Arts/Op-Eds

Anxiety has its source in a place of our being from which rise the majority of our strongest emotions, like anger, violent emotional reactions, and even  physical diseases.  FEAR is the...

In appeals to German Chancellor, Angela Merkel and Austrian Chancellor, Werner Faymann, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre's Director for International Relations, Dr. Shimon Samuels, urged their...

Editor’s note: for best prices on  deals for travel this month, see Flight Centre advertisement on  right side bar or contact Angeline Boekweit, Flight Centre Associate – Winnipeg –204-417-4217 www.flightcentreassociates.com/AngelineBoekweit

Last August, during Camp Massad’s end of session Maccabia program, several counselors got together and wrote a song in Hebrew about captured IDF soldier Gilad Shalit. Last week, Gilad...

Our health care system is treating soft core addicts with the wrong medication!  Straight up—this is not partly truth and partly fiction. This Is all grounded in truth.  Treating...

The Father, Winnipeg Jewish Theatre’s offering for StrindbergFest 2011, is a dramatic and intense piece of theatre put on by a local cast who give some fine performances

Editor’s note: Since we don’t have a proper sports section in the Winnipeg Jewish Review, this piece never published before can count as a Sports article—a mild stretch. This event occurred in the summer of 2009]

In the year 1962,  President John F. Kennedy was the youngest man ever elected, “Return To Sender”   by Elvis Presley was an instant hit, and the province of Quebec was experiencing a Quiet Revolution.  Business was good.

Since its founding a decade ago, Birthright Israel has brought almost a quarter of a million Jewish young adults, ages 18 to 26, to Israel. Established by the Jewish Agency of Israel in conjunction...

  Editor's Note: Award-winning Rochelle Mass has published widely in anthologies and journals both in Israel, where she now lives, and also abroad   Waiting for a Message by Rochelle Mass...

What follows is an observation rather than a judgment. For who am I to judge?  Never the less, Judaism is in the midst of an enormous challenge. Our synagogues today are not drawing congregants in terms of numbers. The attrition rate is alarming. Assimilation and Secularism are commonly heard words.   

    Today is Tu B’shvat – the Jewish holiday of the trees. It’s a bit hard to think about rebirth and regeneration in the midst of a frozen Prairie winter, but the timing...

I’ve got a lot to say today No ones around to listen anyway People ask you what you think But really all they want is another drink Awakening from a deep slumber Makes one often wonder, Where...

It is very apparent to all who are Jewish, and even some who are not, that a boy’s bar mitzvah happens when he turns 13.

Noah Erenberg, a graduate of Joseph Wolinsky Collegiate Class of 1982,  has directed and also written substantial parts of  a new documentary series   One With Nature that will...

Layah took me out back to her vine pointed to the largest leaves, snapped them off smoothed them, piled one on the other gave instructions: these will make a pot full.  Once you’ve filled...

            This Shabbat, we will read about another Moses, the Moses that led Jews out of ancient Egypt to receive the Torah and settle in Israel. The Hebrew name...

Editor's note: Adam Bronstone  who is a Winnipegger now working in the United States  who wrote following response to  Elliot Leven's piece  regarding Time ...

For a great many Jews, the 8 day celebration of Chanukah is a time to call the kids and grandkids to wish them Happy Chanukah, a time to send out Happy Chanukah cards by snail or e mail, a time for parents to give their kids and grandkids Chanukah gifts, a time for family and friends to gather  for Chanukah dinners…

The date is set and the venues are booked. Where will you be on Friday, April 29th, 2011? You could be in London, England celebrating the wedding of the future King of England William, to Kate...

Right from the opening scene, you could see that The Gray Academy of Jewish Education’s musical “13” was going to be lively, energetic, and  toe tapping entertainment.

Jewish law does not prescribe any special feasting or elaborate meal for Chanukah as it does for other holidays.

The first ever Rady JCC Tarbut Festival of Jewish Culture opened last Saturday night, November 13-21 at the Berney Theatre. An amalgamation of the Israeli

Joel Chasnoff, the comedian and author who appeared at the Rady JCC’s Tarbut Festival of Jewish Culture on Sunday November 14, is a skinny guy with cropped grey hair and thick black glasses.

Ohad Rafaeli is in charge of the Hillel floor hockey league , which  he says  has been running consistently year after year for over the past 10 years. "I have spoken to Jewish...

As part of the new Rady JCC sponsored Tarbut festival of Jewish culture, Noah Richler sat down in Winnipeg on Monday, November 15 to chat about his father, Mordecai Richler, with former Winnipegger Michael Posner. Noah is the youngest of Mordecai’s sons, a writer and founding staff member of the National Post. Posner is a journalist with the Globe and Mail, a playwright and the author of five books

This Shabbat we read in the Torah about Jacob’s marriages and of how he builds his family. Jacob’s wives are the Matriarchs of the Jewish People; we look up to them with admiration and reverence. Jacob and his wives were blessed with 13 children-twelve sons and one daughter. These twelve sons became the leaders and founders of the twelve Shevatim, the twelve family divisions of the Jewish Nation.

The Gray Academy of Jewish Education presents the musical THIRTEEN Tuesday, November 30 to Thursday, December 2, 2010 at the Franco-Manitoban Cultural Centre, 340 Provencher Blvd., at 7:00 p.m. Tickets are $13.00 and can be purchased by calling the school office at 477-7410.

Let me start by saying I love Mexico.  I love the smell when I get off the airplane, that humid, warm, slightly organic smell that replaces the frigid, bone chilling air of a Manitoba winter.  One of my favourite places in Mexico is Los Cabos.

I received an E mail from my eldest daughter Erin around 12:25 pm last Friday asking if I wanted to come for dinner that night.Well I saw the E mail around 3 pm and informed her I had been invited to attend Herzlia – Adas Yeshurun scholar in residence weekend by Rabbi Ari Ellis and I accepted. Rabbi Yosef Benarroch from Israel was the visiting scholar. He has family in Winnipeg.

A letter to my fellow progressives, whoever you are, and however defined. Do you feel there is a place for you in your local Jewish community? How do you try to effect change? We hear a lot about tensions between different ethnic, religious, or political communities.

A small girl with a big voice, Lara Secord-Haid blew the large crowd away at her first solo concert this past Sunday. Secord-Haid, a Gray Academy graduate, is currently in her third year at the New England Conservatory in Boston, Massachusetts, where she studies opera as a lyric coloratura soprano.

“Lenin’s Embalmers” mines the confluence between politics and science and comes up with a highly entertaining dark comedy.  The Canadian premier of Winnipeg born Vern Thiessen’s production opened to a near capacity crowd last Thursday, kicking off the Winnipeg Jewish Theatre’s 23rd season with plenty of laughs.  

The New York Times today, October 10, 2010, reported that the wife of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner, Liu Xiaoba, was allowed to meet with her husband on Sunday at the prison in north-eastern China where he is serving an 11-year sentence. But she was then escorted back to Beijing and placed under house arrest, a human rights group said. I have often wondered why we in the west care so little about those who need our assistance so badly?

“It’s the first time I’m playing the Shaarey Zedek. I’ve played the Sharon Home but never the Shaarey Zedek,” says well-known entertainer David Gale who will be performing with Randy Vancourt at the Jewish Foundation’s upcoming 2010 Endowment Book of Life Donor Recognition Event on October 14 at 7:00.

Last year the Winnipeg Jewish Review published an article about a B’nai Brith Manitoba sponsored event honouring Anje Van Tongeren, an elderly Dutch woman living in Winnipeg. Van Tongeren and her mother had been members of the Dutch Underground during World War II

Twenty-one year old Lara Secord-Haid, a member of Winnipeg’s Jewish community whose passion is singing opera, recently won five gold medals in the Manitoba Music Festival, in the categories of Italian Art song, French melody, Aria, German Lieder and Spanish Cancion, as well as one silver medal in Oratorio.

She will be performing on October 17th; at the Mennonite University at 2:00 p.m. Tickets are available from Elba Haid at (204) 475-1543 or (204) 957-7325.

When I was a kid, my friends and I worshipped a range of onscreen idols. When I make a mental list of some of them — John Travolta in Grease, Kevin Bacon in Footloose, Michael Jackson in his game-changing Thriller video, and Mikhail Baryshnikov in White Nights, I see that they had two things in common. These men were cool. And they could move.

I recently finished reading two very good novels, both of them about Jewish men and their relationships with their distant fathers, emotional mothers, angry wives, and selfish siblings; both of them about identity crisis and the search for love, peace, contentment and a place to call home.

I was raised in a semi observant Jewish home by a Mom, Dad and Grandma along with a large extended family. Well the effect was strong enough that the mere thought of a salami sandwich with a glass of milk even today makes me want to vomit.

[Editor’s note: The following poem has previously appeared in the literary  journal Diviners and in the exhibit "Visual Poetry II" at the Piano Nobile Gallery in the Centennial Concert Hall].

Israeli soldier  Gilad  Shalit  was captured in 2006 by Hamas, and this past  week turned 24 while still being held in captivity.

During Camp Massad’s Maccabiah program, a song for  Gilad Shalit was written in Hebrew and is performed in the video above. The Administration, staff and campers of Camp Massad, the only Hebrew speaking Camp in western Canada, join the Shalit family,  Am Israel, and people throughout the free world in hoping and praying for the speedy and safe release of Gilad Shalit. 

A documentary that explores the meaning and significance of the Jewish New Year was aired Sept. 7 at 10 p.m. ET on Vision T.V.  

Dahn Hiuni was a fifteen-year-old sophomore studying theatre and art at Talma Yalin, Tel Aviv’s then-only High School for the Arts, when his parents sat him down one afternoon for a family talk. “How would you like to move to Canada?” they asked earnestly.

Josh Dolgin, (aka Socalled,) is a Canadian rapper and producer, known for his eclectic mix of hip hop, klezmer and other folk music syles. Dolgin, a Montreal musician with Winnipeg roots ( and lots of family and friends in Winnipeg) is a pianist and accordion player.

When Yehuda Avner made aliyah from England in 1947 as a 17-year-old member of Bnei Akiva, he could not have imagined the career that he would enjoy, the people that he would get to know, or the role that he would play in the development of the Jewish state.  More than 60 years later, Avner has written a book about this unimagined life,

ISRAEL PAVILION IN SHANGHAI RANKED AS MOST ATTRACTIVE OF ALL PAVILIONS

Jewish student Maxim Berent, who is the chairperson of the Cultural Committee for the Israel Pavilion at Folklorama, will be incorporating 

Among the many stories I have heard about my family ancestry, one in particular that has intrigued me is the story about my paternal great grandfather’s brother and sister who left Canada to return to Russia after the revolution. The truth is that it is not much of a story, because once they went back, they were never heard from again.

When I was 20 I knew I wanted to write a novel. Countless drafts, hours of editing, and many choices to be had proves that anyone can write a book. This is the story behind the story.