Dreidel parties aren't always easy to spin
And the latest from Hallmark Hanukkah
Welcome to our effort to keep you posted on everything related to Bonjour Chai, which involves inviting your feedback on everything we do. Let your people know about the show that keeps you up to date on the hotter-than-horseradish takes.
The political latkes are hot
We won’t really get a chance to dive into the whole Moncton Menorah Mess on the show this weekend—and today there’s a Calgary Chanukkiah Catastrophe to contend with. (The CJN technically spells it hanukkiah, but that’s of no use for alliteration.)
While the Moncton saga was a real head-scratcher, and the city seems to be heading in the right direction—the mayor regrets enforcing a ban of any religious symbol on municipal property—I think the Calgary decision is standing on much stronger legs.
Mayor Jyoti Gondek announced that she would not be attending the annual Calgary menorah lighting, given that it had shifted to a political tone. The promotional poster for the 35th annual event literally shouts Am Yisrael Chai!, and Rabbi Menachem Matusof of Chabad Alberta acknowledges that there was a messaging pivot this year.
I don’t need to go full-on François Legault to wonder if maybe its time we rethink the state-sponsored display of religion. If it means enough to you, go ahead and light that public menorah—or celebrate Diwali, or promote that you attend a daily mass. But let’s let politicians keep a distance from anything that risks being used against them.
Avi Finegold
bonjour@thecjn.ca
Hallmark gets self-aware
Five years ago, it was novel that the Hallmark Channel added some Jewish content to its annual made-in-Canada stream of Christmas rom-coms, even if they mostly pitted one holiday against another. (We covered this phenomenon on the podcast in 2021.)
Round and Round, the sole offering for this year—filmed in Maple Ridge, B.C.—has fewer boldface names than prior offerings, but Mira Fox’s review in The Forward explains that it actually makes fun of the genre, which sounds like the most Jewish thing about the movie.
What else we’ve been talking about…
“Prestige Worldwide” was identified as the company whose 17 chartered buses from Toronto to the Rally for the Jewish People in Ottawa didn’t show up Monday morning. But the inability to further confirm its existence may be related to it also being the company name from the 2008 comedy film Step Brothers.
Black Creek Pioneer Village now has a display for Hanukkah featuring a menorah from the mid-19th century, per the timeline of Toronto’s open-air heritage museum that opened in 1960. It recognizes that around 450 Jewish people lived in Canada a century earlier—although most of them lived in Montreal.
Charles Officer, the filmmaker who died at age 48 on Dec. 1, was best known for Black Canadian stories like his 2008 breakthrough Nurse.Fighter.Boy. and the 2015 documentary Unarmed Verses. The son of a Jamaican-Jewish mother, his funeral is scheduled for Sunday at Benjamin’s Park Memorial Chapel.
Look out for more from Bonjour Chai as we figure this newsletter thing out! Subscribe to the show which usually appears in the feed by Thursday night inside every podcast app.