Not in Heaven

The Toronto International Film Festival is going on, and while it only has a handful of Jewish-themed or Israeli-produced films, those films have drawn some of the biggest spotlights. Chiefly among them has been The Bibi Files , a new work-in-progress documentary that received its world debut this week, and which shows never-before-seen leaked footage of people admitting to bribing Israeli Prime M...

Joshua Leifer made headline last month when he was slated to do a public talk at a Brooklyn bookstore about his debut book, Tablets Shattered: The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life , and discovered, an hour before the event was scheduled to start, that the event had been unilaterally cancelled by an employee who didn't want to host a Zionist onstage. (The Zionist in q...

It's time to head back to school—but this year, for some Jewish students in North America, school is going to look a little different. Some will be receiving what's known as a "classical" education: a curriculum based on a return to fundamentals, a focus on time-tested great books and a rejection of mandates that emphasize diversity and inclusion. There are plenty of classical schools po...

Canadian Jews may have noticed a trend in their communities this summer: Conservative politicians making the rounds. Leader Pierre Poilievre, Deputy Leader Melissa Lantsman and even former prime minister Stephen Harper have all made numerous appearances at synagogues, pro-Israel rallies and fundraising galas. It's nothing new to see the country's political right wing court Jewish voters—such a swi...

Avi and Phoebe are taking a little summer vacation and will return soon. In the meantime, we're presenting an episode of The CJN Daily that Avi was on earlier this summer about kosher slaughter in Canada. Last week, the Federal Court of Canada sided with Jewish communities in Montreal and Toronto in their dispute with the federal government over new biological guidelines covering how cows are slau...

This week, the hosts of Bonjour Chai are digging into the explosive world of U.S. politics. It began with President Joe Biden announcing on July 21 that he would, after significant pressure and plummeting poll numbers, drop his bid for re-election as the Democratic nominee for president. The next day, Vice-President Kamala Harris all but secured her spot as his replacement, raising historic amount...

Last week, two very different sex-related 1980s icons passed away: Dr. Ruth Westheimer, the 4'7" German-born Holocaust survivor, who was 96; and Richard Simmons, whose mother was Jewish, and who rose to fame as a sweat-focused TV fitness guru whose personal sexuality was famously ambiguous . So, clearly, the hosts of Bonjour Chai had sex on the brain. What sexual-education lessons remain for...

This month, two major elections have changed the European political landscape. In both France and the United Kingdom, progressive parties have overcome significant right-wing counterparts, overthrowing 14 years of British Conservative power and staving off Marine Le Pen's far-right National Rally party in a surprising result. Jews, as they often are, find themselves caught in the middle. Should th...

It was true before Oct. 7, but especially afterwards: an increasing number of progressive-minded people are viewing Jews as settlers in Israel. "Go back to Europe," some especially antisemitic ones chant at rallies. But it begs the question: if Jews are settlers in Israel, where aren't we settlers? Ben Wexler, a writer and academic who recently graduated from McGill University, has been...

What does Palestine have in common with climate change, gender equality and indigenous rights? The Omnicause, that's what. In the modern era of left-wing protests, these issues become conflated—think queer Palestinians, viewed as indigenous to their homeland, fighting climate change with organic farming practices. Or something. Perhaps something not so cartoonish: indeed, there are clear links bet...

The trope of Hasidic women leaving their communities—particularly during a journey of queer self-discovery—is not exactly unique. And yet, memoirs and documentaries continue to come out, the latest being Kissing Girls on Shabbat by Sara Glass, who is now a therapist. After Phoebe Maltz Bovy reviewed the book for The CJN , she had more questions—so we invited Glass on to ask them directly. The thre...

We're taking the week off for Shavuot. Instead, we're airing a new episode of a podcast miniseries from our friends at the Jewish Public Library, called recollections . Avi and Phoebe will be back next week. May 2024 marks the 110th anniversary of the Jewish Public Library. Our opening season is a celebration of our Jewish Leftist roots in Montreal. In this podcast, we weave together interviews wi...

Israel had some strange bedfellows in the news this week. The New York Times unveiled that country's Ministry of Diaspora Affairs created social media bots that posted AI-generated comments to influence American lawmakers and the general public; meanwhile, a rally against antisemitism in Manhattan drew headlines when it was revealed that the organization behind the rally was a Messianic Jewish gro...

When Israel's Judaica store, a prominent retailer in the Toronto area, announced it was closing after 40 years, it felt like another moment in an unfortunately increasing trend: the decline of Jewish "third spaces", places beyond the home and office where Jews feel comfortable and welcome. Synagogues are closing and merging; community centres are broadening to welcome non-Jewish communit...

Last September, Eitan Hersh, a political science professor at Tufts University in Boston, tried something that hasn't been done before: he created a class teaching conservative ideas to students of his private liberal college. He felt there was a gap in the school's poli-sci curriculum, sensing that graduates were leaving without understanding the central ideas of the political right. He included...

You may not know who Joe Roberts is. But some people online, who may or may not have ever met the man face-to-face, claim to know him extremely well—to the point that they are posting photos of his grandmothers' graves, scouring the web for his tweets and published articles, and making bold statements about whether he's really who he says he is. Whether, for example, he's even Jewish. The former t...

College campuses have been heated spaces for Jewish students for a long time. The rapid spread of tent-in protests that began at Columbia University last month has only exacerbated the issue, giving an international platform to pro-Palestinian (and anti-Zionist) students and faculty members grounded in our post-secondary institutions. Jewish and non-Jewish protesters, both faculty and students, ha...

As pro-Palestinian encampments pop up across Canadian campuses this week, protesting against university ties to Israel and threatening to keep their tents pitched until the war in Gaza ends, it helps to understand the broader context of how this all began. And if you ask the Columbia University students at ground zero of this movement how they feel about the media circus they've created, they'll t...

For the third year in a row, Bonjour Chai is proud to present the Great Canadian Seder, a coming-together of notable and insightful Canadian Jews from across different demographics and denominations. Why is this year different from all other years? Because seders across Canada will likely be marred, like any good family gathering, by some kind of political argument over Israel. How should you navi...

This week, the editor of Guernica resigned in protest of her own staff and publisher. The respected literary journal had recently published of an essay by an Israeli writer and translator, Joanna Chen, called "From the Edges of a Broken World". In the piece, Chen conveys Israelis, like their Palestinian neighbours, as human and worthy of compassion. The resulting backlash from left-leani...

Do your young kids have a smartphone? Most do. And parents have been witnessing the repercussions firsthand for years. This week, the subject came to the forefront when Jonathan Haidt, a Jewish writer, penned a piece in The Atlantic warning of the "terrible costs" of raising children with phones. A new mental health crisis, higher suicide rates, ever-more screen time: much of the ailment...

A slew of headlines came out this week, within Canada and beyond, warning of a rising tide of antisemitism within Canada. It's not just Fox News and the National Post —_when the Times of Israel is reporting on Canadian Jews worrying their " golden age " is over, and the _Globe and Mail warns of a " dangerous slide into antisemitism ", you know things have gotten bad. Nobody kno...

Editor's Note: This episode was recorded one day before Kate Middleton revealed she had been diagnosed with cancer, and thus the episode makes no reference to her health issues. We wish her a speedy recovery. Kate Middleton, an English princess, made international headlines this past week for allegedly disappearing for a few weeks from the outside world. In an apparent effort to assuage public con...

Malky Berkowitz wants a divorce. But the 29-year-old Orthodox woman, who lives in Kiryas Joel, north of New York City, can't get a _get—_a Jewish Orthodox divorce—because her husband won't allow it, even after four years of Berkowitz fighting for one. Her case is just one of many taken up by Adina Sash, a feminist Orthodox activist in Brooklyn who posts online as @FlatbushGirl. But as Sash kept po...

In the last month, several high-profile features have come out, in publications such as Time and The Atlantic , giving mainstream, non-Jewish audiences a glimpse into what life has been like for North American Jews since Oct. 7. One major point of coverage: pro-Palestinian (or anti-Israel) protests. The pictured painted by these articles and others, including here at The CJN, is one of constant fe...