Local News
Working with late night talk show stars Colbert and Stewart dream job for former Winnipegger
By Myron Love When the Jewish Post last touched base with Raffie Rosenberg in the summer of 2020, she was back in Winnipeg for a few months during the Covid lockdown reconnecting with her father, Lewis Rosenberg (her mother, the late Dr. Fran Steinberg passed away ten years ago) and other relatives while looking forward to returning to New York in the fall to continue her studies at Columbia University.
As far back as she can remember, she noted in that earlier interview, she has had her sights squarely set on a career in the entertainment industry. “I started dancing lessons when I was two years old,” she recalled. “I loved it.”
She added that her interest in the theatre was also stimulated by her parents, both of whom had been involved in the arts. Prior to pursuing a career in medicine, her mother studied at the Royal Winnipeg Ballet. She also taught dancing and further studied dance at York University. Her dad also has a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree – Theatre Design and Technology – from the University of Minnesota.
Having graduated previously (in 2016) from Western University’s Ivey School of Business, Rosenberg earned her second degree – an MFA – with a focus on theatre management and producing – from Columbia in 2022.
And she is very happy to report that, over the past two years, she has had the opportunity to work behind the scenes with two of her heroes in the entertainment business – none other than the king of late night television, Stephen Colbert, and his predecessor, Jon Stewart.
She got on with Colbert’s “The Late Show” as a production intern during her final semester at Columbia shortly after graduation from Columbia for a five-month period (January-May, 2022) and followed up on that coup by being hired as a production assistant on Stewart’s return to the air waves via Apple TV with “the Problem with Jon Stewart,” a weekly series featuring hour-long single subject episodes. The show launched in the fall of 2021. Rosenberg joined the production team in the fall of 2022.
(The show was recently cancelled.)
Those were my dream jobs,” Rosenberg notes – “to work with both Stewart and Colbert on televised shows that include elements of live theatre (such as a studio audience and band).”
She points out that entertainment internships are difficult to get – especially in late night. “The team at Colbert is really proactive about interviewing a huge number of candidates and taking a look at people from the online applicant portal,” she reports. “I got lucky and the timing was right for that internship.”
She notes that, being in an entry level role at The Late Show and at The Problem, she didn’t work with either host directly. “The staff of The Late Show is over 100 people and at The Problem there were around 60 of us,” she says, “but both Jon and Stephen are incredible bosses. They’re kind, focused, and great leaders. Even though I never worked with either directly, being able to work on their shows was a huge highlight and definitely a childhood dream come true.”
Her role was different for each of the shows – reflecting the different responsibilities in her job titles and the fact that Colbert is nightly and Stewart’s show was weekly.
“As a production assistant, I was more involved in areas such as research, working on the podcast and deeper dives into current events ,” she points out. “Also, we were working with a longer lead time on Jon’s show – which gave us more room to expand on individual subjects.”
In her independent work as a creative producer, she points out, she is more involved in sourcing funding to help get the project off the ground, crafting the narrative, working with the script writers and hiring lead actors and the director.
For the past two summers, Rosenberg has produced the Arts in Action Festivals for the Broadway Advocacy Coalition. The BAC was founded in 2016 by a group of actors and activists with the goal of using the arts to try to create as a vehicle to help create a more just world. The two-day Arts in Action festivals present workshops, performances, panels and screenings in furtherance of its goals.
With the conclusion of production for the “The Problem With Jon Stewart” last fall, Rosenberg is open to new projects – one of which is a collaboration with a couple of other Jewish artists on a coming-of-age comedy.
It would seem that Raffie Rosenberg has a bright future to look forward to in theatre and film production.
Local News
Application filed by two former members of Etz Chayim Congregation against the congregation to have their memberships restored dismissed by judge
The following is taken from the Canadian Jewish News website: “Manitoba’s Court of King’s Bench has dismissed Hadass Eviatar and David Hoult’s application challenging the termination of their membership at Congregation Etz Chayim. In his decision, Justice Vic Toews noted that, although Hoult’s letter describing a hypothetical attack on the synagogue may have lacked sensitivity given the political climate, he did not intend to threaten violence against congregants. However, the judge ruled that the court did not have jurisdiction to intervene in the membership dispute under Manitoba’s Corporations Act, finding that the couple had no financial, proprietary or economic interest that would entitle them to the remedies they sought. The judge concluded that religious organizations are generally free to determine their own membership rules and ordered each side to bear its own legal costs.”
If you would like to read the original article that broke the story about the battle between Hadaass Eviatar and David Hoult with Etz Chayim Congregation you can go to Epic Court Battle.”
Local News
Jewish Federation now says Jewish population of Winnipeg in 2021 (according to the census) was 13,940 – not the 16,000 figure that the Federation had been touting for years
By BERNIE BELLAN (Posted Oct. 27, 2026) Longtime readers of The Jewish Post & News (and this website) would probably know that I have long had a very strong interest in establishing as accurate figures as possible when it has come to reporting the size of Winnipeg’s Jewish community.
For years I argued that our Jewish Federation was exaggerating the size of our Jewish population. I heard the figure of 16,000 bandied about by leaders in our community quite often when it came to reporting the size of our Jewish population – without any empirical evidence to back that figure up.
I had long maintained that the only reasonably accurate figures when it came to reporting the size of Winnipeg’s Jewish population were those produced by the late Evelyn Katz, when she was the unofficial demographer for the Jewish Federation – over 30 years ago. What Evelyn would do is keep careful track of births, deaths, numbers of newcomers but, perhaps most important: the number of people who had left our community.
Thus, in August 2022 when I interviewed Faye Rosenberg Cohen who, at the time, was just about to retire as the Jewish Federation’s Chief Planning and Allocations Officer, I was somewhat astonished to hear Faye say, when I asked her what proportion of our Jewish community was made up of immigrants, she answered that “I can honestly say when I look at those numbers it’s somewhere around 1/3 of the community.”
In response, I asked: “So you’d say it’s somewhere between 4-5,000?”
Faye said: “I think it’s more than that.”
I wrote in that article, “I indicated my skepticism at that time, saying ‘You know that I’ve always been skeptical about the numbers that have been used by the Federation for the population of the Jewish community. I think though that it’s always been more of a case of identification – who identifies as Jewish.’ ”
Later, after the results of the 2021 census were released, I wrote that “if you take into account the results of the 2021 census, the Jewish community cannot be larger than 14,270 at a maximum. But that figure would also include anyone who had either said either their ethnic origin was Jewish or their religion was Jewish.”
Since many of the individuals who had said on the 2021 census that their ethnic origin was Jewish, but their religion was something else, I maintained that ascertaining the real size of our Jewish community was highly problematic.
Still, for the sake of argument I was willing to accept that, realistically, it was somewhere between 13,000-14,000 – but nowhere close to the figure of 16,000 that had come to be suggested by our then president of the Jewish Federation or by other leading figures in our community.
So, it was with a sense of satisfaction that I heard Sharon Graham, who is now the Jewish Federation’s Community Planning and Allocations Lead say to an audience of over 50 people who were at the Gwen Secter Centre on Thursday, October 22, that the Jewish community in 2021 was – at a maximum: 13,940.
Sharon was at the Gwen Secter Centre to speak to Remis Lecture attendees. Her presentation preceded a presentation by Jewish Federation CEO Jeff Lieberman. Sharon used a PowerPoint presentation to provide some very interesting insights into where our Jewish community was at in 2021- and I’m offering some parts of her presentation here for you to read because I thought they were so interesting.
I had actually made many of the same observations about the results of the 2021 census in my own reporting back in 2022, but seeing what I had written confirmed by the Jewish Federation’s point person on planning told me that Sharon has a much more realistic view of our community than did Faye Rosenberg Cohen.
Here, for instance, is a slide that shows the proportion of our Jewish community that is made up of immigrants. It’s slightly under one fifth, not the one third percentage that Faye had suggested.
But, what really set Sharon’s presentation apart from anything else I’ve ever seen presented by someone from the Jewish Federation – other than the aforementioned Evelyn Katz, was the slide she projected which showed that, while there had been a large influx of newcomers to Winnipeg’s Jewish community between 2016-2021 there had also been a significantly high number of people who had left our Jewish community in those same years, as you can see in the following slide:
That is something we just don’t hear discussed by leaders of our Jewish organizations, but let’s be realistic: For many newcomers who came to Winnipeg and were counted as new members of our Jewish community, Winnipeg – for a variety of reasons, was a stepping stone to other communities. It may have been for reasons of better job opportunities, moving closer to other family members, or – the reason that we hear so often when it comes to people saying they want to leave Winnipeg: the weather.
But, whatever the reason, Sharon’s figures show that, as much as GrowWinnipeg may have been an abiding success when it’s come to attracting newcomers to our Jewish community here, getting them to stay long term is a different story.
And, while there were other aspects of Sharon’s presentation that certainly merit discussion, especially the figures she produced about intermarriage, rather than delving into them here, I thought it useful simply to insert them for you, the reader, to see – and draw your own conclusions.
Local News
Marty Green expands his protest against extremist Jewish settlers to two more venues – and is arrested twice more
(Tuesday, October 27) We received the following press release about Marty Green being arrested again, both at the University of Manitoba and at Shaarey Zedek Synagogue:
Both sides came to blows on Saturday, October 24, at the Shaarey Zedek Synagogue as security personnel sought to prevent Marty Green from interfering with synagogue traffic as he protested just outside synagogue grounds against the actions of religious settlers in Israel’s occupied West Bank territory. Synagogue Executive Director Rena Secter Elbaze quickly intervened to prevent further escalation. Police arrived shorty thereafter and detained Green for 45 minutes before driving him home and releasing him. It is not clear whether their decision not to lay charges was the result of their own onsite investigation or whether it was at the request of the synagogue executive.
Green has now been arrested four times in the last month and faces multiple charges for disturbing the peace, including two episodes at the Asper Campus and one more this past Friday (Oct. 23) at the University of Manitoba. While Green says initially he was merely handing out leaflets (at the Asper Campus), since his first arrest on September 23, he has returned to the campus with a large placard and an acccordion, accompanying himself while singing songs with lyrics that include such phrases as “The Jews Are Bananas….B-A-N-A-N-A-S”. In addition to listing actions of the religious settlers as including arson, vandalism, and theft, he pointedly alleges that the IDF has been backing up the settlers in their actions.
Green had earlier notified the Shaarey Zedek that he was contemplating bringing his protest to the synagogue. He was told that if he attempted to enter the grounds he would be prevented from doing so. At that time, Secter Elbaze told Green that his intentions were inappropriate, declaring the synagogue to be “a house of worship dedicated to prayer, learning, community, and spiritual engagement.” Green responded that if the synagogue were willing to contact the Crown and inform them that “that there was never any legal basis for their claims that I was conducting myself inappropriately at the Asper Campus” (with regard to his earlier arrests) that he would “voluntarily refrain from carrying his informational campaign to the synagogue(s).”
Green further argues that the recent “psak” (religious ruling) by leading Israeli rabbi Rov Dov Lior, in which Lior declares that it is not merely permissible but praiseworthy for Jews to steal olives from Arab orchards….that this ruling brings his protest within the proper realm of religious discourse. He says further that if the local rabbis were willing to speak out to their congregations against the aforesaid psak, that he might have refrained from taking his campaign to their grounds.
Although Green was released on Saturday without charges, police confiscated his placard. They explained that it was being held as evidence pending an investigation by Major Crimes as to whether it constituted hate literature.
There was no further information given as to what happened at the University of Manitoba.
