Tête-à-tête: Conversations in Canadian Jewish Studies

What responsibility do arts organizations—and the arts in general—have in championing Jewish culture, fostering inclusivity, and building bridges across communal lines?  In this episode of Tête-à-tête , host Jonathan Slater is joined by curator and writer Evelyn Tauben, founder of the Toronto-based Jewish arts organization FENTSTER , for a conversation about challenges that Jews in the arts in Can...

After  a twelve-year hiatu s,  Parchment , the only literary journal devoted to contemporary Canadian Jewish writing, is back ! The latest iteration of the journal is supported by a  coast-to-coast-to-coast   who's  who of Canadian Jewish  writers, scholars, and litterateurs  and will feature a mix of fiction, poetry, literary non-fiction, and translation that explores  the many shades of Canadian...

Theresa Tova, the Paris-born, Calgary-raised actor, singer, and playwright, is synonymous with the Canadian Jewish musical stage. Creator of the award-winning Holocaust-themed musical Still the Night , one-third of the globe-trotting sensation The Three Yiddish Divas, and now starring as Yente in the first-ever Canadian production of Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish , Theresa joins the show for a wi...

Museums have long been at the forefront of public engagement with the history and memory of the Holocaust. But as the possibilities of technology for discovery and learning about such an emotionally fraught subject expand, and the question of what the Holocaust has to teach us remains as thorny as ever, at museums old and new the goals of that public engagement are undergoing serious revision. Yas...

In the second half of the twentieth century, approximately twenty thousand Jews emigrated from North Africa to Canada. Most of them were from Morocco, and most settled in and around Montreal. Yolande Cohen, a historian at the Université du Québec à Montréal and herself a Moroccan Jewish immigrant to Canada (via France), has spent much of her career collecting and analyzing narratives of this migra...

Political extremist, fascist agitator, marginal crank? Adrien Arcand, the Montreal-based journalist and publicist, was one of mid-twentieth-century Canada's most notorious antisemites. Known as the "Canadian Führer," Arcand has long been viewed, in scholarship and public memory, as the leading exemplar of Quebec antisemitism from the 1930s through the 1950s, and one of the greatest ontological thr...

In 2025, the Azrieli Foundation's landmark Holocaust Survivor Memoirs Program (HSMP) celebrated its twentieth year in existence. To mark the occasion, the journal Canadian Jewish Studies / Études juives canadiennes brought together six scholars, along with HSMP managing editor Arielle Berger, for a robust conversation that reflects on the educational, cultural, and moral legacy of the program.  On...

Last year, two of the leading historians of Jewish Canada, Pierre Anctil and Richard Menkis , p ublished In a " Land of Hope" : Documents on the Canadian Jewish Experience, volume 1, 1627-1923 , a landmark collection of primary sources . Thanks to the generous support of York University's J. Richard Shiff Chair for the Study of Canadian Jewry and the University of British Columbia's Open Access Fu...

Over the past couple of years, no scholar has tried to understand what makes Canadian Jews tick with greater energy and enthusiasm than the sociologist Robert Brym. Since publishing his groundbreaking post-October 7 report , "Jews and Israel 2024: A Survey of Canadian Attitudes and Jewish Perceptions," in the spring of 2024, Brym has gone on to produce similarly pioneering research on Jewish inter...

In this special episode, host Jonathan Slater passes the microphone to historian David S. Koffman, the J. Richard Shiff Chair for the Study of Canadian Jewry, for a solo reading of his excellent essay, "Two Inward Turns: Canadian Jews Since Multiculturalism, Since October 8, and Since Trump's Annexationist Threat," which appeared in the summer 2025 volume of Sources: A Journal of Jewish Ideas , pu...

Ruth Panofsky, a writer, literary scholar, and professor of English at Toronto Metropolitan University, sits down with host Jonathan Slater to examine the making of renowned Canadian Jewish writer Helen Weinzweig's seminal 1989 short story "My Mother's Luck." Working with material from Weinzweig's estate and the author's papers at the University of Toronto's Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, Ruth t...

In this episode we speak with Miriam Borden, a doctoral candidate in Yiddish studies at the University of Toronto and contributor to the summer 2024 volume of  Canadian Jewish Studies / Études juives canadiennes , which is devoted entirely to the field of Jewish education. Miram chats with host Jonathan Slater about her article, "Joshua, King David, and the Flying Nun: Doodles and Reader Annotatio...

"If you have not been to Łódź you cannot imagine its texture, the strange uniqueness of its streetscape...." In  this episode we speak with Norman Ravvin, writer, literary scholar, Concordia University professor, and contributor to the fall 2024 volume of   Canadian Jewish   Studies   /   Études   juives   canadiennes . Norm discusses with host Jonathan Slater his essay, " City, Writer, Conference...

In this episode we speak with Daniel Held, co-editor of the special summer 2024  volume of Canadian Jewish Studies / Études juives canadiennes , which dives into the many varieties of Jewish education in Canada, past, present, and future. Dan, the chief program officer for the United Jewish Appeal of Greater Toronto and   executive director of the Julia and Henry Koschitzky Centre for Jewish Educa...

Welcome to Tête-à-tête: Conversations in Canadian Jewish Studies, a new podcast from the Association for Canadian Jewish Studies. Join host Jonathan Slater, an emeritus professor of communications based in Montreal, each month for incisive and thought-provoking conversations with scholars, journalists, curators, and more, whose work fills the pages of the ACJS's flagship journal, Canadian Jewish S...