Not in Heaven

This episode originally aired on The CJN's peace-building podcast, In Good Faith. To subscribe and hear more, visit thecjn.ca/faith . Mainstream Jews, who support Israel and consider themselves Zionists, feel like they are under attack. When they see people wearing keffiyehs and storefronts stamped with Palestinian flags, they hear an implicit attack: "You are not welcome here." But for...

In the lead-up to New York's mayoral election, many prominent Jewish New Yorkers came out against the eventual winner, Zohran Mamdani. Now that Mamdani has won, what do they do? How do they reconcile that a third of the city's Jews voted for someone who has spoken out against Israel? And how can they preach about unity when they already made clear they were taking sides? This is the topic of today...

The hit Netflix rom-com Nobody Wants This is back, and with it are Jewish debates about intermarriage and onscreen representation in mainstream media. The show's first season tells the story of heartthrob Rabbi Noah (Adam Brody) and non-Jewish podcaster Joanne (Kirsten Bell) falling in love. It was an unexpected hit for Netflix last fall, topping its most-watched list for weeks. Some Jewish viewer...

This week, many Jewish schools will be participating in a hallowed end of October tradition: sending out letters discouraging families from celebrating Halloween. The prominence of Halloween in public has ballooned in recent decades, evolving into a full-blown seasonal phenomenon. But despite the celebratory spiders and inflatable pumpkins, Jews tend to have a mixed relationship to the festival. M...

For months, Zohran Mamdani has held a double digit lead in the New York City mayoral race. The 34-year-old media-savvy firebrand burst onto the scene with a suite of fresh, progressive ideas—but his candidacy has forced a reckoning among the city’s significant Jewish community. Mamdani says he doesn’t use the slogan “Globalize the intifada” himself, but he does not condemn those who do. He’s said...

Even for the least religiously involved Jews, the High Holidays are a high point—and sometimes the only point—of organized Jewish engagement. For many families, it may be the only time in a year they step inside a synagogue or participate in a prayer service. A time for re-upping their membership in the Jewish collective, returning to the same well of tradition: the same tunes, buildings and praye...

Jews may joke about the High Holidays being a time for binge eating—overflowing tables of multiple meats, several courses, soups, sides and desserts—but for anyone suffering from an eating disorder, it's a dangerous time of year. That's how Ilana Zackon, a performer and writer, remembers coming home for the holidays in her early 20s. Privately, she had a binge-eating disorder; when faced with moun...

School has returned—and with it, the annual anxiety of Jewish parents fretting over the cost, and results, of Jewish day school. What good is Hebrew knowledge if most Israelis speak English? What are the benchmarks for a successful Jewish education? Is it just about surrounding our kids with other Jewish kids, or is there something deeper in the biblical knowledge? Different parents will give diff...

Buckle up, sports fans, it’s synagogue pre-season—a.k.a. Elul, the Hebrew month of spiritual preparation directly before the High Holidays. It's somehow both a marathon and a sprint for observant Jews and their leaders: synagogue staff, rabbis and cantors prepare to go into overdrive writing sermons, leading prayers, facilitating spiritual experiences, and essentially running the year's most impor...

Depending on which side of the political spectrum you're on, and which media outlets you trust, you perspective of what's happening in Israel and Gaza will be extremely different. And chances are, regardless of which stance you take, you're missing critical pieces of information. For our rabbi podcasters, who have dedicated their lives to knowledge-gathering and understanding different perspective...

We're taking some time off to recharge this summer and prepare for new projects at The CJN. Instead of a new episode, we're bringing you another podcast from The CJN: The Jewish Angle , hosted by former Bonjour Chai host and current opinion editor at The CJN, Phoebe Maltz-Bovy. Avi Finegold is her guest. Not in Heaven will be back soon—stay tuned. To our knowledge, neither the now-former CEO of te...

David Zvi Kalman, a research fellow at the Hartman Institute and Sinai and Synapses, is one of the foremost thinkers looking at the intersection of artificial intelligence and Jewish life. While many in the Jewish community worry about destruction of past traditions, Kalman looks to the future. He looks at what could be the next big transformation in Jewish thought—on the margins today, mainsteam...

It’s a brave new world out there for the Jews. Over the past two weeks, we've seen a series of stories published showing the ways new technologies are affecting Jewish life, from bot armies to A.I.-generated memes to racist Elmo to chatbots who think their surname is Hitler . But are any of these technologies creating new avenues for Jewish living (or Jew hatred)—or are they merely reflecting a cu...

Jewish congregations and institutions—particularly non-Orthodox ones—often focus on how they can be more appealing and accessible to the growing number of Jews who feel like religion isn't for them. This has resulted in "big tent Judaism", which may have swung the door open for the masses—but has it also diluted Jewish spaces and expertise? Recently, Rabbi Ari Witkin, ordained in the Rec...

Over the last century, North American Jews have poured untold millions of dollars into an alphabet soup of legacy institutions: UJA, CIJA, ADL, JNF, et al. And yet, after 19 months of rising antisemitism—while Canadian and American Jewish communities feel like they're free-falling through a crisis—many have been asking, "What have we been giving all this money for? Where are the results?&quot...

In 2013, Rabba Rachel Kohl Finegold, one of the first graduates of Yeshivat Maharat—a trailblazing institution in the Orthodox world that ordains women clergy leaders—became the first Maharat hired as clergy at an Orthodox synagogue, Montreal’s 175-year-old Congregation Shaar Hashomayim. Fast forward more than a decade to June 2025, and Yedida Eisenstat carries on that mantle as a member of the cl...

Observing Shabbat is one of the most important markers of religious Jewish identity and defining rhythms for religious communal Jewish life. It’s one of the 10 commandments, alongside not murdering people. When the Talmud gives an example of the ultimate religious transgression, it doesn't say eating a BLT—the example is public desecration of the sabbath. So last Friday, when the Israeli Rabbinate...

Have you heard of the World Zionist Congress before? Until relatively recently, a lot of people hadn't—including two hosts of The CJN's Not in Heaven podcast. Yet, perhaps owing to the impact of Oct. 7 and the wide-reaching effects of the Israeli government's actions on the Jewish Diaspora, Jews around the world have found themselves not only suddenly attentive to the existence of the World Zionis...

The world feels increasingly unsafe for Jews. Digital spaces are riddled with antisemitic rhetoric. Israel recently issued a travel warning for Jews visiting Canada. And, last week, threats turned real when Elias Rodriguez allegedly shot and killed two Israeli embassy staffers outside the Jewish museum in Washington, D.C., shouting about a free Palestine during his arrest. One of the hosts of our...

Recently, Congregation Dorshei Emet—the only Reconstructionist synagogue in Quebec, and the oldest in Canada—took a major vote on whether to secede from the official Reconstructing Judaism movement. A microcosm of the province in which it resides, the "remain" faction won. But the results could not mask the increasing schism, which, in turn, has revealed yet another crack in the foundati...

A new study on Canadian Jewry was recently published by Robert Brym and Rhonda Lenton in Canadian Jewish Studies , an academic journal out of York University. The numbers show that intermarriage is no longer as rare as it used to be in Canada, with 30 percent of Canadian Jews marrying outside their faith. Some key takeaways: younger Jews are more likely to intermarry than older ones, and men are m...

Mainstream Jewish communal leaders have, for ages, been talking about "skewing younger" with programming. But none of them would dare come near Sinners' Shabbat , a sexy, raunchy burlesque show, ripe with bondage ropes, leather skirts, cleavage and kippot and queer couples. Helmed by Tova Sterling, a chef and influencer in New York City, the events were born out of her feeling n...

Most Jewish holidays date back thousands of years. We commemorate the time when an ancient Persian with a triangle hat tried to kill the Jews, when the Maccabees rededicated the temple in Jerusalem, when we escaped slavery in Egypt and the seas parted ways. But in the past century, Jews have added three new holidays, all of which fall in the span of a week. We're now at the tail end of the trilogy...

It's election season in Canada, with a record-breaking 7.3 million voters having already cast their ballots ahead of April 28. And between Passover seders and weekly Shabbat sermons, there's been no shortage of opportunities for Jewish communal leaders to weigh in on federal affairs during this high-stakes election cycle. But should they? An Israeli think tank recently used AI to analyze 4,400 ser...

It's that time of year again, when all of us at Bonjour Chai reach out to noteworthy, interesting, prominent Canadian Jews to share their thoughts, stories and memories of Passover. This is the fourth annual Great Canadian Seder, featuring political musings on national borders, Donald Trump and Israeli hostages; nostalgia for a bygone Canada; and one very unique love letter to Moses. Plus, to kick...