Culturally Jewish – Details, episodes & analysis

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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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

Support The CJN

• Get free emails from The CJN
• Donate to The CJN (+ get a charitable tax receipt)
• Subscribe to Culturally Jewish (Not sure how? Click 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.

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

He decided to transform his emotions into a new production. Working with his close friend, the rapper CJ Capital (who is not Jewish, but also a major Kanye fan), as well as Dan Petrenko and Tracey Erin Smith, both of whom are Jewish theatre creators in the Prairie provinces, Zosky spent a year developing a new play. Pain to Power: A Kanye West Musical Protest debuts at the Winnipeg Jewish Theatre on Mar. 9, about a month after Kanye's latest album, Vultures 1, which was just released this week. Pain to Power adopts Kanye's music and reclaims it into a work of art that Zosky believes the multimillionaire rapper would absolutely hate.

He and Petrenko, the artistic director of the Winnipeg Jewish Theatre, join Culturally Jewish to discuss the origins of the show and their artistic process—which included a trip to Israel in early October 2023 that ended up being cut short when they got caught in Hamas's terrorist attack, hearing missiles exploding over their heads from inside Ben Gurion airport, moments before they caught the last flight out on Oct. 7.

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.

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

His forthcoming comic debut, Wardens, follows a 20-year-old Jewish woman living in The Ward, the popular immigrant neighbourhood in downtown Toronto. After a tragedy befalls her family, a creature called "The Schmata" rises to cause chaos. The comic is peppered with Yiddish, deeply nostalgic and steeped in Jewish ideas, based on significant research into life in The Ward.

Having recently launched his Kickstarter campaign to raise funds to complete the project, Gross joins our Culturally Jewish podcast to discuss the origins of this supernatural tale and what research went into its creation.

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

The open letter is the latest splash in the ongoing conversation about how Jews are represented in the arts. Jewish roles routinely go to non-Jews, and while Jewish stories are more common today than they were 20 years ago, many still feel superficial, sometimes off-the-mark and written by non-Jewish writers. Given the rise of antisemitism and assumptions about Jewish people in a post-Oct. 7 world, media representation matters more than ever.

But how easy is it to always cast Jewish actors in Jewish roles? Not as easy as you think, according to Jess Greenberg, head of the Montreal-based Greenberg Casting agency. As she explains, productions are bound by budget constraints, physical geography and sometimes the financing company's own goals. She joins Ilana Zackon to pull back the curtain on casting Jewish on The CJN's arts podcast, Culturally Jewish.

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

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

While The Runner is still set to run as part of Vancouver's PuSh Festival (alongside a Palestinian work called Dear Laila), the Canadian play has disappeared from the archives of CBC's podcast about Canadian theatre, PlayME, opening up the question of whether art that tackles controversial subjects should be outright cancelled because of public outcry.

In the opinion of the hosts of Culturally Jewish, The CJN's arts podcast, the answer is firmly "no". In our first episode of 2024, we take a deep dive into the play itself, the controversy surrounding its deliberately racist characters, the slippery slope of cancel culture and how this damages the relationship between Jewish arts workers and broader Canadian institutions.

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.

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

Then came the protests.

In the summer of 2023, for the first time in her life, protesters began showing up outside libraries where she was scheduled to perform. Around the same time, Münster found herself at the centre of a city-wide debate, as she became the only drag storyteller approved to come into Toronto District School Boards classrooms for drag storytime—and the school board refused to give parents the option to opt their children out.

And then, after facing months of right-wing backlash in-person and online, Oct. 7 happened. Suddenly, Münster—who is Israeli, and has worked for the UJA Federation and Hillel in Toronto—found herself being verbally attacked by her queer friends on the left, too, who strongly support the Palestinian cause and skew anti-Zionist.

All this has forced Münster into a unique space, navigating a thin line between two increasingly unfriendly political sides. She joins The CJN's arts podcasters on Culturally Jewish to describe her controversial year, explain the Jewish history of drag and discuss her upcoming annual variety show, 8 Gays of Hanukkah, happening Dec. 17 in Toronto.

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.

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

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

Rakoff spoke with the hosts of Culturally Jewish to describe her writing process, how her own time in an ultra-Orthodox Israeli community influenced the story, and how its themes resonate even stronger in the wake of Hamas's attack on Israel on Oct. 7.

Also in this episode: Ilana recounts the Jewish Futures arts salon in Toronto last week, plus she and David give a rundown of the most exciting Hanukkah events happening in the next couple weeks.

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.

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

Those cross-generational stories, and their empathetic parallels, form the spine of a new chamber opera, I Have My Mother's Eyes, premiering Nov. 18 at the Chutzpah Festival in Vancouver. The improvised opera, composed by Rita Ueda, will explore the emotional core behind both the Japanese and Jewish families, which has created a unique bond filled with tragedy and hope. And as Ueda tells us on Culturally Jewish, The CJN's arts and culture podcast, to tell an emotional story onstage, there's no better medium than opera.

Ueda and George Bluman join to share how they transformed Bluman's remarkable family history into an international opera show.

Credits

Culturally Jewish is hosted by Ilana Zackon and David Sklar. Our producer is Michael Fraiman (reach him by email at mfraiman@thecjn.ca), 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.