In Bloomywood, Michael Bloomstein (played and co-created by David Meyers) wanders around Tinseltown asking random people on the street to help him make a movie about his life. (photo from David Meyers) When David Meyers moved from New Jersey to Los…
The character of Guy Nehama, played by Reshef Levi, dreams of becoming a standup comic. (photo from Topic) It took me a couple of episodes, but then I was hooked. Initially, most of the characters on the award-winning Israeli show…
Loolwa Khazzoom in Iraqis in Pajamas’ video for their song “Cancer Is My Engine,” to be released on Chanukah. (photo by Ailisa Newhall) With shared themes of finding light in the darkness, Seattle-area band Iraqis in Pajamas is releasing the video…
How Well Do Treatments Prevent COVID-19, Shingles, Heart Disease, Diabetes and Anything Else that Might Ail You? That was Dr. James McCormack’s topic at the Jewish Seniors Alliance fall symposium Nov. 22. And some 100 participants Zoomed in to hear…
Abigél Szoke and Károly Hajduk in the film Those Who Remained. (photo from Menemsha Films) The Hungarian movie Those Who Remained has been making the rounds at international film festivals, including, in recent weeks, the Victoria International Jewish Film Festival. And…
A participant in Yehudit Silverman’s The Story Within process shows off their self-made mask. (photo from Yehudit Silverman) This past spring, Prof. Yehudit Silverman’s new book came out. In The Story Within: Myth and Fairy Tale in Therapy, the Concordia University…
Dr. Liran Levy, left, and Dr. Milton Saute. (photo from IMP) Sheba Medical Centre in Israel and Canada’s Toronto General Hospital are collaborating to advance the field of lung transplantation in Israel and to enhance medical education in both countries.…
Israel’s Hula Valley is a major stopping place for migrating birds. (photo by D.J. Tiomkin) Jay Shofet, the director of partnerships and development for the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel (SPNI), presented an overview of the broad range…
SherlockS has a window display starring a two-foot-high teddy bear dressed like Sherlock Holmes. (photo by Micha Paul) There is a small, magical hat store right in the heart of Jerusalem, called SherlockS. It’s not hard to find. Just walk…
Izhiman’s – the car is decorated with the company’s logo, based on advertising from that era showing a turban-wearing waiter – à la Cairo’s legendary El Fishawy coffee house in the Khan al-Khalili – serving, of course, coffee. (photo from Izhiman’s)…
These loaded sweet potatoes were satisfyingly filling. (photo by Ingrid Weisenbach) In a word: yum. I tried out four recipes in The Tahini Table: Go Beyond Hummus with 100 Recipes for Every Meal by Amy Zitelman with Andrew Schloss. All…
It started out as a culinary experiment. A desire to try something completely out of my wheelhouse. Something I knew my husband Harvey would not eat. It involved tofu. And peanut sauce. I was sure he’d like the second part.…
With all the oil used for frying Chanukah potato pancakes – otherwise known as latkes, in what we think is Yiddish, or as levivot in Hebrew – they may be considered an unhealthy food. Yet, each Chanukah, many of us,…
Chanukah lights on Agron Road in Jerusalem, 2012. (photo from Djampa) History tends to repeat itself or, as Sholem Aleichem put it, The Wheel Makes a Turn. In this story, he wrote about Chanukah, depicting a proud Jew lighting the nine-branched…
One of Shlomit Etzion’s handcrafted quilts. (photo by Nir Falay) Despite being generally considered the cradle of ancient civilizations and the source of the world’s monotheistic religions, the Middle East region is not known for its quilting. Yet, even in Jerusalem,…
How does a 1940 Yiddish theatre song – probably based on a passage from the Talmud’s Tractate Bava Metzia – end up becoming a popular piece sung around the world? Over a 75-year period, Aaron Zeitlin’s “Dona Dona” (in Yiddish,…
The author in the synagogue in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina. (photo from Miri Garaway) When I first started planning and researching our October 2017 trip to Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, the foremost thing on my mind was learning about the Jewish history…
Las Vegas’s Or Bamidbar Chabad Sephardi synagogue at Chanukah. (photo from Rabbi Yossi Shuchat) The Las Vegas Strip is where all of the action is, an endless sea of attractions and hotels with casinos, exhibits and more. These hotels cater…
Simon Fraser University’s Prof. Lauren Faulkner Rossi, left, interviews child survivor Marie Doduck in a Zoom presentation Nov. 5. (screenshot) For some survivors of the Holocaust, the COVID pandemic has brought back the traumas of the past. Marie Doduck spoke…
Prof. Chris Friedrichs speaks at the annual Kristallnacht Community Commemoration, on Nov. 9. (screenshot) Under the Nazi regime, almost all personal property and wealth owned by German Jews was either explicitly confiscated or, in the case of bank accounts, effectively…
Scanning Israeli news this week has a feel of a sci-fi fantasy. Most eye-catching of all is the assertion by a Tel Aviv University researcher, in a peer-reviewed article, that hyperbaric oxygen therapy can “reverse aging” by lengthening telomeres, the…
After the election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, many Jews were quick to celebrate that Harris’s husband Doug Emhoff is Jewish. Indeed, it is a win given the sharp rise in antisemitic expression and white supremacy we’ve seen in…
My husband saw the pair of decoder rings in a catalogue, long before our twins were old enough for them. Still, he ordered them and put them away. At the time, it amused me. How could he predict the future?…
A still from the documentary Shared Legacies: From the left are Martin Luther King Jr., Ralph Abernathy, Maurice Eisendrath and Abraham Joshua Heschel during the march from Selma to Montgomery, 1965. The Victoria Shoah Project held a panel discussion on…
As the use of the internet has grown, so has the need to protect data stored online, as well as prevent an organization’s website or social media platforms from being hacked. Since COVID-19 has hit, that need has increased manifold,…
Volozhin Yeshivah in Belarus, 2017. In learning about the institution, Mark Weintraub was moved to sponsor a lecture on it, in honour of his mother, and to champion restoration efforts. (photo by Da voli) “How did I not know about…
Storyteller Shoshana Litman. (photo from maggidah.com) Shoshana Litman, Canada’s first ordained maggidah (storyteller), kicked off Kolot Mayim Reform Temple’s 2020-21 monthly lecture series on Nov. 1 with a talk entitled Building Jewish Culture Through Stories and Song. “We humans are…
“I learned about climate marches and I learned about dancing bubbies,” said my niece Fae, 9, when we were discussing Bonnie Sherr Klein’s new children’s book, Beep Beep Bubbie, over FaceTime. Among other things, my niece Charlotte, 7, learned “you…
So much of what we do in life we do almost automatically. For better or worse, we anticipate what’s coming next and, often, we’re right. But a trio of children’s books just published by Tradewind Books will amuse young readers…
Aaron Friedland, creator and host of the podcast Impact in the 21st Century. (photo from Aaron Friedland) If you’re looking for a new, uplifting podcast to cast away the oppressive weight of pandemic blues, consider Impact in the 21st Century,…
