. But these are the kinds of concepts—distinctly Jewish stories with shades of halachic heterodoxy—that are packed into Things That Cause Inappropriate Happiness, her new collection of short stories, released April 2024.
Botha joins The CJN's arts podcast, Culturally Jewish, to discuss her new collection and offer a glimpse into life as an openly Zionist author in an industry that has become infamously inhospitable to Zionist authors.
Credits
Culturally Jewish is hosted by Ilana Zackon and David Sklar. Our producer is Michael Fraiman, and our theme music is by Sarah Segal-Lazar. We’re a member of The CJN Podcast Network. To support The CJN and receive a charitable tax receipt, please consider a monthly donation by clicking here.
When Jaclyn Grossman was an 18-year-old opera student, her teacher heard her soprano voice and informed her she'd sing the music of Richard Wagner. Grossman didn't know much about the German composer, but quickly fell in love with his music. She was not particularly phased by the fact that Wagner was infamously antisemitic, included offensive Jewish stereotypes in his works, and is even de facto banned in Israel.
Years later, she began researching operas written by Holocaust victims and survivors. She co-founded the Likht Ensemble to perform their works and toured the continent singing these nearly forgotten Yiddish pieces. And only then did she realize that her two passions existed within an extremely controversial space.
This week, opera fans can hear Grossman in the Edmonton Opera's production of Das Rheingold; then, in July, she heads to Ontario's Festival of the Sound to sing in Yiddish in Postcards. In advance of these contrasting shows, Grossman sits down with our arts podcast, Culturally Jewish, to explain how she reconciles these two worlds—and why Jewish fans shouldn't cancel Wagner.
Relevant links
Learn more about the Edmonton Opera's production of Das Rheingold
Learn more about Postcards at the Festival of the Sound
Visit the website for the Likht Ensemble
Credits
Culturally Jewish is hosted by Ilana Zackon and David Sklar. Our producer is Michael Fraiman, and our theme music is by Sarah Segal-Lazar. We’re a member of The CJN Podcast Network. To support The CJN and receive a charitable tax receipt, please consider a monthly donation by clicking here.
During the pandemic, David Sklar—an actor, playwright and co-host of The CJN's arts podcast Culturally Jewish—wrote a theatre script called Vial. The plot focuses on a college professor who feels conflicted when one of her far-left-wing Jewish students writes an extreme essay about Israel; the professor, who starts off adamantly pro–free speech, begins to reconsider her stance when the essay sparks wider outrage and fierce debates on campus and beyond.
In 2023, a colleague of Sklar's—a drama teacher at Dawson College, a CEGEP in Westmount, Montreal—reached out to see if Sklar had any unpublished work she could bring to her students for a month-long workshop. Sklar offered Vial: it wasn't especially relevant at the time, but she was free to use it.
Then Oct. 7 happened.
That's why, this month, a group of theatre students—with only two Jews among them—are studying this controversial script about campus politics and free speech, while pro-Palestinian activists stage tent-in protests literally blocks away.
Sklar flew to Montreal to spend a few days speaking with the students in person, and now he reports back on what those conversations were like—while also playing clips of what Dawson students Dalia Leblay, Rachel Bruder-Wexler and Bram Lackman-Mincoff thought of the script.
Credits
Culturally Jewish is hosted by Ilana Zackon and David Sklar. Our producer is Michael Fraiman, and our theme music is by Sarah Segal-Lazar. We’re a member of The CJN Podcast Network. To support The CJN and receive a charitable tax receipt, please consider a monthly donation by clicking here.
On December 1, 2023, Charles Officer passed away at age 48. The award-winning filmmaker was revered in the national arts community, having directed documentaries such as Invisible Essence, about the cultural impact of The Little Prince, and The Skin We're In, a film adaptation of author Desmond Cole's popular essay on racism in Canada. His movies were purposeful and personal, tackling topical issues with incisive commentary and deep research.
The 2024 Hot Docs film festival in Toronto will be commemorating Officer's life with a tribute screening of his 2010 film Might Jerome on May 4, including a Q&A panel with some of his industry colleagues. Two friends and collaborators join Culturally Jewish to describe Officer's unique life as a Black Jewish arts worker in Canada: Jake Yanowski, who cofounded the production company Canesugar Filmworks with Officer, and Michael Levine, one of Canada's foremost literary agents.
Credits
Culturally Jewish is hosted by Ilana Zackon and David Sklar. Our producer is Michael Fraiman, and our theme music is by Sarah Segal-Lazar. We’re a member of The CJN Podcast Network. To support The CJN and receive a charitable tax receipt, please consider a monthly donation by clicking here.
Irena Gut Opdyke was a Polish nurse who, during the Second World War, was forced to become a housekeeper for a high-ranking German officer. At some point, she was offered the chance to save a dozen Jewish lives. She agreed, hiding them in a space nobody would think to look—in the German officer's basement.
Later honoured as a Righteous Among the Nations, Irena's story is not very well known. But a group of Quebecois filmmakers is about to change that. Irena's Vow, being released in theatres across Canada on April 19, is a historical drama that marks a rare Canadian-made entry into the Holocaust film genre. Lead actress Sophie Nélisse joins Culturally Jewish to discuss what filming was like and what she hopes audiences will take away.
And before that, hosts David and Ilana explain—with good reasoning—why neither one of them actually watched Irena's Vow... or, in fact, almost any other Holocaust movie. (Hint: it involves generational trauma.)
Credits
Culturally Jewish is hosted by Ilana Zackon and David Sklar. Our producer is Michael Fraiman, and our theme music is by Sarah Segal-Lazar. We’re a member of The CJN Podcast Network. To support The CJN and receive a charitable tax receipt, please consider a monthly donation by clicking here.
When a member of the Jewish community in London, Ont., recently decided to go through with medical assistance in dying (MAiD), it sent shockwaves through the tight-knit community. Some were angry and confused, others were sympathetic and supportive—and others felt mixed emotions, including the father of Jordi Mand, a playwright and screenwriter. Mand discussed the topic extensively with her father (and then her brother, and others), and soon came to realize how controversial the idea of medically assisted death was within Judaism.
The emotional scenario set the stage for her latest play, In Seven Days. It tells the story of a woman who returns home to learn that her father has decided to end his life via MAiD in a week's time, leaving her, their family and even the local rabbi scrambling to try and change his mind before then.
The production debuted at the Grand Theatre in London, and will come to the Meridian Arts Centre in Toronto by way of the Harold Green Jewish Theatre Company from May 4-16, 2024. Ahead of the play's Toronto debut, Mand and director Philip Akin sat down with the hosts of Culturally Jewish for a frank talk about death, life, comedy and the nature of choice.
And before that, the hosts discuss recent controversies in the Jewish arts world, including the poorly worded Oscar acceptance speech by the director of The Zone of Interest and the cancellation of next month's Hamilton Jewish Film Festival.
Credits
Culturally Jewish is hosted by Ilana Zackon and David Sklar. Our producer is Michael Fraiman, and our theme music is by Sarah Segal-Lazar. We’re a member of The CJN Podcast Network. To support The CJN and receive a charitable tax receipt, please consider a monthly donation by clicking here.
On March 5, the biggest comedy festival in the world, Just for Laughs, announced it was cancelling this year's events in its hometown of Montreal and filing for bankruptcy protection. The news shocked international comics and local Montrealers—but Andy Nulman, who co-founded the festival in 1985 and spearheaded its expansion through the 1990s, wasn't entirely surprised. Though he took a step back from the company in 1999 and left entirely in 2015, he'd been hearing of JFL's financial troubles in the media, just as most in-person events had taken a hit since the pandemic.
And yet, as he recounts on Culturally Jewish, The CJN's podcast about Canadian Jewish arts, seeing that the enormous summer festival would be cancelled entirely still blindsided him—and hit him emotionally. In this in-depth conversation, Nulman discusses the global shifts that led to JFL's recent troubles, the way Montreal's Jewish community supported the festival from its earliest days, and why he's optimistic that Just for Laughs hasn't truly had its last laugh forever.
Hear in this episode:
Milton Berle in 1991, who was invited to perform at age 83
Tim Allen's set in 1990, which helped get him Home Improvement
Howie Mandel in 2002, who later led a group that bought the comedy festival in 2018
Credits
Culturally Jewish is hosted by Ilana Zackon and David Sklar. Our producer is Michael Fraiman, and our theme music is by Sarah Segal-Lazar. We’re a member of The CJN Podcast Network. To support The CJN and receive a charitable tax receipt, please consider a monthly donation by clicking here.
Eric and Erin Warner's grandfather lived to the admirable age of 103. And in that time, the Jewish immigrant to Canada saw Toronto change in innumerable ways, from the migration of Jews out of the Ward and Kensington Market to mass communication shifting from the radio to the internet. It's a life's story that Eric, who's worked in music promotion and production since he was a teenager, wanted to tap into—in part to help his own young children understand where their family came from.
He roped in his sister, Erin, to sing on the album, and his longtime friend Jason Craig to help write the songs. The result is a concept album, A Song for Ira, released in February 2024, which debuted with a live show at the Miles Nadal JCC on Family Day. The concept is that two grandparents, Harold and Ruth, are gifted songwriting classes, which they use to write eight folksy tracks about growing up in a bygone Jewish Toronto. Writing about mid-20th century family vacations and longstanding Jewish institutions, the album paints a picture of the past for the benefit of the future.
The Warner siblings and Jason Craig join Culturally Jewish to describe the songwriting process and why they believe writing music is an ideal way to speak to younger audiences.
Credits
Culturally Jewish is hosted by Ilana Zackon and David Sklar. Our producer is Michael Fraiman, and our theme music is by Sarah Segal-Lazar. We’re a member of The CJN Podcast Network. To support The CJN and receive a charitable tax receipt, please consider a monthly donation by clicking here.
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