Itamar Erez will perform together with Liron Man and François Houle on Sept. 11 at VCC Music Auditorium. (photo from CWR)
On Sept. 11, Itamar Erez takes to the stage with two of his “favorite musicians on earth”: Liron Man and François Houle.
Presented by Caravan World Rhythms, World Trio will take place at Vancouver Community College Music Auditorium. Just last month, Erez returned from Germany and Tunisia; he leaves for Colombia about a week and a half after the VCC concert.
“It has been busy and not always easy touring,” Erez admitted to the Independent, “but the thing is that I really enjoy sharing my music with new audiences around the world and it gives me more energy and enthusiasm to continue in my way and to create and perform.
“This year, I have played in Germany, Austria, Cyprus, India, the U.S.A., Canada, Tunisia, to name a few places. Tunisia was definitely a highlight. I played with Omar Faruk Tekbilek, the great sufi musician, in front of 6,000 people, got to visit the old city of Carthage and Sousse, and enjoyed the good Tunisian food and their warm hospitality. This summer, I also performed (with my percussionist, Yshai Afterman) at the Jewish Museum in Berlin, which was great. And, a few days later in Freiburg, we collaborated with Iranian musicians from Isfahan in a program called Face to Face – Music from Iran and Israel. It was really an amazing experience.”
Last year was also a remarkable one for Israel-born Erez, and not just for his many performances. Adding to the honors he has received over the years for his work, he garnered the 2014 ACUM and Landau prizes for special achievement in jazz.
Erez has two CDs with the Adama Ensemble – Desert Song (2006) and Hommage (2010) – and one with Afterman, New Dawn (2013). About his work with Afterman, a fellow Israeli, he said, “This duet has been working since 2011 and is touring extensively in Europe and Asia. We are very proud of this CD – in a duet setting, there is a lot of freedom to each musician, but at the same time you cannot hide behind other musicians. There is a lot more responsibility to each of us, so it is very challenging.
“Antonio Serrano, master of the harmonica, who collaborated for a long time with Paco De Lucía, until his [De Lucía’s] recent death, is a special guest on this album and can be heard in two tracks,” added Erez, who is currently working on new material for an upcoming CD.
Erez (piano and guitar) will be joined by Man (handpan and percussion) and Houle (clarinet) at VCC.
“I have known François for a long time,” said Erez. “He premièred some of my music when I lived in Vancouver at the end of the ’90s. I was always impressed by his creativity and musical skills but we never got to collaborate together until now. François is a musician who can play anything, in any style, and always keep his own unique voice.
“Liron is a good friend and a brilliant musician,” he continued. “We started together the Lavo Ensemble in Israel about two years ago and toured there. Liron is one of the best handpan (known also as Pantam or Hang) player in the world, and a great flamenco guitarist. His energy for making music is really contagious.”
Since this past July, Erez once again calls Vancouver home. When he returns from Colombia, where he will play with the Lavo Ensemble, he will have a solo guitar set at West Coast Guitar Night on Oct. 17 at the Cultch. “I will also be teaching at the VSO School of Music starting this fall,” he noted.
Now that he has moved back, there will hopefully be many more opportunities to hear him play.
VCC Music Auditorium is at 1155 East Broadway St. Tickets for the Sept. 11, 8 p.m., concert are $20/$30 in advance from caravanbc.com or 1-800-838-3006, and $25/$35 at the door (students receive a $5 discount).
Susan Freedman was inspired by her parents’ love letters. (photo from Susan Freedman)
Among this year’s Vancouver Fringe Festival offerings are several one- person shows, including Spilling Family Secrets by Susan Freedman and The Inventor of All Things by Jem Rolls – both of which have had soldout performances and received high praise on the Fringe circuit. The Independent spoke with each artist about their creation.
Spilling Family Secrets is Susan Freedman’s fourth one-woman Fringe show. Its basis is love letters that her parents wrote to each other between 1927 and 1937, which she melds with stories of her own “marital misadventures.”
JI: You’ve performed Spilling Family Secrets at other Fringes. What has some of the audience feedback been?
Susan Freedman, creator of Spilling Family Secrets. (photo from Susan Freedman)
SF: I’ve had terrific audience feedback on this show – and a lot of it! People talk to me about the letters themselves. They are very touched by them. People tell me about how they have seen/found their parents’ or great-grandparents’ love letters. Sometimes the letters have been burned! Sometimes people tell me they’re going to go back and look at them again.
I’ve had many people talk to me after the show about their marital and family issues. It’s an intimate show and people sometimes feel that because I’ve shared my stories, they are comfortable sharing theirs. There is lots of laughter in the show and often some teary-eyed audience members at the end. Yesterday, I had a woman (in Edmonton) run up and give me a huge hug. I’d never seen her before but she was very emotional and positive about the show and felt comfortable coming up to me like that. Pretty lovely!
JI: Sometimes in performing a role more than once, different understandings develop along the way. Have new revelations about your parents, your “marital misadventures” or other parts of the material arisen over the last year-plus?
SF: I am struck by how patient my parents were and how impetuous I was in my love life. More and more, as I do the show, I realize the great benefit in really getting to know the person you are going to marry – before you marry them! I’m more grateful than ever that my parents had such great values, and I realize my good fortune in having had them as parents. I love doing this show and when I mentioned that to my daughter, she said: “Of course you do. You get to spend time with your parents at their best.” It’s true. In their letters, they were young and hopeful and, as my father said in a letter written to Brownie in 1929: “I don’t think we will ever grow old.”
JI: Could you give a brief overview of your creative process, taking the letters from, well, letters, to a performance?
SF: [In the program, it explains:] “My parents’ love letters filled 75 pages – single-spaced – when I transcribed them in 2012. I did it because Brownie and Sam’s 80-year-old letters were too fragile to pass around and I wanted a record of their love story for the family. The letters were long, intimate and wonderful to read. But I do Fringe shows, so I wanted to use the letters in a show. Reading letters on stage is a challenge, so I edited – a lot. I hope what’s left gives you a flavor of Brownie and Sam’s personalities and their relationship….”
That’s what happened. And then I started to combine and add the events from my own life (and my daughter’s) that related to love, the letters and the milestones in the letters. I worked with a wonderful dramaturg-playwright, Lucia Frangione, and she pushed me, asked the right questions and helped so much. Everyone needs a great editor, right? She is mine. I worked with her until I had a good “rehearsal script,” a year ago April.
By now, I’ve done 18 drafts … and I’m pretty pleased with it. It’s just 45 minutes (including time for laughs) and it seems to be a very simple show. It took me a very long time to make it look simple!
I have continued to make small changes and, if I do it again next year (I’d still like to do Montreal and Ottawa Fringes), who knows, maybe more changes.
* * *
Jem Rolls introduces Fringe audiences to Hungarian Jew Leo Szilard (1898-1964), who Rolls believes is a hero. (photo from facebook.com/jem.rolls.1)
Jem Rolls’ The Inventor of All Things is based on the life of Hungarian Jew Leo Szilard (1898-1964): “peacemaker, physicist, refugee, celebrity, Martian, and more. And very funny. Hated by generals, first to think of the atom bomb, and too good to flush his own toilet.”
JI: When did you first “discover” Szilard? What went into creating Inventor?
JR: I was stuck in Dauphin, Man., one Christmas with nothing to read but a cheesy book on Nazi science, which led me to [Austrian Jewish physicist] Lise Meitner and her nephew Otto Frisch, who have a bunch of great stories I could imagine telling, most notably the famous walk in the snow on Christmas eve of 1938 at Kungälv, where she’s just escaped the Nazis by the skin of her teeth, and Auntie Lise and Nephew Otto discuss the strange results in Berlin and suddenly realize that they have all already been splitting the atom in their labs for years – a massive realization which opened everything up.
And that looked like a great story, but then it led me to the funniest, craziest guy of them all – Leo Szilard … he’d thought of the nuclear chain reaction and, so, the bomb, five years before, when he escaped the Nazis in 1933 and was stateless in London.
If he wasn’t so funny, and so preposterously eccentric, I wouldn’t have a show – it would be too dry and hefty. And the fact he’s forgotten just made it all the better to do, especially as the chief reason he’s forgotten is an antisemitic American general deliberately deleting him from history and the fact it’s such a big story of real historical reach. It’s like Frankenstein’s monster: he is the man who forced the atomic bomb genie out of the bottle – because of his fear of the Nazis – and then desperately tried to get it back in again when the German defeat was certain.
I have been thinking about the show for years, and I would explain my ideas to loads of people on the Fringe tour and they all said, “You should do a show about this,” so, in the end, I have.
I’m a performance poet by trade and, though I’m loath to leave that for awhile, the change has been great and, as it’s storytelling, I’ve had to make myself coherent and completely understandable, which has never quite been a priority before. Plus, performance poetry is a very good place to venture into storytelling from. I have all manner of vocal and physical and linguistic tricks I am thoroughly enjoying deploying in a tight historical narrative.
JI: When and where did you first perform Inventor? What are some of the ways in which you have adapted your performance or the content, if at all, as you’ve performed it?
JR: I wrote the show in Cyprus … having been thinking about it for years, and I edited it and learnt it up the Rio Negro in the Brazilian Amazon, in a lovely small town no one goes to called Barcelos and on the front of the slow boats which ply the reaches of the Amazon…. The journeys take days and I would sit on the front all day watching the unchanging jungle go by and muttering the script to myself as the sun arced the unchanging sky.
The process is a long one: years of thinking and reading/researching, a quick first draft and then a long four-month process of learning and editing to get the story in shape, which involves months of agonizing times, throwing bits out of the show that I really like till I have a tight, coherent thing which still has to be performed.
I always open in Montreal, and only then do I find what the show really is, and then there’s weeks of battle to get a show I am happy with and which my performance is doing justice to. It’s also a struggle to make oneself physically and mentally tough enough to give the show what it needs day in and day out.
Doing the show has forced the horrible realities of the times upon me. I know all the history, of course, but to follow the life of this guy who escaped the antisemitic reaction in Hungary in 1919, then the Nazis, who did so much to help his fellow Jews, who never finished any work because he’d always already had another brilliant idea … I really like the guy. I tell the audience I think he’s a hero, that I’m going to prove he’s a hero. Everyone likes their forgotten heroes and, when I show the audience that he was the chief wrecker of the Nazi bomb, I get a huge round of applause for the guy. One can make the claim that a Jew doomed Hitler – and that man is Szilard. And the forgotten-ness of the story is shocking – why hasn’t [Steven] Spielberg made a movie out of him?
I’ve had some very nice times with the show. I’ve been blessed in Hebrew by an old singer. I’ve had very respectable, well-dressed young men come up to me and shake my hand and say, “Well, I’m a Hungarian Jew and no one ever told me that story,” and I had a professor emeritus of physics from Toronto literally bouncing up and down in glee after show, Bob Logan, a Brooklyn Jewish guy who actually met Leo in ’57 and loved the show. I’ve had an Einstein scholar who had to go back and check his research and see that, yes, I was right, and he’d never realized certain things about Einstein because I am putting together Szilard’s story in a way that no one ever has – I am going for the drama, for the cliffhangers, for the big moments, and there a number of very big moments from 1933-1945.
***
Among the one-person shows at this year’s Vancouver Fringe Festival, which runs from Sept. 10-20, are also:
Comedienne Windy Wynazz takes a unique view of the life of a showgirl in UnCouth. (photo by Lynne Fried)
UnCouth (14+), created by Windy Wynazz with Dan Griffiths, and performed by Wynazz. The show is “a bawdy, campy, comedy cabaret, drawing for inspiration on real-life experiences of being teased in school, falling in with a ‘bad crowd,’ and heteronormative gender expectations,” Wynazz told the JI. The 2014 San Francisco Comedienne of the Year “uses contemporary clowning to dig deeper into the underbelly of humanity, all while providing subversive comic relief on the human condition.” UnCouth is also at the Victoria Fringe Festival till Sept. 4.
Roy Horovitz brings the English version of Benny Barbash’s play My First Sony (which is based on Barbash’s 1994 novel of the same name) to this year’s Fringe. (photo by Erez Schwarzbaum)
Roy Horovitz brings the English version of Benny Barbash’s play My First Sony (which is based on Barbash’s 1994 novel of the same name) to this year’s Fringe. The play is told from the perspective of Yotam, an 11-year-old who records everything on his tape recorder, “my first Sony,” including some of the painful moments in his life, such as his parents’ separation.
Interior ministers from the 28 member-states of the European Union will meet next week to address the crisis of migrants flowing into the continent from across the Mediterranean. But just what constitutes a crisis – and whose crisis is it?
Some politicians and commentators allege that the migrants are primarily “economic refugees,” people just seeking economic advancement. But Britain’s Guardian newspaper reports that 62% of the refugees who made it to Europe by boat in the first seven months of the year were from Syria, Eritrea and Afghanistan, with more coming from Darfur, Iraq, Somalia and Nigeria, all places where mere survival in war-ravaged zones supersedes economic advancement on the hierarchy of needs.
Fears stoked by the stream of migrants have led some, such as the British foreign secretary, to warn that the entire European social order is endangered. In fact, the 200,000 migrants who have made it to Europe so far this year represent 0.027% of the total EU population. Compare these numbers with the situation in Lebanon, a country of 4.5 million people currently hosting 1.2 million refugees from the Syrian civil war.
There is no question that much of the social unrest in Europe these days and a vast proportion of its antisemitism derive from immigrants from the same parts of the world from which today’s migrants originate. That is not a problem to be easily dismissed. But neither is it a justification for ignoring a humanitarian crisis.
Addressing the small proportion of radicalized or Jew-hating individuals within groups is an issue that Europe must confront and address – and it has so far not done an exemplary job. But the problem facing the migrants in their places of origin makes the “crisis” faced by the places in which they hope to settle pale in comparison.
Europe just happens to be the nearest beacon of freedom and peace these people can reach and, therefore, they are clamoring to make their way to the continent. But it is the responsibility of all of us, Canada included, to accommodate a share of people seeking escape from violence and war.
Israel has also been a destination for African migrants and the treatment of some has rightly raised concerns of refugee watchdog groups and, last month, the Israeli Supreme Court. The court ruled that the migrants who had been held in a sort of low-security detention facility, about 1,200 people from Eritrea, Sudan and Darfur, could not be held longer than a year. They were not confined to the encampment, but were required to be present twice daily for a roll call.
In all, Israel has about 45,000 asylum-seekers, the vast majority from Eritrea and 9,000 from Sudan. Most made their way by foot through the Sinai into Israel’s southern frontier. Most have been given visas that allow them to stay but not to work, which puts them in a predictably difficult position.
Meanwhile, countries like Hungary are rolling out razor wire along the southern border, an entry point to the European Union, beyond which migrants are comparatively free to travel throughout the 28 countries of the EU.
Recent days have brought particularly horrendous news, with 71 refugees, including a baby, found dead in a truck in Austria, victims of profiteers exploiting the desperation of migrants trying to reach Europe. In Libya, more than 100 bodies washed ashore after a boat sank filled with people trying to cross the Mediterranean. At least 2,600 people are known to have drowned this year in similar incidents.
It is a sign of the desperation that drives this mass migration. Most of these people leave behind everything they have to make their way to what they hope will be a peaceful and prosperous future. They are met with suspicion, incarceration, violence and worse.
It is a striking reversal of the Jewish people’s own history of the 20th century, when those trying to flee Europe were denied entry at every turn, including to what was to become the Jewish homeland in the Middle East. Now, thousands of people from the Middle East are fleeing to Europe and facing every obstacle.
It should not be ignored that many of the refugees are coming from places whose education systems and popular culture instil suspicion and hatred of Jews (and Western culture), and this will be no consolation to the remaining, beleaguered Jews of countries like France. But that underlying problem – and it is a significant one – must be addressed over the long term both in Europe and in the countries where cultural norms breed intolerance and antisemitism. In the meantime, thousands of people are fleeing for their lives and the world cannot turn our backs.
With the High Holidays around the corner, I have noticed my usual light bout of pre-holiday anxiety. So much always seems to ride on this part of the Jewish calendar. For strong believers, there’s the spiritual reckoning. For the less religious who still care about affiliation, there’s the loaded nature of synagogue attendance, compounded by the challenge of pricey tickets. And, for the simply social, there’s the pressure of ensuring some communal marking of the calendar.
Amid all of this, Reboot – an organization that bills itself as “affirm[ing] the value of Jewish traditions and creat[ing] new ways for people to make them their own” – is taking a lighter touch: its annual 10 questions project. Sign up at doyou10q.com and, starting on Sept. 13 and lasting 10 days, the website will email you one question per day encouraging you to engage in the kind of personal reflection that is customary during the intervening days between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur.
Once completed, the answers are sent to Reboot’s “vault” for safekeeping, and users can decide whether to share them or not. Either way, one year later, Reboot will send the answers back to the participant, and the questions will be posed again, so one can see what changes in life perspectives occur over time.
It’s a truism that Jewish life is fundamentally communal. A quorum of 10 is required for prayer; weekly Shabbat dinners are often an extended-family-and-friends affair; Jews are encouraged to educate their children Jewishly in a group setting; Jewish summer camp focuses on intense communal experiences; and bar and bat mitzvahs are marked by a public aliya la-Torah.
So, are individual, web-based initiatives like Reboot’s enough to scratch the itch of Jewish communal practice? Or are they, in their push-a-button way, a frivolous addition to what should be undivided attention to the technicalities of Jewish literacy and to the bricks and mortar of conventional Jewish life, where Judaism is experienced publicly and communally?
This question isn’t a surprising one, but it may be misplaced.
In the age of “destination” bar and bat mitzvah ceremonies, where almost no one from one’s community may be in attendance, and in the age of concierge Judaism – a term the Jewish Outreach Institute now uses to suggest that Jews may be looking for an array of products and services tailored to their own individual needs – and in the generation of the Millennial who seeks to refashion Judaism to suit her own sensibilities, Reboot knows that one has to reach Jews where they are.
But there’s more to it than simply realizing that initiatives like Reboot may be what’s needed to save do-it-yourself-style Jews from disconnection. Despite the absence of Hebrew or Jewish texts or a group of Jews sitting in a study session with a rabbi, initiatives like the 10 questions project is not a challenge to Jewish literacy at all. In discussing the initiative with colleagues, I realized that, without Reboot’s initiative, I might never have given those intervening days another thought.
In my typical hectic pace, I would likely be rearranging my work schedule, securing a break-fast invitation for my family or deciding whether to host one, and practising the Haftorah my shul has asked me to prepare for Yom Kippur morning. No doubt the personal reflection bit would fall by the wayside and, even if I did try to engage in it, it likely would not be as fulsome as that encouraged by the kinds of daily questions Reboot sends. That kind of thinking and writing – including being faced with one’s past challenges – takes immersive effort, both intellectual and emotional.
So, tailored-and-trendy versus tried-and-true may be a false dichotomy, after all. We would be better placed to think of Jewish life as being enriched by as many touch points as our current crop of Jewish innovators can create.
Mira Sucharovis an associate professor of political science at Carleton University. She blogs at Haaretz and the Jewish Daily Forward. This article was originally published in the Canadian Jewish News.
קו סאסאקי שמח מאוד לשמוע שלפחות סירתו ניצלה מהצונמי, והיא נמצאת כיום בידים טובות ומטופלת היטב. (צילום: Spirit Bear Adventures)
המרכז לענייני ישראל והיהודים מגביר את שיתוף הפעולה עם הסטודנטים היהודים במאבקם בפעילות האנטי ישראלית
המרכז לענייני ישראל והיהודים בקנדה שם לו למטרה ראשית לעזור לתא הסטודנטים היהודים הלל, במאבקים נגד הפעילות העניפה בקמפוסים השונים להחרמת ישראל. בשותפות עם הלל המרכז מספק לסטודנטים היהודים הדרכה אסטרטגית, תמיכה מסיבית בשטח ומשאבים כספיים, כדי שיוכלו להתמודד מול הקמפיינים האנטי ישראליים, בזמן אמת. המרכז והלל הכינו תוכניות ואסטרטגיות שונות בעת הצורך, כדי להתמודד ולהפריך את המיתוסים השונים שהומצאו על ישראל.
במקביל המרכז והלל עובדים מול הנהלות האוניברסיטאות השונות וסגל המרצים, להצגת ישראל האמיתית והעובדות הנכונות עליה. במסגרת זו המרכז לוקח נציגים מהאוניברסיטאות לביקורים בישראל, כדי שיראו מה קורה באמת בשטח. במרכז מציינים כי לאור הפעילות העניפה שלו מול האוניברסיטאות ונציגיה השונים, במקרים רבים הקמפיינים נגד ישראל הפכו לפחות פחות אפקטיביים.
נציגים של המרכז בשיתוף הפדרציות היהודיות בקנדה, עובדים ישירות מול הארגונים היהודים השונים לצורך הגברת הביטחון. הפעילות כוללת הדרכת ותדרוך העובדים במוסדות היהודים. נציגים של המרכז מבצעים בקביעות ביקורות אבטחה במוסדות היהודים, בהם הג’ואיש קומיוניטי סנטרס, בתי ספר, גני ילדים, מחנות קיץ ובתי הכנסת. בנוסף המרכז מסייע לארגונים בהגשת תוכניות אבטחה לתוכנית של הממשלה הפדרלית לאבטחת מוסדות בקנדה, שיפור התשתיות והקצאת משאבים כספיים ועוד.
האחראי על תחום הביטחון בהקהילה היהודית במרכז לענייני ישראל והיהודים בקנדה, אדם כהן, נמצא בקשר שוטף עם גורמי הביטחון הקנדיים, ובהם המשטרה הפדרלית, יחידות המשטרה המקומיות ועוד. הקשר הזה מאפשר למרכז לקבל מידע ביטחוני בזמן אמת ולהיערך בהתאם, כדי להגן על הקהילה היהודית בעת הצורך.
שוטי ספינתי: סירה של דייג יפני נסחפה עד לקנדה
דייג יפני שאיבד את משפחתו באסון רעידת האדמה והצונמי שפקדו את יפאן לפני כארבע שנים, יכול להתנחם בכך שסירתו שניסחפה והגיע עד לחופי קנדה, ממתינה כאן עבורו. קו סאסאקי איבד את כל עולמו באסון הטבע הגדול ביותר בהיסטוריה של יפאן, שהתרחש במרץ 2011. ברעידת האדמה והצונמי נגבה מחיר כבד מאוד של כתשעה עשר אלף איש שנהרגו (חלקם נחשבים לנערים עה היום). ובין ההרוגים גם אשתו ובנו היקרים של הדייג המסכן. סאסאקי נשאר מחוסר כל ואפילו סירת הדייג האהובה שלו נעלמה.
אך מתברר שהסירה הלבנה מהפיברגלס לא הלכה לאיבוד או נהרסה, אלא כמו מאות ואולי אלפי חפצים רבים אחרים, נסחפה במים העמוקים של האוקיאנוס השקט, והגיעה אחרי מסע אחרוך עד לחוף המערבי של קנדה. לפני כשנה תושבים אינדיאנים מקומיים שגרים באזור החוף של בריטיש קולומביה, מצאו את הסירה האבודה. התברר להפתעת הכל שלמרות הדרך הארוכה ואסון הטבע הנוראי, כלי השייט של הדייג לא ניזוק כלל. בעזרת זוג אמיד (הבעל קנדי והאישה ממוצא יפני) שהגיעו לבקר בכפר האינדיאנים שתושביו הם אלו שמצאו את הסירה, תורגמה הכתובת המוטבעת עליה. האישה היפנית הפעילה את הקשרים הענפים שיש לה ביפאן, והצליחה לאחרונה לאתר את בעלי הסירה המדוברת. סאסאקי שמח מאוד לשמוע שלפחות סירתו ניצלה מהצונמי, והיא נמצאת כיום בידים טובות ומטופלת היטב. הזוג הקנדי-יפני החליט לעזור לסאסאקי הדייג ולממן אף את ביקורו כאן. בימים אלה הוא אמור להגיע לקנדה כדי התאחד מחדש עם סירתו, לאחר ארבע שנים. ככל הנראה סאסאקי ישאיר את הסירה כאן כיוון שהעלויות להעברתה בחזרה ליפאן גבוהות מאוד. בינתיים מתברר שהדייג התחיל לשקם את חייו ואף רכש לו כבר סירת דייג חדשה.
Dafna Lifshitz, CEO of Appleseed Academies, is part of the FEDtalks lineup on Sept. 17. (photo from Dafna Lifshitz)
Israel is known as the “startup nation,” the incubator for much of the world’s most advanced technological, medical, scientific, cultural and other innovative advancements. But Dafna Lifshitz saw a different Israel that doesn’t fit that mold – and she set out to fix the problem.
Lifshitz is one of four speakers at FEDtalks, a series of short, intense speeches on diverse topics that will launch the Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver’s annual campaign on Sept. 17 at Queen Elizabeth Theatre.
“In the past decade, Israel has reached incredible heights with the growth of our high-tech industry,” Lifshitz told the Independent in an email interview. “We are a world leader in R&D spending, per capita [venture capital] investment and multinational R&D centres.”
But this activity has been concentrated in the centre of the country, remains in the hands of the privileged few and is creating “a dangerous digital divide between the centre and the periphery,” she said. To leverage Israel’s success to even greater levels, access to relevant technological education must be made more widely available.
“Technology education is a tool to make Israel stronger, more vibrant and more equitable,” she explained. “First, from an economic perspective, future economic growth in Israel is all technology-based. To participate in the workforce and gain access to the best opportunities, everyone in Israel must be able to work online, write code and build technology solutions. Second, from a quality-of-life perspective, we know that those who have access to technology and use it effectively will receive better health care, financial services, and much more. Finally, communities who use technology tools to interact with each other and their leaders are stronger and more vibrant.”
People in disadvantaged communities, including those in Israel’s geographic periphery, suffer from lack of access to technology and opportunities in the tech sector, Lifshitz said. “Our challenge is to turn Israel from the startup nation of the few to the startup nation for all.”
And this will be the topic of her FEDtalk – “building a biotech hub in northern Israel.”
As CEO of Appleseed Academies since 2002, Lifshitz has helped a million people in Israel and the developing world access technological education programs through the nonprofit organization.
In Israel, the agency works especially with women, ultra-Orthodox Jews, youth-at-risk, new olim and members of minority communities. Appleseed Academies has 350 centres across Israel. Lifshitz has been dubbed one of Israel’s 100 most influential people by Haaretz and was awarded the Prime Minister’s Prize for Initiatives and Innovation in 2014.
The success of the program in Israel led Appleseed to expand its work to 93 locations in eight African countries through a partnership with Cisco and the Clinton Global Initiative.
“We have managed to build and learn so much in Israel and, from my perspective, if we can share our model with new partners in the developing world, it’s our responsibility to do so,” Lifshitz said. “As importantly, we learn so much from working with cultures different from our own – when I watch how entrepreneurs in Zimbabwe or South Africa work with our models, I’m filled with new inspiration for driving our mission back at home.”
Appleseed Academies partners with the biggest, most successful tech companies in Israel, including Cisco, Intel, Microsoft, Google and Bezeq, as well as with government agencies, municipalities and philanthropists.
“We have learned that when disadvantaged communities prosper, our whole society prospers,” she said.
Her own story undergirds the success of Appleseed Academies.
“It probably started with my choice to transition from a religious to a secular lifestyle, along with my decision to study law and start a law firm with a neighborhood friend,” she said. “As a result of my journey, I realized that I can lead change not just on a personal level, but on a broader scale, as well. As one of my close mentors, Cisco VP Zika Abzuk, and Spiderman like to say: with power comes responsibility. I know I can lead change, and simply cannot ignore that responsibility to do so.”
For more information about and tickets to FEDtalks, visit jewishvancouver.com. An interview with Irwin Cotler appeared in last week’s Independent and Eli Winkelman will be featured next.
Erika Babins, choreographer, and Zach Wolfman, actor, in Awkward Stage Productions’ Titus, written by Andrew Wade and Jenny Andersen. (photo by Corwin Ferguson)
In its sixth appearance at the Vancouver Fringe Festival, Awkward Stage Productions is presenting its first original work: Titus: The Light and Delightful Musical Comedy of Titus Andronicus, written by Andrew Wade and Jenny Andersen.
“Young William Shakespeare wants a hit,” reads the musical’s description. “After cutesy romances and sweeping histories, the young bard is attempting to fold together another blockbuster. He bemoans that no one seems to care for his Titus Andronicus! It seems the violence is not what people want – or at least they won’t admit it. Perhaps it just needs to be presented a little more lightly and delightfully?” Enter Wade and Andersen.
The idea came to Wade when he was acting in a fundraiser production of Titus Andronicus at the University of Victoria.
“I was playing Aemilius and Quintus, and it struck me as so ridiculous how there is a scene where people around him are deciding his fate – accusing him of murder and then sentencing him to be beheaded – and he doesn’t have a single line in his own defence,” Wade told the Independent. “The original play is full of strange, silly moments like that…. During the closing night gathering for that show, I sketched out a one-page brainstorm of ideas if the silly elements to this deeply tragic play were to be highlighted and set to music. I then put that page in a folder and left it alone for four years. And then I pitched the show to Awkward Stage.
“Titus Andronicus has been an excellent vehicle for lampooning [or] sending-up musicals, Shakespeare and our society’s selective obsession with violence as entertainment. The Shakespearean play is so riddled with issues, plot holes and strange character choices, and yet it is also so very, very compelling and touching and human. And what a strange and wonderful musical comedy it turns out to be.”
This is the first writing collaboration between Wade and Andersen, though they have acted together previously.
“While a part of that show,” said Wade, “she mentioned how she might want to write music for a musical at some point.” He made a note to follow up on that discussion and, when he started the first draft of Titus with a different composer and it wasn’t working out, Andersen came aboard, “and our styles clicked.”
“For most of the music, I started by writing some lyrics and sent them her way,” he explained. “Some songs, I added a little voice recording of what it ‘could’ sound like. For others, I included little taglines like ‘sounds like an instructional song from The Sound of Music, but sexier.’ A few of the songs, all I sent her were the words, and Jenny created musical masterpieces from those words, which blew me away.
“And then we would massage the lyrics back and forth for musicality and staging purposes, her telling me I need to cut or add a stanza here or there, me realizing the character needs to elaborate more here and there – a solid, near-egoless workshopping experience. We both dearly treasure what we have created, but we are also both willing to get rid of whatever isn’t working, or fix whatever needs tweaking. I am super-happy with how the collaborative process has gone thus far.”
When Andersen came on board, she said, “a first draft of the book/lyrics had already been written, and I was asked to set it musically.” So, she had no input into the musical’s topic and, she admitted, “a work from the Shakespearean canon would not have been the text I’d have settled on for my first foray into musical theatre composition.”
However, as she has worked with the story, she said, “I’m increasingly realizing the genius in picking this specific play. I think if we had made a musical comedy out of any other Shakespearean work, we would have received polite nods and moderate interest. When we say we’re setting Titus Andronicus as a musical, however, the (nearly universal) response is, ‘That play? How do you make a musical comedy out of that play?!’
“The fact that it’s widely recognized as Shakespeare’s darkest tragedy gives us a few advantages. Of course, people are curious to see how the original text is turned on its ear. More importantly, I think it serves as a statement of what we as a society find funny, what we find acceptable and what we still find as gruesome as we did in Shakespearean times. Why can we often find ourselves laughing at violence, mutilation, murder as comedic tropes, when other issues are still off limits as comedic fodder? Why should any of it be funny, really? What does that say about ourselves as a society?”
Since Andersen came later into the creative process, she said, “For the most part, in my first musical draft, I took Andrew’s lyrics, edited them slightly for smoother musical form/phrasing/syllabic purposes and tried to capture the overall mood of plot and character. We then sat down and parsed out the lyrics to make them universally relevant, to clean up the form and to make sure they were saying what we needed them to say about each situation. For the music, that meant everything from small lyrical tweaks to brand new sections and complete rewrites of certain songs. We went back and forth after that point (often electronically; I think we were in the same room a total of three or four days!) to finesse the flow of the piece. (We literally wrote one of the songs two days before rehearsal started for Fringe!)”
Awkward Stage was created in 2010 “to fill a perceived void of real-life performance and production opportunities for youth in that awkward transition from play acting to professional employment.” As with all its productions, Titus features a cast, crew and creative team “aged 15 to 30ish.”
“Titus has a wide range of ages and experience levels in the show and it’s great to be able to watch them all come together as a cast,” said Awkward artistic associate Erika Babins, who choreographed the musical. “The teenagers in the show are fearless and dive right into the comedic and dramatic high points in the text. During any down time in the rehearsal hall, you’ll find cast members lending their strengths to each other to bring up the overall level of the show.”
When asked about any highlights she could share, she said, “It’s hard to describe some of the funniest moments of choreography without giving away a whole bunch of spoilers but there is a super-serious rhythmic gymnastic dance (as serious as you can be while flitting about with a ribbon), communication through tap dancing, and both life-size and miniature deer prancing around the forest.”
Zach Wolfman plays Bassianus, the late emperor Caesar’s son, younger brother to Saturninus. For the role, he said, “I definitely draw inspiration from my relationship to my brother Jake, who is two years younger than me, and into everything that I’m not – he’s the athlete, sport guy, and I’m the theatrical one. We are both kind of fighting for attention from our parents: my parents divide their time between watching him and my sister in sports games, and me in theatre.
“Professionally, I had a fair amount of Shakespeare training at UBC and through Canada’s National Voice Intensive. It’s fun to examine the Shakespearean qualities that permeate through Andrew Wade’s script, and then go back and look at Shakespeare’s original play.
“I’ve played a lot of wimpy, ineffective princes, who are fighting to prove themselves in some manner or another, and that helps,” he added. “The idealism of Bassianus and the fantasy world that he lives in remind me of a lot of other roles I’ve played – characters falling in love for the first time, young love in a really tender, awkward stage. That kind of new romance seems to breed a certain over-optimistic viewpoint, or rose-tinted perspective in people. Things are new and fresh and awesome, so it’s easy to forget that everyone around you wants to kill you.
“The most challenging aspect of this show is finding the balance between truth and comedy. The show is so fast and funny that you have to fight hard to keep up while you’re laughing. It helps a lot that Andy Toth, our director, is on the side of finding the real heart and truth in this show. Andy opened a rehearsal one day by showing us a great TED Talk by Peter McGraw called What Makes Things Funny. McGraw basically says that, for something to stand out as funny, it needs to step outside of the norm, or background of normal, everyday reality. This show is a roller coaster that goes far off the rails, but is still grounded in characters with real wants, desires and ambitions. Although the show is very dark, at the core, it is a delightful comedy.”
About the most fun aspect of the show, Wolfman said, it “lies in the people I get to work with. Working on this show with three other classmates from UBC is a treat. I feel lucky to be learning so much from Jenny Anderson and Andy Toth every day in rehearsal. Andy drops wisdom bombs left, right and centre and is the perfect person to be directing new work because he asks the tough questions. Andy, Jenny and Erika Babins really bring Andrew Wade’s script to life. Everyone is crazy talented, and I am often in flux between laughter and utter shock.”
Titus is at the Firehall Arts Centre Sept. 10-20. For times, tickets ($14 plus one-time $5 Fringe membership) and the full Fringe schedule, visit vancouverfringe.com.
The Canadian government’s policies toward local research and innovation are being streamlined with industry, making it so researchers are no longer free to look outside the box. This is one of the reasons Dr. Robert Brownstone gives for his decision to leave Canada to live in England and teach at the University College of London.
Dr. Robert Brownstone (photo from Dr. Robert Brownstone)
Brownstone, who was born and raised in Winnipeg, has spent most of his research career in Canada. He is a neurosurgeon who has treated people with movement disorders, pain and epilepsy, and who researches neural circuits that control movement. Prior to recently leaving the country, he was working as a professor of surgery (neurosurgery) and medical neuroscience at Dalhousie University.
“While it could be argued that there have been no cuts to the Canadian Institutes and Health Research (CIHR), funding has been flat (which is in effect a cut) and funding has been directed to specific programs (which is a cut to investigator-driven fundamental research),” said Brownstone in an interview with the Independent.
Minister of State (Science and Technology) spokesperson Scott French challenged this claim, however. “Since being elected in 2006, our government has made record investment in science, technology and innovation to push the frontiers of knowledge, create jobs and improve the quality of life of Canadians – including providing over $1 billion in funding toward neuroscience research alone,” he said.
French added that CIHR directs two-thirds of its funding envelope to basic or discovery science to strengthen Canada’s position as a world leader in health research.
Dr. John Bergeron (photo from Dr. John Bergeron)
McGill University’s Dr. John Bergeron – researcher, professor and chair of anatomy and cell biology for 13 years – explained the issue using a hockey analogy. “For whatever reason,” he said, “we decided that talent and accountability to genuine discovery would not be part of our funding mechanism. That decision was made by administrators and, in my mind at least, it’s sort of like saying, ‘We’re going to get the best logos in hockey and that will make us win the championship, the NHL cup, or whatever.’ And saying, ‘We don’t need talent…. We just need to look good on camera.’ Of course, that’s not sensible.”
Bergeron acknowledged that generous sums of public money are targeted for research and development. However, he said that an accountability mechanism should be considered to see if that money is targeting talent that generates genuine discoveries.
“By any deductive measure, Canada is not doing well,” said Bergeron. “The most recent is the latest rankings of research universities (viewable at shanghairanking.com). We’ve had zero Nobel Prizes in medicine since our one and only award in 1923 (for the discovery of insulin). All big pharma pre-clinical research labs have left Canada and we have only one living Lasker Award winner – James Till of Toronto.
“It is the university presidents and heads of our funding agencies who have failed the Canadian taxpayer. It is young, genuine talent that is needed across Canada, and the lack of accountability of our university presidents and heads of funding agencies is what is holding us back.”
Bergeron said we are shooting ourselves in the foot by funding research without having an infrastructure to apply the discoveries and reap the rewards of our efforts. “One of my goals is to try to use the Merck labs, get them going to put together a world-class institute to exploit genuine discoveries that are made here in Canada.”
As an example, Bergeron pointed to the work of McGill University Canadian-Israeli educator Dr. Nahum Sonenberg.
“With Dr. Sonenberg’s basic science discovery, he went from figuring out all of the machinery involved in making proteins to stumbling across the fact that if you target a small molecule with some of the proteins he’s discovered, it improves memory. So, colleagues in the U.S. and Britain teamed up with biotechs and big pharmas and have now used this discovery to develop drugs to treat senility, Alzheimer’s, memory loss.
“This is going to be a market creating hundreds of millions of dollars that we’re not going to exploit [in Canada]…. We don’t have any infrastructure to do this, all because these crazy administrators know nothing about what real discoveries have been historically.”
Bergeron sits on grant panels for the European Commission that provide 10 million euro grants a year, as well as U.S. funding agencies panels that give out more than a million dollars in grants per year.
“When you’re in Canada, the average grant in the last competition for the open operating grant averaged out to about $125,000 a year per investigator,” said Bergeron. “That’s serious taxpayer money, but it’s not competitive with what’s going on in the rest of the world. We’re spending over $30 billion a year in research and development, yet we don’t use peer review. Funding decisions are made by administrators that know nothing about discovery.”
Jim Woodgett (photo from Jim Woodgett)
Jim Woodgett, investigator and director of research of the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute at Toronto’s Mount Sinai Hospital Joseph and Wolf Lebovic Health Complex, also said that funding has been stagnant in recent years and that restructuring at CIHR has resulted in further hoops researchers need to jump through to access funding.
“To access funds here, in Canada, you have to bring to the table equivalent funds from other sources,” said Woodgett. “They can be philanthropic sources, etc. These types of programs, the government has been quite keen on promoting as a means of leveraging additional support. And some types of research just don’t have that kind of accessibility or the researchers don’t have accessibility to those matching funds, so that does become a bit of a limiting problem.”
Woodgett said there needs to be a balance, and better ways to access funding that do not require fundraising. “You need to balance discovery research and applied research, otherwise what happens is you just dry up after awhile,” he said. “All the ideas dry up and there’s nothing then to translate into applied research.
“You can argue you should spend 10 percent of your funds on discovery and 90 percent on applied … and say that the private sector shouldn’t be funding basic science … they should be only funding applied science.”
Internationally, many government-supported research funds go toward the discovery end of the spectrum. Canada needs to do the same if it wants to retain top researchers, said Brownstone.
Acknowledging that he is not a politician nor an economist, he said, “I feel there is intrinsic value in knowledge or a knowledge economy. Good things come from knowledge. Just look at leaders in the field, like Switzerland and Silicon Valley, unlike oil economies, such as Saudi Arabia.”
As far as creating change and reinventing research in Canada, Brownstone said, “Changing culture is hard, but it can be done with leadership. Look at [U.S. President John F.] Kennedy and landing a man on the moon.”
The photo tweeted Aug. 16 by Walrus editor Jonathan Kay of Mark Adler’s original campaign office sign. (photo from @jonkay)
Conservative MP Mark Adler has removed a reference in his online biography in which he described himself as the first child of a Holocaust survivor to be elected to Parliament.
The move came after an Aug. 17 Canadian Jewish News story revealed that Raymonde Folco, a Liberal who served as a Montreal-area MP from 1997 to 2011, preceded Adler in that distinction, and that Folco was herself a child survivor of the Holocaust.
The Adler campaign also changed a large building sign outside his campaign office that contained a reference to the candidate being the son of a Holocaust survivor, which was removed and replaced with a message about “keeping our taxes low.”
The York Centre MP found himself at the centre of controversy after Walrus editor Jonathan Kay tweeted a picture Aug. 16 of Adler’s original campaign office sign containing his claim about being the son of a survivor. “And who needs Yad Vashem when Holocaust awareness is now being promoted on partisan Conservative signage?” Kay tweeted with the photo.
Adler’s current online biography continues to describe him as “a child of a Holocaust survivor … [who] has passionately dedicated his time to raise awareness about discrimination and antisemitism throughout the world.”
In a prepared statement, Adler said, “Throughout my life, I have advocated for Holocaust remembrance – so that all Canadians will remember the great evil of the Second World War and never forget. My father came to Canada after surviving the horrors of a Nazi death camp, and chose Canada based on the values that continue to unite us: democracy, freedom, human rights and the rule of law.
“I am proud to serve our country and deliver on the priorities of residents in York Centre – including advocacy for the security of the state of Israel and the promotion of democratic values abroad. I share the concern of many residents who are alarmed by the global campaign to isolate and denounce Israel, and the moral relativism that was embraced by past governments who equivocated on the defence of the Jewish state.”
Adler’s NDP opponent, Hal Berman, a palliative care physician, criticized the MP on his own Twitter feed, saying, “Shame on you using #Holocaust for political gain. #yorkcentre deserves better – I am in this for voters.”
Ironically, Berman is also the child of Holocaust survivors. In his own web bio, the Montreal-born Berman points out his “grandparents and mother arrived to start a new life after the Holocaust.”
Meanwhile, Folco said she found it “disgusting” for Adler “to use the Holocaust in this way, for personal ends.” As an MP, she never publicized her status as a child of Holocaust survivors, while Adler is “profiting” from it.
“Whether he is the first or 15th, I should think it is your record that matters: what you’ve done and what you intend to do for Canadians, when elected,” she told the CJN.
Adler is far from the first politician to draw attention to unique circumstances in their personal background.
In Vancouver, Liberal candidate Harjit Sajjan, who served in the Canadian Armed Forces and received the Order of Military Merit, noted in his web biography that he “is the first Sikh to receive this award and continues to be a role model for youth across the country as he prepares to serve his country in new ways.”
Retired senator Vivienne Poy, a Liberal, is described on the parliamentary website as the “First Canadian of Chinese origin appointed to the Senate.” She notes on her own website that she “was the first Canadian of Asian descent to be appointed to the Senate of Canada.”
High-profile NDP candidate Olivia Chow mentions her unique circumstances in her online biography, as well: “Olivia was born in Hong Kong and moved to Toronto with her parents when she was 13. In 1991, Olivia became the first Asian-born woman elected as a Metro Toronto councilor.”
And, south of the border, Hillary Clinton, the front-running Democratic Party presidential candidate, in a statement designed to appeal to new Americans, said during the campaign that her grandparents had immigrated to the United States. However, that comment was inaccurate. Three of her grandparents were born in the United States and the fourth immigrated to the country as a young child.
– For more national Jewish news, visit cjnews.com.
