When Tuesdays with Morrie was first published in 1997, it elevated Jewish author Mitch Albom to a level of literary stardom that reverberated beyond the book world. The story—which detailed Albom's frequent visits with his former professor, Morrie Schwartz, who was dying of ALS—has since been adapted into a TV movie and an off-Broadway production in 2002 before a New York City revival earlier this year.

And now, a new staging is bringing this two-hander play to the Winnipeg Jewish Theatre—starring The CJN's own arts podcaster, David Sklar. David took a few moments out of rehearsal to sit down with his director, Mariam Bernstein, to talk about the Jewish themes inherent to the story.

But before that, Ilana Zackon catches us up on her busy summer, which included a stop at the KlezKanada retreat in rural Quebec and the Ashkenaz Festival in downtown Toronto, and later offers up some nationwide arts listings, including a couple controversial films about the Middle East debuting at the Toronto International Film Festival this week.

Credits

• Hosts: Ilana Zackon and David Sklar
• Producer: Michael Fraiman
• Music: Sarah Segal-Lazar

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You may have heard Talia Schlanger's voice on CBC Radio or NPR, where she has spent years hosting music programs and interviewing artists. Somewhere, in the back of her mind, she was taking notes, planning for her own eventual leap into the music industry—a leap she finally took this past February, with the release of her debut album, Grace for the Going.

But while she credits her years as a broadcaster as helping with her creative process, as she admits on The CJN's arts podcast, Culturally Jewish, she was surprised at how unprepared she would be when it came to the business side of things, such as marketing, grant writing and distribution.

Hear Schlanger describe her personal journey and Jewish identity—including the inspiration she drew from her grandparents who survived the Holocaust, and why she began wearing her Magen David necklace after Oct. 7.

Credits

• Hosts: Ilana Zackon and David Sklar
• Producer: Michael Fraiman
• Music: Sarah Segal-Lazar

Support The CJN

• Get free emails from The CJN
• Donate to The CJN (+ get a charitable tax receipt)
• Subscribe to Culturally Jewish (Not sure how? Click here)

At the onset of the Holocaust, after Maxwell Smart's family began being targeted and killed in Nazi-occupied Europe, he became separated from his mother, who made one final request of her young son: "Please run away." He did as he was told. He ended up spending one and a half years living in the cold, desolate woods of Eastern Europe, meeting and making friends with other young Jews until liberation.

As one of Canada's best-known living Holocaust survivors, Smart—who moved to Montreal after the war—has told his story many times before to schools, museums and journalists. Now it's the plot of a new film, The Boy in the Woods, which premiered in late 2023, and this month became widely available digitally on-demand through many streaming services.

Smart joins The CJN's arts podcast Culturally Jewish to share his story and feelings about bringing his story to the silver screen, while filmmaker Rebecca Snow explains how she met Smart and why she decided to make the leap from documentary to narrative film with such heavy subject matter.

Credits

Culturally Jewish is hosted by Ilana Zackon and David Sklar. Our producer is Michael Fraiman, and our theme music is by Sarah Segal-Lazar. We’re a member of The CJN Podcast Network. To support The CJN and receive a charitable tax receipt, please consider a monthly donation by clicking here.

Danila Botha wants you to know something about her writing: it's not autobiographical. She pulls ideas and themes from real life, from the media and history, from current affairs and what she sees in the world. She is not personally a glitter-strewn closeted lesbian Orthodox woman, nor is she a drug addict who once met Anne Frank in a dream. But these are the kinds of concepts—distinctly Jewish stories with shades of halachic heterodoxy—that are packed into Things That Cause Inappropriate Happiness, her new collection of short stories, released April 2024.

Botha joins The CJN's arts podcast, Culturally Jewish, to discuss her new collection and offer a glimpse into life as an openly Zionist author in an industry that has become infamously inhospitable to Zionist authors.

Credits

Culturally Jewish is hosted by Ilana Zackon and David Sklar. Our producer is Michael Fraiman, and our theme music is by Sarah Segal-Lazar. We’re a member of The CJN Podcast Network. To support The CJN and receive a charitable tax receipt, please consider a monthly donation by clicking here.

When Jaclyn Grossman was an 18-year-old opera student, her teacher heard her soprano voice and informed her she'd sing the music of Richard Wagner. Grossman didn't know much about the German composer, but quickly fell in love with his music. She was not particularly phased by the fact that Wagner was infamously antisemitic, included offensive Jewish stereotypes in his works, and is even de facto banned in Israel.

Years later, she began researching operas written by Holocaust victims and survivors. She co-founded the Likht Ensemble to perform their works and toured the continent singing these nearly forgotten Yiddish pieces. And only then did she realize that her two passions existed within an extremely controversial space.

This week, opera fans can hear Grossman in the Edmonton Opera's production of Das Rheingold; then, in July, she heads to Ontario's Festival of the Sound to sing in Yiddish in Postcards. In advance of these contrasting shows, Grossman sits down with our arts podcast, Culturally Jewish, to explain how she reconciles these two worlds—and why Jewish fans shouldn't cancel Wagner.

Relevant links

• Learn more about the Edmonton Opera's production of Das Rheingold
• Learn more about Postcards at the Festival of the Sound
• Visit the website for the Likht Ensemble

Credits

Culturally Jewish is hosted by Ilana Zackon and David Sklar. Our producer is Michael Fraiman, and our theme music is by Sarah Segal-Lazar. We’re a member of The CJN Podcast Network. To support The CJN and receive a charitable tax receipt, please consider a monthly donation by clicking here.

During the pandemic, David Sklar—an actor, playwright and co-host of The CJN's arts podcast Culturally Jewish—wrote a theatre script called Vial. The plot focuses on a college professor who feels conflicted when one of her far-left-wing Jewish students writes an extreme essay about Israel; the professor, who starts off adamantly pro–free speech, begins to reconsider her stance when the essay sparks wider outrage and fierce debates on campus and beyond.

In 2023, a colleague of Sklar's—a drama teacher at Dawson College, a CEGEP in Westmount, Montreal—reached out to see if Sklar had any unpublished work she could bring to her students for a month-long workshop. Sklar offered Vial: it wasn't especially relevant at the time, but she was free to use it.

Then Oct. 7 happened.

That's why, this month, a group of theatre students—with only two Jews among them—are studying this controversial script about campus politics and free speech, while pro-Palestinian activists stage tent-in protests literally blocks away.

Sklar flew to Montreal to spend a few days speaking with the students in person, and now he reports back on what those conversations were like—while also playing clips of what Dawson students Dalia Leblay, Rachel Bruder-Wexler and Bram Lackman-Mincoff thought of the script.

Credits

Culturally Jewish is hosted by Ilana Zackon and David Sklar. Our producer is Michael Fraiman, and our theme music is by Sarah Segal-Lazar. We’re a member of The CJN Podcast Network. To support The CJN and receive a charitable tax receipt, please consider a monthly donation by clicking here.

On December 1, 2023, Charles Officer passed away at age 48. The award-winning filmmaker was revered in the national arts community, having directed documentaries such as Invisible Essence, about the cultural impact of The Little Prince, and The Skin We're In, a film adaptation of author Desmond Cole's popular essay on racism in Canada. His movies were purposeful and personal, tackling topical issues with incisive commentary and deep research.

The 2024 Hot Docs film festival in Toronto will be commemorating Officer's life with a tribute screening of his 2010 film Might Jerome on May 4, including a Q&A panel with some of his industry colleagues. Two friends and collaborators join Culturally Jewish to describe Officer's unique life as a Black Jewish arts worker in Canada: Jake Yanowski, who cofounded the production company Canesugar Filmworks with Officer, and Michael Levine, one of Canada's foremost literary agents.

Credits

Culturally Jewish is hosted by Ilana Zackon and David Sklar. Our producer is Michael Fraiman, and our theme music is by Sarah Segal-Lazar. We’re a member of The CJN Podcast Network. To support The CJN and receive a charitable tax receipt, please consider a monthly donation by clicking here.

Irena Gut Opdyke was a Polish nurse who, during the Second World War, was forced to become a housekeeper for a high-ranking German officer. At some point, she was offered the chance to save a dozen Jewish lives. She agreed, hiding them in a space nobody would think to look—in the German officer's basement.

Later honoured as a Righteous Among the Nations, Irena's story is not very well known. But a group of Quebecois filmmakers is about to change that. Irena's Vow, being released in theatres across Canada on April 19, is a historical drama that marks a rare Canadian-made entry into the Holocaust film genre. Lead actress Sophie Nélisse joins Culturally Jewish to discuss what filming was like and what she hopes audiences will take away.

And before that, hosts David and Ilana explain—with good reasoning—why neither one of them actually watched Irena's Vow... or, in fact, almost any other Holocaust movie. (Hint: it involves generational trauma.)

Credits

Culturally Jewish is hosted by Ilana Zackon and David Sklar. Our producer is Michael Fraiman, and our theme music is by Sarah Segal-Lazar. We’re a member of The CJN Podcast Network. To support The CJN and receive a charitable tax receipt, please consider a monthly donation by clicking here.