Reasons to live for eating challah in a laundromat
Community happens wherever you make it
A pop-up photo gallery celebrating Shabbat transcends every fight over defining Zionism
For the past two weeks, in the course of discussing the 75-author anthology book On Being Jewish Now—and anti-antisemitic outreach more generally—I have expressed skepticism of the term, “Jewish joy.” (Akin to Black joy, queer joy, etc.) It comes across as a way of saying, see, it’s not all bad!, where the effect is reminding of just how bad the speaker thinks it is. I can’t entirely articulate why it doesn’t sit right, but it doesn’t.
Then I was picking my kids up from school on Friday, in Toronto, and heard a small airplane overhead. It was flying—what else?—a big Palestinian flag. I tried to photograph this, but let’s just say there’s a reason the great photojournalists do not multitask in this manner. The best I could get was a picture where it looks like it’s a tiny flag hanging from a power line, which would have been far less dramatic and really par for the course.
I did some feeling of feelings that would not have been out of place in a book like the one edited by Zibby Owens. I thought about how to explain this to my children, before remembering that they are not at a point in childhood where there’s anything registering beyond, look, a plane. I thought about my own anxiety, and also about what a joke that was compared to parents of young children in Gaza—or in Israel for that matter—with far more substantive worries about what’s overhead.
Whatever the case, I was put in a mindset where I became determined to attend a photography exhibition opening slash Shabbat candle lighting happening down the street from me. I had known about this and thought it seemed… very much the sort of thing I’m happy to know exists, but is for people who don’t have all-hands-on-deck childcare situations. But my desire to get out of my own head led to my entire household getting out of our own home in the evening and seeing what this was about…
A new study found 94% of Jewish Canadians believe in Israel’s right to exist—but only 51% call themselves Zionists
New Israel Fund of Canada, JSpaceCanada and Canadian Friends of Peace Now released a survey of 588 Jewish Canadians that aimed to figure out the community’s relationship to Israel. In short: it’s complicated.
The survey, managed by Leger, found that 94 percent of respondents agreed Israel “has the right to exist as a Jewish state”—yet only 51 percent self-identified as “Zionist”. This startling contradiction could reveal how tarnished the brand of Zionism has become, regardless of Jewish Canadians’ opinions on Israel itself, and dispels the myth of the Jewish community being monolithic about its opinions towards the Holy Land, its voting patterns and its values. Can Zionism be saved? Or should we all just ditch labels and talk about the issues?
To learn more about the key takeaways, we invited Ben Murane and Maytal Kowalski, the executive directors of the New Israel Fund of Canada and JSpaceCanada, respectively, to come on Bonjour Chai and explain their motivations for commissioning the survey and how we can digest the data.
Conversing about conversion
Rabbi Adam Mintz of Kehilat Rayim Ahuvim in Manhattan duked it out with callers on the Talkline radio show hosted by Zev Brenner, who invited him to elaborate on his unorthodox views on Orthodox Jewish conversions—discussed in a recent feature from The New Yorker. Listen for our takes on the topic coming up soon on the podcast.