Features
Proliferation of Middle Eastern restaurants in Winnipeg satisfies desire for Israeli foods
By BERNIE BELLAN
In recent weeks I’ve had occasion to meet the owners of some Arab restaurants in this city. Sure, it was to talk to them about advertising – but it was also a chance to discuss their feelings about relations between Jews and Muslims.
If you’ve been following news from Toronto of late you’d be aware that there’s palpable tension in the air there over what have been overt displays of anti-Israel behaviour. In our last issue we reported on the disturbing situation regarding a particular food establishment known as Foodbenders and how the owner of that establishment seemed to be going out of her way to foment hatred toward anyone who was pro-Israel.
I’m glad to see that many other food establishments that had been buying food from Foodbenders have now canceled their orders and that many public figures in Toronto came our four square against the stance that Foodbenders had taken.
Then, a couple of weekends ago, there was yet another display of crude anti-Semitic behaviour in Toronto – this time at a rally organized by pro-Palestinians where the slogan “Palestine is our country and the Jews are our dogs!” was chanted by some of the attendees. (See the report from B’nai Brith about that rally on page 15.)
Now, while it’s not unusual for there to be displays of hostility toward Israel on university campuses throughout North America, with everything else that’s going on in the world it seems a little confounding for outbursts of anti-Israel behaviour to be occurring in Toronto right now.
There is a certain element of spill-over from the Black Lives Matter movement that can’t be denied as having something to do with these displays of overt hatred for Israel but, by and large, while there are undeniably certain individuals who are prone to displaying abject ignorance about Jews within the Black Lives Matter movement, these two recent examples of extreme hostility toward Israel in Toronto would seem to be exceptions to the relative indifference most Canadians have toward Israel (except, of course, for those of us watching the apparent re-emergence of COVID in Israel on a massive scale).
On top of all that, it looks like Netanyhau’s putative move to annex parts of the West Bank (and I use that term deliberately – not the term “Judea and Samaria”, which has a different connotation) has been put on hold for the time being. Apparently word has come out even from the Trump camp that annexation would not be viewed positively within Trumpland. That’s a little bit hard to understand since Trump has made it a policy to defy traditional thinking whenever he can.
Still, there doesn’t seem to be anything going on within Israel or the West Bank that might be considered all that provocative right now, preoccupied as most people there are with fending off COVID – so why there should be outbursts of anti-Israel sentiment at this time is a little hard to understand.
So it was that I met with the owners of two popular Arab restaurants in Winnipeg – and while we didn’t talk politics much, I was interested to hear that both Ramallah Cafe on Pembina and Arabesque on Corydon have many Jewish patrons, especially Israelis.
I wrote about some other Arab restaurants two summers ago, including Yaffa Cafe on Portage Avenue and Les Saj on St. James Street in an article titled “In search of Israeli cuisine – in Winnipeg”.
(I also wrote about Joy Coffee Bar on Roblin Blvd., which is owned by Israeli Alex Meron-Gamili and serves some Israeli foods although Alex takes pains to explain that his specialty is coffee, not food; and, of course, Falafel Place, which serves some Israeli foods. At the time that I wrote the article Bermax Caffe was also still around and I wrote about that place as well. Don’t bother asking me if I know what’s happened to the owners of that establishment. I don’t.)
That article prompted some readers to suggest other places that serve great food that would be familiar to anyone who’s been to Israel: Baraka Bakery on Main Street and the aforesaid Ramallah Cafe. (I’ve also been to Blady Middle Eastern on Portage Avenue and had something delicious there, but for the life of me I don’t know what it was. I just said to the person behind the counter: “Give me something delicious” – and he did.)
There are also loads of shawarma restaurants now in Winnipeg – something that anyone who has been to Israel would find quite familiar.
So – if you’re looking to try some of the foods that you might have eaten when you were in Israel, well – there is certainly a wide choice of establishments available here from which to choose. Unlike a city such as Toronto, however, which has a huge expatriate Israeli community, Winnipeg doesn’t have a uniquely Israeli restaurant.
I’m sort of surprised at that. I know there have been attempts in the past to have an authentically “Israeli” restaurant in Winnipeg, and what with the fairly large influx of Israelis we’ve had move here over the years, you would think that someone would have tried to create an Israeli restaurant catering to that specific community.
But, just as in Israel, where Jews and Arabs eat so many of the same foods – over and over again whenever I’ve asked the owners of Arab restaurants here whether they have many Jewish customers, they all answer in the affirmative, noting in particular that many Israelis come to their restaurants.
But, let’s be honest: There are readers of this paper who wouldn’t dare set foot in a restaurant called “Ramallah Cafe” (and I’ve been to Ramallah – it’s not my favourite place to visit, I’ll admit, but it did have some great food).
When I met with the owners of Ramallah Cafe and they told me they’d like to advertise in this paper, I wanted to ask them whether they’d consider changing the name of their restaurant to “Tel Aviv Cafe” – just for a short while, so that some readers of this paper who would never consider entering an establishment called “Ramallah Cafe” would give them a try – but I didn’t end up suggesting that after all.
They’re really nice guys though – and, just like every other restaurant in this city, the pandemic and resulting lockdown has really hurt them, but they seem confident they’ll weather the storm.
By the way, it was Ami Hassan of Falafel Place who told me about the latest Arab food establishment to open here, called “Tarboosh”. It’s also on Pembina Highway – in Fort Garry, and it’s owned by the same two people who own Arabesque on Corydon.
I stopped in there one day when I was cycling down Pembina Highway and noticed the sign. It’s still under construction as they haven’t opened the restaurant portion yet, but wow – is it ever big – and what an assortment of foods and spices it has!
I was talking to a charming young woman by the name of Heba Abdel-Hamid while I was there. Heba is co-owner of both Arabesque and Tarboosh. She told me she’s from Montreal originally and grew up in a largely Jewish neighbourhood where she had many Jewish friends.
She agreed with my observation that people generally get along in Winnipeg – in contrast with Montreal and Toronto, which both have quite a bit more ethnic tensions among residents, I think it’s fair to say.
Maybe I’m just naive but I know that individuals such as Belle Jarniewski have done much to bring disparate groups here together over the years – and I don’t recall a single instance of hearing about an imam in a mosque here ever delivering the kind of hateful sermon against Jews that we read about from time to time as having happened in Toronto, Ottawa, or Montreal – and not too long ago, in Calgary as well.
So, when Heba Abdel-Hamid told me that she’s also a part of the Arab-Jewish Dialogue, it served as a reminder how lines of communication are more open in Winnipeg than many other cities. Since we don’t have Folklorama this year, if you’re interested in replicating to some extent the experience of enjoying various ethnic foods, then some of the restaurants I’ve just mentioned here might be worth a try. They all have take-out by the way.
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.