Not in Heaven

Last week, Phoebe Maltz Bovy—who, when she's not co-hosting Bonjour Chai , can be found writing for the opinion pages of the _Globe and Mail—_penned a column for the national newspaper about a sexist backlash ongoing in Israel. The nation's emboldened religious right wing is rising up in a sort of antifeminist movement that has struck at the heart of what many fear is happening to the Jewish homel...

In their long-awaited return to podcast form, Avi and Phoebe catch up on their summer break—including their thoughts on the blockbuster Barbie movie and its many Jewish links. After that, with so much mainstream discussion around feminism and body image dominating the media, they speak with Rabbi Minna Bromberg, the founder of Fat Torah , an organization that aims to end weight stigma in Jewish sp...

By now, you've probably seen the takes: "Barbie is secretly Jewish," "Meet the Jewish woman who created Barbie," yadda yadda. Let's be honest: there's nothing especially Jewish about Barbie. It's a very gentile-looking doll that, despite her various impressive careers (astronaut, doctor, Olympic athlete), represents a physically impossible body type attached to a pleasingly vac...

Before advice columns were popular, the Forverts , originally a Yiddish newspaper in the early 20th century in New York, was running "A Bintel Brief", an advice column that encapsulated the immigrant Jewish experience and helped newcomers adjust to American life. Fast-forward more than 100 years, and the series has since spawned iterations on TV, radio, theatre and graphic novels, and ha...

It's camp season, which means at least one thing: horny Jewish teenagers are probably hooking up right now, as you're reading this. Not only is this inevitable in the Jewish sleepaway camp world—it's implicitly encouraged. Jewish community leaders began promoting summer camp in the postwar era as a way of reaffirming Jewish identity, encouraging authentic Jewish culture and ensuring a Jewish futur...

This week, millions of Central Canadians woke up once again to the distant smell of what seemed to be campfires. As was the case weeks ago, Canada's wildfires are raging beyond Alberta and British Columbia this year—they're keeping Ontarians and Quebeckers indoors, along with much of the population of New England, New York and beyond. Given that most Canadian Jews live in Ontario and Quebec, it fe...

At 14, Hadley Freeman—now a prominent American-British journalist, then a teenager struggling with anorexia nervosa—moved into a psychiatric ward to treat her condition. She spent three years there, only to leave without truly recovering, instead spending more than a decade struggling with obsessive-compulsive disorder, substance abuse and ongoing anorexia that became a new normal for her. This ye...

In early May 2023, a number of parents whose children attend Bialik Hebrew Day School in Toronto wrote an open letter to the school claiming that the institution's "sweeping effort" to introduce gender-identity topics (swapping haggadah references of "sons" to "children", for example) is "unacceptable and cannot be tolerated." The letter-writer states that a...

In recent days, billboards have been popping up across New York City—and social media. Created by a company called JewBelong, the massive hot-pink ads display bold slogans in sans-serif font to raise awareness about Jewish issues. But what began as a cute (if cringey) taglines about Jewish acceptance have morphed into militant mottos demanding we #EndJewHate, citing gas chambers and making awkward...

On this week’s show, pop culture takes over. We’re talking about Taylor Swift’s probably-not-Nazi maybe-boyfriend , the biblical undertones behind the recently concluded hit TV show Succession (and the wave of Talmudic-style episode recaps) and give nachas to jazz musician Tevet Sela and the new HBO series Being Mary Tyler Moore. Then, to kick off Pride Month, we share some feedback from our recen...

Back in March, Tablet published an article called “ Wanted: More Rabbis ", about how non-Orthodox seminaries are trying to adapt to changing communal needs and shrinking enrollment. It got us thinking: Does society really not have enough rabbis, or do we have too many? With synagogue attendance in decline, rabbis are different today than they were 50 years ago—different expectations, differen...

On today's show, we reflect on the tragic death of Herschel Siegel. Siegel, an accepted and embraced gay Orthodox Atlantan who attended Yeshiva University, died on April 28 by suicide at the age of 25. As became evident after his death, Siegel struggled with mental health issues, and he never felt comfortable with how the Orthodox Jewish community accepted gay members. It begs the question: How mu...

Last Sunday, the Bonjour Chai team recorded a live podcast at Shaar Hashomayim in Montreal, as part of their day of learning about the future of Judaism. We invited Rabbi Shmuly Weiss, director of the Rohr Chabad house at McGill University, to guest host and give some insight into the inner workings of Chabad: how they're operating, what they've learned and what the implications are for Jews aroun...

On April 19, Mark Oppenheimer—formerly a host of the popular Jewish podcast Unorthodox and an editor at Tablet—penned an open letter to Jessica Grose, a New York Times columnist who wrote a piece describing how she appreciates certain cultural-religious aspects of Judaism without accepting organized religion as a whole. Oppenheimer took issue with Grose's stance, ultimately suggesting she try goin...

Israel's 75th birthday has been a monumental one for a myriad reasons. A day that should have celebrated three-quarters of a century of having a Jewish homeland has instead been marred by arguably the deepest divisions the state has ever endured, nonstop political protests and controversial legislation looming on the horizon. On today's episode, we ponder the post-celebration future of Israel. Wha...

On Easter Monday, Quebec Premier François Legault tweeted out a column praising the province’s Catholic heritage. While Quebecois history is indeed steeped in Catholicism, the message flew in the face of Legault’s aggressive push for secularism in the public sphere, best exemplified by the recent Bill 21, which banned civil servants from wearing religious symbols such as kippahs and headscarves. A...

As has become a tradition here at Bonjour Chai, we're going to turn to the Sephardic side of Passover celebrations with a deep dive into Mimouna and its surrounding culture. Joining us for this wide-ranging conversation is Christopher Silver, a professor of Jewish Studies at McGill University and the author of Recording History: Jews, Muslims, and Music across Twentieth-Century North Africa , whic...

We’re proud to host our second annual Great Canadian Seder! Politicians and proletarians, cantors and comics, all coming together to share stories, songs, wisdom and musings from across the country. This year, we're joined at our virtual seder table by: Sami Elmagrehbi Cantor Eric Moses Ellin Bessner Mindy Pollak Ralph Benmergui Rabbi Gila Caine Ophira Eisenberg David Birnbaum Rabbi Adam Stein Dav...

The "tradwives" trend has taken off lately—a lifestyle fad wherein "traditional wives" espouse their happiness in cooking, cleaning, keeping working husbands happy, and raising children with a constant smile. And with Passover coming up, we wanted to dive deeper into the phenomenon, and how it intersects with a new fashion fad Vogue dubbed "Torah-teacher aesthetic": w...

The new urban, decentralized, personal style of Judaism is perhaps best exemplified by Base, an organization that first sprung up in 2015 out of New York. Rabbinic couples open up their homes for High Holidays, Shabbat meals and discussion groups, inviting mostly young adults to attend and find a physical place to connect with their Judaism. It's of a piece with the broader rising impulse of revit...

For decades, young Jewish kids would often get books with titles like Great Jews in Sports or Great Jews in Entertainment as bar and bat mitzvah gifts. But this concept of cultural celebration seems to have quieted down a lot, given how Jews have assimilated into broader society and to point out Jewish involvement can more easily come off as gauche. This is the takeaway by Rabbi Chaim Strauchler,...

We are eagerly anticipating Purim—and the only way we thought of topping last year's weedstravaganza was to get even higher. This week, we're going psychadelic. With an increasing number of studies testing how they can help people with PTSD or other psychological distress, the stigma around them is slowly shifting. Zac Kamenetz is a rabbi based in California who heads up an institute seeking to in...

Over the past week, news broke that the novels of Roald Dahl were being rewritten to match modern sensibilities and remove language that some people have deemed offensive. These changes—which came at the behest of the Roald Dahl Story Company and Puffin, the books' publishing house—were ostensibly made to make the books better representative of, and more approachable for, diverse audiences. While...

Today we're asking an existential question: How can you be a good person? New York Magazine recently published an editorial package on how to behave , declaring 194 rules on how to "tip, text, ghost, host and politely deal with strangers." Social anxieties—and figuring out how to fit in and act right—are nothing new for Jews. So Avi and Phoebe, recording in-person at the Drake Hotel, div...

We're starting a new occasional series with Bonjour Chai : extended interviews that dive deep into a person or idea that matters to the Jewish community. In this debut episode, Avi sits down with Mark (Moishe) Bane, who was—when they spoke late last year—the president of the Orthodox Union, the largest umbrella organization of Orthodox congregations in North America, perhaps best recognized as the...