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freelancer

First-ever B.C. Limmud

Yiddish erotic poetry. It’s not a phrase that trips off the tongue, perhaps because Celia Dropkin may have been its only practitioner. There were Yiddish poets and writers in Eastern Europe and America who addressed risqué topics, but few, if…

Children’s Hearing and Speech Centre celebrates 50th

photo - Children's Hearing and Speech Centre

The Children’s Hearing and Speech Centre of British Columbia. (photo from childrenshearing.ca) Imagine not being able to hear. The silence. The isolation. Now imagine the sounds of kids singing, playing, asking questions at story time – even though they are…

PM Harper visits Israel

photo - Laureen and Stephen Harper with Yuli Edelstein

Left to right: Laureen Harper looks on as her husband receives a ceremonial souvenir key from the Knesset speaker Yuli Edelstein in the Knesset’s Chagall Room. (photo by Ashernet) Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu welcomed Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and…

Canada’s support of Israel feels good

Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper stood in Israel’s Knesset Monday and delivered a speech that was, predictably, a summation of his government’s unconditional defence of Israel’s right to exist in peace. While Harper received thunderous applause, his speech was significantly…

Profeti della Quinta brings Salomone Rossi to life

photo - Profeti della Quinta by Susanna Drescher

Profeti della Quinta is at Vancouver Playhouse on Feb. 2. (photo by Susanna Drescher) The documentary Hebreo: The Search for Salomone Rossi (Joseph Rochlitz, 2012) introduced last year’s Vancouver International Film Festival audiences to Profeti della Quinta, a Switzerland-based Renaissance and…

Metro Theatre’s Deathtrap macabre, fun

photo - Deathtrap cast by Tracy Lynn Chernaske

Left to right: Melanie Preston, Drew Taylor, James Behenna, Don Briard and Deborah Tom, in Deathtrap at Metro Theatre. (photo by Tracy Lynn-Chernaske) If you like rollercoaster rides, then Metro Theatre’s staging of Ira Levin’s Deathtrap as part of its 51st season…

Michael Abelman art bright, optimistic

photo - Michael Abelman by Olga Livshin

Michael Abelman’s show runs at the Zack until Feb. 16. (photo by Olga Livshin) A day before Michael Abelman’s art show opened, someone wandered into the Sidney and Gertrude Zack Gallery, looked around, and exclaimed: “How nice. Spring has arrived!”…

Kahane and Andres at PuSh

photo - Gabriel Kahane

Brooklyn-based Gabriel Kahane will be in Vancouver for the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival, with pianist and composer Timo Andres, for Mixtape, a “live playlist” of eclectic and dynamic music appreciation. (photo by Josh Goleman) Gabriel Kahane describes himself as…

Diaspora and Israel 2.0

Next month, we may get an idea of the shape of a dramatic paradigm shift in Israeli-Diaspora relations. The government of Israel is expected to spend as much as $1.5 billion in the next 20 years on a new initiative…

Long-forgotten chapter: 1942’s Operation Torch

image - Message from Dwight Eisenhower 1942

A message from U.S. Gen. Dwight Eisenhower to the people of Casablanca, found on the street of that city in 1942. (image from commons.wikimedia.org) In the wake of invasion and military defeat in the summer of 1940, Adolf Hitler and…

Stamp collector Ed Kroft wins awards

Collect postal history and you learn not just how mail has traveled in years past, but also how people lived and functioned. Just ask Ed Kroft, a collector and historian of postal history from Israel who was recently awarded the…

New York shows Marc Chagall

Seeing the Chagall show at the Jewish Museum in New York made me recall the year when Marc Chagall (1887-1985) was 90 and I decided it was high time that he, my favorite Jewish artist, and I meet. But first…

Mystery photo … Jan. 10/14

photo - State of Israel Bonds parlor meeting, men's group, Vancouver, B.C., 1964.

State of Israel Bonds parlor meeting, men’s group, Vancouver, B.C., 1964. (JWB fonds, JMABC L.14507 ) If you know someone in this photo, please help the JI fill the gaps of its predecessor’s (the Jewish Western Bulletin’s) collection at the Jewish Museum…

Nicholas Winton’s kindertransport

The Wallenberg-Sugihara Civil Courage Society will mark Vancouver Raoul Wallenberg Day on Jan. 19 with the screening of the documentary Nicky’s Family, about Holocaust hero Nicholas Winton. Now 104 years old, Winton lives in England (where he was born). The…

Complexities of human sexuality

Some people still act as if same-sex attraction were a crime or, at least, an abomination and ought, therefore, not be tolerated. Russia, for example, recently announced that it will not permit any of its orphaned children to be adopted…