Features
Winnipeg’s Jerry Shore looks back on seven decades in show business – including a stint as Harry Belafonte’s tour manager
By MYRON LOVE
For my 21st birthday in 1970, a couple of friends treated me to a ticket to Winnipeg’s first ever major outdoor rock concert. One of the principal organizers of that concert, which was called the Man-Pop Festival, and which was held on Saturday, August 29, was Jerry Shore, who turns 90 on July 23.
The concert at the old Winnipeg Stadium featured headliners such as Led Zeppelin, Iron Butterfly, Chilliwack and The Youngbloods.
What I remember about it was that the day dawned bright and sunny. But, around noon, the clouds rolled in and it poured. After a delay of several hours, we were all moved into the old Winnipeg Arena, where the concert resumed and lasted until after 3:00 A.M.
Shore was working closely with the late Maitland Steinkopf in those years. He recalls that Steinkopf made arrangements to move the concert to the arena and borrow equipment on short notice from all over the city.
“It was an amazing concert,” he recalls.
Jerry Shore’s life story is one that most people in the world can only dream about. In a career in show business spanning nearly 70 years, the lifelong Winnipegger has worked with some of the biggest names in music in all of its various genres. He has albums full of signed photos by rock stars, opera greats, leading Country & Western singers, popular singers and prominent actors – as well as a politician or two.
The show business tour manager and talent booker’s clients have included: Harry Belafonte, Nana Mouskouri, the flamboyant pianist Liberace, Richard Tucker and many more. He was also by Steinkopf’s side when the Concert Hall was being built in the mid-1960s – and booked the first act. As well, Shore was in on the ground floor for the founding of Rainbow Stage.
As is the case with many successful people though, Jerry Shore just happened to be in the right place at the right time.
Unusual for a Jewish kid in Winnipeg in the 1930s, Shore grew up in River Heights. His father, Sam, operated a candy factory – “Shore’s Candy Company”. The elder Shore retired in the late 1940s and passed away in 1950.
Jerry Shore’s first big break came about while he was at university. He became friendly with of his professors – one James Wilson, who had stood for office as a Liberal candidate.
“I was a young Liberal and worked on his campaign,” Shore says. “He was on the organizing committee that had been created to form Rainbow Stage. That was in the mid-1950s. I was a member of the Board and/or Director of Promotions off and on for 20 years.”
It was through Rainbow Stage that Shore became associated – in the mid-1960s – with Maitland Steinkopf. “Maitland Steinkopf was one of the most amazing people I have ever met,” Shore notes. “He almost single-handedly raised most of the money to build the Concert Hall.”
And it was Shore who arranged the new Concert Hall’s first concert – by Jewish opera star Richard Tucker. Tucker, Shore recalls, was very protective of his voice. The morning of the concert, the opera star called for Shore to pick him up in the early afternoon.
“Although it was a hot day in May, Tucker came out of the hotel wearing an overcoat, scarf and hat,” Shore recounted. “He wanted me to drop him off at a movie theatre where he spent the next three hours. He didn’t want to have to talk to anybody.”
Shore explains that he became involved in the world of opera after going to Minneapolis to attend a performance of the Metropolitan Opera on tour. “I met some of the people involved and we became friendly,” he recounts. “I arranged to hold auditions in Winnipeg for the Metropolitan Opera. I also arranged a Canadian tour.”
Other opera stars with whom he has worked have been Jan Peerce, Joan Sutherland, Robert Merrill and Pavarotti.
The second act that Shore booked at the Concert Hall was Harry Belafonte. “We became really good friends. He came back for a second show 18 months later. Harry was very meticulous. He had hired a new manager just before his second Winnipeg appearance. He moved on to Regina after the Winnipeg show. A couple of days later, I get a call from him. He had fired his new manager and wanted me to take over as his tour manager.”
Shore organized three tours for Belafonte (whom he recalls as quite shy, as well as outspoken on race relations). “I was in charge of booking fights and ground transportation, hotels, everything, even paying the staff.”
The highlight of his time with Belafonte was his tour of Cuba. “Harry was the first American artist to visit Castro’s Cuba,” Shore recalls. “CBC was doing a special on Harry Belafonte and his roots. There were 30 of us in the group. We get off the plane and there were men in uniform with sub-machine guns everywhere. It was a little scary.”
The Cubans, Shore remembers, treated Belafonte and family like royalty… the rest of the group not so much.
“The hotel we were staying at was the National – that had been built by (Jewish gangster) Meyer Lansky,” Shore reports.
The next morning, the group was informed that Fidel Castro himself was coming to visit. “Fidel pulled up outside the hotel with two armoured cars in front and in back. His English was very good and he was an imposing figure. He gave each one of us a bear hug.”
The three celebrities that he says most impressed him were Liberace, Sir Lawrence Olivier and Bill Clinton. He recalls an appearance by Bill Clinton in Winnipeg about 20 years ago.
“We had arranged a private function at Dubrovniks before he spoke,” Shore recounts. “The first thing Clinton did on entering Dubrovniks was to shake hands with all of the bartenders and serving staff. He did the same thing at the Concert Hall.
“He had an aura about him. He had the common touch.”
Surprisingly, so did the award-winning actor Olivier, says Shore. “Larry” was appearing at a news conference at the Fort Garry Hotel – a conference that Shore was chairing. Shore recalls that Olivier went up to each of the 30 journalists and introduced himself.
As for Liberace, Shore recalls an exchange he had with former Winnipeg radio talk show host Peter Warren. It was Liberace’s first visit to Winnipeg and Warren asked the last question at the press conference. The ever-skeptical Warren asked something along the lines of why anyone would be foolish enough to buy tickets to the pianist’s concerts. Liberace’s response was that anyone who wouldn’t want to buy a ticket to one of his concerts would be the fool.
Of Liberace, Shore recounts that the star used to carry around a Crown Royal bag with him wherever he went. “I never asked him what was in it,” Shore says. “But one time when I was with him, a clerk in a store asked what was in the bag. Liberace said that in the bag was his insurance policy. He opened it to show that it was filled with cut diamonds, rubies and emeralds.”
Remarkably, Shore has just been completely retired for the past three years.
Ironically, Shore observes, for all the traveling he has done throughout his career, he has actually seen very little of the world. “The routing was to get off the plane,” he says, “go to the hotel, spend four or five days preparing for the concert than boarding the plane again for the next city.”
These days, Jerry Shore spends his time reading (mystery novels and biographies), watching favourite TV shows, and enjoying his vast collection (over 800) of cookbooks. He keeps in touch with friends from show business who are still around. But, he says, he doesn’t miss being part of the scene.
“It’s not like it used to be,” he notes. “The personal touch is no more. All the little guys like myself have retired or been pushed out by corporate operators.
Features
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Features
Will the Democratic Socialists of America control the Democratic Party?
By HENRY SREBRNIK On June 23, radical Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) candidates backed by New York mayor Zohran Mamdani won multiple Democratic Party primaries in New York City and elsewhere in the state. They also were victorious in other parts of the country.
The socialist victories in New York far surpassed anyone’s predictions. Who, three years ago, could have predicted that a Muslim anti-Zionist would be elected mayor of a city with 900,000 Jews and would lead insurgents to victories in that party’s primaries in 2026? Yet here we are.
Marxist Third Worldist ideology has moved out of the universities into the polling booths, after campus activism, divestment campaigns, and social media have reinforced an anti-Israeli framework for years. The DSA’s platform states it plainly: It pledges “support for Palestinian self-determination against Israeli apartheid and settler-colonialism.”
The mayor, a long-standing DSA member, worked overtime to appear at countless campaign events for a trio of candidates he dubbed “the Team”: Claire Valdez, Darializa Avila Chevalier, and Brad Lander. The last two unseated incumbent Democratic congressmen. Mamdani has assembled a coalition in New York City that is capable of elevating like-minded candidates to office.
In the Seventh Congressional District, which straddles northern Brooklyn and southwestern Queens, an open primary to replace retiring progressive Rep. Nydia Velázquez saw State Assembly Member Claire Valdez’s’s defeat Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso. She was even further left than Mamdani himself. In the end, it was not even close: Valdez prevailed with 56.1 per cent of the vote to Reynoso’s 35.8 per cent.
In 2019, Valdez joined the DSA after seeing the rise of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and state senator Julia Salazar, both of whom were elected with the DSA’s help. Valdez emphasized her anti-Israel activism as a key part of her campaign. At events, her staff handed out signs that said “Free Palestine.” She launched her campaign alongside Mahmoud Khalil, a key anti-Israel leader at Columbia University that the Donald Trump administration has tried to deport.
Valdez referred to Israel’s war against Hamas as a “genocide” as early as October 13, 2023. She lambasted police for restraining anti-Israel mobs chanting “Globalize the Intifada” and waving Hezbollah flags outside a Brooklyn synagogue last June. “New Yorkers don’t just have the right to protest the sale of stolen Palestinian land — they have a responsibility to,” she declare. She has repeatedly criticized the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). She also boasted on social media of having “wiped my hand on the American flag.”
In the Thirteenth Congressional District, covering the upper Manhattan neighborhoods of Harlem, Washington Heights, and Morningside Heights and parts of the West Bronx, Darializa Avila Chevalier won a much more startling victory over Rep. Adriano Espaillat, a five-term incumbent Democratic Party power broker and chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. Espaillat’s campaign was heavily backed by AIPAC. Chevalier defied expectations and won by gaining 49 per cent to Espaillat’s 46 per cent. She told the crowd at her watch party that she had fought against the “Democratic machine.” Espaillat lost despite the backing of Democratic leaders in Congress and the state, including House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, New York Governor Kathy Hochul, and Julie Menin, speaker of the New York City Council.
When Chevalier, draped in a keffiyeh, first announced her candidacy in November of last year, few outside her immediate circle knew her name. But her message was clear: she presented herself as an organiser working to unite families torn apart by the immigration system and against “what we all know is a genocide in Palestine.”
Chevalier has publicly proclaimed her hatred for Israel, the United States, and “Western civilization” as a whole. She has called for the abolition of prisons, open borders and an end to deportations — even for people convicted of violent crimes. As a student at Columbia University, she was involved in Students for Justice in Palestine. In 2024, she returned to her alma mater to help organize an anti-Israel encampment that was ultimately disbanded by the police.
She co-founded Columbia University Apartheid Divest: “We are Westerners fighting for the eradication of Western Civilization. We stand in full solidarity with every movement for liberation in the Global South. Our intifada is an Internationalist one,” it states.
The day after the October 7 attack, Chevalier attended an anti-Israel demonstration in Times Square. “I can only say I have been advocating for the human rights of Palestinians for my adult life,” when asked about her attendance at the rally. Chevalier has said that her conversion to Islam was inspired by the Israel-Hamas war. Mamdani celebrated her win, describing Chevalier as a person “of clarity, of conscience and of conviction.”
The war was also on the minds of voters in former Comptroller Brad Lander’s race against another AIPAC-funded incumbent, Rep. Dan Goldman, in New York’s Tenth District, covering lower Manhattan and part of Brooklyn. Both are Jewish, but Goldman has been a steadfast friend of Israel while Lander is the quintessential anti-Zionist and a key faction of his coalition was anti-Israel. It was a contest that laid bare the party’s divisions over the Israel-Gaza war.
At his son Marek’s bris, Lander gave a speech lambasting Israel. “We pray fervently that by the time you read this, the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, the settlements, the house demolitions, the violence will be history,” which was later reprinted in a 2003 book titled Wrestling with Zion. Lander enjoyed the night’s biggest victory, winning 65.8 per cent of the vote to Goldman’s 34 per cent. Many Democrats have suggested that Lander has proved useful to Mamdani and other leftists who have been accused of antisemitism for singling out the Jewish state for opprobrium.
In the run-up to Election Day, a chain of Brooklyn coffee shops called Poetica posted that it would have barred Goldman entry had they recognized him during a recent visit to their storefront. “We don’t serve racists, fascists, homophobes, genocide enablers,” Poetica declared. “Too bad we didn’t recognize you right away, or we would have turned you away.”
At the state level, seven of the eight candidates endorsed by the DSA for the New York State legislature also won their primary elections. One of them is Aber Kawas, a Queens-based community organizer. If she, as expected, wins in November, she will be the first Palestinian woman elected to state office in New York history.
“Were defeated congressmen Dan Goldman and Adriano Espaillat insufficiently anti-Trump?” asked Will Rahn, a senior editor and writer for The Free Press, rhetorically, in a June 26 column. “Of course not. They lost because they aren’t anti-Israel enough. ‘Free Palestine’ is now the binding issue on the left, the only thing that actually matters.” No matter who you are, how you identify, or what causes you’ve championed, if you refuse to fall in line on Israel, you risk being ostracized from communities you’ve long called home.
For most of the postwar era, support for Israel was one of the least controversial positions in Democratic Party politics. That consensus has not merely weakened; it has collapsed. Once viewed as a righteous anti-colonial cause, Zionism has been reframed by radical thinkers as the ideology of a colonial oppressor of stateless Palestinians. Opposition to Israel is now the litmus test in Democratic Party politics. “There’s a cliff, and we’re heading towards it,” warned Daniel C. Kurtzer, a Princeton University professor who was ambassador to Israel under President George W. Bush.
The DSA has now built an entire ecosystem that runs parallel to the official Democratic apparatus, equipped with their own consultant network, endorsing organizations, donors and even billionaires who back them.
A generation after Pat Buchanan was denounced as an antisemite by all proper liberals for saying things like “Capitol Hill is Israeli-occupied territory,” will the left now embrace him as a “premature antizionist”? Even satire can’t match this.
Think about it: Since October 7, Israel has done what every other country viciously attacked by implacable enemies throughout history has done: It has lashed back in a defensive war. This is a policy that any state that cared for the life of its citizens would have to adopt.
Yet Israel has become the “omnicause.” That’s why antisemitism and antizionism are two sides of the same coin: hatred of Jews. Jews around the world aren’t being attacked because of Israel. Israel is itself being condemned because it’s Jewish.
American Jews have been blindsided by this, as the French writer Simone Rodan-Benzaquen, senior envoy for Europe at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, tells us in a brilliant article, “Stand Up,” Tablet, July 6, 2026. “When anti-Jewish hostility arrives wrapped in the language of liberation, antiracism, decolonization, and human rights –when it emerges among allies, colleagues, students, professional peers, or other minority communities — the disorientation is deeper. It is inside the world in which one has built a life. It speaks in familiar accents. It borrows cherished values.”
In “A Profound Question Haunting Jews Today,” New York Times, July 6, 2026, Nicholas Lemann, the former dean of the Columbia University Journalism School, agrees. He writes that for half a century or more, American Jews could achieve, “through being successful, culturally Jewish, Zionist, liberal and not especially observant,” a status that elsewhere has persistently eluded them.
“This set of certainties has evaporated. Today, Israel is the pariah nation of the world, and ‘Zionist’ has become an epithet, something it’s unacceptable to be, at least in progressive circles,” where most Jews have usually found themselves.
So, are the Democrats going to become America’s anti-Israel party? And then what?
Henry Srebrnik is a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Prince Edward Island.
Features
Discover Your Ultimate Smooth at Sets on Corydon: Nanoplasty vs. Keratin vs. Japanese Straightening
Are you ready to wake up with flawless, effortless hair every single day? While standard straightening methods try to fit everyone into the same box, your hair has its own unique structure, strength, and history.
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The Treatment Breakdown
1. The Elite Standard: Nanoplasty (Our Premier Selection)
Nanoplasty is a revolutionary, high-technical smoothing treatment that works at a deep cellular level. Using nanotechnology, nutrients and amino acids are deeply integrated right into the hair cortex (the inner core of the hair strand). It heals, seals, and straightens from the inside out without harsh chemicals.
- How it works: It uses an acidic formula triggered by specialized infrared heat to realign the hair bonds. It does not just coat the cuticle; it restructures it while infusing massive hydration.
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2. The Classic De-Frizzer: Keratin Treatment
The traditional choice for managing unruly texture. Keratin acts like a protective shield, filling in the cracks along a compromised or distressed hair cuticle (the protective outer layer).
- How it works: A liquid keratin formula is sealed into the outer layer of the hair with a flat iron.
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- The Big Benefit: Ideal for hair that has undergone chemical stress or bleaching. It acts like a temporary protein bandage to restore softness and cut your blow-dry time in half.
- Longevity: Lasts 3 to 4 months, gradually washing out over time.
3. The Permanent Sleek: Japanese Straightening (Thermal Reconditioning)
For those who want absolute, pin-straight hair that defies high humidity and never reverts.
- How it works: This is a permanent chemical process that physically breaks down the internal bonds of the hair, which are then precision-ironed perfectly flat and neutralized to lock in the new shape forever.
- The Finish: Mirror-smooth, pin-straight, glassy hair with zero wave or curl.
- The Big Benefit: It is completely permanent on the hair that is treated. Rain, humidity, and workouts will not change it. Only your new root growth will need touching up.
- Longevity: Permanent (requires root touch-ups every 6 to 9 months).
Which One Is Right For You?
| Feature | Nanoplasty | Keratin Treatment | Japanese Straightening |
| Primary Goal | Deep cellular repair, sleek straightening, intense gloss. | Frizz elimination, volume reduction, softer texture. | Permanent, absolute pin-straight results. |
| Hair Condition | Healthy to moderately sensitized or colored hair. | Highly compromised, bleached, or heat-distressed hair. | Healthy, resistant, coarse, or virgin hair only. |
| Chemical Type | Amino acids & organic acids (No formaldehyde fumes). | Cuticle-coating formulas (May contain standard preservatives). | Traditional alkaline straightening solution. |
| Post-Care Window | Wash or style immediately. No waiting period. | Must wait 48 to 72 hours before washing or tying up. | Must keep completely dry and straight for 48 to 72 hours. |
An Important Note on Hair Integrity: Beautiful hair is healthy hair. Because Japanese Straightening permanently alters the internal architecture of the hair strand, it is completely unsuitable for heavily highlighted, bleached, or fragile hair. If your hair has a history of heavy chemical processing, a customized Nanoplasty or Keratin Treatment will give you the breathtaking, smooth results you want while respecting and preserving the strength of your hair structure.
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