North Star with Ellin Bessner

If David Segal's name sounds familiar, it's because he put the "David" in DavidsTea, the popular chain of heavily curated loose leaf teas and cafes that sprang up across North America in the 2010s. Segal left the company in 2016, starting a salad-based restaurant chain called Mad Radish instead. Now the Ottawa-based entrepreneur is getting back into the tea game alongside fellow Jewish O...

How widespread is antisemitism and anti-Zionism on Canadian campuses? A new report, commissioned by the Abraham Global Peace Initiative, found nearly 100 reported instances last year. The authors—Neil Orlowsky from York University and Dana Fischman from Carleton University—looked at media articles, social media posts, student unions, faculty associations and hate crime reports from across the coun...

In March 2020, magicians Ben Train and Jonah Babins, like so many other performers, found their livelihoods put on indefinite pause. So they did what any young entrepreneurs would: they pivoted by taking their show to the Zoom circuit. Two years in, it's gotten them noticed by the likes of Seth Rogan. They've recently returned from Las Vegas, where they met with some of their magician idols, David...

Maya Sinclair lives with an extremely rare genetic condition. At six months old, she was diagnosed with Axenfeld-Rieger syndrome, which stunted her growth, kept her teeth abnormally small and forced her to have multiple eye surgeries for glaucoma. Despite these challenges, and being bullied for them at school, Sinclair has written two children's books, spoken publicly about her condition, danced c...

Yesterday, Premier Doug Ford of Ontario announced he would join Manitoba, Alberta and Saskatchewan in speeding up a timeline for loosening COVID restrictions. That means the province would get rid of vaccine mandates, reopening restaurants and bars to full capacity, while keeping mandatory masks in place. It was welcome news to Ontarians who support the truckers' protest that has spent two weeks o...

Ariel Troster doesn't know who she is more mad at: the local police in Ottawa, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau or the truck protesters clogging her city's streets, disrupting locals' lives while wrapping themselves in Canadian flags. Troster was one of the Ottawans who took to the streets over the weekend to counter-protest the "freedom convoy" that's rolled across the country. in -22-degr...

Yesterday, we brought you a story on three antisemitic incidents that happened within days of each other at two different Toronto middle schools. (If you haven't listened yet, hear Part 1 of this series here .) Two of those incidents happened to one boy at Charles H. Best Junior Middle School. Today, he and his parents are speaking out publicly for the first time to offer their reaction to the inc...

Recently, two separate Toronto-area middle schools have witnessed three antisemitic incidents. At Charles H. Best Junior Middle School, kids targeted a Jewish student with Nazi salutes and, separately, with a swastika made out of classroom blocks. Meanwhile, at Ledbury Park Elementary and Middle School, a teacher has been removed for comparing vaccine passports to yellow stars that Jews were force...

Pinchas Gutter has been one of Canada's most active Holocaust survivors. He's spent years educating Canadians about the genocide and what life was like for European Jews during the war. But these days, he's also on a different mission: raising awareness about the 1,200 poor Holocaust survivors living in the Toronto area who are, he says, in need of up to $12 million just to live out their final ye...

Ophira Calof is having a busy month. The 28-year-old Toronto-based actor, writer and curator will be judging entries for AccessCBC, the CBC’s new access project for filmmakers with disabilities; she's picking films and handling programming for the annual ReelAbilities film festival, screening at the Miles Nadal JCC; and she is, as always, advocating for the arts world to make room for creatives li...

Marc Grushcow has never waded into political protests before. But this year, ahead of the Winter Olympics in Beijing, the Canadian retiree—and father of Rabbi Lisa Grushcow at Temple Emmanuel in Montreal —created a video aimed squarely at his country's athletes. He had hoped to convince them to not go to China, or at least forgo the opening ceremonies, in solidarity with the country's 12 million p...

Just before Hitler rose to power, Isay Rottenberg, then living in Amsterdam, made an unusual move. Rather than flee the area, he moved to Germany, buying Europe's most modern cigar factory. In a move that branded him as a sort of reverse–Oskar Schindler, he employed 670 non-Jewish workers and grew his business profitably, refusing to move until the Nazi government forced him to sell his factory an...

Marci Surkes has been called the air traffic controller of the Prime Minister's Office. For the last two years, it's been her job to make sure all the cabinet ministers carried out their mandates and oversee which new laws got introduced to Parliament. She oversaw all major Liberal government policies, from the COVID-19 response to Truth and Reconciliation and everything related to Judaism and ant...

This weekend, a convoy of protesters, including truckers and those opposed to mandatory vaccine passports, reached Ottawa after days of a cross-country tour from British Columbia to the capital. Parts of Canada's Jewish community agree with the protesters—however, their goodwill hit pause after scenes emerged of a swastika flag, among other racist emblems, waving from within the convoy. The main s...

Emma Cunningham has been a volunteer with the New Democratic Party for several years, in several elections, at several levels. Even though she personally feels a little further left than the party at large, she knew she could find a home with the NDP as a progressive Jew. Until last week. When the Ontario NDP nominated Steve Parish—the former mayor of Ajax, who lobbied to keep a local street named...

A new national survey, released today, reveals troubling news about the state of Holocaust education in Canada. Conducted by Liberation75, the Canadian charity focused on Holocaust commemoration and education, the survey found that one in three Canadian kids think the Holocaust either didn't happen or was exaggerated, while nearly half don't know six million Jews were killed. And despite the wealt...

Ashley Waxman Bakshi is an Israeli influencer with more than 300,000 followers on Instagram and another 200,000 on YouTube. Her fans typically subscribe for daily makeup tips, fashion advice and parenting stories of raising four kids. But lately, the Canadian-born social media star has been filling her feed with a different kind of content: pro-Israel videos. Waxman Bakshi is part of a network of...

When Louis Rasminsky was appointed to be governor of the Bank of Canada in 1961, he became the first Jew to hold such a high office in the history the Canadian public service—even though he’d previously been passed over for the job due to antisemitism, and wasn't even allowed to join Ottawa’s exclusive Rideau Club at the time, since it didn't accept Jews until 1964. Canada's public service today i...

January 23 is a big date for JSpaceCanada: with a large virtual conference, the progressive Jewish organization will mark its 10th anniversary, while also bidding goodbye to Karen Mock, who served as its president since 2016. Mock, a veteran human rights campaigner and anti-racism educator, is now in her late 70s, and wanted to make way for younger blood to steer the ship—especially Jewish Canadia...

Shortly after Minister of Public Safety Marco Mendicino learned about the hostage situation at Congregation Beth Israel in Colleyville, Texas, his phone started buzzing with messages from Canadian Jewish community leaders. They wanted to make sure he saw what was happening—and also wanted to convey their concerns about copycat attacks at home. In Canada, the Communities at Risk: Security Infrastru...

Six organizations representing Canadians rabbis across the country issued a strong statement condemning the United Church of Canada for its new proposal to adopt a harder stance against Israel. The 23-page document, which took two years to draft, supports teaching about the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement and labels Israel and Palestine with the same settler-colonial framework applied t...

Across Canada over the weekend, synagogues gatherered virtually to pray for the safety of the hostages at Congregation Beth Israel in Colleyville, Texas. After an hours-long standoff between the FBI and an armed gunman, the situation ended with only the hostage-taker killed and all hostages safe. Meanwhile, nervous Jewish community leaders across Canada got in touch with their local police forces,...

Last August, Capt. Rabbi Arnold Noteh Glogauer made Canadian military history as the first Canadian Jewish chaplain to set sail with the Royal Canadian Navy. Aboard HMCS Winnipeg , he spent four months in and around the Pacific Ocean for manoeuvres off the Philippines, Japan and the Korean Peninsula. Along the way, his patrol kept a lookout for ships smuggling fuel illegally to North Korea and pro...

As the Chief Rabbi of the Jewish Council of the Emirates, Rabbi Yehuda Sarna plays a unique role. He isn't preaching much from the pulpit. Instead, he's more of a diplomat, building bridges with leaders in the United Arab Emirates and managing the country's sudden booming interest in Judaism. After the Abraham Accords established peace between the UAE and Israel in 2020, Rabbi Sarna, who was born...

Two years ago, Israeli officials opened the Stephen J. Harper Hula Valley Bird Sanctuary Visitors and Education Center—a building named after the former Canadian prime minister, who personally donated to and supported the centre. Funded in large part by Canadian philanthropists, the centre is the educational arm of a protected wetland area in the Upper Galilee and an important stopover for 500 mil...