The CJN Magazine: Hanukkah 2023

The Canadian Jewish News Am Yisrael Chai!

Winter 2024 | Hanukkah 5784

In the midst of terrible darkness Jerusalem will always shine

A LIGHT OF HOPE The miracle of Hanukkah will be reflected in our hearts and the candles we light We have come to banish the darkness Sending light and hope from Jerusalem

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What’s inside

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THE FRONT PAGES

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Avi Finegold on the significance of Hanukkah during wartime

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Q&A: Geddy Lee talks about the making of his memoir YO N I G O L D ST E I N

Avishag Shaar-Yashuv; Rob Tringali/Getty Images; Grant Harder; Kailee Mandel; Ronit Novak; Gilad Bar Shalev

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Looking back at the year in sports with Menschwarmers

FEATURES 36

Rabbi Elyse Goldstein reflects on a 40-year career

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The mirror has two faces in Naomi Klein’s Doppleganger P H O E B E M A LTZ B O V Y

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Rebecca Rosenblum on finding connection in isolation

THE BACK PAGES 55

A taste of the new season of sufganiyot

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Adeena Sussman sets a fresh table for Shabbat LILA SARICK

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The history of Canada Post’s Hanukkah stamp

Contributors Avishag Shaar-Yashuv (p.12) is an Israeli photojournalist and documentary photographer diligently covering the war in Israel since it began. She has travelled the Gaza envelope to observe brutalized kibbutzim and military assembly areas, and documented dozens of Oct. 7 massacre survivors recounting their horrific experiences.

An IDF soldier surveys the carnage following the Oct. 7 massacre in Kibbutz Kfar Aza on Thursday Nov 2, 2023.

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Avi Finegold (p12) is the founder of the Jewish Living Lab, who previously served as the interim rabbi at the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue and as executive director of the Montreal Board of Rabbis.

Currently, he slings hotter-thanhorseradish takes on The CJN podcast Bonjour Chai.

Kailee Mandel (p.55) is a Toronto-based commercial photographer and creative director who specializes in products and lifestyle. Her consumable collaborations have spanned all sorts of food and drink—leading up to the sweetest of all cover story assignments.

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The Canadian Jewish News Yoni Goldstein CEO and Editor-in-Chief Marc Weisblott Managing Editor Phoebe Maltz Bovy Senior Editor Ronit Novak Art Director Etery Podolsky Designer Sarah Zahavi Design Associate Lila Sarick News Editor Michael Fraiman Podcast Director Grace Zweig Sales Director Kathy Meitz General Manager

Board of Directors: Bryan Borzykowski President Sam Reitman Treasurer and Secretary Ira Gluskin Jacob Smolack Elizabeth Wolfe

Dear Yoni, with deep appreciation of your outstanding and innovative vision, service, and leadership to Canadian Jewish

For all inquiries info@thecjn.ca Cover: Photograph by Kailee Mandel Food styling by Michelle Rabin Printed in Winnipeg by Kromar Printing Ltd. With the participation of the Government of Canada.

life, we wish you the best in all your future endeavours!

Turning a page after a decade…

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en years ago this month, I was a 33-year-old walking into The Canadian Jewish News office to start my new job as editor-in-chief.

I know it was a Tuesday, because back then Monday was newspaper production day, which involved a mad scramble to get the pages off to the printer.

Nobody would’ve noticed my entrance—much less had a second to direct me to the corner office.

But I remember what I was wearing, and the song I blasted on the drive to the border of Toronto and Thornhill to pump myself up, because I was so nervous.

A decade later, The CJN’s operations are largely virtual, and I’m closing those tabs while reminiscing about everything that happened in between.

The ups and the downs—and the times when things went completely sideways, like when the newspaper closed in April 2020. Eight months later, a 60-year-old media outlet many figured was gone for good miraculously returned.

I’m happy to report that the good times outweighed the bad. The job gave me more than I could’ve ever hoped for. But before I move on to a different role, let me get a few things on the record.

The first is to wish my colleagues much success going forward. News media is a tough haul at the best of times. And these aren’t those times. And yet, The CJN was reinvented with a model that demonstrates how journalism can work, by being nimble enough for constant iteration and innovation, thanks to enthusiastic community support.

What it really boils down to is knowing your audience. But it’s not like this one is a monolith, either. There are around 400,000 Jews in Canada, spread out over a vast geographical space, with too many denominations, sub-denominations and non-denominations to count. Still, we want each and every one of them to see themselves somehow reflected in this project. Probably not at the same time, or tuned in to the same frequency, but often enough to feel connected to something bigger. And feel comforted that they’re being seen as uniquely as they are.

When I started this job, tens of thousands of readers would show their support with a weekly newspaper subscription, and that was enough of a relationship for most. Now, the relationship is something our audience needs to have reinforced each day. The CJN is sustainable thanks to you feeling some ownership in this project.

The validation came in the form of the many hundreds who have so far considered this a cause worth a tax-deductible contribution of at least $100 a year. (You can find the latest names on page 30 of this issue—then add yours if you haven’t yet.) Along with our daily news and podcasts, the support is allowing the magazine you’re holding to evolve in wonderful ways that will go even further in 2024, with confidence that continues to grow.

When I was young I never thought I’d end up a journalist. I sort of fell into it by accident. I certainly never dreamed of making fundraising pitches for the publication my parents and grandparents read at the kitchen table. But it ended up coming naturally to me.

The motivation came from watching how the initial promise of social media devolved into a competition between loudmouths and idealogues, who drowned out so many traditional sources of information. And when the news is so easily manipulated, we need outlets we can trust, as a pillar on which a community rests.

While others tried to fill the short-lived gap, it became increasingly clear to me during that fraught pandemic year: Jews in Canada needed The CJN. The people who stood by me felt the same way.

You can be sure that they are as dedicated as I have been.

The office I first entered was vacated early in the lockdown. And the only thing I saved from the wall was a January 2015 front page printed days after the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris, with just three stark words: “Je Suis Juif.”

It’s a reminder that when tragedy befalls our people, we rally together, we understand each other on a deeper level—and few words are necessary in the end. Similar sentiments were in the air when we were putting this issue together in the weeks leading up to Hanukkah.

Thankfully, the media outlet I led for a decade has many things to celebrate, and the future should only bring more. The Canadian Jewish News will be here for you through thick and thin to provide a crucial connection, with doses of whimsy along the way.

It’s been an honour to do this job. And now I’m honoured to join the rest of you in looking forward to what The CJN does next.

— Yoni Goldstein

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Congratulations Yoni on 10 great years as editor-in-chief of The Canadian Jewish News and for successfully relaunching the CJN platform over the past three years.

Best of luck on your next adventure.

With thanks, from the CJN Board of Directors

The adian Can ish Jew s New

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ESSAY

The War Within PHOTOGRAPHY BY AVISHAG SHAAR-YASHUV

Israeli soldiers work in an artillery unit near the Gaza border on Thursday, November 2, 2023.

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Hanukkah is about many things— self-determination and freedom, but also Jews fighting other Jews.

The parallels to today are alarming.

By Avi Finegold

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anukkah. The temple defiled, the one jar of oil, enough to last one day, miraculously lasting eight days. We recreate this every year to celebrate the miracle and the victory over dark forces that it represented.

Let me let you in on a little secret. I know religious scholars and even rabbis who don’t really believe it. Neither, it seems, did many people who were around at the time or soon after: the documents that describe what happened during the rebellion in 164 BCE don’t seem to discuss a miracle at all. Maccabees I and Maccabees II are contemporary accounts of the events and they don’t mention it. Neither does Josephus, who wrote famous accounts of Jewish history in the first century. In one of them, Antiquities of the Jews, he mentions that the festival was called “Lights,” but assumes that it was because “this liberty beyond our hopes appeared to us, and that thence was the name given to that festival.” It is only in the Talmud, written hundreds of years later, that we see the story that we now know as central to our celebration first appear.

If we set aside the miracle of the light and turn our attention to other parts of the story, what we find is a struggle over assimilation, a surprise military victory—itself likely

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near-miraculous—and a whole lot of open questions. What does it mean to celebrate our military might? Why did it take over 2,000 years for another decisive Jewish victory? What other holidays might be masquerading as military victories?

If those questions feel eerily pertinent, it’s because many people are asking them—not only about a long-ago war but about the one that’s being waged in Israel right now.

Among the long list of the Things You Get Asked as a Rabbi, especially when Israel is embroiled in some sort of conflict: What is the Jewish view of war? Are there Jewish ethics about the conduct of war? What is the IDF allowed to do halachically? What are our obligations towards hostages? Towards enemies? Towards non-combatants?

I don’t claim to be an expert in this field and usually direct anyone who asks me about it to some articles on the topic—there have been no shortage of them written in the interim since the start of the war with Gaza.

But when I do, I also point out that anyone interested can find backing, in the Torah and rabbinic literature, for a great many different—and sometimes conflicting—perspectives on these questions.

Do you want to support an intervention that is peaceful and minimally harmful?

You’ll find plenty of sources that remind us that no single life is more important than another, that we must provide for captives and ensure that we do violence only when we absolutely must. The Talmud discusses the great lengths a king needed to go to in order to engage in a war that wasn’t defensive—the definition and limits of which themselves come in for further careful analysis. The Rabbis then detail how far one must go to avoid unnecessary destruction, pointing to the biblical passage that forbids tearing down fruit-bearing trees during a siege. People love to point out that the IDF even enshrined this in their training, including it in their doctrine of tohar haneshek, or purity of arms, instructing soldiers on how and when they are allowed to engage an enemy.

Conversely: Do you want carnage and destruction to rain down on Gaza? You’ll be glad to see that the Bible is full of bloody battles to capture the land of Israel and that the early Israelites were instructed to destroy entire tribes like Amalek. And let’s not forget that there’s an entire passage in the Torah that discusses women captured in battle, outlining the steps one must follow to be able to sleep with them. (In case this isn’t sufficiently clear: the Torah seems to be 14

telling us that you can have sex with captive women.) In the early days of this war I heard Rabbi Berel Wein, a scholar with many historical works published in the haredi world, claim that Hamas and Palestinians—yes, all of them—were the Amalekites, and that just as the Torah tells us that the latter must be eradicated in toto, including the women and children, so too must we eradicate the former.

You may, at this point, be protesting: that that’s not what is meant, the Rabbis dealt with all this in the Talmud and after. All of that may be true, but clearly there are Jews

increasingly narrow. You are either on the side that says, there is no such thing as proportionality: the Holocaust is happening again and Israel has to answer to no one but itself. Or you stand for peace at any and all costs—even at the expense of Jewish safety and the viability of a homeland in Israel.

This polarization is a central problem and not just incidental to what is happening in the world.

One of the things that seems to be entering into communal discourse with the current Gaza war is the policing of who gets to

Smoke rises following an Israeli airstrike in the Gaza Strip, as seen from Sderot on Sunday, October 29, 2023.

and Jewish leaders who believe it to this day—leaders like Rabbi Yitzchak Ginsburgh, a Chabad rabbi known for his radical views on Israeli-Arab relations, who praised Baruch Goldstein for the Hebron Massacre, and counts Bezalel Smotrich and other right-wing Knesset members as followers.

The Torah can be used to prop up a very wide spectrum of opinions, and yet the acceptable spectrum of opinion has become

participate in it and who is deemed beyond the pale. This policing may have existed in the past more subtly, but has become much more aggressive lately. This is true across the spectrum of Jews and Jewish thinking.

Our feeds are filled with people saying they will block you if you don’t have any compassion for dead Palestinians, or for living ones who have to endure so much hardship. We see others being declared persona non grata

The Torah can be used to prop up a very wide spectrum of opinions, and yet the acceptable spectrum of opinion has become increasingly narrow.

if they don’t believe that Palestinians are all members of Hamas who all want every Jew dead, not just from the river to the sea but across the globe. Then there are the endless arguments over which organization made which statement, what it did or did not include, and why.

This is not helping. At all.

We have come a long way from the Maccabean approach. We often forget, or were never taught, that they employed

some fairly radical tactics in their path to victory. Forcible circumcision of Jews who wanted to assimilate was not unheard of.

Neither was killing Jews who did assimilate. These practices started to fade away in Talmudic times, making way for a more heterogeneous, inclusive understanding of the Jewish faith.

Famously, the redactors of the Talmud included many diverging and sometimes contradictory legal opinions on the questions they discussed. This became a hallmark of Talmudic writing: not just a final verdict but the whole often messy discourse that preceded it was deemed important.

The losing opinions were and are still seen to have value because the process matters as much as the outcome—and the holders of losing opinions were wise and arrived at their views through careful reasoning, just as the victors in legal debates did. Even proponents of what seem to be heresies and radical assimilation are included in Jewish tradition, with rabbis looking for ways to keep them in the fold.

And yet, today we find ourselves excluding and excluding and excluding.

This will do lasting damage to our community and to our individual psyches. We are no longer asking ourselves why an individual has an opinion. We are no longer assuming the best in others.

The Maccabees did this. But the Maccabees also did something novel during the rebellion, something that saved many lives. Jews were dying in attack after attack because the Seleucids had figured out that they wouldn’t fight back on the Sabbath. So the Maccabees ruled that preserving life was paramount—that it trumped the usual rules—and began fighting every day, including on the Sabbath. This is the source of our present-day discussions about pikuach nefesh: it’s why we are commanded to break almost every rule that usually binds us in order to save a life.

This can be a powerful lesson for us, not just about the sanctity of life that Judaism espouses, but about our capacity to hold space for opinions that aren’t ours. While the Maccabees were ostensibly on the side of tradition, this approach to preserving life was by no means standard at the time. Maybe we too need to start by not disparaging ideas and opinions that we think are wrong. At the very least it may help us to understand where others are coming from and why they believe what they do.

The Maccabean victory sowed the seeds for something much bigger and unintended

as well: centuries after their rebellion, the temple that they had rededicated was ultimately destroyed by the Romans. The Rabbis tell us that it was because of sinat chinam—baseless hatred of Jews towards other Jews. Even on purely historical grounds, they’re not wrong: it was quite possibly a lot of infighting between the various sects that prevented the Jews from mounting any credible defence against the Romans. Sinat chinam is something we can combat today simply by trying to understand each other better. You may still disagree with the gun-toter, but you might see that they have many fears, and that those fears humanize them. You might think that a gun isn’t a security blanket, but for them it is. And it might help you not hate them. You may think that every Palestinian agrees with Hamas, but speak to a Jew who regularly socializes or does business with Palestinians and you might see why they have sympathy for them.

I have full faith in the IDF and their ability to unite Israelis together in battle. But I do not see that unity in our community more broadly. It can’t possibly be to our benefit to have bitter internal strife over who is more authentically Jewish, the right or the left.

There are so few times we should exclude people from the community that we should never even think of it.

To quote the Holy Bard of Montreal, Leonard Cohen: Anyone who says I’m not a Jew Is not a Jew I’m very sorry But this is final I have no idea what might happen in Israel or Gaza, either over the short or the long term. A decisive military victory or loss might have unintended consequences that I will not try and guess at. But I do know that perhaps we should not be celebrating military victories the way we used to. In an article on thetorah.com written long before the current war, Malka Simkovich, a scholar of early Jewish history, points out that “the rabbis effectively rebranded the holiday so that instead of glorifying Hasmonean military prowess, the holiday instead glorifies the unconditional and miraculous divine light that Jews can depend on, even in the gloomiest of darkness.”

Let’s take a minute to remind ourselves of this, and maybe bring a little more light into this gloomy time. n THECJN.CA 15

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Hon. Omar Alghabra

Hon. Anita Anand

Rachel Bendayan

Hon. Carolyn Bennett

Hon. Bardish Chagger

Shaun Chen

Mississauga Centre

Oakville

Outremont

Toronto—St. Paul’s

Waterloo

Scarborough North

Omar.Alghabra@parl.gc.ca

Anita.Anand@parl.gc.ca

Rachel.Bendayan@parl.gc.ca

Carolyn.Bennett@parl.gc.ca

Bardish.Chagger@parl.gc.ca

Shaun.Chen@parl.gc.ca

Paul Chiang

Michael Coteau

Julie Dabrusin

Anna Gainey

Hon. Karina Gould

Hon. Steven Guilbeault

Notre-Dame-deGrâce—Westmount

Burlington

Laurier—Sainte-Marie

Karina.Gould@parl.gc.ca

Steven.Guilbeault@parl.gc.ca

Hon. Marco Mendicino

Yasir Naqvi

Markham—Unionville

Don Valley East

Toronto—Danforth

Paul.Chiang@parl.gc.ca

Michael.Coteau@parl.gc.ca

Julie.Dabrusin@parl.gc.ca

Anna.Gainey@parl.gc.ca

Anthony Housefather

Hon. Helena Jaczek

Majid Jowhari

Hon. David McGuinty

Mount Royal / Mont-Royal

Markham—Stouffville

Richmond Hill

Ottawa South

Eglinton—Lawrence

Ottawa Centre

Helena.Jaczek@parl.gc.ca

Majid.Jowhari@parl.gc.ca

David.McGuinty@parl.gc.ca

Marco.Mendicino@parl.gc.ca

Yasir.Naqvi@parl.gc.ca

Hon. Rob Oliphant

Hon. Ya’ara Saks

Hon. Judy Sgro

Francesco Sorbara

Sameer Zuberi

Humber River— Black Creek

Vaughan—Woodbridge

Pierrefonds—Dollard

Francesco.Sorbara@parl.gc.ca

Sameer.Zuberi@parl.gc.ca

Anthony.Housefather@parl.gc.ca

Hon. Mary Ng Markham—Thornhill

Don Valley West

York Centre

Mary.Ng@parl.gc.ca

Rob.Oliphant@parl.gc.ca

Yaara.Saks@parl.gc.ca

Judy.Sgro@parl.gc.ca

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From Doug Ford, Premier of Ontario & the Ontario PC Caucus

Laura Smith

MPP/Députée - Thornhill

Stan Cho

MPP/Député - Willowdale

Daisy Wai

MPP/Députée - Richmond Hill

Robin Martin

MPP/Députée - Eglinton-Lawrence

Stephen Lecce

MPP/Député - King-Vaughan

Andrea Khanjin

MPP/Députée - Barrie-Innisfil

Michael Kerzner

MPP/Député - York Centre

Michael Parsa

MPP/Député - AuroraOak Ridges-Richmond Hill

Logan Kanapathi

MPP/Député - Markham-Thornhill

‘I was never a person who wanted to look backwards’ Geddy Lee talks to Yoni Goldstein about his Jewish roots, the early days of Rush, and what drove him to write his memoir My Effin’ Life.

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Photograph by Richard Sibbald

t took a prolonged pandemic lockdown for Geddy Lee to commit to taking stock of his personal history: My Effin’ Life, co-written with Daniel Richler, is about how growing up in the shadow of the Holocaust segued into worldwide success as the bass-playing frontman for a rock trio called Rush.

Let’s start by talking about where it began 70 years ago for Gary Lee Weinreb in the suburbs of Toronto, before you adopted your mother’s pronunciation of your first name to become Geddy Lee. The immigrant population seemed to be interested in new builds. They wanted to be in an area that was not reminiscent of where they’d come from in any way.

When they arrived, they lived in and worked in the downtown core. And they worked in factories, a lot of them in the shmatte business, doing piecework and trying to scrape together a living. The sooner they could get away from it, up north, where there was more space, it was less reminiscent of the world they’d left behind and all the damage of the old world that had occurred through the war. The result was a neighbourhood with very young trees and a

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lot of spare gardens. It wasn’t exactly a lush environment.

We first lived around Bathurst and Wilson, but then we moved to the outskirts of the city: even newer buildings, even fewer trees—a typical suburban barren landscape.

But I found the suburbs a soulless environment. I couldn’t wait to get to where people lived closer together.

You describe yourself as a nerdy kid, trying to hide your Jewishness—and in many cases being the only Jewish person in groups, especially as you’re getting into playing bass guitar.

We’re talking about two different periods here. Before my father passed away, when I was 12, I was a dutiful Jewish kid like any other Jewish kid. I was very quiet and most of my peer group were the friends that I had either at school or in my neighborhood, which were mostly Jewish.

But after our year of mourning, we moved to Bathurst and Steeles. We were the Jewish kids that were bused into R.J. Lang Elementary School (near Yonge and Finch). And that’s where I started to experience flagrant antisemitism.

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Geddy at SARSStock in Toronto, 2003 A young Gary Weinrib showing an early interest in music

Geddy and his sister Susan with their father Morris Weinrib

Courtesy of Geddy Lee Archive; M Rossi

There were still a lot of farms on the edge of the city; these were the last people to sell their property for construction that seemed forever moving north. Kids would come on their bikes, and they taunted and terrorized us. We grew accustomed to not advertising our religion.

I started getting into music, and meeting other kids that were into music—but few of those kids were Jewish. And eventually I got into different friend groups, to whom I would be introduced: “This is Geddy, he’s Jewish, but he’s OK.” Which I found incredibly offensive, but I didn’t say anything. I was quiet. You don’t want to advertise that you’re different, but you get treated as if you’re different.

That’s a motivating factor when you’re a young musician to join a band. Part of that you’re motivated by is acceptance. I was a quick learner. Regardless of any alienation I might have felt through these various friends. It was the music that sustained me.

It was the music that fed me and the feeling that I can do this.

Your book also gets into explaining how you started to reassess your cultural roots...

When I joined Rush and started playing bars and playing clubs—and then eventually getting signed to a deal—it was a whole different thing. I was becoming a professional musician in my mid-teens. Things were changing really quickly. And it really wasn’t about what religion I was. It was about, you know, music. Everything was music. Everything was the band, you know, writing songs and playing as many gigs as we could. Trying to get gigs. And by the time we’d gone on 22

tour for the first time in 1974, the music was opening a whole new world for me.

I used to wear a mezuzah around my neck on stage. Rush was the opening act for Kiss and we were down south, maybe Alabama.

Gene Simmons came up to me and he picked up my mezuzah and he said, “I don’t think it’s a wise idea to wear that thing when you’re playing in places like this. They don’t think too kindly of our kind.” He scared me a little bit. I put the mezuzah away.

The third chapter is all about your Holocaust survivor parents’ history before they came to Canada and especially detailed when it comes to your mother, Mary Weinrib.

I couldn’t imagine explaining who I am and why I am the way I am without informing people about how I grew up. The shadow of the Holocaust was on me the entire time.

Their stories gave me nightmares. And that helped form my worldview. As I got older and was able to put these things in a better perspective, it still informed my personality. And once I started becoming more successful, I returned to acceptance of my Jewish roots,

even if I was still not a believer in God. It also brought me closer to my mom who had not really been supportive of me quitting school and running away to join the circus. She wasn’t too keen about that, but I started to understand why she wanted me to go down certain paths in life. And I also understood that with my father no longer around as an enforcer, that was very unlikely to happen.

And so, I married out of the faith, as did my brother and my sister—although my sister’s second marriage was to someone Jewish.

We’ve all come back to Judaism very strongly. We celebrate all the holidays. I just felt that what my parents went through, the culture they grew up in, created the culture I grew up in. And if you want to understand me, you’ve got to understand that.

Scholars talk now about this idea of second- and third-generation survivors, and how that legacy affects them. I’m assuming you feel, it sounds like you’re describing, like you feel like you’re a survivor, too.

There’s a lot smarter writing about this than mine, but I do think that there’s a trauma that’s passed on and a guilt that’s passed on. Now, not everybody feels those things in the same way. When I first met Ben Mink, a brilliant musician also from that part of Toronto, we realized that we had so many similar experiences being children of survivors, I can’t even explain how comforting it was to both of us. It brought out this very dark sense of humour about it all. We made so many bad Holocaust jokes between us because we could, because we were the ones who understood how horrific it was. It bonded us as friends, and we both found a way out of the

Jewish ghetto we were living in.

I’m really thankful that my mother spoke of all these things. She was so open with us and scared the shit out of us by telling us horrific stories like they were nothing. But why did she do that? She did that because that was the way she spent her childhood. She was 12 years old when she went into the camps, and a woman when she came out of them.

Five years in that kind of horror. What else are you gonna tell your kids who ask: What did you do when you were a teenager, mom?

“Oh, I almost starved in Auschwitz and then in Bergen-Belsen.”

At the same time, we were not indoctrinated into the faith in the same way as other Jewish kids. We were breaking away, all three of us in our own way. My brother was sent to parochial school, after the failure that my mother felt with me and my sister. He rebelled anyway. It was impossible to contain us and our spirit. All of us siblings have that in common, we wanted a more creative and a more assimilated life. At the same time, we do have a healthy reverence for what they went through. And it brought us to be very dedicated children of my mom. She was the head of the family. We revered her, and we listened to her as much as we could.

But there were lines we wouldn’t cross, and those related to the dogma of the faith.

You write about your need for control, whether in the studio or being able to say to your wife, it’s time for me, it’s time for me to hit the road again. Going over masters and recordings, all those things.

Do you see any link between this and your upbringing?

I don’t know if you can say that’s an effect of a Jewish upbringing or if it’s just a personality flaw. It’s an insecurity when someone feels insecure, which I certainly did as a teen.

I was a shy, insecure person. I felt I was goofy looking. That’s why I grew this hair that kind of covered my face. You tend to overcompensate as you grow older. And as you get more confident in your skillset, you utilize it, and you want control because you want to be heard.

So I went from a kid that was never really heard to someone that finally found his voice.

There’s a sense that you’re always searching for something. You get off a tour, you record an album. You hear flaws, you struggle to correct them, and then you get back on the road and you come back and record again, you’re trying to compensate for the things that didn’t go exactly right last time. It’s a Talmudic scholar kind

of way of going about things. Like you’re asking yourself a question, you’re doing your best to answer it, but you’re never satisfied with the answer.

I’m obsessed with making the perfect record, but it’s impossible to do that. But you still have to try. And with everything I do, I put my all into it. I want it to be, I want everything to be perfect. Even if it’s a stupid comedy film being shown on the rear screen of a concert, I want it to be as funny as it can be. When you’re making records, that’s all that matters is trying to get it as perfect as possible. But there’s an old saying that good is the enemy of perfect. And I think there’s a lot of truth in that, but I didn’t adhere to that philosophy.

I chose to look for perfection. Every time we

I got into different friend groups, to whom I would be introduced: “This is Geddy, he’s Jewish, but he’s OK.” Which I found incredibly offensive, but I didn’t say anything.

made a record, and I reviewed it, I would see what had bugged me about it. I would take that with me to the next project and try to correct it. But you’re always going to make a mistake. Sometimes the mistakes you make translate better for an outsider, for an objective listener. Maybe what you view as a flaw is a just bit of humanity on the tracks.

In the last part of My Effin’ Life, you’re talking about people getting older, and friends and colleagues getting sick and passing away—including your mother, in July 2021. But you’re also talking about

rebirth and becoming a zayde. How do you find the balance between honouring the past and living in the present?

I never was a person who wanted to look backwards. And now I’ve done exactly that by writing a memoir—against everything I’d worked towards. I spent most of my life running towards a musical ideal, running to live, trying to live as large as I could live because I think many things go into that decision. I felt the clock ticking. I lost my father when he was only 45. I always knew, because of the stories of the Holocaust I grew up with, how quickly time goes and what a short leash we all have on this planet. I wanted to make the most of it. So, it took a pandemic to get me to write this book. It took lockdowns—lockdown after lockdown—to get me into that mode.

And some pretty powerful losses, too.

The death of Neil Peart in January 2020 affected Alex Lifeson and me profoundly. I’m sure his family felt it in a much more deep and profound way. But we spent 45 years together, and the last few were exceedingly painful and difficult. We tried to be there for him as best we could. But being locked down with that grief a couple months later forces one to be reflective.

At the same time, my mother was suffering from dementia. I was witnessing her slowly lose her grey cells and be unaware of where she was and have memory conflicts. And I thought, OK, so will that happen to me? Am I now poised? I’m sitting here twiddling my thumbs. maybe the best thing I can do for myself is to finally look back, examine my life, examine the other losses I’ve experienced and try to make some sense of this new loss, you know?

Because when you lose someone, it’s like everyone you’ve lost happens all over again.

You know, they’re all connected in some way. That’s the reason I dedicated a couple of years to the memoir. Parts of it were rollicking and fun and great to remember, and other parts were painful and delicate and had to be treated in a very thoughtful manner when I was writing.

Now I’m in the portion where I’m promoting the book. It’s healthy to understand where you came from in order for you to move forward.

But you can also start getting this bloated sense of your own importance if you spend too much time admiring your own accomplishments. Once I finish this book tour, I’m ready to move on. Whether it’s another book, or whether it’s a musical project—which I certainly hope it will be—I’m ready for that. The memoir has helped me, it’s been cathartic for me. But now, enough is enough. n THECJN.CA 23

Happy Hanukkah!

HANUKKAH

Mayor Steven Del Duca and Members of Council extend their best wishes for peace, joy, hope and happiness during this holiday season.

2022-2026 City of Vaughan Members of Council First row, left to right: Gila Martow, Ward 5 Councillor; Chris Ainsworth, Ward 4 Councillor; Rosanna DeFrancesca, Ward 3 Councillor; Adriano Volpentesta, Ward 2 Councillor; Marilyn lafrate, Ward 1 Councillor Second row, left to right: Gino Rosati, Regional Councillor; Linda Jackson, Deputy Mayor and Regional Councillor; Steven Del Duca, Mayor of Vaughan; Mario Ferri, Regional Councillor; Mario G. Racco, Regional Councillor

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Spencer Horowitz at the 2023 World Baseball Classic, Team Nicaragua vs. Team Israel

Was this the best year ever for Jewish sports in Canada?

By Michael Fraiman or the hosts of The CJN’s sports podcast, sitting down with Michael Landsberg for a live taping was incredible—it was a chance to meet and interview someone James Hirsh and Gabe Pulver grew up watching every day on TV. (For me, as their producer, who doesn’t care much about sports, it was cool to meet the son of my childhood orthodontist, who was probably the nicest Jewish medical professional I visited while growing up in midtown Toronto.)

But for Landsberg, our Menschwarmers live show at the Prosserman JCC’s Leah Posluns Theatre was just one of many events he does in any given month on the topic of mental health.

After a three-decade television career with TSN that ended in 2015, Landsberg co-created Sick Not Weak, an organization that advocates for mental health awareness,

28

trying to connect with people struggling with mental health problems and companies wanting to do more in that space.

As he told our audience, regardless of whether being Jewish gave him a predisposition to suffer from anxiety from an early age, his identity certainly influenced his public perception during his broadcast years.

“I was labeled as arrogant from the first show I ever did,” he said. “Part of it was, I earned it, right? Because I was always opinionated and I would ask questions that, if someone wasn’t giving me an answer, I would be more aggressive than most. But also, I do think there was an undertone of, ‘That Jew—why does he think he knows everything?’”

The first-ever Menschwarmers live event happened a few days before Rosh Hashanah. We wanted to do something special

to close out 5783, which was an exciting year for Jews in sports—particularly in Canada. From the NHL to MLB to PGA to even tabletop games, Canadian Jews made a huge mark in global competitions. As is our mandate on the podcast, we feel compelled to share and celebrate these Jewish sports stories, since Lord knows no one else is going to. Read on for some of our favourites from the past year.

From sparkplug to slugger Months before Spencer Horwitz hit his first homer for the Blue Jays and emerged among a crop of exciting rookies, the 25-year-old first baseman and outfielder shattered expectations for Team Israel, tying a decisive game at the World Baseball Classic in the eighth inning—leading to an upset victory

Rob Tringali/Getty Images

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their parents and/or grandparents reading this magazine.)

for the Holy Land. Turns out that wasn’t an anomaly. Jays fans have since embraced the Jewish rookie, who swooped in after his teammates got injured in September, as someone who doesn’t shy from big moments. Our interview with him before his big MLB breakout turned into one of the year’s most popular episodes—and it shed some light on his goals beyond the big leagues.

“Playing in the World Baseball Classic has been a dream of mine forever,” he told us.

“To be able to represent Israel, and my family, and where we come from, is just an unbelievable experience.”

Cristall clear Only one Jewish hockey prospect was selected in this year’s NHL draft: Andrew Cristall, an 18-year-old out of Vancouver. Drafted by the Washington Capitals, Cristall headed out to training camp in mid-September, forced to navigate his way through this momentous opportunity during the High Holidays. But before any of that, he sat down with Gabe and Ellin Bessner of The CJN Daily for this special crossover episode that became one of our biggest of the summer.

The Washington Post/Getty Images

When the world came to North York Golf fans will remember that week over the summer when the PGA Tour announced it was merging with the Saudi-backed LIV Golf League. That groundbreaking news— shocking sports fans, analysts, athletes and sponsors—happened to coincide with a golf tournament that would normally have only attracted a modest amount of international attention: the RBC Canadian Open. The merger news transformed the Open into a media circus, ground zero for instant reactions, heated debates and geopolitical analysis.

And where was the event held? The Oakdale Golf & Country Club, a historically Jewish venue in North York. And the Menschwarmers, golf fanatics as they are, were on the ground to cover the event. It was a great opportunity to talk about the history of golf as a restricted sport, including Oakdale’s origins, while also tackling the merger of these massive leagues that stood oceans apart—including all the baggage the Saudis are carrying into the new partnership.

Putting the ‘bet’ in aleph-bet Anyone who watches any professional sport for even just five minutes can tell you how

Semitic semantics

pervasive the onslaught of sports gambling has become, ever since the government lifted its ban on single-game sports betting.

Anti-gambling activists, who look at the broader mental health implications, liken this trend to shoving cigarettes in the face of addicts who quit smoking. Meanwhile, most mainstream fans could easily argue that small-dollar bets are just another way of feeling more personally invested and excited about teams, players and games.

But this is a Jewish sports podcast, so we had to ask: what does Jewish law say about this? We looked across the podcast network aisle to bring on Rabbi Avi Finegold, host of The CJN’s weekly current affairs podcast, Bonjour Chai, to chat about the halakhic implications of sports gambling in one of our most unique conversations of the year.

James, Gabe and I are all big word-gamers, from the New York Times’ digital Spelling Bee and Wordle to the biggest of them all, Scrabble. And if there’s a cash prize for an international competition of skill, and esports are now a thing, why shouldn’t we celebrate our Canadian Scrabble champions? Josh Sokol is a staple at Montreal’s celebrated Scrabble club, which—in addition to having a lot of Jewish members—has produced multiple champions of the NASPA tournament in Las Vegas, the biggest Scrabble event on the continent. Sokol is the latest. Of all the media interviews he did after his victory in July, I can guarantee he never had an interview like this one: it was great fun hearing three hardcore Canadian Jewish word gamers talking about the nitty-gritty of punctuation politics and Jewish jargon. n thecjn.ca/menschwarmers

Suiting up for the NHL After owner Eugene Melnyk—who was often mistakenly thought of as Jewish—died in 2022, the Ottawa Senators had to scramble to begin organizing the sale of the team. The board of directors began working quickly on negotiations that only wrapped up in September 2023. A key figure: Sheldon Plener, a lawyer from Toronto who is the chairman of the Senators’ board and filled in as governor after Melnyk’s passing. Plener also happens to be close friends with James’s family.

(Jewish lawyer geography is a tighter-knit game than the usual Jewish geography, apparently.) Plener took some time to sit down with us and explain his unusual path to becoming a highly successful sports lawyer, including how he helped negotiate the expansion of an NBA team into Toronto. A must-listen episode for any young professionals looking to get into sports law. (I’m taking a gamble here and assuming, yes, there are young lawyers and/or

Andrew Cristall

THECJN.CA 29

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Jewish Community Organizations, Synagogues and Schools

Let us join our brothers and sisters in Israel this Hanukkah As we light the lights, let us pray for peace and security Adath Israel Congregation Beit Rayim Synagogue & School Bernard Betel Centre Beth David B’nai Israel Beth Am Beth Sholom Synagogue Beth Tikvah Synagogue Beth Tzedec Congregation Canadian Friends of Ezrath Nashim - Herzog Hospital Canadian Friends of Hebrew University Canadian Friends of Yad Sarah Canadian Magen David Adom for Israel Congregation Beth Haminyan Congregation Darchei Noam Congregation Habonim Hebrew Beach Institute & School Holy Blossom Temple Israel Bonds/Canada-Israel Securities, Limited Na’amat Canada Toronto Reena Temple Emanu-El Temple Har Zion Temple Kol Ami Temple Sinai Congregation The Song Shul Toronto Board of Rabbis

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Dead Sea, 2019 Photograph by Brant Slomovic from the photobook The Cracks in Everything Published by Kehrer Verlag, 2020 34

The Diameter of the Bomb

By Yehuda Amichai

The diameter of the bomb was thirty centimeters and the diameter of its effective range about seven meters, with four dead and eleven wounded.

And around these, in a larger circle of pain and time, two hospitals are scattered and one graveyard. But the young woman who was buried in the city she came from, at a distance of more than a hundred kilometers, enlarges the circle considerably, and the solitary man mourning her death at the distant shores of a country far across the sea includes the entire world in the circle.

And I won’t even mention the crying of orphans that reaches up to the throne of God and beyond, making a circle with no end and no God.

Yehuda Amichai (1924-2000) served in the Jewish Brigade of the British Army in the Second World War, fought with the Israel Defense Forces in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, and was in active duty in 1956 and 1973. ‘The Diameter of the Bomb’ was published in 1976 in his third book of poetry, Time.

Translation from original Hebrew by Chana Bloch.

THECJN.CA 35

Hands across the divide Rabbi Elyse Goldstein on her legacy of linking lives and what the future holds.

PHOTOGRAPHY BY SHLOMI AMIGA EXCLUSIVELY FOR THE CANADIAN JEWISH NEWS

I

’ll never forget the day in 1983 when I arrived as a brand-new rabbi to Holy Blossom Temple in Toronto. Did I mention I am a female rabbi?

My first morning on the job: I am chastised by the senior rabbi’s secretary to never again wear open-toed sandals as they are “too sexy” (it was 30-degrees that day).

I am invited to the nearby Conservative synagogue to meet their young assistant and am not allowed as a female to ascend the bimah to see their Torah scrolls.

The upcoming bar mitzvah family has requested to not have me officiate because it would bother their Orthodox relatives.

36

I am asked to speak at three different Hadassah chapters on what it feels like to be a “lady rabbi.”

My secretary has fielded two phone calls asking me out for a date, a TV show requesting a debate with a Catholic priest on whether or not I am “allowed” to be a rabbi, and an irate congregant asking how long my contract is for, with the closing line, “Well, maybe she won’t last.”

The interdenominational Toronto Board of Rabbis is deciding/debating whether or not they can invite me to sit with them. (Years later I will be elected their first female president, but that is a story for another day.)

THECJN.CA 37

Makeup and hair by Maya Goldenberg

With those doors finally open for women, other gates also unlocked: for LGBTQ+ Jews, Jews of Colour, and so many other marginalized groups I fought forty years ago to include.

Rabbi Elyse Goldstein at her home in Toronto, October 2023

But then my senior rabbi, Dow Marmur, tells me “full speed ahead” for that feminist women’s group I want to start alongside the sisterhood. And he’d be proud if I would speak at the Sunday pro-choice rally at Queen’s Park.

He reminds me I have full freedom of the pulpit for that sermon I’ll be giving on domestic violence. I ask the senior scholar, Rabbi Gunther Plaut, for help with a complicated translation on some difficult midrashic text I will be teaching that week.

I receive a warm phone call from the female United Church minister and we decide 38

to form an interfaith women’s clergy group, even though I will be the only rabbi on it.

I end the day having tea with Henrietta Chesnie, first female president of Holy Blossom, and the only woman on my interview committee. She tells me how glad she is that I am here, and how much she believes in me.

I am ready to start day two.

Although I am often credited with being the first female rabbi in Canada, that title actually goes to Rabbi Joan Friedman who came to Holy Blossom for one year, 1980-1981.

She broke the stained-glass ceiling so I could stand under it, after which I took many of the

shards in my own skin for those who would come after me. And come they did.

If you had told me back in 1983 that there would be an Orthodox Maharat, several Conservative female rabbis and more than a dozen Reform female rabbis in this country, including the senior rabbis of large congregations, I never would have believed it. I would have rejoiced at the thought, though, that the “someday” has manifested into today.

Toronto became this New Yorker’s home as I taught thousands of adults and brought them closer to Judaism for twenty years though Kolel: The Adult Centre for Liberal Jewish Learning, and then founded City Shul and saw it become the spiritual home and important liberal voice for hundreds of downtowners.

As I prepare to retire this June, I am filled with awe and gratitude for this community and our years together. With those doors finally open for women, other gates also unlocked for LGBTQ+ Jews, Jews of Colour, and so many other marginalized groups I fought to include. I am keenly aware of the history I have been privileged to watch, and to change, over these 40 years.

What is next for the young rabbis who come to serve this community? What challenges will they face and what triumphs will they achieve?

Every generation tries to make its mark. In my generation it was feminism and the voice of women which we elevated.

We bucked against the restrictions of the older Reform rabbis who ruled that weddings could only take place in synagogues or Jewish private homes and we battled to allow weddings in hotels and venues, which we achieved in 1985.

We explored rabbinic officiation at Jewish same-sex weddings in 2005 once it became legal in Canada, and then allowed for individual rabbinic decisions on that. I officiated at my first Jewish same-sex wedding in 2006. Those were the goalposts of change back then.

Rabbi Goldstein holds photographs from her life as a pinoeering rabbi. (Right: Ordination class at Hebrew Union College, May 1983; Left: First appearance at Holy Blossom Temple, November 1983.

There have been seismic changes in Jewish demographics and Jewish identity over the past 40 years. The Reform rabbinate in Canada is a very traditional one, still eschewing the American patrilineal decision which recognized children with Jewish fathers as Jews. Most Canadian Reform rabbis do not officiate at interfaith weddings.

The first challenge is: will the new generation of Reform rabbis coming to serve in Toronto be attracted to that traditional stance, or will they contest it? Will they come to sustain it and adopt it as their own, or will they come to modify it and alter it?

What will be the majority rabbinic culture on these important questions of Jewish status in the future?

Second, new thinking about Israel and its place in the Diaspora Jewish identity, Jewish education, and the economics of living a Jewish life will shape the next generation of rabbis.

They are entering a community fractured over Israel-Palestine issues, a community not sure of the worth of joining organized religious institutions, and a tired, working community that does not have time to volunteer.

How will they make ‘teams’ to support their work so they aren’t doing it all alone?

How will they approach the multiplicity of narratives in the global Jewish community around Israel? And how will they make Jewish

education and Jewish life not only relevant but affordable?

Third, they will be at home using social media, ChatGPT and AI and that will affect their teaching and preaching. How will they retain their integrity, their scholarship, and their rigour when the internet makes it so easy to cut and paste someone else’s work, and ChatGPT makes it so easy for a computer to write your sermon?

How will they use social media so that it doesn’t cut off an older generation who do not rely on it, and so that it doesn’t isolate people further and deter them from coming together in person?

And fourth, it was once clear that a rabbi teaches Torah, but today the how we teach Torah has radically changed. From Zoom to reading the Purim megillah in bars, the next generation of rabbis will have to find new ways to engage people. All we had to do in the old days was show up at the synagogue.

Yes, we had to invent new programs and reinvent the wheel several times, but there was still an expectation that Jews would join that synagogue and turn that wheel.

Judaism is now global, sophisticated and sensitive to gender and race. Its new rabbis are as well, and the real test will be if they can move their congregations and organizations forward on this.

And finally, rabbis used to think of them-

selves—and their families—as klei kodesh or holy vessels. We used to see ourselves as channels for other people’s Judaism.

Not so anymore.

The new generation of rabbis wants to empower people, not overpower them. They don’t want to be the professionals who “Jew it for you.”

Rabbis used to be married twice—once to their spouse and once to their congregation. Not so anymore. The new generation of rabbis demands healthy private lives and clear boundaries. The rabbi’s spouse usually also has a career and the traditional rebbetzin is gone. So this last challenge is for us in the Jewish community: are we ready and prepared for this new rabbi?

Once I retire, I will proudly remember when I was that “fighting-for-recognition-and-change” rabbi. I look forward now to hopefully being the voice of a seasoned elder. My life has been immeasurably rich and full as a rabbi in Toronto, and I thank the Holy One for all the people whose lives I have touched and whose lives have touched mine, all the Torah I’ve been blessed to teach, and all the challenges I was strong enough to meet. n Rabbi Elyse Goldstein is the founding rabbi of City Shul in Toronto. She will retire in June 2024.

THECJN.CA 39

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THECJN.CA 41

The big bad Wolf

Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger pulls no punches—but is she punching up or down?

By Phoebe Maltz Bovy PHOTOGRAPHY BY GRANT HARDER

I

t’s hard to picture anything more humiliating than working on a project for nearly a decade only to learn, during a live radio interview, that you’ve messed up key details, thus rendering the entire work—and your reputation—suspect.

On May 21, 2019, Naomi Wolf—a feminist author best known for her 1990 opus The Beauty Myth—went on BBC radio to promote her latest book, Outrages: Sex, Censorship, and the Criminalization of Love. The host, Matthew Sweet, pointed out that Wolf had misinterpreted Victorian archival information.

Men she’d claimed had been executed in Britain for homosexuality—rather crucial data for a history of homophobia—had in fact not been executed. Thanks to this and other similarly consequential errors, the U.S. publication of Outrages was cancelled.

If you’re reading this, wondering how the establishment-challenging activist, long known for her public commentary and analysis, an inspiration to college students for generations, and acclaimed author of No Logo and The Shock Doctrine, could produce

42

such shoddy work, the time has come to spell out that there are actually two different high-profile author-activists named Naomi: Naomi Wolf and Naomi Klein.

It apparently does require spelling out that Naomi Klein and Naomi Wolf are two separate individuals: enough people have confused them that Klein wrote a book, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World, riffing on her experiences having this double of sorts.

In Doppelganger, Klein writes that the two Naomis had been confused for a while, but that things only got interesting on that front when, shortly after the Outrages episode, Wolf went all-in as a COVID conspiracy theorist.

Wolf’s shift in focus from liberal feminism to aimless crackpottery and then to unhinged social critique had the unfortunate effect of putting her work in the same thematic wheelhouse as Klein’s: both Naomis were now on what seemed, from the outside, like the same major-world-events, secret-corruption-exposed beat. This left Klein forced to defend her own reputation—all the while being a leftist critical

of the very notion of a personal brand.

Over the phone, in an interview on Oct. 2, Klein insists upon the book’s wider scope.

“It’s important to just say off the top that the book is not just about the confusion between me and her. It is really about doubles and different kinds of doublings and doppelgangers that exist in the culture.”

Klein is right that someone picking up the book in the hopes of a shallow account of people thinking this one lady is this other lady will be disappointed. The doppelganger theme is rich, potent, and leads Klein in many innovative directions. She covers sweeping territory that includes AI and deepfakes, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Jordan Peele’s Us, and the general sorry state of the world. Writes Michelle Goldberg, in the New York Times, “Only in a superficial sense is Doppelganger really about Wolf… Instead, it’s about the instability of identity in the virtual world and the forces pulling people away from constructive politics into a shadow realm where clout chasing and conspiracy theorizing intertwine.”

THECJN.CA 43

spread mockery Wolf received for this theorizing was “not [Klein’s] fault.” Indeed, Wolf’s self-inflicted humiliations predate Doppelganger and continue apace. But, with this book, Klein unquestionably draws further attention to Wolf. This is ostensibly about holding Wolf accountable, but does it risk backfiring?

D

Naomi Klein at Whytecliff Park in Vancouver, July 2023.

Doppelganger is also, incidentally, an important Canadian-Jewish book—worth noting, as these do not appear every day—with passages about everything from Montreal Hebrew day school to Canada’s response to the Holocaust. Some of the best parts are when Klein examines the Jewish angle of the Naomi-Naomi confusion. Do the people mistaking one Naomi for another think all Jews look alike? (Klein’s mother considers this a possibility, and she herself doesn’t rule it out.)

It’s impossible, though, to write about Doppelganger without returning, as Klein herself does, to Naomi Wolf. The book mentions Trotsky, Sartre, and Freud, but the figure who looms largest in it by far is Wolf.

Wolf, Klein says, “is a kind of a throughline... She’s both an entry point, like the 44

white rabbit, but she’s also a case study of a particular type of person who changed quite dramatically during the pandemic years.” Klein recounts to me, as she does in the book, how Wolf joined forces with the political right, and in doing so, rather publicly abandoned principles in areas like reproductive rights and gun control. “I followed her because she just kept giving me new material.”

And the material does keep coming. Klein reminds me of Wolf’s then-latest viral (as it were) pronouncement, a truly out-there conspiracy theory about vaccine shedding.

“If you’re going to say that people are getting menstrual cramps for sleeping in the same hotel room with people who are vaccinated,” says Klein, “you’re going to get a pile-on on Twitter.”

Klein is right about this, and that the wide-

oppelganger is well-executed and at times quite engaging, with a focus on the urgent rather than the symbolic and superficial. It shows that the author is deeply learned, plugged into high culture and low, and grounded in reality. As a non-fiction book using doppelgangers as a lens for examining our times, the book succeeds.

Where I’m less persuaded—if more entertained—is the Naomi Wolf bit.

The focus on another writer named Naomi doesn’t quite land. The idea that Wolf is Klein’s doppelganger is clever at first but starts to seem forced as the book goes on.

It’s not that I don’t believe people misspeak and name one in lieu of the other. (Reader, I have thus misspoken.) But this is something readily corrected, and it does not appear to have impeded either one’s ability to go about her life, each being extremely her own Naomi. They get confused all the time, it gets rectified, and life moves on. These things happen.

I’m not sure exactly where in Doppelganger it hit me that I was too sympathetic to the wrong Naomi. Maybe it was where Klein eyerolls at Wolf for referring to herself as a “tech CEO” when Wolf had, at the time, merely a “low-traffic website.” Klein had just gotten through reminding readers that her 1999 book, No Logo, sold over a million copies.”

Or maybe it’s not even about sympathizing with Wolf, but about finding the conceit itself questionable. Yes, both Naomis are public figures, and I’m sure gatekeepers aplenty OK’d this on legal grounds, but the use of this other person, an actual person, to make a book-length point about the shakiness of identity, seems a bit much.

From a storytelling perspective, Klein doubtless made the right call. But I wonder if a version of the book that was less person-specific would have made the points more effectively. I should be thinking about how terrifying it is—and it is!—that propagandists made the pandemic worse than it had to be, and what this implies for future crises.

Instead, I’m wasting time wondering, But how does Naomi Wolf feel about there being this smash hit new book about how ridiculous she’s become?

My reaction to Doppelganger took me by

surprise. My politics are closer to Klein’s than Wolf’s. I’d like to believe I’m on the side of reason and data and whatnot, regarding COVID and in general, and have the vaccine confirmation emails to prove it. I think the Nazi imagery Wolf and others embrace, presenting anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers as akin to Holocaust victims, is abhorrent. If I were granted the ability to remove the social media presence of one of these women, Wolf’s would be the obvious choice.

Yet Wolf, in Doppelganger, represents human foibles. She’s the Hannah Horvath of Girls and George Costanza of Seinfeld, the figure in whom the reader—a reader probably less accomplished than Klein, because who isn’t?—sees herself at her lowest points.

T

he central tension in Doppelganger is whether Naomi Wolf is a danger or a dingbat. If it’s the latter, then the book is a punch down, a public intellectual coming down rather hard on someone whose intellectual capacities are not what they once were. Klein insists that it’s the former, citing Wolf’s current status as a member of Steve Bannon and therefore Donald Trump’s inner orbit. She warns against those who’d “underestimate” Wolf, whose anti-vaccine conspiracy theorizing gave her a new, substantial platform on the right.

The sophisticated reader is meant to look past the Wolf thing, to understand that Wolf is but a lens into big ideas: misinformation, totalitarianism, literature, history, psychoanalysis, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The problem is the book itself, which returns again and again to Wolf. Doppelganger would not be getting the level of coverage it is, I suspect, if it were merely Naomi Klein, major thinker, sharing her interpretation of world events. The book needs the Wolf angle, and boy does the Wolf angle provide. The low-hanging dingbat-flavoured fruit on offer was just too tempting to omit.

Klein opens a chapter with a discussion of Wolf using, in her newsletter, the expression, “‘What did you do in the war?’—referring not to any actual war, but to the ultimately unfounded concern that she’d be denied a bowl of $6 overnight oats at an upscale Manhattan hotel, on account of her unvaccinated status.

The gist of the anecdote is that Wolf has no sense of perspective. Klein spells out that, through her language choices (“lunch counter”), Wolf is comparing her oatmeal woes to Black Americans’ Civil Rights-era protests. But the oatmeal tale also conveys that Klein—unlike Wolf—knows to triage the

most important issues of the day. Klein does not merely namecheck Ukraine and climate change as topics “the war” might instead have referred to, had Wolf been more plugged in, but goes into specifics about where both were in the news at the time.

This is a pattern throughout the book, this swinging back and forth between calm analysis and reminders that Naomi Wolf is a fool. In trying to make sense of what draws otherwise sensible people to conspiracy

I should be thinking about how terrifying it is—and it is!­—that propagandists made the pandemic worse.

Instead, I’m wasting time wondering, But how does Naomi Wolf feel?

theorizing, Klein writes that she understands why “white suburban moms” would feel “done with being dismissed and mocked as ‘Karens.’” Later on the same page, she refers to Wolf as “a onetime-famous feminist who now wants to speak to the manager”—a reference to the meme about “Karens” being past-it, entitled white ladies who request to speak to higher-ups in customer-service situations, and who call the cops if they see a Black person.

Does it help matters to call Naomi Wolf a “Karen,” or does that just rev up Wolf’s admirers?

Occasionally, the book’s humour (and it’s not, on the whole, a funny book, nor need it be) is self-deprecatory, as when Klein recalls

having been confused (by name, not in person) with the supermodel Naomi Campbell.

But more often, it’s at the expense of Wolf, who is, you see, not a very serious person.

Not now, in her conspiratorial period, but also not ever.

W

hen Outrages went bust back in 2019, it was chic to write about how, actually, Naomi Wolf had never been any good. In particular, the work she’s known for, The Beauty Myth, can’t have been any good (even though many did remember it as powerful) given that Wolf was the one who wrote it. Slate, The New Republic, and The New York Times all ran essays about how Wolf was always a lightweight or worse.

Klein stands with the revisionist historians.

She recounts a conversation with her motherin-law, a former newspaper columnist: “‘Well, I didn’t think much of that Beauty Myth book; there wasn’t much new there. But we were all glad that this pretty young woman was choosing to identify as a feminist.’” Klein simply adds, “That made a lot of sense.”

It lines up with what Klein remembers of her own first encounter with the book: “There was nothing in my quick read of The Beauty Myth that was new or revelatory to someone raised by a second-wave feminist who had made a documentary film about pornography eleven years before.”

Not everyone had this response—but then again, not everyone’s mother makes feminist documentaries. Maris Kreizman, writing in The New Republic, explains that she knows better now, but that her initial response to the book was to feel, well, seen: “If Wolf’s debut felt trite and inadequately argued to anyone paying attention, then I decidedly hadn’t been. The Beauty Myth made me question my surroundings in a way that no other book had at the time... I had never taken a women’s studies class; I tended to get most of my information from women’s magazines, from broadcast TV, from the canon of literature we read in my English classes, from late-night drunken conversations.”

My own reaction was far closer to Kreizman’s. When I first read The Beauty Myth, in 2013, it seemed plenty novel, but growing up, we had fashion magazines around the apartment, not political manifestos.

T

he doppelganger phenomenon implies asymmetry: there is the real person, and then there is that individual’s sinister double. This is Klein’s book, not Wolf’s, and Wolf (understandably) refused to participate.

THECJN.CA 45

accountability. And I don’t buy into the idea that women, specifically, need to be gentle when criticizing the politics of other women, a patronizing view that sometimes poses as feminist solidarity. Am I being too hard on Klein for being too hard on Wolf? As the folks of Reddit ask, AITA: Am I the A**hole?

“

In the book, Klein refers to Wolf as “my doppelganger,” or as “Other Naomi”; the conspiratorial world she inhabits is the “Mirror World”—all as though Wolf is a distorted, perhaps malicious reflection of Klein. The part I found most troubling on this front was Klein’s analysis of Philip Roth’s 1993 novel Operation Shylock, a novel about an impostor, which, she writes, speaks to her own experiences with Wolf—an analysis that suggests a blurring of lines between doppelgangers and impostors, and also between imagined and real people. Naomi Wolf is not a fictional character whose purpose is to tell the story of a protagonist, Naomi Klein. And for all her faults, she’s no impostor.

I ask Klein about this, and she tells me that she sees fact as different from fiction, and that, as far as Wolf’s resemblance to her goes, “I’ve no reason to believe that there’s any intent there.” Klein goes on to tell me 46

just how much people confused her with Wolf (in the UK, “It’s absolutely ubiquitous,”) and I only realize after our half-hour conversation that I should have pressed her on this. It’s not that I don’t see why Operation Shylock would resonate, but that I’m iffy on the fairness of the comparison.

“As empathetic as they are with one another,” writes Klein, about her undergraduate students, “they have little but cynicism when it comes to the professed pain of wealthy influencers.” Klein isn’t convinced, and decides to “gently push back,” asking them, “Why should surpassing a certain follower count preclude the possibility of feeling real pain?”

It’s not just acceptable but necessary for public figures to call one another out. I’m sure even heads of state are capable of having big feelings when criticized, but this is no reason to hold back from demanding

I’ve been pleased,” Klein tells me, “that a lot of the people who have read the book have remarked that it is not just a pileon, and it does attempt to give her credit where credit is due, and also look at the ways in which she has been a spectacle for online bullying and mockery, and to actually question that.”

These other readers are correct that Doppelganger “is not just a pile-on.” This is still different from it not being, in part, a pileon. As for “credit where credit is due,” I know the parts of the book she means: Wolf was once critical of Zionism in ways Klein found admirable. A milquetoast liberal is, Klein allows, better than a fascist, a proto-girlboss feminist superior to an anti-feminist. In the book, Klein recalls that she looked up to Wolf’s persona, if not her actual work, as a young author herself, leading to a formative if awkward (due to Wolf’s strange behaviour, even then) in-person interview.

Even in her what-if-I’m-the-doppelganger coda, Klein cannot resist sharing an anecdote showcasing Wolf’s inadequacies. Klein writes that when she was 20 and listening to Wolf speak about The Beauty Myth, a university friend “gently challenged Wolf on why she had so little to say about the particular pressures on Black and Asian women to bleach their skin and surgically lift their eyelids in order to conform to Eurocentric beauty ideals.” This is a justified criticism of the book, as indicated by the fact that people thought to make it at the time.

But Klein does not leave it there. The point cannot just be that The Beauty Myth was flawed even by the standards of its moment, but that she, Naomi Klein, knew this immediately. Of her own feminism and that of her university friends, she writes, “We were already way ahead of her.”

Klein writes that she thinks the rational, progressive side needs to do less infighting and focus instead on solidarity and collaboration, working towards a better world. A worthy goal—but, ultimately, I’m not convinced that the doppelganger framing helps the cause. She warns her readers against feeling “smug and superior” to the Wolfs of the world, but Doppelganger invites the reader to join its author in doing exactly that. n

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Lockdown Literature Toronto author Rebecca Rosenblum talks pandemic weirdness and small-town Jewish childhood 48

I

f you’re searching for the voice of literary Jewish Toronto, look no further than Rebecca Rosenblum. An acclaimed novelist and short-story writer, Rosenblum’s latest is a non-fiction work, These Days are Numbered: Diary of a High-Rise Lockdown. She assembled the book from her own pandemic-era Facebook posts, and in doing so, documented what everyday life was like during a period many might wish to forget, in a living situation that was less than bucolic. If you’re thinking, Do I really want to read someone’s COVID social media posts?, the answer is yes, you do. Culture critic Lydia Perović writes that she “started this book skeptical but its voice won me over quickly: deadpan, hapless, overly invested in the minutiae, curious and anxious about the well-being of other humans.”

I also devoured These Days are Numbered, then sat with Rosenblum, 45, on a Grange Park bench, next to the Art Gallery of Ontario, amidst a pigeon or two, late this summer—a very different time to be discussing Jewish identity and antisemitism.

In our identical white linen button-downs (not planned!), we talked masks, Duolingo Yiddish, and growing up Jewish in small-town Ontario. What follows is an edited and condensed version of our conversation.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy: You’re a fiction writer.

When and how did you come up with the idea of turning your pandemic Facebook posts, about life in a Toronto apartment complex, into a non-fiction book?

Rebecca Rosenblum: I never came up with the idea. I was just writing these posts for my own pleasure, and for the conversation with other people. Then a few of them said, Oh, maybe these posts could be a book, and I’m like, I don’t know about that. Eventually, Russell Smith at Dundurn Press and said, I will help you make it into a book if you want.

I told him, Yes, that sounds great, because I didn’t know how to do it myself.

Nadia Bormotova /iStock Illustrations

PMB: How did you decide to end the diary in February 2022?

RR: People have been critical of this, because I didn’t formally write a conclusion or an epilogue. That’s because the pandemic wasn’t over. In many ways, it’s not over. But it was kind of lightening up. I was getting to the point where I could go to things and not feel constantly COVID, COVID, COVID. There was room for other thoughts and other experiences that weren’t entirely coloured by it. I was

leading a life that didn’t necessarily seem a part of this book anymore.

Which wasn’t to say that I had drawn any firm conclusions about what happened in this period. There is a sneak conclusion in the second to last entry. There’s a kind of, Here’s what I’ve got so far about this experience. That entry was organic, and then I went back and revised it and added some more stuff which wasn’t in the original entry.

That’s the sneaky thing you can do when you make posts into a book. Not everything in that original post was there. I didn’t want to have a conclusion, because I’ve drawn no conclusions, but I wanted to have something.

I’m smarter than I was.

PMB: Are you still on Facebook?

RR: Oh, yes. I don’t think Facebook will live forever as a medium. But it’s the best thing I’ve found so far, as a kind of test kitchen of

my emotions, a little bit of a walled garden.

It’s not public in the way that Twitter is. And Twitter is dying, maybe faster.

PMB: At various points I found myself wanting to tell March 2020 Rebecca Rosenblum, It’s not the surfaces! It’s the aerosols!, while of course remembering wiping down the surfaces in the Toronto apartment I lived in at the time. During the editing process, was it weird to look back at how the pandemic felt at various points, when different things were understood about the virus and how to avoid getting it?

RR: It was, and it’s a super useful microcosm of how fast we all learn, and how many things were wrong about. All those ideas that we could skip a seat on the subway, and that would be fine, somehow? That was a terrible idea. Nonsense. But everyone did it. Don’t THECJN.CA 49

sit next to me; sit over there. It’s useful in so many ways going forward to know that whatever I think today—give it a year.

PMB: You record a lot of early-pandemic details that felt bizarre at the time, like the realization that smiling is invisible through a mask. Which aspect of daily life surprises you the most in retrospect?

RR: Just the iciness of interacting at the grocery store or the dentist. Any normal interaction where you’d make chit-chat, just stonewalling everybody so that they wouldn’t come near you. It was so antithetical to how I am in the world. I hated it. I still hate those memories. But it was something we were supposed to do.

PMB: Your book gets at the ways class inequality manifested itself during the pandemic especially. You make regular mentions of realizing how much better you have it than some, even when you’re struggling in one way or another.

But at one point you write, “Even though 50

My husband, whose family has been in this country for hundreds of years, has a teeny, tiny WASP nose and his mask kept sliding down his face. of course it is worse to be the guy who is trying to kick people in front of Tim Hortons, it is not that great if someone tries to kick you, either. I get so tired of being patient and grateful for my lot in life.”

How much of the pressure to be grateful do you think comes from social media, or Facebook specifically, as a medium? To acknowledge privilege, but also to avoid being too candid about one’s own difficulties in a way that puts people off?

RR: Yeah, or just me being a very online person and exposed to thinking in that way.

There always needs to be a kind of contextual-

ization. I think it’s good to be aware of where I fall on the privilege spectrum but I don’t know if I always need to be announcing it. It’s for me to work with and not for other people to hear about. I don’t know if I fully reckoned with that question. I’m working on it.

PMB: What was so interesting is the way you get at how different the lockdown era was—not just for people in various socioeconomic situations, but also for different personality types. Because there were certain people who found it a relief to not have to be out in the world, but that was certainly not universal sentiment.

But class was, clearly, central, and your apartment complex—a cluster towers just east of the centre of Toronto, with many low-income residents—does sound like it was unusually hard-hit by lockdown conditions. Are you still living in St. James Town?

RR: Two days after the publication of this book, I moved to North York [a more suburban Toronto neighbourhood, further from the centre]. Which is very weird, because I

didn’t mean to write a book about St. James Town. And I didn’t mean to immediately leave after I did. It’s just how it worked out. Things were very rough for that neighborhood during the pandemic. There was a huge amount of construction. The final park went right at the end. So now there are no parks, and everything is just being built or destroyed or something. It’s still a vibrant neighborhood in many ways. But anyway, it was our time.

North York is very Jewish. I’m used to, if I ever see a babka anywhere, at any time, buying it immediately, because I almost never see a babka. Now if I go to No Frills— not even a bakery—there’s a whole shelf of babkas, and you can compare. Then maybe next week you think, Oh, well, that one wasn’t as good as this one. I’m going to get the one that’s $1 more. I’ve never had that experience before.

PMB: Is this your first time living in a more Jewish area?

RR: Oh, yeah. I’m from a very small town with four churches.

PMB: Yes, you write about your childhood in a small town, without other family in Canada, and “being a Jew who grew up away from Jewish community.” Where was this, and what brought your family there?

RR: I am from a town called Mount Hope, which is south of Hamilton towards the Grand River. My dad taught sociology at McMaster University and he moved here for the job. My parents were living in New York at the time. In Mount Hope, they wanted to live out of town. We lived among the corn. My parents were not very social.

PMB: Your book has a lot of Jewish moments, like when you recount High Holiday shopping in Montreal, or find yourself thinking of the extra cup for Elijah when you have an extra Korean face mask for

a girls’ night. But there’s one scene that I found particularly delightful. Please share, for those who have not yet read your book, the WASP noses and masks anecdote, because I think The CJN’s readers need to know about this.

RR: My husband, whose family has been in this country for hundreds of years, has a teeny, tiny, WASP nose and his mask kept sliding down his face. At first, I didn’t realize why.

I thought he was just bad at wearing a mask, because I didn’t have this problem. Eventually I realized, Oh, it’s your little WASP nose. And he said, nobody’s nose is shaped like a wasp.

He didn’t even realize what I was saying.

PMB: Love it. So how were you brought up in terms of Jewishness or Judaism?

RR: I compare it to how a lot of gentiles live with the holidays. We celebrated Jewish holidays in much the same way as gentiles often enjoy Christmas or Easter. We’d love them,

THECJN.CA 51

we’d get the menorah and celebrate. There was not a religious aspect to it. It was a very secular upbringing.

There were two other Jewish families in our town, and I didn’t know them very well.

We were very free to do whatever. There was nothing else to judge by. Every now and then, another kid would want to come for Hanukkah or something. My dad would always say, You can’t go by this. As in, If you ever meet other Jews, you can’t assume that they’re going to do this, because this is just what we do.

My mom would always say, ‘Oh, I don’t speak any Yiddish.’ But if you asked her what something means, she knows.’

PMB: Do you think it was strange for them to be somewhere without a lot of Jews around if they were both from New York? I ask as a New York Jew myself.

PMB: Who were these people? Friends?

RR: People you wouldn’t expect it from.

People who care about me. If I’m saying to you, I am upset, this scares me about where our society is headed, and you’re saying, Oh, these are benign… I felt not just that they had hurt me, but that something is different in our culture than I imagined it to be. That people feel more OK about certain Nazi symbols, that they can be used for other things now, that this is just a clumsy way of saying something else.

PMB: How would you answer that?

RR: A few times I would go home and ask, and then I would try to go back to school and say We, you know how Jesus is your savior, whereas we’re still waiting for our guy. That did not go over well in Grade 2.

RR: Almost never hostile. Every once in a while, there would be a problem. But by and large kids just didn’t know. Sometimes the parents didn’t know. But they were pretty nice about it. They just had questions that I was not equipped to answer.

PMB: What role does Jewishness play in your life now?

RR: I joined a congregation, Shir Libeynu, for the first time, during the pandemic. That’s been pretty interesting. But I’m still trying that out.

PMB: Many people spent the pandemic baking sourdough or regrowing scallions from the root. You chose to learn Yiddish on Duolingo then and on Zoom. Why Yiddish?

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PMB: You also write about antisemitism.

There’s a patio encounter with Doug Ford staffers, who call someone they’re talking about “so Jewish-looking,” and it doesn’t sound like it’s to praise their ability to wear a mask correctly. Then you discuss seeing images of swastikas at the convoy rallies in Ottawa, and the way people told you not to care about this. Do you see antisemitism as a growing concern in Canada, or is it something you’ve come across your whole life?

RR: That last thing really startled me. The Ford staffer thing, you kind of expect that.

But the people saying, Don’t worry about those swastikas, they don’t matter, you have to read them in context.

RR: I don’t think they knew how strange it was, because they had such a strong Jewish culture—and secular Jewish culture —where they were from. They were very confident in that. Then they would send me to school and I would talk to other kids who would ask Where’s your church? I would say, I don’t go to church. I’m Jewish and they’re like, What’s Jewish?

PMB: Were the questions hostile or just sort of ignorant?

RR: Not a ton. I do have a friend who actually speaks Yiddish quite well, so I can talk to her. But I’m often too embarrassed.

RR: I had always wanted to learn. My father, who’s dead, spoke it, so it wasn’t actually great timing. But I always wanted to learn and I had time and Duolingo made it available to me. It turned out that Duolingo is like a great video game, but actually, you need to talk to other human beings. So I took the class at the JCC, which was much better.

Then I got a little bit less locked down and didn’t pursue it as ardently.

In my family, Yiddish was the lingua franca.

My grandfather was Polish, my grandmother spoke Russian. But everybody spoke Yiddish. Nobody spoke Hebrew. So that’s what I was able to connect with. I mean, everybody’s dead. But even my mom, she would always say, Oh, I don’t speak any Yiddish.

But if you asked her what something means, she knows.

PMB: Have you gotten opportunities to use it in real life?

PMB: Were the people who defended use of Nazi symbols supporters of the convoy protests, or were they more saying that you were being oversensitive to mind them?

RR: It was a few different people. Some thought the convoys had a good point and were being melodramatic, but others thought that I was being too sensitive.

Either way, I’m just like, no swastikas. They meant one thing, and that was genocide, and no thank you.

PMB: That’s what I really liked about the Yiddish part of your book, because sometimes, Jewish identity can become too much about anti-antisemitism, rather than the more positive things, like Yiddish-learning and babka-shopping.

RR: I mean that’s most of my Jewish experience. It’s very food oriented. n

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54

Sufganiya Sensation Potato latkes used to be the typical Canadian way of representing the Hanukkah miracle of oil in edible form.

But no amount of accompanying applesauce can compete with the freshly stuffed stylings of sufganiyot.

Behold these bodacious beauties that My Zaidy’s Bakery has prepared for these pages.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY KAILEE MANDEL EXCLUSIVELY FOR THE CANADIAN JEWISH NEWS FOOD AND PROP STYLING BY MICHELLE RABIN

THECJN.CA 55

Plump up the jam V

ariations on the doughnut date back to the middle ages.

But the sufganiyah eventually triumphed in Israel—and it was thanks to a political coup.

Jewish food historian Gil Marks relates how the Histadrut (national labour union) promoted them in the 1920s, as a way to boost employment. While latkes could be made at home, workers were needed to fry, package and deliver pastries.

The plan succeeded and Israeli bakeries began to create increasingly exotic concoctions, including some that come with an attached vial of liquor. And the trend of over-the-top creations eventually made its way to Canada.

Just a few years ago, My Zaidy’s Bakery in Thornhill, Ont., offered just four standards for Hanukkah: raspberry jam, chocolate custard, and caramel. But they’ve now rotated over two dozen varieties, all of which are parve and nut-free.

Tiramisu, birthday cake and unicorn styles make recurring

appearances based on supplies. Key lime and a Lotus Biscoff cookie combination with deep caramel are on the agenda this year, along with a Napoleon cake creation stuffed with custard.

Leora Atia, whose family has owned the kosher shop for four decades, is in charge of dreaming up new flavours. She keeps a running list open on her phone, ready to jot down ideas when inspiration strikes.

After she recently saw a gingerbread latte at a coffee shop, she was inspired to make a sufganiya with a tiny gingerbread man on top.

Following the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel and the start of war, the bakery moved up its production by a few weeks, to bring some extra joy into peoples’ lives.

My Zaidy’s unveils a different surprise flavour for each of the eight days of Hanukkah. So far, none of them have toppled raspberry jam as the most popular of all.

Oreo Cream

Chocolate Mousse Passionfruit

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S’mores

Lemon Meringue

Piña Colada

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Oreo

Classic Raspberry Jam

THECJN.CA 57

2145 AVENUE ROAD, TORONTO, ON M5M 4B2 416.441.2888 | HARVEYKALLES.COM

‫חנוכה שמח‬

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58

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Kraft Berger LLP Wishes our Clients & Friends Happy Hanukkah David Yabrov Jerry Dykopf Elias Benaim Howard Bergman Jeff Westreich Jay Feingold Allan Jubenville

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THECJN.CA 59

Shabbat is trending Adeena Sussman on her new cookbook Shabbat and its resonance in our times

BY LILA SARICK PHOTOGRAPHY BY NAOMI HARRIS EXCLUSIVELY FOR THE CANADIAN JEWISH NEWS

I

n an age where a cook with, say, an overabundance of zucchini is likely to turn to Google for a recipe, Adeena Sussman makes the case for cookbooks.

“The web is great for recipes, but cookbooks are great for stories,” she says. “I think people are looking for more meaning, and for a deeper connection with the food they are cooking.”

Sussman, who has co-authored 14 cookbooks, says she reads cookbooks the way other people read novels.

“There’s something about a book that allows you to take it at your own pace. You can look through it a hundred times, backwards, forwards, lingering here, lingering there….A good cookbook has a really strong narrative arc.”

In 2018, she made aliyah, and a year later published her acclaimed book, Sababa, which was an exploration of the tastes of Israel, as experienced by an American cook.

Her newest offering, Shabbat, is an homage to both her late mother’s traditional Sabbath meals and the diversity of dishes and traditions in Israel.

“The longer I’m in Israel, there’s sort of this Venn diagram of my Jewish identity, my Israeli identity, my cooking identity, and I’m always trying to refine where those things overlap,” she notes. “Shabbat is a great unifier in Israel. Eighty percent of the country observes it every week.”

In the introduction to Shabbat, Sussman writes: “It isn’t lost on me that Shabbat is the north star of my kitchen identity; after all, it’s been a central part of my whole life.

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But it took almost leaving Shabbat cooking behind to realize how much I actually needed this respite. Shabbat is a weekly opportunity to slow down, chill out, and feast along the way.”

She grew up in one of the few observant families in Palo Alto, Calif. where her family often hosted visitors and friends looking for a Shabbat meal.

The theme of Shabbat has hit a chord with readers, as people strive for a healthier work-life balance and to take a weekly break from their phones.

“Everybody wanted in on our Shabbat table growing up, whether they were Orthodox or not, or Jewish or not. There’s a certain magic that happens when you put certain elements together.”

Today, she lives in Tel Aviv, not far from the Carmel Market, which she visits on Friday mornings for inspiration.

These days, her Shabbat is “a little bit more spontaneous in nature. It can be a more traditional meal with roast chicken and potatoes, but often preceded by a walk on the beach. Or it can be a Saturday meal with a giant salad with some feta cheese and some cute little fruit from the shuk and fresh challah and a bunch of Israeli salads on the

sides and some dips.”

Canadian cooks, who can’t visit abundant farmers’ markets, especially in the winter, shouldn’t be intimidated.

“My cooking is very flexible, if you can’t find a certain fruit a recipe calls for, use a different fruit,” she says. “The idea is to cook and to take enjoyment, both from the cooking, and also from the sharing and the serving of the food, and gathering around the table.”

The theme of Shabbat has hit a chord with readers, according to Sussman, as people strive for a healthier work-life balance and to take a weekly break from their phones.

“It’s always funny to talk about a thousands-year-old tradition as trending, but Shabbat is trending. People are looking for reasons to re-connect and disconnect all at the same time,” she says.

Although Shabbat is not organized around the Jewish holidays, Sussman has some recommendations for a Hanukkah meal. For a main course, she suggests the potato kugel, which she describes as a “giant, oversized latke.” The kugel is both crispy and custardy, rich with eggs. It pairs well with any salad that has a bright, lemony dressing or citrus to balance the richness of fried or heavier main courses.

When she’s deciding what to cook for Shabbat, Sussman is inspired by both the seasonal produce around her and whatever she happens to be craving.

“The cook’s mood and the cook’s desires are as important as wanting to feed your guests. If the cook is happy, then everyone is going to be happy.”

Adeena at The Edible Story in Toronto, Oct 2023

THECJN.CA 61

62

Favourite recipes for a delicious Hanukkah dinner from Adeena Sussman’s book Shabbat SPINACH SALAD WITH ORANGES & PINE NUTS Serves 6 Active Time: 20 minutes Total Time: 20 minutes

S

Photograph by Dan Perez, from Shabbat by Adeena Sussman. Penguin Random House; freepik.com

erve this wintery salad when you want something fresh and crunchy to present alongside richer dishes. The sharpness of raw onion, juiciness courtesy of orange segments, and crunch from bell peppers and roasted pine nuts combine with spinach for a felicitous pairing (add feta or goat cheese if you like). In Israel, I use so-called Turkish spinach, which has thicker leaves that hold up to dressing without wilting; look for the heartiest variety in your neck of the woods.

1 tablespoon olive oil 1/3 cup pine nuts 1/8 teaspoon plus 1/4 teaspoon fine sea salt One large 9-to 10-ounce bunch spinach, preferably large-leaved 1 medium orange, rind removed, segmented,* and 1 tablespoon juice reserved 1/2 small white onion, finely chopped 1/2 small red bell pepper, seeded and thinly sliced 1/4 cup olive oil 2 tablespoons white wine vinegar 1 tablespoon finely chopped shallots 1 tablespoon honey 2 teaspoons Dijon mustard 1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

1.

Combine the oil, pine nuts, and 1/8 teaspoon of the salt in a small saucepan. Toast the nuts over medium heat, shaking often, until golden, 5 to 6 minutes. Transfer to a plate to cool. Stack the spinach leaves and slice them crosswise into1/2-inch strips.

2.

Arrange the spinach in a salad bowl and top with the pine nuts, orange segments, onions, and bell pepper. Combine the oil, vinegar, reserved orange juice, shallots, honey, mustard, the remaining 1/4 teaspoon salt, and the pepper in a jar, seal tightly, and shake until creamy. Pour the dressing over the salad and toss to coat.

Dressing can be refrigerated, tightly sealed, in an airtight container for 1 week.

To cut orange segments, slice off the top and bottom ends of an orange so it can sit flat on the counter. Using a sharp knife and starting from the top, cut away the zest and white pith beneath, leaving the flesh exposed. Hold the orange in your hand over a bowl. Release the segments by cutting the flesh away from the white membrane surrounding each segment. Squeeze the membrane to release any juice; reserve 1 tablespoon of the juice for this salad.

*

THECJN.CA 63

BUBBE’S EXTRA CRISPY POTATO KUGEL

Serves 12 Active Time: 25 minutes Total Time: 2 hours

W

henever she came to visit us in Palo Alto, my grandma Mildred would make her incredibly delicious potato kugel. It served as a powerful magnet for my friends, who were on “kugel alert,” especially on Fridays, when she would make a fresh batch. My dear friend Heather Henriksen had a particularly close relationship with my grandmother, who would summon her to our house with just a few words: “Heather, I made kugel, come over, I saved you a corner.” The two of them would sometimes sit in the backyard kibitzing for hours, and later Heather would recount stories that some of us in the family had never heard ourselves.

One in particular has become the stuff of family legend. Mildred and my grandfather Jack Sussman, who died before I was born, lived a modest, hardworking life. Jack was a printing “jobber,” serving as a middleman for anyone needing triplicate receipts and business cards, and my grandmother worked as a bookkeeper.

Money was tight, and when they became engaged in 1933, an engagement ring was out of the question. As my grandma told Heather, on their twenty-fifth anniversary, they went out for dinner and, as he always did, Jack came around to help her out of the car on the passenger side. He opened the door, then promptly dropped to one knee, proffering a modest diamond ring. “Mildred,” he said. “It’s been twenty-five years since we got married.

Isn’t it about time we got engaged?” My grandmother’s special gift was just that: She had a special story, an inside joke, and a somehow endless supply of crispy kugel corners for those who wanted—and needed—them the most.

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1.

2.

Preheat the oven to 400°F.

Grate the potatoes and onions on the large holes of a box grater or using the large shredding disc of a food processor. Place the grated potatoes and onions on a clean kitchen towel and squeeze out as much liquid as you can. Transfer the grated vegetables to a large bowl and mix with the eggs, 1/3 cup of the oil, the flour, salt, and pepper, ensuring the potatoes are evenly coated. If you don’t mind tasting raw egg, taste the batter to make sure the salt level is to your liking.

3.

Place a 9 × 13-inch or 10 × 14inch ceramic or metal baking dish on top of a rimmed baking sheet. Add the remaining 1/3 cup oil to the baking dish, place it in the oven, and heat until the oil is very hot, 10 minutes. Using oven mitts, carefully remove the baking dish from the oven, stir the batter, gently spoon the batter into the dish, and spread it out evenly, making sure not to splash the hot oil. If some of the oil comes up the sides, use a spoon to carefully spread the hot oil over the top of the kugel. Return the kugel to the oven and bake until the exterior is very crisp and deep golden brown, 1 hour 30 minutes to 1 hour 45 minutes. (It might seem like it’s taking forever for the top to brown, but it will!) Remove from the oven, cool slightly, and sprinkle with more salt, if desired. Serve hot, warm, or cold out of the fridge he next day, when it might remind you slightly of a piece of Spanish tortilla española.

Photograph by Dan Perez, from Shabbat by Adeena Sussman. Penguin Random House; freepik.com

8 medium russet potatoes (4 1/2 pounds), peeled 2 large onions, halved 6 large eggs 2/3 cup vegetable oil (not olive oil) 1/4 cup all-purpose flour or potato starch 1 1/2 tablespoons kosher salt, plus more if needed 1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

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Miracles in your mailbox T

he first time Canada Post unveiled a stamp for Hanukkah, in 2017, the covers and booklets were hastily recalled due to “a design issue” surrounding a prominent yellow star—which was unfortunately reminiscent of badges forced upon Jewish people by antisemitic regimes throughout history.

Rabbi Reuven Bulka of Ottawa’s Congregation Machzikei Hadas was enlisted to prevent future debacles, and he served as consultant until his death in 2021. The role was handed to Rabbi Lisa Grushcow of Montreal’s Temple Emanu-El-Beth Sholom: her supervision of designer Hélène L’Heureux and illustrator Stephanie Carter included ensuring that the colours of the candles weren’t mistaken for Christmas, that letters on the dreidel appear in the correct order, and to explain that the pomegranates in the original sketch were more synonymous with Rosh Hashanah.

(Grapes appear on the stamp instead.) A year after she approved the 2023 design, Gruschcow sees additional resonance in picturing an Israeli sufganiyah, and dove and olive branch symbols of peace—during a holiday that celebrates winning a war. “Hanukkah is really a Rorschach test that can be experienced differently each year depending on who we are, where we are, and what’s happening around us,” she says. “The letters on the dreidel note the miracle happened in Israel, at a time when we’re acutely aware of not being there. And yet all of our stories are so intertwined.” Am Yisrael Chai!

The eight nights of Hanukkah begin on the evening of Dec. 7, 2023.

Photograph by Ronit Novak

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Advertorial

Why Chartwell Constantia may be the perfect place for you to call home As the holiday season approaches, we are reminded of the value of community and relationships, especially as we age and transition into senior living. A retirement residence can be a wonderful way to fulfill your desire for authentic social connections.

For senior Leone, who has lived in Chartwell Constantia for one year, the sense of community she felt, along with the warm reception she got during her visit, compelled her to

atmosphere in the heart of a thriving Jewish community. Offering independent living to their predominantly Jewish residents, the seniors’ home honours and celebrates Jewish cultural and religious values, including weekly rabbi lectures, educational programs, Torah study groups, and Shabbat services.

Five-year resident Rita shares what sh e e njoys a b o ut Ch a r t we ll Constantia’s celebration of Jewish culture. “I enjoy the I love the communal candle lighting. Jewish cultural foods It reminds me of lighting the [and] Shabbat service,” she says. “I love the candles in my home. co m m u n a l c a n d l e make the residence her new home. lighting. It reminds me of lighting the “My husband got sick, and we started candles in my home.” to think that we may need some extra support. [We] sold [our] house and The Jewish cultural and religious moved to a condo where [we] met a celebrations are not just reserved for lot of people. These people started those of the practicing faith. In fact, to move into Constantia and were the delightfully inclusive atmosphere raving about it,” she explains. “I of Chartwell Constantia appeals to decided it would be good for me too. many non-Jewish seniors.

I loved my visits – so warm and welcoming. People living here are “[I’m] not a very religious person but wonderful and friendly.”

[I] enjoy the holiday programs and the Shabbat communal candle lightChartwell Constantia Retirement ing program,” Leone explains. “All the Residence provides seniors in staff and residents welcome everyThornhill a warm and inviting one to programs, conversations, and

encourage everyone to attend programs even on the day of.”

As for resident Alison, who has called Chartwell Constantia home for almost 15 years, she shares that although she is not Jewish, she has always felt welcome. She also maintains that the friendships she has made at her residence are her most cherished memories. When asked to describe the people at Constantia, she said, “All the staff and residents are very friendly.” Over the years, she has become accustomed to the various traditions and holidays celebrated at the multicultural residence.

Chartwell Constantia is a place that intentionally embraces the culture and customs of their Jewish residents and community, while also ensuring an inclusive, comfortable environment that anyone, regardless of their faith, can participate in.

Call 289-588-0974 and ask about their limited-time offer or visit Chartwell.com to learn more!

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