The Jewish Angle

In the immediate aftermath of Oct. 7, 2023, Marsha Lederman wasn't sure if she wanted to write about Hamas' historic terror attack for her regular column in the Globe and Mail . Should she recuse herself because she was Jewish, or because she had family in Israel? Did even she want to step into the minefield of publishing an opinion on Middle Eastern politics? In the end, she did weigh in—repeated...

What's the line between a personal essay and a hot take? Takes are written quickly, maybe flippantly, to latch onto a news hook. But essays are longer, more thoughtful and nearly impossible to write once a week. Meghan Daum has done both. And her latest book, The Catastrophe Hour , compiles a selection of her essays from 2016-2023, touching on cultural issues and providing insight into her approac...

There has been a vibe shift in Hollywood over the last couple years. Conventionally attractive white people having sex have come back in favour (see: HBO's White Lotus and Netflix's The Hunting Wives ); Caucasian celebrities are embracing their genetics ( Sydney Sweeney's genes ); and studios continue capitalizing on 1990s nostalgia , bringing back classics like Basic Instinct and Sex and...

In medieval and early modern Europe, the Christian ruling class enjoyed the banking services of what were known as "court Jews"—Jewish people acting as financiers in exchange for temporary protection, even while other Jews faced scrutiny and persecution. This protection, however, was never secured; if fortunes changed, they could easily become political and societal scapegoats. This anal...

The host of this show, Phoebe Maltz Bovy, likes to wear floral dresses. So does her guest, author Joanna Rakoff. But while these two women are fans of floral fashions, they are not MAGA supporters or "momfluencers"—a note that must be clarified for anyone following the political battleground that has erupted around this fashion trend. In this episode of The Jewish Angle, we unpack the cu...

To our knowledge, neither the now-former CEO of tech company Astronomer, nor the company's now-former head of HR, are Jewish. The secretive couple—who were having an affair that was famously caught by a videographer behind the Jumbotron of a Coldplay concert—instantly became a viral sensation, sparking waves of ridicule and resulting in their departure from the company. But The Jewish Angle podcas...

When U.S. President Donald Trump re-ran for the presidency in 2024, American voters elected him on the premise that he would mark a shift from 2000s-era neoconservatism and keep the U.S. out of foreign wars. Americans on the political left, along with an increasing number on the right, did not think American interventionism worked throughout the 20th and early 21st centuries, and felt these foreig...

Ashkenazi food—until recently relegated to the joke pile of ethnic foods, unavoidably beige and full of fat—is undergoing a surprising revival. From karnatzel to kasha, traditional dishes once associated with bubbe's kitchen are now finding their way onto trendy urban menus, sparking an unexpected culinary renaissance that's as much about cultural reconnection as it is about gastronomic indulgence...

On June 30, a task force set up by the U.S. federal government, aimed at combatting antisemitism, published an open letter to Harvard University. "Harvard University is in violent violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, and national origin," the letter alleges. "The enclosed Notice of Violation details the findings o...

When Zohran Mamdani announced his candidacy for mayor of New York City in late 2024, he flew under the radar of voters and critics. But as his campaign gained steam—notably for arguably radical proposals such as free bus fares, municipally owned grocery stores, and a $30 minimum wage—he wound up overtaking his chief rival, Andrew Cuomo, the former governor of New York, and winning the Democratic c...

Hadley Freeman often goes back and forth, in her head, about Israel and Palestine. One the one hand, Israel has killed more than 57,000 Gazans; on the other hand, can you trust those figures when they come from Hamas? But what other number can you trust, if Israel refuses to allow in international reporters? Then again, can you even trust outsider news media anyway, or are they blatantly biased? A...

On Mar. 3, Ellie Avishai hopped on a call with a senior colleague from the University of Austin in Texas. She was shocked when the colleague informed her a recent LinkedIn post of hers—an anodyne post of maybe 100 words, mostly a quotation and congratulation, which she had not given much thought to previously—had gotten her into big trouble with a university funder. In her post, which dealt with d...

The mainstream North American Jewish Diaspora is at a crossroads. Down one path lies U.S. President Donald Trump, American Evangelicals and legacy Jewish organizations like the Anti-Defamation League and American Israel Public Affairs Committee, staunchly defending Israel to the general public; down the other, small-L liberal Jews find themselves awkwardly situated between arguing for Israel's rig...

Last week, U.S. President Donald Trump tried to revoke Harvard University's ability to enroll international students—a move that was soon blocked by a federal judge. So, instead, on May 26, Trump floated the idea of taking US$3 billion of grant money, earmarked for Harvard's scientific and engineering research deemed of national importance, and rerouting it to trade schools. Nevermind the logistic...

Over the last year, odds are good that you've seen what's been dubbed "AI slop"—unhinged, nonsensical "art" generated by artificial intelligence tools. Maybe you've seen a bizarre cinematic animated mini-movie on Facebook, surreal pseudo-photographs on Instagram, or propagandistic images on what was once known as Twitter, now X. After seeing enough of this, a realization dawned...

Yoel Inbar rose to prominence in the fall of 2023, when he was in the process of getting hired at the University of California, Los Angeles. He didn't end up getting the job—and it was transparently about a podcast episode he'd recorded a year earlier, in which he criticized "diversity statements". The mandated letters have become part of the academic hiring process, page-long essays exp...

This month, the Federal Trade Commission in the United States finally brought a long-awaited antitrust court case against Meta, the company that owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. The FTC is arguing that Meta has a monopoly on the social networking space, which has squandered competition in the market. Critics point out that this might have been the case a decade ago, before TikTok entered the...

On the eve of Canada's federal election, U.S. President Donald Trump took to Truth Social, the little-used social media website he created, to recommend Canadians head to the polls and vote for... Donald Trump. "IT WAS MEANT TO BE," he typed, in all-caps, prompting the vast majority of Canadians to roll their eyes and remain in minimal voting lines, eagerly awaiting their election result...

The United States has historically been unusually resistant to antisemitism, for a number of reasons: some that speak well of America; others that are more the result of Americans preferring to pick on other marginalized minorities over Jews. But right-wing antisemitism has flourished in the age of social media and President Donald Trump's first term in office, and left-wing antisemitism has skyro...

Join Phoebe Maltz Bovy, a culture critic and opinion editor at The Canadian Jewish News, as she explores the modern world of Jewish life — with Jews stuck in between dangerous political flanks on both the left and right.