RSS
In PBS series ‘Little Bird,’ a Jewish woman uncovers her traumatic Indigenous past

(JTA) — When Jennifer Podemski’s Indigenous mother gave birth at 17, social workers removed Podemski from a Toronto hospital and put her into the foster care system. It was only through the efforts of one social worker, who was retiring, that she was reunited with her mother at three months old.
The social worker had saved Podemski from the infamous “Sixties Scoop,” a policy in Canada between the 1960s and 1980s that tore thousands of Indigenous children from their families and put them into the child welfare system.
Growing up in a Jewish area of Toronto, Podemski learned more about her Israeli father’s side of the family because of the Jewish stories she was surrounded by — including some imparted from her paternal grandfather, a Holocaust survivor.
Now a filmmaker, Podemski has drawn heavily on her experience in co-creating “Little Bird,” a six-part series about the Sixties Scoop that debuted in Canada earlier this year and came to the United States on Oct. 12. Weekly episodes air on PBS through Nov. 16 and are available to stream on all PBS platforms, including PBS Masterpiece Prime Video.
“I wanted to humanize these experiences,” said Podemski, who is Indigenous to Saskatchewan on her mother’s side. “They haven’t yet been humanized because they haven’t been told.”
The show starts with Esther Rosenblum (played by Darla Contois) at her engagement party in 1985, enjoying almost-clichéd Jewish success — law school, a doctor fiancé named David and a large home shared with her tough-love adoptive mother. The mother, Polish-born Golda Rosenblum (Lisa Edelstein), survived the Holocaust and came to Canada as a teenager, having lost her entire family in Auschwitz.
Although Esther’s life looks pleasant, she tiptoes around a constant simmer of discrimination. She is shattered to overhear David’s mother fretting about him marrying “one of them,” referring to an Indigenous person adopted into a Jewish family. The future mother-in-law questions how their family is supposed to believe that Esther is a “regular Jew” who can become “a mother of her own — and that’s just going to go fine?” Another guest points out that David got “one of the good ones,” adding: “I have a cousin who adopted one of them and he’s into the drugs and all that stuff.”
A parallel storyline unfolds in 1968, when Esther was five years old and her name was Bezhig Little Bird. Bezhig was abducted along with her brother and sister by child welfare agents and police, who handcuffed their hysterical mother and beat their father, when he protested, to the brink of death. The series follows Esther/Bezhig on the journey to find her birth family and understand the roots she was torn from.
Like Esther, Podemski was raised in a Jewish community with a tenuous connection to her Indigenous ancestry. Her maternal grandparents were victims of the residential school system in Canada, which forcibly separated children from their families for long periods of time between the 1880s and the 1990s. The schools stripped children of their culture and native language, with the nominal objective of giving them a Euro-Canadian Christian education. The schools became notorious for physical, sexual and psychological abuse and high death rates.
Podemski had to seek out information on Indigenous history as a teenager, when she began studying the atrocities committed against her people. She chafed at discriminatory remarks within her childhood Jewish community, even when they were unintentional, and struggled to feel at home.
“I grew up in a Jewish reality, one that I didn’t really fit into, the way I look,” Podemski told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “I never felt really like I belonged in either [Jewish or Indigenous] places.”
Podemski’s 30-year career has spanned both acting and producing, with a break-out role in Bruce McDonald’s 1994 film “Dance Me Outside” and award-winning credits for the 2003-2006 series “Moccasin Flats” and the 2013 film “Empire of Dirt.” Frustrated with the representation of Indigenous people in film and TV, she founded Big Soul Productions and Redcloud Studios Inc. to amplify Indigenous perspectives. Between 2021 and 2023, she appeared opposite her sisters Tamara and Sarah Podemski in the acclaimed FX series “Reservation Dogs.”
Jennifer Podemski, left, with her sister Sarah at the 2023 Canadian Screen Awards at Meridian Hall in Toronto, April 14, 2023. (Jeremy Chan/Getty Images)
“Little Bird” places a premium on representation, with Indigenous Canadian actors playing the Little Bird family and Edelstein, who starred in the popular medical drama “House,” as Esther’s Jewish mother. The creators consulted advisors from Raven Sinclair, a Sixties Scoop survivor and University of Regina professor, to rabbis who approved scenes of Jewish ceremonies.
Edelstein told JTA that she reached into her own family memories to play Golda Rosenblum, conjuring images of her Jewish grandparents who immigrated from Eastern Europe.
“I was really excited to get to play a Jewish woman and to represent that story with dignity,” said Edelstein. “She reminded me a lot of my grandparents, so I definitely was remembering the gestures and feelings that I got from them.”
At the time of Esther’s fictional adoption, middle-class parents were typically advised to erase the past of their adopted Indigenous children, who were presented as mistreated or abandoned. Golda is at first defensive of her decision to help obscure Esther’s origins, but her love for her daughter eventually makes her a hero of the story.
“When I first met you, you were all dressed up in a nice dress but you didn’t smile,” she tells Esther in the series. “I thought, she has lost everyone, I have lost everyone, this is a good match. But it wasn’t true — you had a family.”
Co-creator Hannah Moskovitch said she felt a heavy sense of responsibility, as a Jew, approaching a story about the near annihilation of a culture. Although the histories are entirely different, some elements of state-executed plans to destroy the Indigenous people in North America and the Jews in Europe looked similar to her — from the meticulous bureaucracy and dutifully law-abiding foot soldiers to the dehumanizing language of “solutions” to Indigenous “problems.”
Yet despite those parallels, Moskovitch had never heard of the Sixties Scoop before starting work on the series.
“It’s shameful that I didn’t know,” she told JTA. “I grew up with the injunction from my community, ‘Never forget.’ And then there was a genocide that had happened in my country that I didn’t know about.”
—
The post In PBS series ‘Little Bird,’ a Jewish woman uncovers her traumatic Indigenous past appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
RSS
After False Dawns, Gazans Hope Trump Will Force End to Two-Year-Old War

Palestinians walk past a residential building destroyed in previous Israeli strikes, after Hamas agreed to release hostages and accept some other terms in a US plan to end the war, in Nuseirat, central Gaza Strip October 4, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Mahmoud Issa
Exhausted Palestinians in Gaza clung to hopes on Saturday that US President Donald Trump would keep up pressure on Israel to end a two-year-old war that has killed tens of thousands and displaced the entire population of more than two million.
Hamas’ declaration that it was ready to hand over hostages and accept some terms of Trump’s plan to end the conflict while calling for more talks on several key issues was greeted with relief in the enclave, where most homes are now in ruins.
“It’s happy news, it saves those who are still alive,” said 32-year-old Saoud Qarneyta, reacting to Hamas’ response and Trump’s intervention. “This is enough. Houses have been damaged, everything has been damaged, what is left? Nothing.”
GAZAN RESIDENT HOPES ‘WE WILL BE DONE WITH WARS’
Ismail Zayda, 40, a father of three, displaced from a suburb in northern Gaza City where Israel launched a full-scale ground operation last month, said: “We want President Trump to keep pushing for an end to the war, if this chance is lost, it means that Gaza City will be destroyed by Israel and we might not survive.
“Enough, two years of bombardment, death and starvation. Enough,” he told Reuters on a social media chat.
“God willing this will be the last war. We will hopefully be done with the wars,” said 59-year-old Ali Ahmad, speaking in one of the tented camps where most Palestinians now live.
“We urge all sides not to backtrack. Every day of delay costs lives in Gaza, it is not just time wasted, lives get wasted too,” said Tamer Al-Burai, a Gaza City businessman displaced with members of his family in central Gaza Strip.
After two previous ceasefires — one near the start of the war and another earlier this year — lasted only a few weeks, he said; “I am very optimistic this time, maybe Trump’s seeking to be remembered as a man of peace, will bring us real peace this time.”
RESIDENT WORRIES THAT NETANYAHU WILL ‘SABOTAGE’ DEAL
Some voiced hopes of returning to their homes, but the Israeli military issued a fresh warning to Gazans on Saturday to stay out of Gaza City, describing it as a “dangerous combat zone.”
Gazans have faced previous false dawns during the past two years, when Trump and others declared at several points during on-off negotiations between Hamas, Israel and Arab and US mediators that a deal was close, only for war to rage on.
“Will it happen? Can we trust Trump? Maybe we trust Trump, but will Netanyahu abide this time? He has always sabotaged everything and continued the war. I hope he ends it now,” said Aya, 31, who was displaced with her family to Deir Al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip.
She added: “Maybe there is a chance the war ends at October 7, two years after it began.”
RSS
Mass Rally in Rome on Fourth Day of Italy’s Pro-Palestinian Protests

A Pro-Palestinian demonstrator waves a Palestinian flag during a national protest for Gaza in Rome, Italy, October 4, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Claudia Greco
Large crowds assembled in central Rome on Saturday for the fourth straight day of protests in Italy since Israel intercepted an international flotilla trying to deliver aid to Gaza, and detained its activists.
People holding banners and Palestinian flags, chanting “Free Palestine” and other slogans, filed past the Colosseum, taking part in a march that organizers hoped would attract at least 1 million people.
“I’m here with a lot of other friends because I think it is important for us all to mobilize individually,” Francesco Galtieri, a 65-year-old musician from Rome, said. “If we don’t all mobilize, then nothing will change.”
Since Israel started blocking the flotilla late on Wednesday, protests have sprung up across Europe and in other parts of the world, but in Italy they have been a daily occurrence, in multiple cities.
On Friday, unions called a general strike in support of the flotilla, with demonstrations across the country that attracted more than 2 million, according to organizers. The interior ministry estimated attendance at around 400,000.
Italy’s right-wing government has been critical of the protests, with Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni suggesting that people would skip work for Gaza just as an excuse for a longer weekend break.
On Saturday, Meloni blamed protesters for insulting graffiti that appeared on a statue of the late Pope John Paul II outside Rome’s main train station, where Pro-Palestinian groups have been holding a protest picket.
“They say they are taking to the streets for peace, but then they insult the memory of a man who was a true defender and builder of peace. A shameful act committed by people blinded by ideology,” she said in a statement.
Israel launched its Gaza offensive after Hamas terrorists staged a cross border attack on October 7, 2023, killing some 1,200 people and taking 251 people hostage.
RSS
Hamas Says It Agrees to Release All Israeli Hostages Under Trump Gaza Plan

Smoke rises during an Israeli military operation in Gaza City, as seen from the central Gaza Strip, October 2, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Dawoud Abu Alkas
Hamas said on Friday it had agreed to release all Israeli hostages, alive or dead, under the terms of US President Donald Trump’s Gaza proposal, and signaled readiness to immediately enter mediated negotiations to discuss the details.