On a weekday afternoon in a community centre, the loudest table in the room is usually the Mah Jongg game, with the scoring done in pencil and the snacks taken very seriously. Every spring the National Mah Jongg League sends out a new card of hands, and for the first few weeks afterwards the games run slowly while everyone learns them.

When the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York staged Project Mah Jongg in 2010, in a show that later travelled to other museums, it treated the game as social history, following it from the 1920s through suburban living rooms and Catskills bungalow colonies. The exhibition’s argument was that a game hands down the room it was played in and the people around the table along with its rules, and those are the parts most likely to change when a game moves onto a screen.

Games with a season

Many of the games people remember best were tied to an occasion. Card tables came out at the cottage in July and went back into the closet after Labour Day. A euchre night, especially in southwestern Ontario, belonged to a hall or a legion branch. Canasta, which arrived from South America after the war and was a full-blown craze by the early 1950s, usually meant four friends on a Tuesday.

Mah Jongg keeps its own calendar. The League was founded in New York in 1937, and its annual card resets the game each year, so players across the continent learn the same new hands at the same time. That stops a game passed from one circle of friends to the next from splitting into a hundred local versions.

One card, one wheel

A game handed on by word of mouth tends to pick up house rules and personal habits as it moves between generations. Sit down at a Mah Jongg table or a physical casino wheel, and much of the game is governed by unwritten etiquette – verbal call bets handed down by older players, informal table compromises, and generational betting habits. Software replaces that social latitude with strict standardization. In a game of online roulette, for instance, the wheel geometry, bet timing, and paytables are hardcoded into the code, leaving no room for the local habits or informal dealer calls that shaped physical play for generations. What the software can’t pass along is the room. Live versions of the game, streamed from a studio with a person spinning the wheel and calling the number, bring back a voice and a face. The regulars are harder to stream. A studio table has players but no Thursday night, and none of them knows whose turn it is to bring the coffee.

At a card night, somebody always announced the last round, and the evening ended when the host started folding up the tables and people went looking for their coats. A screen doesn’t do that, so adults who play online for entertainment are better off settling a spending limit and a stopping time before they begin.

What outlasts the game

The summer resorts ran to a calendar as well, and Grossinger’s, which closed in 1986, is the one people still name first. The Forward’s piece on how Jews learned to be American at Grossinger’s, which this paper reprinted, reviews We Met at Grossinger’s, a documentary about the resort’s dining, dancing and shows and the thousands of couples who met there. The review doesn’t mention a single card game, and it doesn’t need to. What people remember about those summers is who they sat with. Ask someone who played in a regular game for years about a particular hand and they’ll usually draw a blank. They’ll know exactly who always turned up late with the rugelach, though, and whose kitchen the game moved to after the old community hall closed. Those are the details the next set of players inherits.

The League’s card is a large part of what keeps Mah Jongg going. It gives every table something new to argue over each year (plenty of groups order their cards together so nobody starts behind), and when next spring’s card arrives, the arguing at community centres in Winnipeg will start well before anyone has learned the new hands.

By Rachel Shteir

September 22, 2026

This story was originally published in the Forward. Click here to get the Forward’s free email newsletters delivered to your inbox.

Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s 1928 Chicago newsroom comedy The Front Page was so famous that when Harry J. Romanoff died in 1970, his New York Times obit referenced it. And in a 1986 review of a revival with John Lithgow as the conniving editor Walter Burns and Richard Thomas as the ruthless reporter Hildy Johnson, Frank Rich asked: “is there anyone who hasn’t seen The Front Page?”

Staged by George S. Kaufman and produced by Jed Harris, the original ran at the Times Square Theater for 276 performances. It has had many lives, including Howard Hawks’ fantastic 1940 screwball comedy, His Girl Friday.  Hawks brilliantly turned the bromance into a he-she love story, casting Cary Grant as Walter Burns and Rosalind Russell as Hildy. He also softened the script so that it passed The Hays Office — the film censorship bureau named for ex-Postmaster General Will H. Hays.

The play’s many admirers include Walter Kerr, another New York Times critic, who, writing about a 1969 revival, memorably described it as ” like a watch that laughed.” David Mamet praised Hecht and MacArthur’s satire in several places, once calling it “arguably the best American play.” Tennessee Williams wrote that it “uncorseted the American theater,” and Kenneth Tynan and Tom Stoppard loved it.

Hecht, who, according to researcher Jesse Tisch in an essay on Medium, did the majority of the writing, died in 1964 and our century seems more ambivalent about the play. Some critics loved the 2016 Broadway version, which Jesse Green, then of New York Magazine, said had been pieced together from several scripts. That production’s all-star cast, including Nathan Lane as Walter Burns and John Lithgow as Hildy did not prevent the late Terry Teachout from calling it “toothless.”

Part of the play’s slide may be related to the demise of legacy journalism. Chicago is down to two newspapers from the seven of the era of The Front Page. And part may be style. The long, crowded scenes lack the propulsive energy of a lot of streaming-influenced drama and the characters lack the tormented interiority many theater audiences have come to expect.

Now,  the first major production in ten years —  by the playwright Jeffrey Hatcher, best known for Compleat Female Stage Beauty, which became a film starring Billy Crudup, and for a 2022 stage adaptation of Dial M For Murder — has opened Northlight Theatre’s inaugural season at their $33 million building in Evanston.

Set in a crummy press room in the Criminal Justice Building in Chicago, The Front Page was the first Broadway show about zany, wisecracking journos and the corrupt politicians they took down. About to quit the paper, get married and move to Buffalo, Hildy Johnson stumbles onto death row inmate Earl Williams’ jailbreak. Walter Burns wrangles Hildy into covering one last scoop.

The play uses many sources, some of which contradict each other. In Chicago, Hecht had both devoured and befriended the Jewish comics of the day. He loved clowns, including The Marx Brothers. The Cocoanuts, the 1924 Marx Brothers’ Broadway madcap vehicle that George S. Kaufman wrote and directed and Irving Berlin wrote music for anticipates certain elements of The Front Page. Set in a resort hotel instead of a newsroom, its crime and con-filled ambiance and fast-talking shyster characters seem like a prequel to Hecht’s drama.

But The Front Page also came out of the imagination of a first-generation American Jew who came of age in the 1910s. Born in 1893 in New York, Hecht moved west with his Russian immigrant parents, settling at age ten in Racine, Wisconsin. He arrived in Chicago when he was 16, became a journalist and hung out with figures in that city’s Literary Renaissance, most of whom were not Jewish.

Hecht had an enduring but tormented friendship with the writer Max Bodenheim, who was raised Jewish. It began with the men collaborating on plays and starting a modernist magazine, The Chicago Literary Times, and descended into each satirizing the other in novels. Even worse, Bodenheim seemed to become Hecht’s evil twin. Like Hecht, Bodenheim was a provocateur. Like Hecht, he moved to New York. But where Hecht flourished, Bodenheim crashed into poverty. Hecht helped him financially. But he couldn’t save him. In 1954, Bodenheim and his third wife were brutally murdered in their apartment.

If Bodenheim was a daredevil, Hecht was a fabricator. He embellished his nonfiction, including chunks of his 1921 and 1922 column for The Chicago Daily News, “1,001 Nights in Chicago.” Hecht’s Chicago peers mostly tolerated his provocations and fabulations. But as he grew famous, they became less tolerant. Writing in 1973, after Hecht’s death, Norman Mailer wrote that he was “never a writer to tell the truth when a concoction could put life in his prose.”

And yet to say that The Front Page is just an embellishment seems wrong. It is based in real life. Jazz Age Chicago had plenty of newspapermen, (some Jewish) who regularly impersonated people with accents, tall tales and disguises to get stories. The city was full of Jewish criminals too, like Ike Bloom, who ran Midnight Frolics Cafe, a nightclub Hecht frequented. But the central characters Hecht and MacArthur used as models for The Front Page were not Jewish. Walter Burns is based on Walter Howell, a famously Machiavellian editor. The death row murderer Earl Williams is based on Tommy O’Connor, a convicted murderer who was never captured after he escaped the county jail in 1921.

Though Hecht didn’t write The Front Page until he left Chicago for New York in 1924, he continued to identify with the city — or at least his version of the city. In Hollywood where he won his first Academy Award for the silent gangster film, Underworld, he wrote dozens of movies including Notorious, Scarface, Twentieth Century, Design for Living and Wuthering Heights and ghostwrote Gone With The Wind, Stage Coach and A Star is Born. “He invented 80% of what is used in Hollywood movies today,” Jean-Luc Godard said in 1968.

Hecht liked to say that “he became a Jew at 39” in the late ’30s, when he took up anti-Hitler activism. He wrote polemics entreating Americans to pay attention to Hitler and pageants, such as one staged in Madison Square Garden, encouraging the country to attack Germany. As the scholar Liesl Olsen has written, he was “a heroic truth-teller who demanded that his country act decisively during modern history’s blackest hour.”

But recent biographers have complicated the idea of Hecht’s Jewishness as a midlife discovery. In the words of one, Adina Hoffman, he was “divided,” the man who grew up hearing Yiddish. And he was, like a lot of Jews of his generation, not observant, instead using journalism and the performing arts to express his Jewishness. In his Chicago days, literature and theater were his response to literary friends (and enemies) characterizing his Jewishness in one way or another. Carl Sandburg affectionately referred to him as the “Jewish Huck Finn.” Ezra Pound (less affectionately) called him “Rabbi Ben Hechtenberg.”

Hecht had to protect himself, either by acting tough, or by submerging himself in characters and fantasies. So he turned to theater. In Chicago, he wrote plays with Sherwood Anderson and then with the founder of The Goodman Theatre, Kenneth Sawyer Goodman. In New York, he briefly hung out with the Algonquin Table set, many of whom dabbled in theater. But it was not a mutual admiration society. Dorothy Parker complained about his “smiling and swaggering savageries” and Alexander Woolcott wrote, “Hecht’s favorite character in literature is the disconcerting little boy who, when the King paraded in the imaginary robe, cried out: ‘But he hasn’t got anything on!’” Even the actor George Jessel, meeting Hecht during a rehearsal of The Front Page, described him as a yokel “wearing a loud red tie and a shirt that might have been used as a stage curtain for a troupe of very gay midgets.”

In The Front Page, Hecht and MacArthur wrote a play that, with its profanity and cynicism towards politicians and journalists, initially attracted the attention of  the police, who sent stenographers to note the supposedly pornographic dialogue. But nothing much came of the outrage except that the play became a hit. Nearly 100 years later, the classic vehicle seems, at first glance anyway, more charming than shocking.

The new production is directed by Northlight Artistic Director BJ Jones, who was an unofficial associate at Skokie’s now-defunct National Jewish Theater in the 1980s and 1990s.

Jones sees The Front Page’s legacy in 20th century Jewish writers, especially ones with a Chicago connection — David Mamet’s scurrilous language, Larry Gelbart’s rat a tat dialogue in M*A*S*H.

Reading The Front Page now you also might get the sense of  a Jewish play manqué: its outsider characters, its energy, its cynicism. Jeffrey Hatcher, who adapted it, says. “It’s Jewish in the same way as you could say about Irving Berlin, ‘there’s nothing Jewish about him except for everything he says.’ You feel it in the razzamatazz of the talk.”

Here are the first lines of the original 1928 script, in which the guys are playing poker:

The Card Players: crack it for a dime….by me…I stay…me too….I’m behind again…I was even a couple of minutes ago… papers…three…two…three to the dealer.

The scene is urban melting pot! Jazz! Vaudeville! As Hatcher puts it: “The play is chock full of Irishmen, Wasps, Presbyterians. But Jews are not there except in the style and verve of the language.” For his part, he names Officer Jacobi, who in the original is “voice from jail yard.” And he adds Abramovitz, an offstage journo.

Hatcher also wisely kept the gender-flipped casting from Howard Hawks’ His Girl Friday, in which star reporter, Hildy Johnson, was played by Rosalind Russell. He whittles down the play from three acts to two and the cast from 23 to 13. And he cleaned up some of the slurs. Like Hildy calling Jacobi “pickle nose” and the word “sissy.”

He did, however, keep “Polack Mike.” “We don’t want to blunt the knife so that it’s a butter knife,” he said.

Still, there is something constricted in The Front Page. The long scenes are sometimes funny, but also cruel, this world where nepotism and corruption rule, violence is king, and an editor and a politician manipulate everyone. If Hecht’s divided Jewishness led to his outsider take on Chicago journalism, his world can also seem hollow.

In the famous last scene, Walter lets Hildy go off to get married and even gives the happy couple his watch. The minute they leave, he calls his henchman to get the police to arrest them. And then he delivers the fabulous last line as if he himself even believes it: “The son of a bitch stole my watch!”

In 1928 the phrase “son of a bitch” shocked audiences. Now it seems quaint. But the vignette made me consider how the play takes people’s selfishness and cruelty for granted. Those in charge are so glib about the lives of others, including those they supposedly love. It barely seems like a comedy anymore; it’s too real.

*

Rachel Shteir, a 2025-6 Guggenheim Fellow, is working on a book about why theater matters. Read full bio →

This story was originally published on the Forward.

By BERNIE BELLAN In May 2023 I wrote a story about Joan Druxman, whom I had just met in person when she was a guest speaker at the Remis Luncheon series that month.

Sadly, Joan passed away on September 5, after a brief illness. My original story received over 4,000 views, so I thought it worth repeating here, to honour the memory of a vivacious and fascinating woman. Here is that story again:

The February 21, 2001 issue of The Jewish Post & News had an article titled “It’s a Comedy Night!”
That article went on to describe an upcoming event in which State of Israel Bonds would be honouring Rabbi Alan Green. Among the comedians to be appearing at the event was to be “Joan Druxman-Jones.”
Now, 22 years later, State of Israel Bonds doesn’t have an office in Winnipeg, Rabbi Green doesn’t live here any more (although he will be returning this weekend as the Shaarey Zedek’s Rabbi in Residence during Shavuot) and, as for Joan Druxman-Jones, well, she is back in Winnipeg – after having left in 1990 – and after having had a tumultuous series of career changes throughout her life –and, after having dropped the Jones in her name and gone back to Joan Druxman.

Joan Druxman was the guest speaker at this year’s kickoff Remis Forum luncheon on Thursday, May 11, at the Gwen Secter Centre.
I had never met Joan prior to that Thursday, although advertisements for her well-known women’s clothing store, “Joan’s Boutique”, were a regular feature in our paper for years. Once she took the podium at the Gwen Secter Centre it was easy to see how Joan had been a successful model for years. She still maintains a shapely figure and, even at 83, Joan is quite an attractive woman. (Is it okay to say that, I wonder? Who knows what’s permissible nowadays to write about a woman – or a man, for that matter, when it comes to physical appearance?)
But, more than anything, what struck me in listening to Joan tell her life story was her ease in speaking, her quick wit, and her self-effacing sense of humour.
As Simone Cohen Scott noted in an email sent out to Remis Forum attendees (and, by the way, anyone can attend a Remis luncheon. Just let the Gwen Secter Centre know you’re coming by the Tuesday of that week’s luncheon. Call 204-339-1701.), I took “voluminous notes” while Joan spoke.
So, here’s my account of the story Joan told: Born in Winnipeg, Joan (whose maiden name was Zelcovich, she said), grew up in Estevan, Saskatchewan, and moved back with her family to Winnipeg when she was 15.
Joan explained why her father decided to move to Winnipeg. He had owned a successful hotel in Estevan, but many of the patrons of that hotel were rough-hewn oil workers from the area around Estevan. “My father wasn’t about to let those oil workers anywhere near his two teenage daughters,” Joan said. (She had a younger sister at the time they moved here.)
But, the summer before the Zelcoviches moved to Winnipeg, they spent part of that summer at Clear Lake.
There were a lot of Jewish girls at Clear Lake, Joan noted, but they snubbed here because of the way she dressed. “They thought I was a hick,” she said.
That fall though, when Joan began attending Kelvin High School, and she was introduced by the teacher to the other students, the other girls couldn’t wait to be her friend, Joan said. This time she was dressed to the nines, she noted – something that has been very important to her ever since, she also observed.
As she noted toward the end of her talk, “I firmly dress the way you want to be treated.”

But from where did get Joan derive her impeccable fashion sense?
“My mother subscribed to the New York Times Magazine. It was the Vogue of the day,” she said.
Sure enough, when she was only 16, Joan got her first job working at the Mirror Room in the Hudson Bay store while she was attending high school.
After attending Kelvin for a couple of years Joan decided to attend the University of Manitoba. (In those days, she explained, you could take Grade 11 at the university.)
As things turned out, however, and as Joan observed, university was not for her.
“I hated it like you can’t imagine,” she said. “When I got 17 in Biology I knew university was not for me.”

So, Joan decided to enroll in the Angus School of Commerce (which was owned by Janice Filmon’s father at the time) where she obtained her diploma in typing and shorthand. “I was a wiz on the Dictaphone,” she noted.
But, she had to find a job after graduating. “I saw an ad for a company called Gunn Garment, which was owned by Harry Silverberg and Dave Kaufman, and which was managed by Max Duboff.”
“I became Max’s secretary and house model,” Joan said. “That’s how I became a model.”
It was during her time at Gunn Garment that Joan was introduced to the man who was to become her husband, Winnipeg Blue Bomber George Druxman.
“Marilyn Trepel called me up and told me someone had seen me at a wedding. Would I like to meet him? He’s one of the Blue Bombers,” Marilyn said to Joan.

As a Bomber wife, Joan was asked to appear on a local television show along with other Bomber wives where they would each be asked to cook a favourite dish.
“I made blintzes,” Joan noted.
As luck would have it, “two guys from Manitoba Sugar saw me and asked me to do a regular cooking show on TV.”
It was while appearing on her own cooking show that an editor of the Winnipeg Tribune asked Joan whether she would like to become food editor of that paper, and shortly thereafter, the fashion editor as well.

The next step in Joan’s career came when she was asked whether she would like to become the fashion coordinator for the Hudson’s Bay Company in Winnipeg, Saskatoon, and Regina, also the manager of the Fashion Room in the Bay.
But, as Joan recalled, “at the time the Bay fashions were all centrally coordinated. I hated them all. I decided to go out on my own.”
Thus began the longest segment of Joan’s varied career: as owner of Joan’s Boutique.
It was no simple matter, however, for a woman to strike out on her own in a business at that time, which was in 1976
Having been divorced from George Druxman (who died in 1999), Joan was mother of three boys at the time: Trevor, Greg, and Adam. Two of the boys were married by then.)
“I wanted to set up in an old house,” she recalled.
“I went to see a bank manager who said to me: ‘I’ll have you know fashion retailing is the riskiest business there is.”
Not one to be discouraged, however, a former classmate of Joan’s from Kelvin, Brian Aronovitch, told her there was a house at 34 Carlton owned by lawyer Ken Houston – who wanted to rent out part of the house.
At the same time Joan was introduced to another bank manager who was supportive of her dream of opening her own boutique.
“I opened Joan’s in 1977,” she observed. “Business just took off. It was bursting at the seams.”
Ever on the eye for another opportunity, it was while out for a walk in the neighbourhood of the Carlton store that Joan said she saw a rooming house for sale at 22 Edmonton.
“It was a tax sale,” Joan noted. And so, in 1979, Joan Druxman opened Joan’s Boutique at her new location on Edmonton, where she was to remain for the next 13 years.
“I gutted it and had clothing and accessories on the first and second floors,” she said, “with a hairdresser on the third floor.”

Ever restless, however, Joan decided to move to Vancouver in 1990.
“I saw things there that weren’t happening in Winnipeg,” she observed, including a very large Japanese population.
Joan opened her first store in Vancouver at the corner of 12th and Granville, but soon she came across a better opportunity at Berard and Granville. She approached a former friend from Winnipeg, Karen Simkin, who had also moved to Vancouver and who had opened a little gift shop.
“I invited Karen to move to that new location with me,” Joan said.
Karen’s husband, Garry Simkin, was fully supportive, and so the two women opened a store that was a combination clothing and gift ware store.
As mentioned though, Joan had taken note of how many Japanese tourists there were in Vancouver. Accordingly, as she explained, “I went to Simon Fraser University and learned how to read and write Japanese” so that she would better ingratiate herself with Japanese customers.
Things were going along well until their landlord told Joan and Karen that he was going to be raising the rent to $250,000 a year. (And remember, this was the 1990s. One can well imagine how exorbitant that amount would have been back then.)

So – another career switch for Joan was in the offing: “I decided I’d like to be an actress,” she observed. At the same time she started doing stand-up comedy (as noted at the beginning of this article.)
Ever eager for new challenges, however, Joan decided to apply for a green card and move to Los Angeles –where she began studying acting while working for Nordstrom’s.
“I also got my California real estate license,” she added.
But this was all before Obamacare, Joan noted. “Medical insurance was costing me $1500 a month.”
Joan decided to move back to Winnipeg where, once again, she opened “a little store.”
In 2020, however, with the onset of the Covid pandemic, Joan found she “couldn’t get stuff from Europe” and, as a result, she had to close her store.
“So, I walked into the cosmetics department of the Bay (Polo Park store) and said, ‘I want to see the Chanel manager.’ “
As luck would have it, that manager happened to need someone at the Chanel perfume counter and Joan was hired on the spot.
Which brings us full circle to where Joan started when she only 16 – working again at the Bay.
“Here I am at the Bay working five days a week – and loving it,” she said. “Without a bank manager, without a landlord, and without the tax man.”

But, as Joan observed, she still dresses to the nines – even though now she takes the bus to work. (It stops right in front of her apartment and drops her off right at work, so why not?)
As she noted though, you can imagine the looks she gets from other passengers who see an immaculately dressed woman getting on their bus every day.
One time, Joan said, her regular bus driver asked her: “Are you a celebrity?”
Joan told him she wasn’t, but one day that bus driver happened to be shopping at the Bay with his wife when he spotted Joan at the Chanel counter and said to his wife: “I know her. She rides my bus.”
That’s Joan Druxman for you – more twists and turns than a Gerry Posner story. Some day she ought to write a book. Hey, there’s an idea for her next career move!
Post script: We were informed that the day after Joan Druxman spoke at the Gwen Secter Centre she was involved in a terrible accident when she was coming out of work at the Bay.. It seems that Joan was caught in the midst of a situation where some young boys had been fleeing the store after having stolen some jeans. One of them ran into Joan, knocking her to the ground – which broke her hip. At last report she had undergone hip replacement surgery and had been released from the hospital.

By DAVID TOPPER When my late wife, Sylvia, and I moved into the house I’m still in, we brought with us not only our furniture and other things from inside the old house, but some outdoor plants and flowers – even a shrub. The shrub, of course, was small: a young mock orange. Sylvia had a thing about mock oranges, so we dug it up and took it with us to the new house. Then there were irises that we inherited from the previous owners of our first house. I can still recall Sylvia doting over those irises when we moved there in 1971. They were very different varieties from those she was familiar with. I liked them, too. I also remember a rose bush. Well, everyone likes roses. Appropriately, it was red. So, the irises, along with the mock orange and the rose bush were transplanted to the new yard. That was in the summer of 1976.

For reasons that I cannot explain, when it came to plants and such, there was a sort of division-of-plant-labor between us. I took care of all the indoor plants and Sylvia did the outdoor ones. This meant that she only worked during the relatively short span from late spring to early fall, since we live in Winnipeg, Canada. Whereas, I looked over the house plants all year long.

Actually, I can explain something. You may have noticed that when speaking of digging up things I use the plural. This was because Sylvia enjoyed physically working in the yard. This digging urge she acquired in the year after High School that she spent working on a Kibbutz in Israel. It was daily hard physical labor in the field: digging, planting, pruning, picking and so forth. Yet she always talked about it lovingly. That was 1960-61 and I saw the blissful look on her face when working in our yard, from 1971 onward.

In time we had a diverse array of plants and flowers. In no particular order, we had lilacs, peonies, hostas, lilies, day-lilies, irises, roses, tulips, lungwort, elephant ears, clematis, rhubarb and the mock orange (which – along with the irises and roses – had grown quite nicely, since the summer of 1976).

All this lasted until the foremost transition in our lives. Early in 2014 Sylvia was diagnosed as being in an early stage of dementia. Over the next six years, as she drifted deeper into her black hole, I gladly obliged taking over the household chores, some of which I had begun already – such as doing most of the cooking. As for the outdoor tasks from spring through summer, that deeply implanted love of gardening was one of the last things to go from her immediate world. Even when she was not too sure who I was, she was glad to work with me in the yard with a shovel in her hands – and a smile on her face.

Sylvia died in the winter of 2020. Come spring, it was just me and the yard.

I don’t remember if it was that first spring or one later, but one day I noticed that the mock orange looked less robust – so I pruned it. That seemed to work for the summer, but the following spring it lost its vigor. More pruning didn’t help. Thus, slowly, over time, it died off and I dug up what was left.

Around the time I was still fiddling with the mock orange, I noticed the rose bush that Sylvia gave lots of love and care was not looking its usual hearty self. I got the fertilizer that she used to try to revive it, and that seemed to work. But the following year, the bush lost its vitality – and nothing I did (extra watering; keeping it dry) worked to impede the track it was on. In time, the rose bush died, too.

“What’s next,” I shouted to our yard.

The following spring the tulips came up as usual, but didn’t look as healthy as they should. These had a special meaning, since we bought the bulbs on a trip to Holland and planted them ourselves. Obviously, I tried everything I could to bring them back – reading all that the Internet had to say about tulips. Needless to say, that was the last summer for the tulips.

“Oh no,” I cried the following spring, when I first saw the irises. They were up, but not looking very well. This was probably the most difficult loss. I don’t know why, but those irises were part of an exceptional bond between us. Sylvia and I and the irises: their singularity symbolized the uniqueness of our relationship.

The irises were the last to go.

As I write this, the rhubarb still comes up, but it’s not as hearty as it used to be. The rest of the plants are doing fine: lilacs, peonies, hostas, lilies, day-lilies, lungwort, elephant ears and clematis. Incidentally, I also have a unique fondness for the clematis, since I bought it and planted it myself many years ago.

I wish to make clear that I’m not putting forth any causal or symbolic or spiritual or mystical meaning to all this, in relation to Sylvia’s demise. Rather, I’m just telling the story of my personal experience with the plants and flowers in our yard. You may read into it whatever you wish.

Now when I walk about my yard, enjoying the remaining plants and flowers amidst the bushes and trees, I not only see and derive pleasure from all that I still have – but I also “see” what is missing: that mock orange, the rose bush, those tulips and the irises.

It also reminds me what I intimately and ultimately miss.

Tags: bonding |caring |coping |loss |sharing |symbolism

David R. Topper writes in Winnipeg, Canada. His work has appeared in Mono, Poetic Sun, Discretionary Love, Poetry Pacific,Academy of theHeart & Mind, Altered Reality Mag. and elsewhere.

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By HENRY SREBRNIK As we enter the fourth year of the “October 7” wars, things in Eastern Europe remain dire. There have been dozens of attacks on Jewish institutions across the region. 

True, there are a few bright spots. Albania’s prime minister is a surprising ally of Israel in a mostly Muslim country. Edi Rama openly defends Israel’s right to protect itself, and condemns Hamas in extremely harsh terms, calling them the “Nazis of the 21st century.” He notes that waves of Jewish refugees were welcomed over the centuries. 

“On the eve of World War II, only about 200 Jews lived in Albania,” he told the Jewish magazine Mishpacha. “After the Holocaust, there were more Jews here than before — about 3,000. We didn’t hand over a single Jew to the Nazis. Seventy-five Albanians are officially recognized as Righteous Among the Nations, but in truth, the entire population mobilized.”

There is also better news from Croatia. Rabbi Pini and Raizy Zaklas moved to the country in 2004 to establish the first Chabad centre on “the land of a thousand islands.” Coming from their native Israel, it took time for them to come to terms with the fears of the Jewish community.

“We spent the first decade just earning their trust,” Raizy explained. “We had to put our grand ambitions aside and choose an individualized approach, fostering relationships through one-on-one meetings at coffee shops. Sometimes we felt disheartened at the slow pace of growth here, and worried we weren’t making progress. But I see in retrospect that we were putting down roots.”

In 2016, the Zaklas purchased a five-story building in the centre of Zagreb. Since then, it has become the spiritual center of Jewish life in the country. It’s a place where hundreds of weddings, bar and bat mitzvahs, and holiday programs take place annually. It’s a place where more than 3,000 Croatian Jewish men, women, and children find connection with their heritage. And it’s a place where thousands of tourists visit each year. 

Less positive is the position of the Czech Jewish community. The Federation of Jewish Communities in the Czech Republic registered a total of 4,694 antisemitic incidents in 2024, compared with 2023, when 4,328 cases were reported. The severity of antisemitic incidents dramatically increased following the events of October 7. 2023. Anti-Jewish hatred, particularly in the form of demonization and delegitimization of Israel, became socially accepted and, according to the Federation, dominated public opinion.

In Greece, a spate of incidents in 2025 included a pro-Palestinian protest that blocked Israelis attempting to disembark from a ship in Syros, an alleged attack against Israeli teens in Rhodes, and an attack on King David Burger, a kosher eatery in Athens. Greek Jewish groups condemned an “anti-Zionist patrol” which took place on the streets of Thessaloniki, 95 years after assault squads targeted Jews in the same city. The left-wing anarchist Rouvikonas group organized the “anti-Zionist patrol” heading toward Mavili Square, which they said “Israeli capital has parasitically infiltrated.” They were joined by members of the groups Permanent Struggle for Class Liberation and the Libertarian Initiative of Thessaloniki.

However, in recent years there has been great improvement in formal Greek-Israeli relations, particularly following the disintegration of Israeli relations with Turkey. In August, Israel and Greece finalized a $3.5 billion deal, called the “Achilles Shield,” providing the Hellenic Republic with a multilayered antimissile system designed to protect the European Union country against aerial attacks from nations such as Iran and Turkey. It is one of the largest defence export deals in the history of the Jewish state.

The two countries “share common strategic interests and face shared regional challenges,” Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz indicated. “At a time when actors with hegemonic ambitions are seeking to expand their influence and undermine stability in the region, Israel and Greece will continue to deepen their defence and strategic cooperation.” 

Hungary too is a bright spot. It has stood virtually alone in defending Israel in the European Union. Budapest has consistently blocked one-sided, anti-Israel statements and stood firm on Israel’s right to defend itself. At the United Nations, where Israel is routinely demonized, Hungary has refused to go along with the mob. And not just on the international stage. At home, Hungary walks the walk.

Hungary is home to the largest Jewish community in Central Europe, with estimates ranging from 80,000 to 100,000 Jews, most of them living in Budapest. The city is one of the only capitals in Europe where Jews can freely wear a yarmulke without being harassed, attend synagogue without metal detectors and celebrate Jewish holidays without police guarding the doors of synagogues. The government has invested millions into preserving Jewish heritage sites, restoring synagogues and funding Holocaust education not just as a formality, but as a national priority.

Poland had the highest Jewish population in Europe prior to the Holocaust and was also the site of the Nazi death camps where most European Jews were murdered. It has therefore always been careful to curb expressions of antisemitism since it became a democratic state in 1989.

But the proportion of Polish citizens who dislike Jews has risen to 40 per cent, according to Poland’s Centre for Public Opinion Research’s 2026 findings. Conducted annually since 1993, the survey asks Poles whether they like or dislike various national and ethnic groups (21 in total). It found that the proportion of people saying they dislike Jews rose eight percentage points, more than for any other group. 

Still, thousands of people converge on the historic Jewish quarter of Krakow every summer to attend the annual Krakow Jewish Festival. The festival was initially launched three-and-a-half decades ago for a non-Jewish audience as a new generation of young Poles has discovered a shared past in their mixed history.

“We seek to reintroduce the Jewish contribution to Polish culture to mainstream Polish society after many decades under Communism, where Jewish issues were banned in the country, and people didn’t know that Jewish contributed so much to our heritage,” Krakow Jewish Festival director Robert Gadek explained. “Here you have a Jewish festival that is being held in the open air, and everyone feels safe.”

The war in Gaza sparked a wave of antisemitism in Romania, which has a poor track record of protecting its Jews. Antisemitism in Romania today is visible in far-right demonstrations, extremist political movements, and hostile rhetoric in parts of the media. “It’s getting worse,” according to Alexandru Muraru, a member of Romania’s parliament and vice-president of its National Liberal Party, who is not Jewish. “In Western Europe, they have big Muslim communities, which generates antisemitism. In Romania, there are only one or two mosques, but our antisemitism has historical roots.” Indeed, it does. In the 1930s, Greater Romania was home to some 800,000 Jews, giving it the world’s fourth-largest Jewish population after the United States, Poland and the Soviet Union.

“Back then, Jews made up an important proportion of Romanian society,” indicated Gilbert Șaim, who is the gabbai, or custodian, of Bucharest’s famous Choral Temple. “Despite widespread discrimination, there were villages, towns, and cities with large Jewish majorities — even villages established by ethnic Jews centuries ago, like Podu Iloaiei.”

Only 20 per cent of Romanians know about the Holocaust or its wartime role under pro-Nazi puppet Ion Antonescu. Most are unaware of their country’s role in the mass murder and deportation of hundreds of thousands of Jews during World War II. Antisemitism is expanding on social media, Facebook, TikTok and Telegram, though less visible in traditional mass media. The COVID pandemic amplified conspiracy dating back to the late 19th century.  Despite a ban on glorification of Nazi heroes, at the end of November 2024, there was a public ceremony to commemorate a fascist leader. 

This past April, the European Parliament lifted the immunity of one of its 33 Romanian members, Diana Sosoaca, the controversial leader of the ultra-nationalist and antisemitic SOS Romania party. Sosoaca, a lawyer, received the honorary Order of the State of for her support of the Palestinian cause. 

Although antisemitic incidents are not too common, Serbia, like most other countries in Eastern Europe, also contends with a strong nationalist streak. Around 1,500 Serbs belong to extremist groups, of which perhaps 120 are active. Serbian Action, a small group of neo-Nazis, occasionally holds rallies and spray-paints antisemitic, anti-immigrant and anti-gay graffiti on public buildings.

Israeli and Serbian officials denounced antisemitic comments made by demonstrators during a clash between Serbian students and police at a protest last April. “Death to Vucic and all the Jews around him,” one protester said in a televised interview, referring to Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic. “Long live Serbia.”

Nemanja Starovic, the Serbian minister of European integration and the chair of Serbia’s delegation to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, called on the protest leaders to “unambiguously condemn these antisemitic incidents and to immediately remove all antisemitic messages and slogans from university premises.”

A cause of uncertainty among Jews in Slovakia is the continuing defence by some traditionalist Slovak Catholic clerics and others of the reputation of Father Jozef Tiso, Slovakia’s most senior perpetrator during the Second World War. Tiso was responsible for extreme anti-Jewish laws and widespread Jewish impoverishment followed by expulsion of most of the country’s Jews to Nazi death camps. Yet there has emerged a whole literature of excuses for him.

As Slovenia takes a hard line against Israel, its tiny Jewish community feels increasingly isolated. Slovenia’s Jews have experienced a pattern of hostility for decades. In June 2024, Slovenia’s parliament voted to recognize a Palestinian state, only one week after Spain, Ireland, and Norway had taken that dramatic step. Half a year later, Slovenian public broadcaster RTV, became the first in Europe to demand Israel’s exclusion from the 2025 Eurovision Song Contest. RTV warned it might boycott future editions of Eurovision if Israel isn’t expelled.

Slovenia banned imports from Jewish settlements in the West Bank, only a week after prohibiting all weapons trade with Israel, the first EU member to do so. It also became the first European Union country to impose a travel ban on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Henry Srebrnik is a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Prince Edward Island.

By H.C. Piloski
PART I — ROOTS
Foreword
The Red Inheritance is a work of fiction built on real histories. The political movements, neighbourhoods, and events depicted here — from Winnipeg’s North End to the Holodomor, the gulag system, and the ideological battles of the twentieth century — are drawn from documented fact. The characters themselves are invented. Their names, relationships, and private lives have been changed.
This story engages with difficult truths: the idealism that drove many to fight fascism, the blindness that led some to excuse Stalinist terror, and the intertwined traumas carried by Jewish and Ukrainian families who fled Europe’s catastrophes. It also reflects the historical record of the Soviet security organs and the diverse individuals who served within them. These realities are presented not to assign collective blame, but to illuminate the moral complexity of an era when ideology often overshadowed humanity.
What follows is fiction. But the shadows it walks through are real.
This story is one thread in a larger tapestry of inherited memory and consequence.

I. The Tape (1934 → 2026)
Rachel Levinson found the box on a humid August afternoon in 2026, tucked behind dusty binders in the archives room of the Jewish Heritage Centre. It was unlabelled except for two faint words:
CP — Private.
Inside lay brittle pamphlets, yellowing papers, and a cassette tape with a fading label:
Labour Temple. 1934.
Her grandfather, David Levinson, born in 1915 to Polish immigrants Sarah and Moshe, had been the youngest of four children — a fact that shaped both his stubbornness and his need to prove himself in the crowded Levinson household. He had been a young Jewish organizer in Winnipeg’s North End, swept up in the Jewish Youth AntiFascist League. He had told her stories of the confrontation at Old Market Square, when Jewish and Ukrainian youth chased the brown shirts out of the square in 1934.
But he had never mentioned a tape.
She slid it into the old player.
A click. A whirr. Then his voice — younger, sharper, filled with conviction.
A faded photograph showed him as he once was: lean, brighteyed, a mediumsized North End boy toughened by winter streets and by the old prewar YMHA — the building Jewish youth used before the Hargrave and Qu’Appelle “Y” existed. That building was long gone now, replaced decades later by the Asper JCC in the south end — another reminder that the world her grandfather moved through had vanished, leaving only photographs and memory.
Her grandfather spoke of fascism rising in Europe, of solidarity, of the Soviet Union as “the only nation standing unflinchingly against tyranny.”
Then another voice mentioned a poet. A furnace. Books burned.
The tape clicked off.
Rachel sat frozen, the silence louder than the recording.

II. The North End (1930s → 1990s)
She drove to the North End the next day, needing to remember before she judged.
Her grandparents’ house on Matheson Avenue still stood — modest, sturdy, with a vegetable garden in the back. She remembered Shabbat dinners: the smell of chicken soup, her Baba Rivka’s laughter, her grandfather’s gentle voice blessing the candles.
The North End had always been a world unto itself:
Ukrainian churches with onion domes catching the prairie sun
Jewish bakeries on Selkirk Avenue selling poppyseed rolls and rye bread
Old synagogues tucked between corner stores
Brick houses, stucco cottages, and woodframe homes built by immigrants who arrived with nothing but hope
It was a neighbourhood shaped by trauma and by the stubborn hope that refuses to die:
Jews fleeing pogroms
Ukrainians fleeing famine
Poles fleeing war
Indigenous families surviving despite everything
Her grandfather’s politics had grown out of this soil — out of fear, out of solidarity, out of the belief that collective action could save people from the horrors they had escaped.
But the tape suggested a darker truth.

III. Her Grandfather’s War (1939–1945)
Rachel dug through old family papers until she found his service records.
David Levinson Royal Winnipeg Rifles Enlisted: 1942 Served in England, Normandy, and the Netherlands Demobilized: February 1946
He had fought fascism directly, not just in rallies but on the battlefield. He returned home a decorated veteran, married Rivka in 1947, and began work as a skilled employee at CP Rail.
He had been everything a family man should be.
And yet he had remained a Communist — not the romantic kind who drifted away after 1956, but the loyal kind, the dogmatic kind, the kind who refused to believe that Khrushchev’s revelations at the 20th Party Congress were anything more than Western propaganda.
A Stalinist.

IV. The Letters Home (1942–1945)
Among the papers Rachel found were copies of letters David had sent home during the war — to his parents, his siblings, and to Rivka, his wifetobe.
They were eloquent, heartfelt, and full of longing.
To Rivka:
“The nights here are long, and the cold seems to seep into the bones. But when I think of you lighting the candles on Friday night, I feel warm again. I carry that light with me.”
To his parents before Normandy:
“I don’t know what tomorrow brings. But I know why I’m here. If we don’t stop them, they will burn the world. I want to come home to Matheson Avenue. I want to sit at your table again.”
To his younger brother:
“Study hard. Live well. Don’t let the world make you bitter.”
Rachel felt her throat tighten. These were not the words of a zealot. They were the words of a young man trying to hold onto hope in a world on fire.

V. Her Father’s Story (1950s → 1978)
Her father, Michael, listened quietly as she explained what she had found.
“I knew he was involved,” he said. “More than involved. Dedicated.”
He admitted he had briefly joined the Young Communist League in the 1970s, swept up in youthful idealism. He had even attended the World Youth Festival in Havana in 1978, a gathering steeped in revolutionary rhetoric.
“But I drifted away,” he said. “Your grandfather never did.”
“He wasn’t perfect,” Michael said, “but he was steady. He worked hard, showed up for people, and carried more than he ever complained about. Whatever his politics were, he was a good father.”
“And he had a quiet sense of humour,” Michael added. “He could make you laugh when you least expected it.”
Then he told her something else — something his father had shared only once.
“During the war,” Michael said, “the men in his unit used to say, ‘Thank God the Red Army is fighting on the Eastern Front, so we don’t have to die.’ He never forgot that.”
It wasn’t ideology. It was survival. The Eastern Front had been a furnace, and the Red Army had walked into it first. For David, that memory fused with politics, becoming part of the reason he believed the Soviet Union had carried the heaviest burden in defeating fascism.
She asked whether he thought David had known about the poet.
Michael hesitated.
“He wasn’t a cruel man. But he believed in the cause. Maybe too much.”

VI. Her Mother’s Silence (1970s → 2026)
Her mother, Elaine, folded laundry as Rachel asked what she knew.
“I wasn’t political,” Elaine said. “Your grandfather knew that. He never pushed it on me.”
She explained that she had gone along with his beliefs because they were simply part of the household — relics of his past, not demands for her future.
“He was stubborn,” she said. “But he wasn’t a bully.”
Rachel believed her. But the poet’s books had burned. And someone had stood nearby.

VII. The Professor (2026)
She met Dr. Samuel Rosenfeld, a historian of Winnipeg’s Jewish left, in his cluttered office at the University of Manitoba. Books were stacked in uneven towers, papers spilled across his desk, and a halffinished cup of coffee sat precariously close to a pile of archival photographs.
He recognized her grandfather’s name immediately.
“A committed man,” he said. “Fiercely loyal. Sometimes too loyal.”
He handed her a folder about a Ukrainian poet who had immigrated to Canada, published a slim volume of verse, and then — in a burst of misguided hope — returned to the Soviet Union in 1932.
He disappeared into the gulag.
His books were burned in the Labour Temple furnace by local Stalinists.
Mykhailo Horodetskyi (1905–1933?)
Dr. Rosenfeld recommended books: Let History Judge by Roy Medvedev; The Strangest Dream by Merrily Weisbord; The Harvest of Sorrow by Robert Conquest; Red Famine by Anne Applebaum; The Forsaken by Tim Tzouliadis; How People Live in Soviet Russia (1932 in Yiddish, English translation 2020) by Mendel Osherowich.
“That last one,” he said, “was written by a Jewish journalist from New York who visited Ukraine during the famine. It was ignored for decades. Your grandfather probably never read it.”
Rachel felt a quiet ache. Her grandfather had lived in a world where certain truths were simply not allowed to enter.

VIII. The Prague Spring (1968)
As Rachel continued reading, she found references to another moment her grandfather had never spoken about: the Prague Spring of 1968.
Czechoslovakia had tried to build “socialism with a human face,” loosening censorship, expanding freedoms, allowing people to breathe again. And the Soviet Union crushed it under tank treads.
Her grandfather had been in his mid50s — old enough to understand, young enough to choose.
Had he defended the invasion? Had he doubted for the first time? Had he stayed silent?
The Prague Spring was a fracture point for many Western Communists.
But not for him.
His loyalty endured.

IX. Her Friend from Ukraine (2026)
Her friend Oksana Melnyk, a refugee who had fled Russia’s genocidal war against Ukraine, listened carefully as Rachel told her everything.
“My grandparents fled Ukraine during the Holodomor,” Oksana said. “My grandfather saw the Bolsheviks murder his parents in their village.”
Rachel felt her breath catch.
“They walked for days,” Oksana continued. “They buried their dead in frozen ground. They survived because they refused to die.”
She told Rachel about the missile strikes, the mass graves, the deported children — the new war of erasure.
“Russia is trying again,” she said.
Rachel realized her investigation was no longer just about her grandfather. It was about two histories colliding — but not equivalent histories.
David had fought fascists abroad, returned home, married, worked, raised children, tended a garden, blessed candles, and lived a long life in a free and democratic country.
Oksana’s grandfather had survived a stateengineered famine and witnessed murder.
The moral terrain was uneven, and she needed to tread carefully.

X. The Poet’s Poem (1932 → 2026)
Oksana translated one of Mykhailo Horodetskyi’s surviving poems — smuggled out of Ukraine before he disappeared.
“Harvest Without End” Translated by Oksana Melnyk
We cut the grain with blistered hands, but the fields do not forgive. Each stalk remembers those who fell, each seed refuses to live.
The earth is full of quiet bones, the sky of unsaid names. We gather what the land still gives, and carry sorrow like a flame.
Yet even in the darkest dust, we plant because we must. For harvest comes to those who wait, and hope grows from the rust.
Rachel imagined the book burning in the furnace, the pages curling, the words disappearing into smoke.
She imagined her grandfather standing nearby.

XI. Two Funerals (1998 & 2011)
She remembered her grandfather’s funeral in 2000 — the cold wind, the Hebrew prayers, the earth falling onto the coffin.
She remembered her Baba Rivka’s funeral in 2011 — the thawing spring air, the gentle mourning.
Two graves. Two lives. Two histories.
And now a third history — Oksana’s — had entered her own.

XII. The Decision (2026)
Rachel sat at her desk, opened her laptop, and began to write.
Not to condemn. Not to absolve. But to understand.
Her grandfather had fought fascists. Oksana’s grandparents had fled Communists. Both had suffered. Both had survived. Both had believed they were fighting for a future.
She would tell all of it.
The heroism. The blindness. The love. The silence. The contradictions. The pain carried across continents and generations.
She owed that to her grandfather. She owed that to Oksana. She owed that to the truth.

PART II — THE SHADOWS
XIII. The Embassy Rug (Late 1950s → Early 1960s)
There was another story — whispered, half forgotten — that Rachel could not ignore.
In the late 1950s or early 1960s, senior leaders of the Communist Party of Canada were invited to the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa. They were presented with a customwoven rug, a gesture of fraternal solidarity.
Pinned inside the rug, hidden beneath the fabric, were several thousand dollars in mixed denominations.
No receipts. No explanations. Just quiet loyalty.
It wasn’t a purge. It wasn’t a gulag. But it was a reminder: ideology had its networks, its incentives, its subtle pressures.
Her grandfather had lived in that world. He had trusted it. He had defended it.
And yet he had also blessed Shabbat candles, tended a garden, and carried her on his shoulders when she was small.
Contradictions. Everywhere.

XIV. The MP Who Spied (1940s → 1950s)
Rachel found another thread woven through her grandfather’s world: Fred Rose, Canada’s only Communist Member of Parliament.
Rose had been elected in 1943 on a wave of wartime goodwill — a Jewish labour activist who spoke passionately about workers’ rights and antifascism. But after the war, the truth emerged: Rose had been an agent of Soviet intelligence, passing information to the NKVD.
He was arrested in 1946, convicted, and eventually deported.
Her grandfather had never mentioned him.
Rachel realized that the Party David belonged to was not just a political movement. It was part of a global network — one that demanded loyalty, silence, and sometimes complicity.
The rug in Ottawa had not been an anomaly. It had been a symbol.

XV. The Jewish People’s Cultural League (1930s → 2026)
A week later, Rachel visited a modest community centre in the North End — home to the Jewish People’s Cultural League, a secular leftwing Jewish organization that had once been a hub of Yiddish culture, labour activism, and socialist politics.
The room smelled of old books and percolated coffee. Posters of Yiddish poets lined the walls. A faded banner read:
JUSTICE • PEACE • CULTURE
An elderly volunteer explained that the League had run choirs, libraries, lectures, and children’s programs. They had fought fascism. They had defended civil rights. They had also — sometimes reluctantly, sometimes fervently — defended the Soviet Union long after its crimes were known.
Rachel listened, thinking of the poet’s burned book.
The volunteer showed her a photograph from the 1940s: a crowd gathered for a League event, her grandfather somewhere among them, young and earnest.
“These were good people,” the volunteer said softly. “But they were caught in something bigger than themselves.”
Rachel felt the truth of it. Ideology had shaped communities as much as individuals. And her grandfather had lived at the centre of that world.

XVI. The Councillor’s Shadow (1940s → 1986)
Later that night, Rachel reread the article about Joe Zuken. She realized he was the perfect embodiment of the contradiction she was trying to understand.
A Communist and lawyer by training, he had fought for the poor first as a member of the Winnipeg School Board, and later as a longtime City Councillor. He even ran for mayor one year — a campaign that drew support from a wide range of leftists and other progressives, generating headlines across Canada and even in The New York Times.
He was an impassioned orator — sharp, articulate, and unafraid to confront injustice headon. A Marxist who defended civil liberties. A man who believed in the Soviet project but also challenged inequity at home.
Her grandfather had admired him. She found a note in one of David’s old journals:
“Zuken speaks truth even when it costs him.”
Rachel wondered whether her grandfather had seen in Zuken the version of Communism — really democratic socialism, much like that practiced by the governing New Democratic Party — that he wished were real: humane, principled, uncorrupted.
But history had not been kind to such hopes.

XVII. Sontag’s Reckoning (1982 → 2026)
Rachel reread Susan Sontag’s famous 1982 speech at Town Hall in Manhattan — the night she stunned a room full of American leftists by declaring:
“Communism is fascism with a human face.”
The audience had gasped. Some walked out. Others shouted. But Sontag didn’t retreat. She insisted that moral clarity required naming the crimes of Stalinism without euphemism, without nostalgia, without excuses.
Rachel wondered how her grandfather had reacted when he heard about it. Had he dismissed Sontag as a traitor to the cause? Had he ignored it? Had he felt a flicker of doubt?
She would never know.
But she understood something now: the moral rupture Sontag described was not abstract. It lived inside families like hers — in the gap between David’s idealism and the realities he refused to see.

XVIII. The Conversation (2026)
She met Oksana at a café on Corydon Avenue. They sat by the window, watching people pass by.
Rachel told her everything — the tape, the poet, the furnace, the rug, the League, Zuken, and Sontag’s Manhattan reckoning.
Oksana listened quietly.
“My grandfather saw the Bolsheviks murder his parents,” she said. “He never forgave. He never forgot.”
Rachel nodded.
“My grandfather fought fascists. He believed he was saving the world.”
They sat in silence, two women carrying two histories — different in scale, different in suffering, but both shaped by the same century’s storms.
Finally, Oksana said:
“Maybe your grandfather wasn’t wrong about the fight. Maybe he was wrong about the system.”
Rachel felt tears rise.
“Maybe,” she whispered.
They sat for a long moment, the café noise fading into a soft blur around them. Outside, a couple walked a dog. A bus hissed at the curb. Life went on — ordinary, unthreatened, free.
Rachel thought of her grandfather’s life: the house on Matheson Avenue, the garden he tended, the letters he wrote home from Europe, the steady job at CP Rail, the Shabbat candles he blessed with a gentle hand. He had lived in a country where he could argue, vote, complain, hope. His convictions had shaped him, but they had not destroyed him.
Oksana’s grandfather had lived in a world where hope itself was dangerous.
Rachel finally said, “He lived a good life, Oksana. A safe life. He came home from the war, married my grandmother, raised children, worked hard, grew tomatoes, read the Free Press, and believed he was part of something noble. He didn’t suffer the way your grandfather did. Not even close.”
Oksana nodded, her eyes softening. “I know. And that’s why this matters. Your grandfather had the luxury of believing. Mine had the burden of surviving.”
Rachel exhaled, feeling something settle inside her — not peace, but clarity.
“I’m not writing this to judge him,” she said. “I’m writing it because I finally understand the scale of the world he lived in… and the world your grandfather survived.”
Oksana reached across the table and squeezed her hand.
“That’s all any of us can do,” she said. “Tell the truth. Even when it’s complicated.”
Rachel looked out the window again. The lateafternoon light had shifted, turning the street a muted gold. Two histories — one sheltered, one scarred — had met in that small café on Corydon Avenue.
And for the first time, she felt she could carry both.

H.C. Piloski is a Winnipeg writer who works quietly at the edges of memory and history. His fiction often begins in archives and ends in the private places families rarely speak about.

(Posted Sept. 28) Caution.  Caution.  A very long muse ahead….
 
So Prime Minister Netanyahu made his fifteenth address at the United Nations General Assembly.  I get excited with every speech.  Preparing some lightly buttered popcorn and comfortably settling in front of the T.V. for some high-stakes geopolitical posturing.  And this one didn’t miss the mark and the high bar Netanyahu sets for himself.
 
Liked when he referred to our ‘friends’ leaving the hall before he spoke.  Asking.  And smirking.  At the beginning of his speech.  If there are any other “moral cowards” who would like to leave.  He could have said much worse. 
 
Liked his strong defense against the acrimonious, hostile, and simply incorrect accusation of genocide.  Insisting, with examples, of Israel being guilty of the opposite.  Supplying a million polio vaccinations.  Distributing two million tons of food.  Providing warnings of pending attacks -leaflets, cellphone calls, ‘knocks on the roof’ (an IDF tactic of firing non-lethal projectiles towards roof tops as warning to noncombatants to evacuate before a pending airstrike)- in civilian areas where Hamas is inevitably hiding.  Netanyahu also referenced Colonel John Spencer, head of Urban Warfare studies at West Point and the preeminent expert on, well, urban warfare.   Who clearly defends Israel as having done more to prevent civilian casualties in war than any other military in history.  That’s quite a claim!  So yes.  Israel can actually be guilty of ediconeg – the opposite of genocide.
 
Didn’t like Netanyahu’s Ben-Gviresque defense of violent West Bank settlers.  Or is it  Judea & Samaria.  I admittedly struggle in geographically defining the area, I digress.  And didn’t like him referring to these settlers as “juvenile delinquents”.  They are much more than that!  If not terrorists, they should at least be called -and treated- as violent criminals.  I admittedly struggle with finding the appropriate label, again digressing.  Overall, this struck me as pandering to his far-right electorate.  Standing before the green marble wall of the UN podium…hmmm, not the most appropriate venue for local electioneering.   
 
Didn’t like his beeper reference.  While brilliant, the pager attack in Lebanon happened in Sept 2024.  Was so taken aback by this reference that I fact checked the date between mouthfuls of popcorn.  And Israel already took credit for this publicly and at several international forums.  Just seemed a bit dated, forced and out of place. 
 
Liked the swipe at our ‘friend’ Mamdani.  On the podium of the U.N. in N.Y.   No less!
 
Liked his call for Jews around the world to stand tall.  “Raise your head high.  Be proud.  Be confident.  Don’t be intimidated.”  He admonished.  Okay, confession time.  I will not speak Hebrew with the wife when travelling overseas.  Am a bit scared and maybe need to stand a bit taller.  I digress.
 
Liked Netanyahu’s callout to the Iranian people.  Declaring that “The power of the people will overcome the people in power.”  Although he didn’t have to provide a public service announcement for Elon Musk’s Starlink, waving a Starlink device at the podium. 
 
Didn’t like, as pointed out by the Jerusalem Post, that there was no complementary vision to his fiery, hardline and somewhat Sparta-like rhetoric.  No mention of a more conciliatory, Athenia-like vision for the day after.  Emphasizing Israel’s desire for peace and what it can and has offered the world.   
 
Loved the overall theme.  That Israel will survive.  And thrive.  Because, as he exclaimed several times, “We have no other choice!”  This was based on a reference in his address to his older brother Yonathan Netanayhu who led the rescue at Entebbe in 1976 and was the only Israeli casualty.  Netanyahu even thanked the Uganda government for recently erecting a statue dedicated to his brother.  Thought this a nice, personal touch.
 
Loved Netanyahu’s passion.  His fiery indignation echoing throughout his almost forty-minute speech.  His fury at the goldarn outrageous, bigoted, noxious branding of Israel as ‘bad’ by much of the world’s useful idiots.  Although should have channeled some of that ire to a more conciliatory day after vision.
 
Anyway.  As for the United Nations.  That bastion of partiality and moral cowardice.  Think it should be renamed the United Naars.  Again I digress.  

(Posted Sept. 25) Looping back to an August 9 muse about my visit to Jerusalem’s Basimta Café and its dispute with the neighborhood ultra-orthodox for opening on Shabbat.  Which I felt was a bit of a storm in a teacup as there wasn’t much protest action when I visited.  But kerfuffles nonetheless.  Unfortunately the café decided against remaining open on Shabbat.  According to the café manager “…it will return to what it was intended to be: a calm, pleasant and open place for coffee, culture and dialogue.”   As it turns out, the manager is also CEO of Jews for Jesus.  Which is fine by me.  Live and let live.  But just wondering if this was also reason for the café brouhaha.  As there are many other Jerusalem cafes open on Shabbat which the ultra-orthodox do not protest against.  Not that I want to give anyone ideas.  Just sayin’.

(Ed. note: Just to put Bruce’s latest musing in context, here again is what he wrote on August 9): August 8, 2026)

Outside Basimta Café in Central Jerusalem.  Love the red shirt against a tiny sea of black.  Not sure I am shrugging because of the ultra-orthodox uproar over a Jerusalem café operating on Shabbat or the lack of an ultra-orthodox uproar over a Jerusalem café operating on Shabbat.  For the last six weeks Israeli headlines shouted about the cafe chaos.  With the ultra-religious blocking entrances and storming the café.  While shouting ‘Shabbos!  Shabbos!’   Upsetting the secular amongst us just wanting to enjoy our Saturday iced matchas.  So the wife and I thought we would check it out.  And.  Yes.  Buy something to support the business.  Uproar.  Not.  Blocked entrances.  Not.  Storming the café.  Not.  Albeit there were police barriers separating the devout protesters from the coffee drinkers.  The protesters being just a few dozen black clad, pious Jews.  Mostly teenagers.   And yes.  Shouting ‘Shabbos!  Shabbos!’  Certainly underwhelming in its reported mayhem.  Reminds me of the famous saying misattributed to Mark Twain – “If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed.  If you do, you’re misinformed.”  But I did enjoy my iced matcha.

(Posted Sept. 22) Admire him or despise him. Love him or hate him. Commend him or vilify him. Praise him or criticize him. Respect him or disdain him. Believe him or doubt him. Vote for him or not. However you perceive him. And whether you support him. Wishing Prime Minister Netanyahu a successful visit to New York and the U.N. And that we won’t have to send him a cake with a hacksaw baked inside. Mamdani… stand down!

(Posted Sept. 18) Just wonderin’.  When a tree falls in a forest and no one’s there to hear it, does it make a sound?   And if Iran says it’s not enriching uranium and no one’s there to verify it, do they develop fissile material?

Now Iran just obtained a seat on the General Committee of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s General Conference – how crazy is that.  Like letting the cat guard the milk.

(Posted Sept. 15) Apparently some superheroes are against us.  But not really.  Whewww!!!   Fortunately it’s just the progressive actors who play them in movies.  Such as Benedict Cumberbatch (Dr. Strange) and Mark Ruffalo (the Hulk) as well as other minor actors not worth mentioning.  What are these misinformed thespians aligning themselves with.  Not sure they really know.  Well.  It’s with The Freedom for Marwan campaign, which pushes for the release of convicted, arch-terrorist mastermind Marwan Barghouti.  Convicted in 2004 and sentenced to five life sentences plus 40 years for orchestrating various heinous shooting sprees in Israel during the Second Intifada (2000-2005).  Killing and wounding too many innocent Israeli civilians including a Greek Orthodox monk outside Jerusalem.  As a comic book fan, and closet Batman and Aquaman (when I swim), it saddens me that these guardians of the universe can be associated with defending evil.  But then I remind myself it’s only the actors -what do they know anyway- and not really the superheroes. Unlike our own Gal Gadot (Wonder Woman), Natalie Portman (the Mighty Thor), Shira Haas (Sabra) and Liev Schreiber (Sabretooth).  All firmly on the side of good.

(Posted Sept 10) Honey cakes.  Honey cakes.  Honey cakes.  It’s that time of year.  Yummy!  Here comes Rosh HaShana 5787.  And its…. You guessed it.  Honey cake season.  That light brown loaf our baba used to make.  Starting a few weeks before Rosh HaShana and extending through Yom Kippur – a first bite to break the fast and usher in a sweet year- honey cakes are found throughout the country.  The familiar sight of the ready-made, pre-packaged, ‘assembly-line’ honey cakes wrapped in cheap cellophane found in Grocery stores.  The freshly baked honey cakes adorning window displays at local bakeries.  The exorbitantly priced, gourmet honey cake desserts offered at fancy Tel Aviv restaurants.  And of course, honey cakes festooning the festive, colorful, Rosh Hashana dinner tables across Israel.  I bake my own honey cake which is pretty good.  My wife and kids would beg to differ.  But these slightly glazed honey cakes -of my own culinary, shtetl inspired creation- are heartedly enjoyed by me as I gain several honey cake induced pounds.  Shana tova!

(Posted Sept. 8) Hoarding.  A combination of my own little wartime PTSD and some recent headlines about Iran trying to coordinate a multifront attack (is that capability still there?!) and October 7 like rumblings from the West Bank (or Judea & Samaria, depending if you wear a kippa and if its knitted and if it tilts to this side or that side -that’s a shtetl insider joke).  I digress and Yikes!  And we just had a nation-wide drill of the IDF’s top-level headquarters preparedness for such scenarios.  Double Yikes!  So ya.  I’m always checking and rechecking that we have way more than enough of some things.  The thought of entering another prolonged war and some stuff no longer available, even for a short time, scares the bejeebers out of me.   Just writing about it triggers the ‘go and buy’ dopamine hit.  Medications.  Toilet paper.  Bottled water.  Canned goods.  Also worried about the country running out of bullets.  But I can’t hoard those.

(Posted Sept. 5) An open letter to the zany and zealous mouthpieces of those delightful, anti-Israel protests held regularly in Toronto.  In the heavily Jewish Bathurst & Sheppard area no less.  Fear and harassment in the community?  Not by the hairs of our chinny chin chins.

Dear Friends.  

Are you serious.  

Sincerely,

Bruce Brown, a Zionist who does not rape children.  Who does not murder children.  Who does not eat children.  And, get this, who lives in Israel.

(Ed. note: To better understand what Bruce is talking about, go to this story on our website: Police open hate-crime investigation)

(Posted Sept. 1) Can you be more of an international embarrassment and liability?  Yes talking about Israeli’s antagonist extraordinaire and National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir. 

Declaring that Israel should kill ’30-40 Gazans a day’.  Seriously?!?!  His actual statement may have been more refined and qualified.  But it doesn’t really make a difference.  That’s the takeaway.  Like whose side is he on anyway.  Talk about giving our detractors ammunition to delegitimize our little shtetl.  Hello?!?! 

And a few days later.  Showing off in front of a gallows site under construction at a high security prison.  Seriously?!?!  The death penalty for terrorists.  Right or not – I think the former.  But like can you give us reason to be compared to an extremist state.  That’s the takeaway.  Like whose side is he on anyway.  Talk about giving our detractors ammunition to delegitimize our little shtetl.  Hello?!?! 

Serenity now!

(Posted August 28) Kites.  Color.  Childhood.  Hamas and friends should watch Mary Poppins with the final kite flying scene.  Remember that song, Let’s Go Fly A Kite.  Ya, I know.  Somewhat ethnocentric.  But still….  I have fond memories of flying kites with my kids.  Down the Mediterranean shoreline in Tel Aviv.  At the Ness Tziona kite flying festival. Along the green grounds of the Weizmann Institute.  Laughing and running.  Looking to the sky with awe.  Multi-shades and fancy.  Kites.

With your fist ‘olding tight
To the string of your kite

…oh, oh, oh!

Lets go fly a kite

Kites.  Fun.  Laughter.  Innocence.

Kites.  Not an instrument of war.

(Posted August 25) How principled can you be!  Ireland -one of the most anti-Israel and foggiest countries in the EU- insisted that its government’s new, 60$M executive jet NOT be equipped with Elbit’s FalconEye navigation system, which helps pilots navigate in fog -how ironic- and other difficult weather conditions.  Without this unique system the plane must be diverted to alternative airports.  This a part of the government’s official boycott of Israeli goods. So good luck to Prime Minister Michael Martin in landing his aircraft in Dublin.  

And despite some negative sentiment towards everything Israel, Elbit achieved over 32$B in backorders with Europe driving much of its export growth.  On a more personal muse.  The morning after Iran’s first attack on Israel (April 13 2024), I woke up not with fear and panic.  Well.  Okay.  Some of that.  But also great excitement regarding an investment opportunity which developed overnight.  Actually it was the wife’s suggestion.  After Israel successfully intercepted over three hundred missiles and drones – showcasing the strength of Israel’s defense industry- my wife had a eureka moment.  What better public relations for Israel’s defense industry.  Let’s buy stock in Elbit, a key player in that ecosystem.  We did.  And about eighteen months later we cashed in.  With about 150% profit.  This is not an endorsement to buy… blah, blah, blah….

Again.  Good luck to Prime Minister Martin.

(Posted August 21) Sometimes musings are terribly sad.  But should be shared.

Happy belated birthday beautiful Ariel.  Turned seven on August 5^th.  Thought about him and his younger brother Kfir and mother Shiri.  All murdered by Hamas shortly after their unbelievable and surreal abduction on Oct 7 2023.  

As I was driving home today.  “I Thank You Child” by Zakk Wylde shuffled onto my Spotify.  Always kills me, this song.  It was played by Yarden, the father who himself was held hostage, at the funeral of his family.  For Ariel and Kfir.  The lyrics chilling.  The frequent drum rolls haunting.

It was you who made living all worth the while

Oh, I thank you, my child

Comfort in your eyes 

For the warmth inside your smile

Faith’s done gone astray

It was you who made living all the while

All my fears repressed

Oh lovin’ you child it’s the best

This song.  Written almost thirty years ago.  Finds its devastating meaning today.  With the Bibas family tragedy.

How.

Listen to the song here:

(Posted August 18, 2026) And the beat goes on in the strait.  A bit quieter lately although may be heating up again with the 60day ‘ceasefire’ officially expired.  And while Iran occasionally lashed out over the last two months, they did not attack Israel.  How do you spell deterrence.  According to my Yiddisha mama, its spelled ‘Pftt.  Pftt.  Pftt‘. 

(August 14, 2026) Despite three years of varying degrees of warfare.  Moody’s biannual report of the Israeli economy was quite positive.  Basically, the report saw no pressures on Israel’s credit rating.  While the macro data remains strong, Israel still faces a complex geopolitical situation further complicated by upcoming elections (we pondered about how crazy that is in an earlier muse).  And Israeli’s inflation rate for the first half of 2026 fell to a historic five year low of 1.2% (vs Canada’s 2.6%).   As for my own pocketbook.  Haven’t had an infamous Israeli bank overdraft in years.  So all is fine. 

If that’s not enough economic voodoo talk for one musing.  According to one famous barometer.  Israel moved to second place in the Economist’s Big Mac Index.  Introduced in 1986, this tasty indicator compares the purchasing power parity across countries by measuring the price of a McDonald’s Big Mac -which most can relate to- against the benchmark U.S. burger.  So while a Big Mac in the U.S. costs $6.22.  In Israel it costs $7.67, the second most expensive place to buy the hamburger in the world,  Switzerland being the most pricey at a whopping (no reference to Wendy’s) $9.04.  While the cheapest Big Mac can be enjoyed in Indonesia at only $2.38.  Canada ranked 22^nd of the fifty-four countries considered, at $5.85.  Parity.  Smarity.  I’m going for my Big Mac fix.  Just after I finish writing this muse….

(August 11, 2026) Bravo Boy George.  We certainly will dance again!  And what better way than with his new reggae tune.  Now Boy George is dealing with a hostile backlash against his just stand for Israel.  Having to withdraw from London’s East End production of Jesus Christ Superstar where he was going to play – guess it.  King Herod.  Never a big Culture Club fan, but I am anyway -as a sign of support- going to download his greatest hits to my Spotify library.  And hoping to have a chance to buy a concert ticket should Boy George perform in Israel.  Kind of reminds me of Bob Dylan’s 1983 song Neighborhood Bully.  Also in defense of Israel.  I’m going to download that song as well.  Although don’t think he was hounded the way Boy George is now.  Sign of the times I guess.

+++++

Coming clean.  I sometimes find myself chanting, to no one in particular, that snappy little ditty ‘from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.’  Now why can’t we come up with something as catchy. With such an impressive gene pool of great Jewish songwriters. George Gershwin. Irving Berlin.  Burt Bacharach.  Carole King.  Neil Diamond.  Leanard Choen.  Paul Simon.  Gene Simmons, Amy Winehouse.  Bob Dylan.  And yes, even the Buddhist Boy George.  And still… gurnish!  No wonder we’re losing the global PR battle

(August 8, 2026) Outside Basimta Café in Central Jerusalem.  Love the red shirt against a tiny sea of black.  Not sure I am shrugging because of the ultra-orthodox uproar over a Jerusalem café operating on Shabbat or the lack of an ultra-orthodox uproar over a Jerusalem café operating on Shabbat.  For the last six weeks Israeli headlines shouted about the cafe chaos.  With the ultra-religious blocking entrances and storming the café.  While shouting ‘Shabbos!  Shabbos!’   Upsetting the secular amongst us just wanting to enjoy our Saturday iced matchas.  So the wife and I thought we would check it out.  And.  Yes.  Buy something to support the business.  Uproar.  Not.  Blocked entrances.  Not.  Storming the café.  Not.  Albeit there were police barriers separating the devout protesters from the coffee drinkers.  The protesters being just a few dozen black clad, pious Jews.  Mostly teenagers.   And yes.  Shouting ‘Shabbos!  Shabbos!’  Certainly underwhelming in its reported mayhem.  Reminds me of the famous saying misattributed to Mark Twain – “If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed.  If you do, you’re misinformed.”  But I did enjoy my iced matcha.

(August 6, 2026) Here we go again.  Another round of forever negotiations.  As someone who negotiates for a living.  The way things are going in the straits.  If I had to recommend a book on the subject to a new hire.  Between The Art of the Deal, A Presidential Edition by Donald J. Trump or The Real Art of the Deal by the Mullahs of Iran with a special forward by the IRGC. Well.  I would choose the latter.

(August 3) Bravo Yoav Segalovitz, Liberal Yesh Atid MK and Monsour Abbas, United Arab Ra’am MK and party head.  For breaking a glass ceiling where a Jewish lawmaker joins an Arab political party.  No less a political earthquake in my little shtetl.  Which can significantly impact coalition block arithmetic and posturing and strategy in the upcoming elections.  Now Ra’am can be considered a legitimate ‘Zionist’ partner when forming coalition blocks and potentially pushing the ‘center left/right’ party over the 60 seat majority threshold.  In our crazy parliamentary democracy defined by a multi-party (about fourteen!!), proportional representation system.  To paraphrase Winston Churchill, Israel’s proportional representation model of governance is the best parliamentary democracy system except for all other forms of working democracies.  Stay tuned for more amateurish political musings as we move towards Israel’s 26^th national election – five of them held since 2019. 

(August 1) Although both sides say they are open to diplomacy.  Neither really trusts the other.  And American military action, or its threat, continues.  I read headlines in the middle of the night -it’s a nervous habit lately– that the Dynamic Duo of Trump and Netanyahu may again strike in unison.  Possibly this weekend.  Yikes!  Prompting me, at 2:30 AM, to dash around the house stocking my safe room.  Bottled water.  Canned food.  Medicines. Documents. The beat goes on….

If it’s crazy here.  It’s insane in Italy.  With a recent online ‘Jew Hunt’ in the Milan area.  Before being removed, the digital forms urged reportings of Israelis and Italian Jews staying in local hotels.  The infamous Global Sumud Movement -yes, the one coordinating ‘peace and humanitarian’ flotillas to Gaza- was somehow connected.  Although they deny involvement?!  This deranged decree was looking to identify Zionist tourism and Zionist neo-colonization in Italy.  I’ll stick with stocking the saferoom.

Then there’s New York Mayor Mamdani, a Global Sumud Movement supporter, threatening to arrest Prime Minister Netanyahu if he comes to New York.   But since discovered he has no legal right for such a grandstanding, antisemitic, anti-Israel, anti-Western, anti-democratic antic.  Maybe Mandami should be arrested!  Or at least impeached.  For being a grandstanding, antisemitic, anti-Israel, anti-Western, anti-democratic mayor.

Here’s a post Bruce sent us Friday, July 31:
WARTIME MUSINGS

Should credible threats against FLOTUS and ‘FSOTUS’ (first son..) not be justification to attack first.

As for yesterday’s summit. Netanyahu really can’t win. Explainer. If Trump now attacks without victory its ’cause of Netanyahu. If Trump now attacks with victory its ’cause of Trump. And, in Israel, if Trump doesn’t attack -victory or not- Netanyahu failed in his eighth meeting with Trump. And if Trump does attack -victory or not- half the country will vilify Bibi anyway. Missing a permutation?

Ya. I know. Kinda’ need a definition of victory for that musing to work.
And here in my little shtetle. We go to sleep unsure if there will be a code red in the middle of the night. And if not. We wake up thinking it will be tonight. How do you define stress?

Seemed like an appropriate way to end this musing.

Bruce Brown is a former Winnipegger who made aliyah to Israel over 35 years ago. Bruce first began writing for us – in his own inimitable style, in 2012, during what was known as “Operation Pillar of Defense.” His occasional musings on aspects of life in Israel that were far from what you’d typically read in other reports from Israel were hugely popular – both in the print Jewish Post & News and on this website.
We’re now glad to report that Bruce is back writing for us – this time on a regular basis. We will post Bruce’s reports as they arrive – with the date of each post at the beginning of that post.
Here’s some information about Bruce – and awards he’s received for his writing:

Bruce Brown.  Canadian born.  Now living in Israel (for a long time).  Bruce works in Israel’s hi-tech sector by day and, in spurts, is a somewhat inspired writer by night.  He received the American Jewish Press Association’s award for writing excellence in 2019 and 2025.  And wrote the1998 satire, “An Israeli is….”.   Bruce’s visuals are AI-assisted and created with ChatGPT under his inimitable visual concept and creative direction.  Bruce’s musings are political, social, economic and personal.  With lots of biting, contrarian, sardonic, irreverent and mischievous insights.

An NBA defender who meets a ball handler near the opposite baseline is trying to interfere with the possession before the offense gets organized. The immediate reward need not be a steal. Making a guard change direction, protect the ball, or find another receiver can interrupt the route into a play. But pressure has several possible results, and slowing that first journey does not necessarily slow the whole game.

In Logan Murdock’s November 2025 report on full-court defense, Phoenix Suns guard Jordan Goodwin described his aim: “Try to make them take at least six seconds off the clock.” That was his target, not a measured average. Indiana Pacers coach Rick Carlisle described another purpose: getting opponents to play faster than they prefer. Both approaches interfere with timing, though one delays the setup while the other hurries decisions.

The shot clock helps explain the difference. In a normal NBA possession following a made basket, the offense has 24 seconds, with the countdown starting when the inbound pass is legally touched on the court. It must also advance out of the backcourt within eight seconds. Crossing half court does not start a fresh shot clock. Time spent getting there leaves less time to create a shot. A defensive deflection that stays inbounds does not restart the countdown.

Defensive pressure also needs careful interpretation in basketball betting. An NBA matchup on the Bovada website cannot be reduced to whether one team presses: the combined score depends on how often both sides get the ball and what they do with their chances. A defender delaying the first pass into an offense can leave less time for a good attempt. A turnover followed by a quick basket has a different effect.

Those possibilities make defensive intensity an incomplete description of a scoring outlook. A team can force its opponent to work harder while creating quick attacking chances for itself. It can also concede an easy chance when pressure fails. Understanding the tactic means separating its purpose from its outcome, rather than treating an aggressive defender as evidence that the game must produce fewer points.

Pressure does not always mean a trap

One defender following the ball is different from two defenders closing around it. The first can contest the dribbler while teammates remain with their own assignments. A trap commits another player to the ball, so teammates elsewhere must cover the passing options and protect the basket.

A stopped dribble changes the contest. Once a player voluntarily picks up the ball, he cannot simply start dribbling again. He can still pivot, pass, or shoot, but moving away from pressure with another dribble is no longer an option. A defender can therefore restrict movement without taking possession. This is also why a guard’s choice to keep the dribble alive deserves attention: it preserves a way to move while searching for a pass.

Watch where the ball goes next. A trap can succeed by forcing an awkward pass that another defender intercepts. The players surrounding the ball do not have to be the ones who take it away. Reaching for a steal also differs from keeping the ball handler contained; abandoning position can give the guard a route past the pressure.

The offense has answers. In the Murdock report referenced earlier, Golden State guard Brandin Podziemski described using his body to shield the ball against smaller defenders and quickness to get beyond longer opponents. Beating the first defender can leave that player trailing, creating a temporary advantage farther upcourt. The remaining defenders then have to respond to an attack before their teammate has time to recover.

The work before a highlight

Former NBA guard Keith Bogans gives a defender’s perspective in his conversation with Vernon Maxwell. Discussing Jaden McDaniels, Bogans says that seeing a defender pick up a superstar across the court gets him excited in the way a dunk or crossover excites other viewers.

*

His reaction focuses on the challenge being accepted. The scorer has someone to deal with before reaching a preferred attacking position. Bogans also describes the recognition that such defensive work receives from teammates and coaches, even when it attracts little attention elsewhere.

The assignment does not end when the scorer passes. The defender still needs to follow the play and be ready for the ball to return. Early pressure can force a star to give up the ball without removing him from the possession. Watching the next pass shows whether the defense has actually disrupted the attack or merely moved it.

When defense creates offense

Indiana scored 19 points off turnovers in Finals Game 6 against Oklahoma City on June 19, 2025. The figure does not isolate full-court pressure.

A change of possession ends one team’s opportunity and begins another’s. The team winning the ball can attack immediately or organize its offense, depending on the space and defenders ahead. Pressure therefore cannot be assessed only by the time an opponent spends bringing the ball forward.

Look beyond the pickup point. Does the offense arrive late but still organized? Does it make a hurried pass? Does the ball handler escape and make the remaining defenders cover extra ground? The first defender can use up time without winning the ball. If the guard gets past him, watch whether the other defenders can stop the drive without leaving someone open.

By PJ Grisar September 8, 2026

This story was originally published in the Forward. Click here to get the Forward’s free email newsletters delivered to your inbox.

When Fauda Season 4 ended an eternity and a devastating war ago, our hero was at death’s door, reciting both the central prayer of Judaism, the Shema, and the Muslim Fatiha.

It was a cliffhanger with monumental implications for Doron Kavillio (Lior Raz), an Israeli Jew who spent his days undercover as a Muslim Arab — an identity crisis long in coming.  Zoom out and you can see the doomed duality of Israel and Palestine, Jew and Muslim, connected in a cycle of death and more alike than they may seem.

Season 5 begins bilingually, with Hebrew and Arab definitions of the Arabic word Tha’r, blood revenge, “restoring violated honor or avenging injustice.” This concept is now the point of commonality — not how men pray, but how they seek revenge.

Welcome to a post-Oct. 7 Israel. Doron is in therapy, struggling to recall eight missing hours of his life on the day of Hamas’ attack on the Gaza envelope.

Comrades have left the country — Steve (Doron Ben-David) is protecting oligarchs in London, Sagi and Nurit are in Australia. Eli (Yaakov Zada-Daniel) is now Orthodox, living in a settlement and reeling from the murder of his wife and stepchildren at his now-torched kibbutz. When a Bedouin friend, Salem (Bian Anteer) who lost his son in the raid on Eli’s home, approaches him with a tip on the Nukhba fighter responsible, they depart for Marseille to answer the call of Tha’r.

It would hardly be Fauda if this act of vengeance didn’t give way to a much larger plot. Marseille is the staging ground for Saeed el Hatib (French-Algerian actor Hakim Djaziri),  “the Sinwar of Europe,” who is recruiting sympathetic, white continentals for a fresh massacre in Israel.

Fauda has always made some viewers uncomfortable. Massively entertaining, bingeable to those of us who stream it in the Netflix aftermarket, its existence was premised on ongoing injustices in the West Bank and Gaza and the violence that bursts through their borders. (The BDS movement labelled it a “war-crimes glorifying” series;” Haaretz called it “morally dubious.”)

And yet as late as the last season it contained very real criticism of Israel’s conduct, including its costly campaigns to recover captured soldiers and the torture used to extract information on their whereabouts. The show always alluded to real operations — Cast Lead, Brother’s Keeper — in dialogue. But because it can’t merely mention an attack as raw and monumental as Oct. 7, and because it has no desire to question the response to it, it chooses to recreate its savagery.

Episodes 7 and 8, flashbacks to that day, are front-loaded with a trigger warning and a disclaimer that you can skip them and still be able to follow the main plot.

It’s hard for me to recommend those episodes. If not exactly atrocity porn, their central, race-against-time set piece is too anchored in recent events and constructed too much like an action movie. It feels in a sense exploitative, even if intended as a tribute. (To give them credit, both Lior Raz and his co-creator Avi Issacharoff, who said they “wrote from their trauma,” were on the ground helping the south of the country evacuate in the aftermath.)

The new season starts with the promise of complexity. It opens on a grieving Muslim father and shifts to a milksop accountant who worked for Hamas, seemingly tortured by Eli in a blind rage for a crime he didn’t commit. Could an excessive devotion to Tha’r, a tribal code of retribution, be the diagnosis of the show’s creators of Israeli society at this moment?

If it is, it’s not a critical one. The villains are the villains, and, most revealingly, they now number people with no connection to the conflict.

Hatib’s enlistment of white Europeans for a mass-casualty terror attack services a trite narrative of postcolonial guilt finding an outlet in the pro-Palestinian cause. It works on another level too: This fighting force is squaring off against Doron’s corps of Mizrahi Jews, whose mere presence dismantles the lie that Israelis are themselves all white colonizers, and that Israel and the European empire of yore are in any way analogous.

When, back at mission control, the counterterrorists speak of “suspicious-looking Europeans” who are “in their 30s,” the derision for this type of fellow traveller is palpable. Their standard bearer, Mélanie Laurent, formerly Tarantino’s “face of Jewish vengeance,” plays Anne, a blonde, “high middle-class Catholic French woman” who straps up with C-4, a keffiyeh ever-draped around her neck. Through her, and in a quite literal way, the show suggests the Western love affair with Palestinians — which in this season’s logic means Hamas — is misguided.

All the while, we never see Gaza, where much of Season 3 was set, with some among its population humanized. We never reckon with the destruction there. We hear about it, and a kind of lip service is paid to the crime of collective punishment — the sort that we hear at the end of almost every season — but it’s secondary to storytelling as elegy and justification. One could just have easily placed the Hebrew word Zachor before that first cold open: Remember what they did to us.

At one point, after a shootout with more blood spatter than I ever recall seeing on the show, Doron empties his clip into an enemy with the words “this is for October 7.” Seconds later, in a Shin Bet command room his handler Gabi (Itzik Cohen, whose between-seasons weight gain is a running joke) quips, a la Danny Glover in Lethal Weapon, “I’m too old for this.”

He’s not the only one.

In the past week I’ve chatted with some folks older than me — they don’t know each other and are largely to my right on Israel — who don’t relish the thought of another season. Not just because they don’t want to watch Oct. 7 reenacted, but because following the exploits of Israeli security agents has vastly different optics after the Hamas-Israel war, unprecedented settler violence and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir’s recently-stated ideal scenario of killing “30 or 40” Palestinians in Gaza each night.

This may well be the privilege of the diaspora, but the fatigue points to a shift in attitude that’s worth paying attention to. If these horrors are out of sight, out of mind this season, they’re top of mind to many who are watching — and many others who might have once tuned in.

PJ Grisar is a Forward culture reporter. Read full bio →

This story was originally published on the Forward.

By JOANNE PALMER (reprinted with permission from the New Jersey Jewish News and the Jewish Standard) If every person is a world, as our tradition tells us, then a city is filled with so many worlds that it’s impossible to imagine all those rubbing-together universes.

That’s particularly true of Jerusalem, one of the world’s oldest cities, at just about 5,000 years old, give or take; a recent demographic study, done in 2026, estimates its population at around 1,181,760. It has grown remarkably quickly; maybe people are drawn by its ancient, stony beauty, or by the history and other-worldliness that shimmers around it, or by the vibrant, modern cacophony of its diverse residents.

For the last 15 years, Sharon Gabay, a highly successful professional photographer whose bread-and-butter is stunning headshots, party pictures, and portraits of politicians and other social and legal strivers, has wandered through the city, just looking and taking pictures. He’s a 15th-generation Yerushalmi, and although now he lives in the Judean hills, in Moshav Nes Harim, near Ein Kerem and Beit Shemesh, he goes to Jerusalem every week to photograph what he sees.

He’s published six books of photography about Jerusalem. All are both beautiful and emotional. The most recent of them, “Jerusalemites,” is the newest and perhaps the most emotional, created with love, gestated in fear, and now born into a world that perhaps surprisingly radiates with hope.

Okay. What could that possibly mean?

It means that on October 11, 2023, Mr. Gabay went to Kfar Aza. “Everybody who could do anything did something, and I wanted to do something too,” he said. Some kind of response to the barbarism and terror and grief of the Hamas attack. Kfar Aza, one of the southernmost kibbutzim in Israel, was one of the hardest hit. “Because I am a documentary photographer, I asked to join Zaka,” Israel’s emergency response, rescue, and recovery nonprofit organization, “the first time they went in. I went in with them.

“I took pictures. I had two exhibitions using these pictures” — one of them “Holocaust in the Village,” is online — “but it hurt my mind. It was a trauma for me. And I didn’t touch my camera for two years. I just stayed in my studio in Nes Harim, taking psychiatry pills and trying to forget what I saw.

“And during this time I decided to make this book. I sat on it for two years, just learning how to do it effectively.

“There are almost no words in this book. Only pictures. And this is the message: We all live together 99 percent of the time. What the world sees about Jerusalem in the news is what happens maybe three or four percent of the time. All the rest of the time, all 99 percent of the people, other people around the world don’t know about. So I decided to make this book.

“The little text that I do have is in three languages — Hebrew, English, and Arabic. The languages spoken by the people of Jerusalem.”

The small number of Hebrew words in the text are written in a font created from the handwriting of Aner Shapira, who was 22 when he went to the Nova music festival in southern Israel on Simchat Torah — October 7, 2023. He took cover in a shelter with a group of other young Israelis, and he saved many of their lives by throwing seven explosive grenades that Hamas operatives threw into the shelter back out at the terrorists. The eighth exploded in his hand and killed him.

When Aner died, “he left behind a lot of songs that he wrote. They took his handwriting and made a font of it, and I chose to use it for the text.

“He was a Yerushalmi and he loved the city. He wrote about the diversity inside the city, and how you can see everything there. So I decided to put the text in his handwriting as a memorial to him.

When he began to make the book, Mr. Gabay had to look through the enormous archive he’d created. For 15 years he’s roamed the city. His camera is small, old, and unthreatening, a beaten-up Fuji with a visible crack on the case. He takes pictures unobtrusively, he said. He doesn’t ask permission. He just shoots. Usually people don’t even know they’ve been photographed. Sometimes they come across pictures of themselves in his work, and sometimes they email or message him, asking for a copy. Of course, he said, he always sends one.

Culling his vast collection of images was not easy, Mr. Gabay said. Putting it together “made me go out on the streets again.” The vast majority of the photos in the book were taken before October 7, but he took some later, to fill in logical gaps. Even now, with the book finished, he wanders the city’s streets one day every week, camera in hand.

As he prepared the book, he winnowed the vast library of images to 2,000, and from there he whittled it down to 300. For that first cull, “I went through them one by one, me and my cat, hiding from the missiles when they came in, because this is the Middle East. I did it day by day by day by day, until I managed to take it from one and a half million to 2,000.”

The second selection process “was much easier, because by then I knew how I wanted to do it. It is not a random collection of pictures. It is a story, from beginning to end; it is the long story of a city. So there is always a connection from each picture to the picture before and the picture after. But this took a long time.”

“The book turned out to be very successful. I sold all the copies before I launched it. One museum in Israel took 1,000 copies. It got to Herzog”— Israeli President Isaac Herzog —“and Huckabee” — Mike Huckabee is the U.S. ambassador to Israel — “and they both wrote letters about the book.

“Now I am working on the second edition. I want to distribute it to all the Jewish communities and Christian communities and Muslim communities that don’t hate us. There are no politics in this book. It is just people. The background to the pictures is all black because the only light we have in Jerusalem is the people.”

His message, Mr. Gabay said, is that “Jerusalem is not an apartheid city. Everyone lives here.

“I was raised in Jerusalem,” he said. “When we were little, my friends and I went to the Muslim quarter. Nothing happened. Once in a while there’d be some trouble, but most of the time we lived together with no trouble. My family has been here for more than 300 years. I have a picture of my great-great-grandpa in the Old City of Jerusalem. We are connected to the city, all my family is, and we really love it.

“Jerusalem should have tourists the way Vatican City does. People don’t come to Jerusalem.” His attempt to cure that problem is to show the city’s glories on social media. “I have more than 100,000 followers, and they are from all over the world,” he said. “I have Iranian followers and Saudi followers. Suddenly they see the city and they are surprised. They want to come to visit. They all of a sudden see that if they come here, they won’t be arrested because they are Muslim.

“I want to dedicate my work to telling the truth about Jerusalem.”

Mr. Gabay still takes pictures in Jerusalem because “I always go out to see if there is something new, because there is always something new to take pictures of in Jerusalem.”

He also takes pictures of politicians, and that’s a particularly busy area now because of the Israeli election set for October 27. “Today I had a member of the Knesset from Ram, the Muslim party. Mansour Abbas’s party. They want to participate in Israeli politics. They say, ‘We have a life here, and we want to live.’ And on the other side, I did a lot of people from the government we have now. Which, you know, is not the best government we’ve ever had.

“I tell them to their faces what I’m thinking. They know me. They know that I have a big mouth, and that I never, ever lie. So every politician from every side, even the one who was here today, sees the book. And I’ve never had anyone ever say that it’s one-sided or that it doesn’t tell the truth. It’s about all the tribes of Israel.

“I’ve put all my knowledge about Jerusalem and its people in the book, and I try to bring in exactly what happens in real life. I don’t try to stage anything. I am a viewer. I come. I see. I take a picture, and I save it. And people can see what life is like in Jerusalem.

Mr. Gabay also spends a great deal of time doing pro bono work. He takes photos for “At Eye Level,” a nonprofit that works with people with autism. His website showcases much of who he is and what he does; readers can learn more about his book here.

He has a traveling exhibit for the book; the photos can be printed locally so there are no shipping or customs costs, and he often comes to speak in the United States, talking about “Jerusalem and its unique human diversity.

“This book, ‘Jerusalemites,’ is about hope,” he said. “It tells people around the world that what you know about Jerusalem isn’t right. We live together, day by day, all of us, everyone. Yes, we have been at war for three years, but Jerusalem is still vibrating.

“Jerusalem is a hope that if you let people just live, they can live together, and they can make it a great city.”