North Star with Ellin Bessner

On Tuesday, the criminal trial began for two key leaders of the trucker convoy protest, Tamara Lich and Chris Barber. The case touches on some of the deepest political divides in Canada today—and was, back in 2022, an equally hot topic for Canadian Jews. While many in the community turned against the convoy after antisemitic images emerged of protesters waving Nazi flags, some Jewish Canadians felt comfortable brushing aside the antics of the movement's fringe members in support of the broader anti-government message. To bring that discussion back into context, we're re-airing an interview from February 2022, when the action was happening. Ellin Bessner spoke with two Jewish Canadians who supported the controversial convoy to figure out how they viewed the Nazi symbolism and how the pandemic’s economic fallout permanently impacted their careers.  Credits The CJN Daily is written and hosted by Ellin Bessner (@ebessner on Twitter). Zachary Kauffman is the producer. Michael Fraiman is the executive producer. Our intern is Ashok Lamichhane, and our theme music by Dov Beck-Levine. Our title sponsor is Metropia. We’re a member of The CJN Podcast Network. To subscribe to this podcast, please watch this video. Donate to The CJN and receive a charitable tax receipt by clicking here.

On September 3, Ukraine's defence minister, Oleksii Reznikov, who has stood at the helm of the country's protracted war with Russia since Day 1, announced his resignation. If you missed the news, you wouldn't be alone; with the war heading into its third year in a few months, global attention has drifted away. Clear media narratives and easily digestible stories have fallen wayside since the conflict began in February 2022. A new book aims to recall some of the humanity that's been lost in this inhumane struggle. Ukrainian Portraits, by Canadian writer, journalist and professor Marina Sonkina, focuses on human-scale stories she gathered at a refugee centre on the Polish border, which was set up by the Joint Distribution Committee, one of the world's largest and oldest Jewish humanitarian organizations. Sonkina joins The CJN Daily to relay these stories that so easily get lost in the fog of war. Credits The CJN Daily is written and hosted by Ellin Bessner (@ebessner on Twitter). Zachary Kauffman is the producer. Michael Fraiman is the executive producer. Our theme music by Dov Beck-Levine. Our title sponsor is Metropia. We’re a member of The CJN Podcast Network. To subscribe to this podcast, please watch this video. Donate to The CJN and receive a charitable tax receipt by clicking here.

This year has been the worst wildfire season in recorded Canadian history, with the millions of Canadians waking up for the first time to the smell of smoke and hazy skies. In the last week, blazes have continued raging in Canada’s coldest, northernmost regions, with all 20,000 residents of Yellowknife, the capital of Northwest Territories, being ordered to evacuate the city. Thousands more across the territories and northern British Columbia have followed suit. What can Canadians expect moving forward? And how much progress have we really made in the last few years? To get a sense of the urgency and what's at stake, we're re-airing an interview The CJN Daily ran with Seth Klein in November 2021. Klein is the head of the climate emergency unit of the David Suzuki Institute. Like his sister, Naomi Klein, he’s also a published author, with his book, A Good War: Mobilizing Canada for the Climate Emergency, published Sept. 2020. Credits The CJN Daily is written and hosted by Ellin Bessner (@ebessner on Twitter). Zachary Kauffman is the producer. Michael Fraiman is the executive producer. Our intern is Ashok Lamichhane, and our theme music by Dov Beck-Levine. Our title sponsor is Metropia. We’re a member of The CJN Podcast Network. To subscribe to this podcast, please watch this video. Donate to The CJN and receive a charitable tax receipt by clicking here.

In recent months, thousands of Canadian workers—in separate industries—have organized in unions and walked off the job. Port workers in British Columbia, teachers in Nova Scotia, liquor store staff in Manitoba, Metro grocery employees in Ontario—all have hit picket lines this summer, in a significant reversal of a long decline of union power. Jews have a long history of labour activism in North America, dating back to when their leadership in the shmata business evolved into some of the first organized unions in the United States. But are Jews still deeply embedded in the movement? And what are the economic and political forces behind this recent emboldening of workers? With Labour Day around the corner, The CJN Daily speaks to Rabbi Shalom Schachter, a former labour lawyer who has worked with the Ontario Nurses' Association and the Canadian Union of Public Employees, to understand the bigger picture around the future of Jews in organized labour—and the future of work. Credits The CJN Daily is written and hosted by Ellin Bessner (@ebessner on Twitter). Zachary Kauffman is the producer. Michael Fraiman is the executive producer. Our intern is Ashok Lamichhane, and our theme music by Dov Beck-Levine. Our title sponsor is Metropia. We’re a member of The CJN Podcast Network. To subscribe to this podcast, please watch this video. Donate to The CJN and receive a charitable tax receipt by clicking here.

In late July, the Israeli government won a major victory in its mission to shift power from the Supreme Court to the legislature, where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu presides over the governing coalition. The so-called "reasonableness bill" stripped the High Court’s ability to use the legal standard of reasonableness to outlaw actions of the government. The action has resulted in massive endless protests, clashes with police in the street and a serious reckoning about the future of Israel as a liberal democratic state. In Canada, Jewish community leaders reacted strongly to the historic legislation. Today, we're bringing you four of those voices from across the country, recorded in the aftermath of that vote. You'll hear from Rabbi Elan Mazer, director of of Mizrachi Canada; Steve McDonald, VP of communications for UJA of Greater Toronto; Ben Murane, executive director of the New Israel Fund; and Joe Roberts, chair of the board at JSpace. Credits The CJN Daily is written and hosted by Ellin Bessner (@ebessner on Twitter). Zachary Kauffman is the producer. Michael Fraiman is the executive producer. Our intern is Ashok Lamichhane, and our theme music by Dov Beck-Levine. Our title sponsor is Metropia. We’re a member of The CJN Podcast Network. To subscribe to this podcast, please watch this video. Donate to The CJN and receive a charitable tax receipt by clicking here.

With students returning to classrooms next week, Ontario will become the first Canadian province to mandate Holocaust education starting in Grade 6. The process began last fall, after a number of high-profile American celebrities—including Kanye West and Kyrie Irving—brought antisemitism centre stage, especially online. Ontario Education Minister Stephen Lecce announced a series of reforms to combat the rising trend of antisemitism across Ontario schools, as The CJN Daily has previously covered. Earlier this summer, The CJN Daily's Ellin Bessner and CJN news editor Lila Sarick spoke to Lecce about the new material, how it’s being introduced, what parents can expect and why the changes are so important to the minister on a personal level. Credits The CJN Daily is written and hosted by Ellin Bessner (@ebessner on Twitter). Zachary Kauffman is the producer. Michael Fraiman is the executive producer. Our intern is Ashok Lamichhane, and our theme music by Dov Beck-Levine. Our title sponsor is Metropia. We’re a member of The CJN Podcast Network. To subscribe to this podcast, please watch this video. Donate to The CJN and receive a charitable tax receipt by clicking here.

This interview originally aired on Bonjour Chai_, The CJN's weekly current affairs podcast. Hear the full episode and subscribe at thecjn.ca/bonjour._ With back-to-school prep in full swing and another semester around the corner, we wanted to ask: what is the Jewish community really getting out of Jewish day schools? What’s their long term effectiveness in terms of building Jewish identity? And, knowing the extreme costs, how do these effects stack up against other, potentially cheaper, forms of Jewish education, including after-school programs, summer camps and Birthright trips? As Canadian Jewish parents are collectively paying out tens of millions of dollars for a product, we're asking: is it working? With those questions in mind, we're revisiting a conversation Bonjour Chai host Avi Finegold had with Dr. Yehudah Kurtzer last year. Back then, Rabbi Kurtzer was the president of the North American wing of the Shalom Hartman Institute; this summer, after Rabbi Donniel Hartman of Montreal announced he was retiring as the president of entire international organization, Rabbi Kurtzer filled his seat.

This interview originally aired on Rivkush_, The CJN's podcast interviewing incredible Jews of colour. Hear the full episode and subscribe at thecjn.ca/rivkush._ Charly Wai Feldman is a woman of the world. Born in Montreal to a Jewish father and mother from Hong Kong, she lived in Jamaica and Vietnam before settling in the United Kingdom with her husband, himself of Indian descent (but grew up in Germany and Singapore). But while her nationality is an evolution, a central underpinning has always been her Jewish faith. As she puts it in this episode of Rivkush, “The whole principle of learning how to exist as a diaspora and being able to exist as a diaspora really hit home for me, at a time when I was looking for that sense of belonging.” Today, Wai Feldman is a documentary filmmaker whose most recent work, Long Distance Swimmer: Sara Mardini, profiles the prominent Syrian refugee as found herself propelled to international stardom as an Olympic athlete and global ambassador for refugees. It's a story that was later made into the hit Netflix film, The Swimmers. She spoke to Rivkush shortly after her film debuted at the Hot Docs film festival in Toronto.

This interview originally aired on Culturally Jewish_, The CJN's podcast covering Canadian Jewish arts and culture. Hear the full episode and subscribe at thecjn.ca/culture._ There’s a certain type of Jew, usually Ashkenazi, sometimes Israeli, with a mop of curly hair, an acousitc guitar and an affinity for marijuana, who will inevitably love bands like The Grateful Dead and Phish. Those groups are collectively known as “jam bands”, which play lengthy, musically complex songs, often in concert, always with a hefty reliance on improvisation. Once synonymous with psychedelic drugs, the jam band scene has gone mainstream in recent decades—and for a myriad reasons we’ll dissect on today’s episode of Culturally Jewish, Jews are buying front-row tickets. This summer, the Ashkenaz Festival and Magen Boys Entertainment are putting on their first-ever summer jam concert series. Producer Michael Fraiman visited the first show to ask concert-goers why they felt Jews loved jam bands; after that, Ashkenaz artistic director Eric Stein joins Ilana and David for a discussion about the surprisingly deep connections between Deadheads and Yiddishkeit.

This interview originally aired on Menschwarmers_, The CJN's podcast about Jews and sports. Hear the full episode and subscribe at thecjn.ca/menschwarmers_ On July 19, Josh Sokol, a 29-year-old Scrabble influencer from Montreal, won the top prize of US$10,000 at the 2023 North American Scrabble Players Association championship in Las Vegas. But, as Sokol explains on this episode of Menschwarmers, he isn’t even the first Jewish Montrealer to win this competition—one of his local club colleagues took home the top prize last year. What is it about Montreal that’s producing such high-quality gamers with encyclopedic memories of the dictionary? And why are so many of them Jewish? To give answers and insight into the world of professional word gaming, Sokol joins our podcast about Jews and sports—because, you know what, it’s summer, and board games are competitive enough that we consider them a sport. Subscribe to Sokol’s channels on YouTube or Twitch to watch him play.