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)
• Subscribe to Culturally Jewish (Not sure how? Click here)

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

Support The CJN

• 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

Support The CJN

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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.