Rivkush

Jessica Jantjies is a Cape Town-based writer exploring African Jewish identity through her own multi-layered heritage. As a colored South African with indigenous, African, and Jewish roots, she challenges narrow definitions of Jewish identity. Her journey includes discovering her family's Lemba heritage, navigating the complexities of South African racial categories, and advocating for more inclus...

As this chapter of my podcast journey comes to a close, I want to express my deepest gratitude to The CJN for the incredible opportunity to share these stories and conversations. With their support, I was able to highlight voices in our community that are not often heard. Thank you to my producer Michael Fraiman. Michael took a complete and sometimes challenging beginner and guided me on this jour...

Even though Galeet Dardashti grew up in an Ashkenazi household, she knew she was different. Her family's culture, background and music didn't feel or sound like that of other Ashkenazi Jews. But it wasn't until she took a trip to Israel in college that she realized what it meant to be Mizrachi. Not only did she have roots in Iran, but her grandfather was the most famous Jewish singer in Iranian hi...

How many times have you heard claims that Israel is an imperialist country? That Israelis are settlers on Arab land? That Israel is an apartheid state? As a black, gay Jewish man, Dmitri Shufutinsky has heard it all. He spent years on American campuses before flying to the Middle East and joining the Israel Defense Forces, giving him a full view of what the common anti-Israel arguments are. Too mu...

Growing up, Liz Kleinrock never felt like she fit into her Jewish community in Washington, D.C. Born in Korea and adopted into an Ashkenazi family, she constantly felt pressure to justify her Judaism—whether at Hebrew school, summer camp or synagogue. Years later, after becoming a professional antibias and antiracist educator, she met author Caroline Kusin Pritchard, and the two clicked. One day,...

Gad Saad, the Canadian professor and social media icon with well over a million followers online, grew up in Lebanon as one of a rapidly decreasing number of Jews in the 1970s and '80s. He routinely faced genuine, unabashed Jew hatred, hearing "Death to the Jews" chants in the streets—and witnessing his own school friends talk about killing Jews. Fast-forward to this week, and Israel is...

Adiel Cohen remembers Oct. 7 like it was yesterday. He was at his sister's house in Northern Israel when he woke up to hear his phone buzzing with rocket alerts and notifications. His first-ever panic attack washed over him as he realized he would quickly be called back into the army—which happened immediately after Shabbat. That night, Cohen filled a backpack with a few essentials and travelled s...

When the University of Windsor recently conceded to the demands of its pro-Palestinian encampment protesters, officials signed an agreement that stated, among other anti-Israel sentiments, the post-secondary institution would affirm "its commitment towards principles of decolonization... in the context of the occupation of Palestine." The narrative of Israel as a colonizing force is syno...

There's a fact Zilka Joseph likes to toss out to prove how old the Bene Israel culture is: the community, native to the Indian subcontinent, spent centuries unaware of what Hanukkah was. That's because the first Bene Israel people arrived on the shores of modern-day India in 175 BCE, according to some estimates—almost a full decade before the Maccabees fought back against King Antiochus. Blending...

When Sarah Kolker returned to her hometown neighbourhood in Philadelphia as a young adult, she noticed a run-down park that she grew up around. She remembered how her mom wouldn't let her go to the park at all. But now, the artist and social justice advocate was inspired to help reimagine the public space entirely. She joined in starting petitions, holding community gatherings, and meeting with po...

As an Orthodox Jewish woman of colour, Leah Finkelstein knows what it's like to feel like an outsider. Unfortunately, her kids know, too—like when one of them scored a record-breaking triple double for his yeshiva's basketball team, resulting in the school proudly celebrating the box score on an image on social media... with a photo of a different, white teammate. (She complained; they ended up ta...

Devyani Saltzman was born into the arts and culture world, the daughter of two filmmakers—one Jewish, one Indian. Raised on production sets, she went on to write dozens of articles for newspapers and magazines, become the founding curator at Toronto's Luminato festival and work at numerous arts institutions, including the Art Gallery of Ontario, where she was the director of public programming fro...

As the descendent of Holocaust and residential school survivors, Tamara Podemski understands generational trauma better than most. She grew up hearing those stories and internalizing those struggles, and now carries these themes in her work as an actress and singer—along with her personal experiences living in ethnic societies that didn't always accept her, including Jewish spaces. Podemski joins...

When Chaya Lev converted to Judaism, she was determined to move to Israel. Later on, after surviving breast cancer, she decided to transform her dream into reality, making aliyah in 2016 and starting an Afro-inspired dance movement in the Middle East. But after Hamas launched a lethal terror attack on Oct. 7, it changed her life. With rockets being fired and Israeli sirens blaring, she and her syn...

Sara Braun grew up as a Black Jewish woman in a small town in the Netherlands, which was, she says, exactly what most North Americans imagine: windmills stretching up from fields of tulips and delicious smells wafting from rustic kitchens. But that's where the picturesque scenes end. While her Blackness was more or less accepted—treated as exotic, though not demeaned—her Judaism was not. She downp...

With the third largest Jewish Diaspora in the world, Canada has no shortage of communal organizations: B'nai Brith, the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center, plenty of Federations, cross-country campus Hillels—the list goes on. All of them, in some way, claim they are combatting antisemitism. So do we really need another one? Daniel Koren thinks so. After workin...

One of Israel's most exciting rappers is Nissim Black, the Seattle-born Hasidic musician whose conversion story is as fascinating—and heartfelt—as his art. Born in Seattle to parents who themselves helped pioneer rap music, Black was always asking big questions and seeking genuine answers, but never found a meaningful connection until he found Judaism. Now living in Israel with his wife and seven...

Charly Wai Feldman is a woman of the world. Born in Montreal to a Jewish father and mother from Hong Kong, she lived in Jamaica and Vietnam before settling in the United Kingdom with her husband, himself of Indian descent (but grew up in Germany and Singapore). But while her nationality is an evolution, a central underpinning has always been her Jewish faith. As she puts it in this episode of Rivk...

When Tamás Wormser, a documentary filmmaker from Montreal, first heard about a small community of Jewish Ugandans who live in a rural village, he knew he had to visit. He was struck by the poverty: no running water, no electricity, no cutlery. And of course, without television for entertainment, they turn to each other. They sing and dance. Wormser was taken aback: this community, which he'd consi...

During the infamous Sixties Scoop, the Canadian government forcibly relocated tens of thousands of Indigenous children, separating them from their families and placing them in foster homes or adoptive households. Little Bird , a new show by Crave and APTN, which premiered May 26, follows one young woman who was taken from her reserve in Saskatchewan at age five and raised in a Jewish home in Montr...

Loolwa Khazzoom has been advocating for the acknowledgement of Jewish multiculturalism since the 1990s. It's what led her to start the Jewish Multicultural Project, which works with Jewish institutions to provide resources for raising awareness about diverse Jews, as well as numerous other organizations that spotlight Jews from the Middle East and North Africa. Despite all her years doing this wor...

Michael Twitty is a multiple award–winning chef, author and food historian who is proudly Black, gay and Jewish. His star has been rising for years, from his 2010 blog Afroculinaria to his James Beard Award–winning book The Cooking Gene to his latest work, Kosher Soul . But his success hasn't helped him evade judgment or presumptions—mostly because of his Jewish identity. In this personal intervie...

Last week, Joel Etienne made headlines following his clash with the Conservative Party of Canada. Etienne, who was running to lead the party, claimed he raised the requisite $300,000 and garnered 500 signatures, but was rejected by the party regardless. After initially filing for an appeal, he dropped it and resolved the matter privately, broadly throwing his support behind the party. In this wide...

When Susannah Heschel was growing up, discussions about civil rights were part of her daily life. They were, in fact, unavoidable—her father, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, was one of the leading Jewish figures of the movement, who walked beside Martin Luther King Jr. on his famous Selma march. But a lot has changed since then. Heschel, now a professor of Jewish studies at Dartmouth College, unders...

If you ask Jared Jackson, founder of the American organization Jews in All Hues, he'll tell you white supremacy has seeped into mainstream North American Judaism. Jackson doesn't use "white supremacy" to refer to swastikas and white hoods, but rather how Jewish spaces are often uncomfortable for Jews of colour, with so much of the community discourse being steered by white-skinned Ashken...