Features
Jewish Life in Canada, seen through the eyes of William Kurelek
By IRENA KARSHENBAUM In December, as I was running up a steep hill in the bitter Calgary cold, which is not as bitter as the Winnipeg cold, I was cursing myself for not having covered my brilliant head with a woollen scarf.
Wearing my 1916 prairie costume, underneath a 25 year-old sheep skin coat that now passes for historic, I scaled the hill at Heritage Park while worrying I might suffer a heart attack triggered by too much vigorous movement in the frigid cold. The angle of the hill dropped down and my brisk pace turned into a slow, penguin-like waddle to steady myself on the ice.
My eyes looked up and facing me, as if on the palm of my hand, was a scene from another time. The sun danced on the dazzling, white snow and in the near distance, across the railroad tracks, stood a little, yellow false-front building, once called the Montefiore Institute, framed by naked, trembling trees, and where I was headed. A horse-drawn wagon turned the corner and slowly crossed along the path. Not being satisfied with just savouring the moment, I grabbed my phone. An image emerged on my screen, worthy of a cozy children’s book, or a William Kurelek painting.
My vision was prescient.
That afternoon, on my volunteer shift as an interpreter, in the kitchen of the Montefiore Institute, which also served as the cheder, I looked through the sideboard buffet that housed a small library. I was searching for a Hanukkah story to read to the children when my eyes rested on Jewish Life in Canada, by William Kurelek and Abraham Arnold.
I flipped the pages of this old book and even though I was familiar with Kurelek’s work, I suddenly could see that the artist’s paintings depicting early Canadian Jewish life looked an awful lot like us, the costumed interpreters bringing Jewish life, to life, to the guests visiting the restored 1916 prairie synagogue. I was momentarily confused, was I a subject of a William Kurelek painting that had magically come alive?
Not wanting the other interpreters to think I am some kind of a book thief (which, of course, I am!) I announced, loudly, that I will be borrowing the book to write my latest story about an out-of-print book — Bernie didn’t know this yet — with promises to return it.
At home, I read the book. Divided into two parts, the first half being the works of William Kurelek (1927-1977), with his own writings about each painting, and the second by, Abraham Arnold (1922-2011) — who served as the founding Executive Director of the Jewish Historical Society of Western Canada — and who contributed a series of essays about various aspects of Jewish life, that read more like a text book.
Kurelek credits “the two Abes of Winnipeg” — Arnold and Abe Schwartz — in his introduction for giving him the support he needed to bring the book project to life.
Kurelek recounts how, in 1973, the idea for the book emerged and was meant as an expression of thanks to the Jewish community for his success as an artist. It was Winnipeg-native, Avrom Isaacs (1926-2016), who first discovered the artist and took the risk of exhibiting his work, a break Kurelek desperately needed having for ten years tried “in vain on my own for recognition.” Isaacs gave Kurelek two opening nights, the first being sponsored by a Jewish women’s organization (he doesn’t say which one) that also bought a few of his pieces. He states that in fact his first art patrons were Jewish and only later, “followed by those of British origin.”
Jewish Life in Canada contains 16 of Kurelek’s paintings, all of which as indicated in the book, are held in the collection of a Mr. and Mrs. Jules Loeb, and was published by Hurtig Publishers of Edmonton in 1976. The book is out of print and unavailable, except through maybe a lucky find at a used book store or on Amazon. My search for a used copy, surprisingly, brought up information that a new edition of a Jewish Life in Canada, this time with writing by Sarah Milroy, will be published by Goose Lane Editions of Fredericton in May of 2023.
Through his paintings, Kurelek, born to a Ukrainian family in Whitford, Alberta, depicts Jewish life in Canada from the east coast, “Jewish Doctor’s Family Celebrating Passover in Halifax,” to the prairies in “Baker’s Family Celebrating the Sabbath in Edmonton” and “Jewish Wedding in Calgary” set in front of the original House of Jacob synagogue, to the west with, “General Store in Vancouver Before World War One.”
Having converted to Catholicism in adulthood, Kurelek doesn’t shy away from religious subjects displaying remarkable knowledge about Judaism’s religious practices. In “Yom Kippur” he shows what the Holy Day looks like with congregants immersed deep in prayer, men wearing their tallis, women praying in the women’s balcony. He paints a white parochet explaining that, “White, symbol of purity, is the dominant colour of this solemn day.” He used Toronto’s Kiever Synagogue as the basis for this work.
Kurelek shows how Jews toiled in their new land with works like “Morosnick’s Market, Dufferin Street, Winnipeg,” “Teperman’s Wrecking Firm in Toronto” with men sorting scrap metal, men sewing in “Jews in the Clothing Business in Winnipeg” and “Jewish Scrap Collector Questioned by a Toronto Policeman,” a composite work inspired by Kurelek’s memories and multiple photographs including one from Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan.
Four of Kurelek’s paintings depict Jewish farming life.
In “Pioneering at Edenbridge, Saskatchewan,” Kurelek writes about the history of the colony, which was settled in 1906 by 20 Jewish immigrants, originally from Lithuania, who decided to leave their new-found home in South Africa for a second migration to fertile farm lands along the Carrot River. It is this painting, with its horse-drawn wagon and wooden homes in the distance, that reminded me of the view I encountered at Heritage Park that December day.
In “Bender Hamlet, the Farming Colony that Failed,” Kurelek displays good knowledge of Jewish prairie history, listing all the farm colonies of Saskatchewan and Alberta, even mentioning my beloved Montefiore where the Montefiore Institute originally stood, also Camper, Pine Ridge and Bender Hamlet of Manitoba. He paints Bender Hamlet, founded in 1903, with a few, far away, grey buildings set against a vast sky and yellow, grassy fields littered with rocks. The inspiration for the painting, he notes, came from Abe Schwartz, who gave Kurelek his great-aunt’s diary describing her life farming in North Dakota. Kurelek explains how he incorporated pieces of the diary into the picture frame, “I want to convey the idea that these memories are like voices in the wind as it sighs through the thistles of the overgrown fields and through the chinks of abandoned buildings.”
Kurelek’s Jewish Life in Canada is more than a thanks to the Jewish community, but a gift of memory that reveals a life that once was to future generations.
Irena Karshenbaum, founder of the project that gifted the restored Montefiore Institute to Calgary’s Heritage Park, volunteers as an interpreter in the synagogue and writes. www.irenakarshenbaum.com
Features
“Lessons from the Holocaust for Today”
By HENRY SREBRNIK On April 12, I spoke at our annual Yom Hashoah memorial ceremony in Charlottetown. The last time I did so was in April 1976, in Montreal. It was, for Canadian Jews, a completely different time. Montreal was still the first city of Canadian Jewry, with Toronto a distant second. Israel seemed a secure country, having won a hard-fought victory three years earlier in the Yom Kippur War.
There were clouds gathering, true – after all the UN General Assembly had passed the “Zionism is a form of racism” the previous December, and a powerful Communist bloc led by the Soviet Union was still a formidable enemy.
Today, Jewish life has become far more precarious. Two things are essential for an anti-democratic political movement to succeed: ideological justification by academics and intellectuals, and control of the streets by violent mobs. Since Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas invaded Israel, we have seen both.
At McGill University in Montreal, a March 21 referendum by the Law Students’ Association (LSA) supported amending the group’s constitution to boycott Israeli academic bodies, though it was deemed illegitimate by the university’s president. Similar actions are taking place across Canada. Indeed, at Vanier College, a Montreal CEGEP, it abruptly cancelled its Holocaust commemoration on March 25 because it didn’t think it could keep guests and the college community safe.
Unfortunately, we know a terrible precedent for this union of the intellectuals and the mob. Nazi ideology, too, was not formulated by street thugs. Historian Max Weinreich published his book Hitler’s Professors in 1946, noting that German scholarship provided the ideas and techniques that led to and justified unparalleled slaughter. All too many Nazi war criminals were holders of PhDs.
As historian Niall Ferguson reminds us, in an article published in the New York Free Press of Dec. 11, 2023, “Anyone who has a naive belief in the power of higher education to instill morality has not studied the history of German universities in the Third Reich.” The “final solution of the Jewish question” began, he has written, with words — “to be precise, it began as lectures and monographs and scholarly articles.”
The American writer Vivian Gornick, reviewing a book, “Turning a Blind Eye, A memoir of daily accommodation to fascism,” by the German historian Joachim Fest, about Hitler’s Germany in the 1930s (before the Holocaust), quotes this passage:
“Everyone sees that life for the Jews is gradually shutting down. Take their neighbor and good friend, Dr. Meyer: one day he can no longer subscribe to newspapers and magazines; another, he has to hand in his bicycle and typewriter; another, he can no longer keep a pet or buy flowers. Then all the Jews simply start disappearing from the neighborhood.” The Nazi march to power literally begins with shutting Jews out of public life while using academia as the heavy hand of indoctrination.
Is this slowly happening to Jews in Canada today, as they are pushed out of or refused admittance to cultural events, colleges, universities, and graduate schools, academic university positions, publishing, music, theatre, and so on? In “Canada’s Polite Pogrom,” By Jesse Brown, Atlantic, March 24, 2026, he writes: “Is a national tolerance for zealotry purging Jews from public life?” Jewish life in Canada may have “forever changed,” he argues. “I can no longer take for granted that people like me are represented in Canada’s hospitals, schools, newsrooms, and legislatures.”
We may see the quiet withdrawal of Jews from Canadian society “without any glass or bones being broken,” simply because the evidence that they are no longer welcome has become overwhelming. Another writer calls it the social and academic “shtetelization” of Western Jewry.
We even face obstruction from the Canadian government. In just the last two years, eight explicitly Jewish non-profit charities, including the Jewish National Fund, have been stripped of their ability to collect tax-deductible donations by the Canada Revenue Agency — often amid pressure campaigns from anti-Israel activists. The delisting was also celebrated by the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada (PIPSC), the union representing CRA workers.
We now witness continuous large “pro-Palestinian” rallies through our cities, invasions of shopping malls and thoroughfares, including intimidating behaviour against Jewish passersby. Today, police stand and watch mobs chant for Israel’s destruction, call for the genocide of its people, harass visibly Jewish citizens, and drive antisemitic intimidation deep into urban life. They now believe their job is to enforce the law only if it does not risk upsetting violent constituencies. This makes Jews expendable, because defending them risks confrontation.
And these events are not just “political protests.” At an al-Quds rally in Toronto March 14, protesters held signs that showed rats crawling out of a Star of David, depicting a Jewish man as a goblin-like creature emerging from a cave, and showing a Jewish man as a hook-nosed caricature.
Three Jewish synagogues in Toronto were hit with gunfire in one week in March. After every such incident, we hear that “antisemitism has no place in Canada.” But if that were true, synagogues would not require concrete barriers. Jewish schools would not need armed security. Community institutions would not conduct threat assessments before hosting events. Yet big city mayors like Toronto’s Olivia Chow don’t seem, to put it diplomatically, be losing much sleep over what’s going on in their cities.
The attacks on Jews, including physical assaults and social media campaigns, are part of a purposive campaign designed to make Jews think twice about gathering with other Jews, entering a synagogue, going to kosher restaurants, putting a mezuzah on the doorpost of their apartments or dorm rooms, or wearing a Jewish star around their necks. In fact people have been attacked on the street for speaking Hebrew.
If each Jewish holiday will now be seen by antisemites as an opportunity for terror, then the prognosis for diaspora Jewry is bleak. Unless things change, Jewish life in the diaspora will become more sealed off from the larger society.
We may be returning to a time that we thought was long behind us. And we are less prepared for it than our forebearers were, because they were used to living in a semi-segregated world, and expected less from the larger society. As large swaths of the Jewish community are beginning to retreat inward, the greater long-term fear is the collapse of Jewish life here altogether.
Henry Srebrnik is a professor of political science at the University of Prince Edward Island.
Features
Streaming the Diaspora: Jewish Stories in the Digital Age
The digital era has transformed how cultural narratives are created, shared, and preserved. For Jewish communities around the world, streaming platforms have become powerful tools for storytelling — enabling voices from different countries, traditions, and generations to connect in ways that were once impossible. What used to rely on local gatherings, printed texts, or regional broadcasts is now accessible globally, instantly, and interactively.
Streaming has allowed Jewish stories to transcend geography. Whether it’s historical documentaries, modern dramas, or personal testimonies, audiences can now explore a wide spectrum of perspectives — from Ashkenazi and Sephardic traditions to contemporary Israeli culture and diaspora experiences in North America, Europe, and beyond. This shift reflects not only technological progress but also a deeper need for identity, continuity, and shared memory.
A New Era of Cultural Storytelling
Streaming platforms have opened doors for creators who might previously have struggled to find mainstream distribution. Independent filmmakers, historians, and content creators now have the ability to reach global audiences without relying on traditional gatekeepers.
This has led to:
- more diverse representation of Jewish identities
- storytelling that blends history with modern perspectives
- greater visibility for lesser-known traditions and communities
As media scholar Henry Jenkins noted,
“Digital culture allows stories to travel, evolve, and find new audiences beyond their original context.”
Jewish storytelling, rooted in centuries of oral and written tradition, naturally adapts to this model — evolving while maintaining its core themes of resilience, identity, and community.
The Role of Streaming in Preserving Memory
One of the most significant contributions of streaming platforms is the preservation of historical memory. Documentaries about the Holocaust, migration stories, and cultural archives are now widely accessible, allowing younger generations to engage with history in a more immediate and emotional way.
Streaming enables:
- access to survivor testimonies and historical footage
- educational content for global audiences
- preservation of languages like Yiddish and Ladino
This accessibility helps ensure that stories are not lost, but instead reinterpreted and shared across generations.
Bridging Generations Through Digital Media
Another important aspect of streaming is its ability to connect different age groups. Older generations may bring lived experiences, while younger viewers engage through modern formats such as series, podcasts, and short-form video content.
This creates a dynamic exchange:
- elders share traditions and personal histories
- creators reinterpret these stories for modern audiences
- viewers engage, discuss, and reshape narratives in digital spaces
The result is a living, evolving cultural dialogue rather than a static archive.
Entertainment, Identity, and Digital Habits
In today’s digital ecosystem, cultural content exists alongside many forms of online entertainment. Users often move fluidly between watching series, engaging with interactive platforms, and exploring different types of digital experiences.
For instance, while streaming culturally rich content, users may also explore entertainment platforms featuring zoome slots, where interactivity, design, and engagement play a central role. Although the purposes differ, both environments reflect how digital platforms are designed to capture attention, create immersion, and keep users engaged through evolving content.
This coexistence highlights a broader reality: modern digital life blends education, culture, and entertainment into a single, continuous experience.
Challenges of Representation in the Digital Space
While streaming has expanded opportunities, it also raises important questions about representation and authenticity. Not all stories are told equally, and some narratives may be simplified or commercialized for broader appeal.
Key challenges include:
- balancing authenticity with accessibility
- avoiding stereotypes or oversimplification
- ensuring diverse voices are included
Creators and platforms must navigate these issues carefully to maintain cultural integrity while reaching wider audiences.
The Globalization of Jewish Narratives
Streaming platforms have also contributed to the globalization of Jewish stories. A viewer in Canada can watch an Israeli drama, a French documentary, or an American series — all within the same platform. This interconnectedness allows for a richer understanding of how Jewish identity varies across regions while still sharing common roots.
This global reach encourages:
- cross-cultural dialogue
- broader empathy and understanding
- new interpretations of identity in a modern context
Streaming vs Traditional Media
| Aspect | Streaming Platforms | Traditional Media |
| Accessibility | Global, on-demand | Limited by region and schedule |
| Diversity of content | High | Often restricted |
| Viewer interaction | Possible (comments, sharing) | Minimal |
| Content longevity | Long-term availability | Time-limited broadcasts |
| Entry for creators | Lower barrier | High barrier |
This comparison shows why streaming has become such a powerful medium for cultural storytelling.
Final Thoughts
The digital age has reshaped how Jewish stories are told, preserved, and experienced. Streaming platforms have turned local narratives into global conversations, allowing voices from across the diaspora to connect in meaningful ways.
By combining accessibility, diversity, and interactivity, streaming has created a new space where tradition meets innovation. As audiences continue to explore these stories alongside other forms of digital engagement, the importance of thoughtful, authentic storytelling becomes even more significant.
In this evolving landscape, Jewish narratives are not just being preserved — they are being reimagined, shared, and lived in real time across the digital world.
Features
U.S. Senate candidate from Michigan calls Israeli government ‘evil’ like Hamas
Abdul El-Sayed, doubled down on his criticism of the Netanyahu government and defended campaigning with controversial streamer Hasan Piker
By Jacob Kornbluh (Posted April 19, 2026) “This story was originally published in the Forward Click here to get the Forward’s free email newsletters delivered to your inbox.”
FoAbdul El-Sayed, a U.S. Senate candidate from Michigan, said in an interview aired Sunday that the Israeli government is as “evil” as Hamas, sharpening his criticism of Israel in the closely-watched Democratic primary.
“Killing tens of thousands of people makes you pretty damn evil,” El-Sayed told CNN congressional reporter Manu Raja on the network’s Inside Politics program. “It’s not how evil is this one versus that one — Hamas: Evil, Israeli government: Evil. We can say both.”
El-Sayed, 41, is a physician and the son of Egyptian immigrants. He is seeking to channel the energy of the 2024 Uncommitted movement, which protested the Biden administration’s support for Israel in the war against Hamas in Gaza. He is also hoping to build on the surprise success of the New York City mayoral campaign of Zohran Mamdani in taking on the Democratic establishment.
He is locked in a dead heat with state Sen. Mallory McMorrow and Rep. Haley Stevens. The primary is set for Aug. 4.
Earlier this month, El-Sayed faced backlash for appearing alongside streamer Hasan Piker, who has been accused of antisemitic rhetoric — including saying that Hamas “is a thousand times better” than Israel. McMorrow, who is married to a Jewish man, and Stevens, who is closely aligned with AIPAC, have both criticized El-Sayed.
In the CNN interview, El-Sayed defended his decision to campaign with Piker, framing it as an effort to reach voters who feel alienated from traditional politics. “My understanding of America is, it’s a place where we have freedom of speech,” he said.
The Michigan Senate race is shaping up as one of the starkest tests of the Democratic coalition and how the party navigates policy towards Israel in Congress amid the wars in Gaza and Iran. The state is home to the largest concentration of Arab Americans in the United States.
Last week, 40 Senate Democrats voted to block $295 million for the transfer of bulldozers, used by the Israeli military to demolish homes in the West Bank and Gaza; 36 of them also supported a measure to block the sale of 1,000-pound bombs to the Jewish state. It shattered a previous high of 27 Democrats who backed a similar pair of resolutions of disapproval to block some weapons transfers last year.
Sen. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, who is Jewish, was among those who voted for the measures. In remarks as they announced their votes, Democrats highlighted their opposition to the Israeli government’s policies in the occupied West Bank, the humanitarian situation in Gaza and the war with Iran.