Vladimir Putin’s second presidential term (2004–2008) was marked by Moscow’s obvious desire to regain its status as a global superpower, which had been lost by the Soviet Union as a result of its defeat in the Cold War. The point of official departure from the former policy of open partnership with Western countries and close cooperation with NATO was the so-called 2007 Munich Speech of the Russian President and the invasion of Georgia that followed in August 2008. Moscow’s global claims gained momentum sharply after Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, and received an even more refined doctrinal formulation after February 24, 2022.

A critical element of the Kremlin’s new doctrine, which represented a peculiar synthesis of neoconservatism and formally leftist Soviet ideology, was its anti-colonial aspect: the movement of the unprivileged countries of the Global South against the world economic and political dominance of the Global North, usually identified with the US-led bloc of “old” and “old-new” Western democracies.

From the point of view of the Russian leadership, such ideological constructs were to become the common denominator of the geopolitical, diplomatic and economic strategy of the international organizations that Moscow is building as a tool to confront the “collective West.” Notable among them is BRICS — an informal association of initially four non-Western states with rapidly growing economies, established in 2006 at the initiative of the Russian Federation, which has gradually expanded to nine member states, together accounting for 46% of the world’s population and 37% of global GDP.

Moscow’s bid for leadership in the global South also had an obvious Middle East dimension. Already at the beginning of the shift in Russia’s foreign policy, it was made clear there that Moscow was no longer willing to settle for the rather formal status of “co-sponsor of the Middle East peace process,” but intended to set the tone in the region. It is clear that with such an “anti-imperialist” vision, which, incidentally, is shared by ultra-leftist and radical-progressive circles in Western countries, the emergence of the subject of “Israeli colonialism” allegedly oppressing the “freedom-loving people of Palestine” in the official rhetoric of the Kremlin was a matter of time.

As a result, in late 2010s Russia’s initial practice of balancing and mediating between almost all actors involved in the Middle East conflict began to gradually change, and its final reformatting took place after October 7, 2023.  This time Moscow almost openly supported Hamas as a satellite of Iran, Russia’s current closest partner in the Middle East.

Russia’s support for the Palestinian National Authority in the West Bank, whose leaders from the very beginning of the Russian military invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 have taken the side of Moscow, where they continue to repeat the long-exhausted formula about the creation of an independent Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital as the only way to resolve the conflict in the Middle East. (In this context, the results of voting by PA residents with Russian citizenship in the March 2024 Russian presidential election are quite revealing. More than 90% of those who took part in the elections in the PA voted for Vladimir Putin, while Vladislav Davankov was the leading candidate among the Russian citizens who voted in Israel).

The appearance of the PNA/PLO and Hamas delegations at the next BRICS summit in Kazan in late October 2024 as honorary observer guests in the “BRICS plus/outreach” format was in line with this policy. The head of the Palestinian Authority Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) made the most of the arena graciously provided by the organizers and the sympathetic attention of the federal and local Russian press to accuse Israel of “genocide” of Palestinian Arabs, “ethnic cleansing in the Gaza Strip,” and other alleged “violations of international law.” He concluded by demanding that BRICS member states impose sanctions against Israel and expressed hope that “Palestine will be accepted as a member of BRICS” in the near future.

In fact, it is not so much the bilateral relations with the virtual “Palestinian state” that are important for Russia itself, but rather more significant things for Moscow – its attempts to intercept the status of the main sponsor of the “Palestinian cause” from the West in order to gain geopolitical regional and global advocacy perspectives. Apparently, it is within the framework of such a strategy that the Soviet rhetoric about the alleged “pivotal nature of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict for the entire situation in the Middle East” and its “key role in the major regional crises threatening the security and stability of the region” is being revitalized.

Russian society, which until recently was generally favorably disposed toward Israel, has embraced the revival of propaganda clichés that seemed to have been long gone: according to polls, the percentage of Russians sympathizing with the Palestinian Arabs today is many times higher than the percentage of those sympathizing with the Jewish state.

In fact, this was not a big surprise. Data collected over 26 years of sociological observations by the authoritative Moscow-based Levada Center showed that although the majority of Russians do not support either side in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, since 2011 there has been a gradual increase in the share of respondents whose sympathies are on the side of the Palestinian Arabs, while at the same time the number of respondents who support the Israelis has been decreasing. By October 2024, the level of support for Palestinian Arabs exceeded the level of support for Israelis by 4.5 times (28% and 6%, respectively), while 13 years ago the ratio was inverse.

However, also in 2011 there was an absolute maximum — more than 70% — of respondents who did not express sympathy for either side in the conflict. In October 2024, the share of such respondents in Russia amounted to 57% — almost identical (56%) to the share of Americans who chose the same answer option in a parallel survey by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. At the same time, while the share of those who found it difficult to answer was four times lower than among respondents in Russia, the share of Americans who supported Israel (31%) was five times higher than the share of Russians (6%), among whom the number of those who sympathized with the Palestinians was, on the contrary, 2.5 times higher than among those who sympathized with the Israelis (28% and 11%, respectively).

In light of these data, it is not surprising that the share of American respondents who believe that Israel is protecting its interests in the current conflict and its actions are justified is more than twice as high (32% and 14%) as the share of Russians who share this opinion. But among those who chose the statement “Israel has gone too far and its actions are not justified,” the split was the opposite: 59% of the Russians surveyed and 34% of the Americans thought so.

The fundamental question — What is going to be “the day after”? — eventually leads the debate to the problem of establishing a Palestinian state, which in the romantic period of the Norwegian Accords of 1993–1997 was considered by many to be the optimal solution to the Palestinian Arab problem and the trigger for ending the almost century-long Arab-Israeli confrontation and the Middle East conflict as a whole. While the idea of resolving the Palestinian-Israeli conflict according to the Oslo model (“two states for two peoples”) has clearly exhausted itself long ago, this formula is still too entrenched in international political and diplomatic discourse to be abandoned without severe consequences for the strategies based on it, the careers built on it, and the diplomatic, political and economic resources invested in it. And it is in this capacity that it remains a notable geopolitical and geostrategic factor.

It seems that public sentiments in the two countries quite accurately reflect the local media agenda: rather diversified in the United States, and relatively homogeneous, with the dominance of pro-government media, in Russia. At first glance, the opinions of Americans and Russians are completely identical on this point: 49% of respondents in both the American and Russian samples were in favor of the creation of an independent Palestinian state. At the same time, the number of those who were against the creation of such a state in the United States (41%) was slightly less than those who were in favor, while in Russia this number was three times less (14%).

However, if for the United States and its allies this subject, in one way or another, mistakenly or not, is still seen as one of the ways to solve the problem, for Russia and its allies it is hardly more than an active propaganda resource and a tool of geopolitical confrontation with the “global West” and competition with China, Turkey and the Saudi bloc for influence in the Middle East.

Prof. Vladimir (Ze’ev) Khanin lectures in Political Studies at Bar-Ilan University and is Academic Chairman of the Institute for Euro-Asian Jewish Studies in Herzliya, Israel. A version of this article was originally published by The BESA Center.

The post Why Russia Has Skewed Its Population Against Israel first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

As a professor who insisted on placing the notion of personhood at the centre of the clinician-patient relationship in the medical school curriculum, Dr. Abraham “Abe” Fuks made an impact on generations of health professionals in his hometown and beyond.

More than half a century after earning his own degree from McGill University—where he ultimately served as Faculty of Medicine dean from 1995 to 2006—Fuks died in Montreal on Dec. 1, at age 78.

A leading researcher in immunology, Fuks also made great and enduring contributions to the understanding of tumour biology, type 1 diabetes, and clinical trial ethics. His work shaped the evolution of medical education in Canada, beginning with McGill’s medical curriculum, notably introducing the Physicianship component, whose courses and modules emphasized humanism in medical training.

Teaching, he argued, should not just look at fixing and curing, but also true healing and empathy.

After conducting biochemistry and molecular biology research at Harvard University, where he also taught courses, Fuks returned to McGill to serve as a professor in Medicine, Oncology and Pathology.

Subsequently, he was instrumental in reshaping the school’s medical infrastructure by organizing the 1997 merger of the Montreal General, Royal Victoria and Montreal Children’s hospitals—along with the Chest and Neurological institutes—to create the McGill University Health Centre (MUHC).

Despite this era of austerity and repeated punishing budgetary constraints during his tenure, Fuks still managed to endow chairs and boost faculty numbers while expanding the biomedical research facilities at McGill.

Lending his talent to numerous committees and initiatives, he was affectionately dubbed the “philosopher dean” for his renowned humanistic approach to patient care and generous demeanour.

Fuks prescribed of listening as an obligatory skill set for doctors-in-training amid a modern teaching-hospital environment that is increasingly a place of short-term admissions and gauged and rewarded for even shorter stays.

The slew of professional and personal kudos he received from peers were capped with being awarded the Order of Canada in 2018. But according to one friend of 50 years, Fuks still kept the important things in life sacred.

“Yiddishkeit and friendship, friendship, friendship,” were his priorities according to former city councillor Abe Gushonor. “With all the people he knew, all that he was involved in, he believed in the importance of staying close.”

The two met through the Yiddish Theatre when “we were much, much younger,” laughed Gonshor, “back when Dora Wasserman first set out to create this theatre that created unchanged friendships that lasted forever.”

Fuks was one of the pillars of the group, performing with his sister Sylvia in many productions.

During the 18 years after ending his stint as dean, Fuks remained a committed mentor, seen regularly on campus, ready to chat with students or faculty, lend an ear or a dose of wisdom when needed—always with a smile, sharply dressed, sporting his signature bowties.

Those who had “the privilege of his collegiality or friendship were fortunate to share time and experience with a special human being,” wrote Myer Bick, president emeritus of the Jewish General Hospital Foundation.

“His character encompassed the rare combination of qualities of a brilliant mind, understanding of the human condition, humility and of course a sharp wit.”

A few years after he helped launch the White Coat Ceremony for medical students, Fuks was honoured by the Douglas Research Centre, telling an audience a highlight of his leadership was working with successful young people, which he likened to “academic parenthood.”

“He was the most incredible listener and had the unbelievable power of information retention,” Gonshor recalled. “He would remember things I told him 40 years ago in great detail, and because he listened so well, he gave the best advice. Any person that ever interacted with him, notice that he was focused on that person, and very humble and compassionate.

“He never boasted about his achievements and with all the things he did and all the things he’s accomplished, it was never about him. It was always about the people around him.”

Fuks also had a keen understanding and passion for relations between institutions, donors, and wider communities, and helped sound the alarm about Quebec City’s recent large-scale Bill 15 health reform, which would dramatically alter institutional governance imposing a new level of remote bureaucracy over local leadership.

A year before his death, in his poignant but folksy critique, Fuks told a Montreal audience of healthcare professionals, advocates and politicians that hospitals and other establishments are not bureaucratic agencies but rather “social-cultural entities of communities.”

Rather than talk about organizational charts, he helped direct Quebecers’ attention to the perils of losing local voices on boards, whom he called the “glue between institution and professionals, between hospitals and communities they serve.” That’s where he said, change happened, where spikes in conditions amid local populations are discussed, bold initiatives conceived, and member are dispatched to seek donor support, not by far-away life-tenured bureaucrats.

“Giving ultimate authority over healthcare to someone with zero frontline knowledge,” he famously warned, “is like asking me to run the Bank of Canada.”

Expressing his own admiration for his peers, in 2023 he created an Academy of Exemplary Physicians along with a video interview series with each to honour their contributions.

Born in Germany in the shadow of the Holocaust and brought to Canada as a baby, he grew up in a Parc Avenue triplex above his parents’ store.

Edna Mendelson, an extended cousin—and also a child of a survivor—recalls him as a “legend” for providing support to her family when they arrived in Montreal in the late 1960s.

“The family bond and the deep Holocaust survivors’ bond was thick and unshakeable,” she said.

Abe Gonshor lost his 24-year-old daughter Sarah to a very rare form of cancer, and his friend Abe was very moved by her experience and suffering through pain during diagnostic tests.

“For years afterward he carried a letter Sarah wrote about what she felt doctors should know, something that inspired Abe to stress that importance to medical students before they became doctors, learning how to listen, how to speak.”

But mostly Gonshor remembers simple times together, as they met for Friday night dinners and Saturday morning coffee, along with regular Sunday brunches in the west end of Montreal.

“With all the things he was doing—teaching, schools, hospitals, foundations, committees and philanthropy—he found time to be with his friends. He always was with us. How much we’ll miss him, and how much the world will.

“There’s such an impact. I don’t know if words can explain it.”

The post Obituary: Dr. Abe Fuks, 78, transformed medical education in Montreal—with a dedication to friendship and Yiddishkeit appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News.

Lelala Hewak has been taking portrait photos of hundreds, if not thousands, of Jews worldwide for a project called The J-Word, which is all about challenging assumptions about appearance.

“What we like to do, where we live, how we like to live, how we like to dress, how we like to worship—everything about us is different,” she said.

“It bothers me that people dare to make damaging generalizations, let alone slurs or attacks, and they don’t even know anything.”

She’s conscious that putting the spotlight on Jewish faces, right now, may “raise eyebrows” or encounter pushback, she says, but Hewak points to rising antisemitism as an issue on a worldwide scale.

“There’s plenty of people working on humanitarian and other political issues to do with how things are being handled by Israel in the Middle East. It’s not my area of expertise. Why would I dare go there?… Doesn’t mean I should be silent on this other problem.”

Hewak recently visited New York to take the portraits of freestyle rapper Kosha Dillz, and Rabbi Manis Friedman of Chabad Lubavitch—both of whom are familiar figures on social media. Her goal is not proving multiethnic Jews exist, she says.

“I’m not trying to say ‘Oh, look, we have different colour skin’,” but rather, that a Jew might wear, for example, anything from construction work clothes to the black suits of some religiously observant Jews.

Hewak’s playful, provocative art is one approach among many within Jewish creative circles, where artists have now contended for more than a year with a cultural world that often defaults toward overwhelming anti-Israel sentiment, and frequently poses litmus tests around it. Even artists who have refrained from commenting on the political situation post-Oct. 7 can find themselves under attack or cancelled.

Jewish arts events now tend to involve extra calculations about security for venues, audiences, and artists, causing artists to grapple with how much or in what capacity to identify Jewishly in their creative output.

What happens when you’re accused of disturbing public safety—just for showing up as Jewish cartoonist? Miriam Libicki illustrates her experience being banned from her hometown comic con (@theCJN): https://t.co/NRsrEQGOG9

Stay tuned for Miriam Libicki in Lilith’s new issue… pic.twitter.com/cAKcLlb5c4

— Lilith Magazine (@LilithMagazine) October 20, 2024

For some, this new environment has meant deliberately looking inward and making art that draws more explicitly on their tradition than ever before.

Toronto-based Tamar Ilana Cohen Adams, who performs Mediterranean music and dance, was in Izmir, Turkey on Oct. 7, 2023. Following the attack, her concerts, including one at a synagogue, were moved due to safety concerns, including fears of bomb threats.

“They took down the flyers that were all over Istanbul and Izmir, and we did private house concerts. Now that was the first time I felt that kind of need to hide as a Jew,” she said.

Tamar Ilana, as she’s professionally known, visited the region every summer growing up, with her mother, ethnomusicologist Judith Cohen, who immersed her in folk music traditions including Ladino and Sephardic songs. Now she’s the vocalist at the front of Toronto’s Jaffa Road, a Jewish/Middle Eastern fusion band, and leads Ventanas, her Mediterranean and world music project, in which she incorporates flamenco into her performance and composes new music using or referencing traditional forms.

The apprehensions have been a new experience within a musical and cultural world that was part of Tamar Ilana’s travels and upbringing.

“My whole life, it’s always been in the background. But I had never felt it myself until I was in Turkey. All the Jewish schools closed, Jews stayed home, Jews hid, and we hid our concert.”

During concerts in Spain after Oct. 7, she felt pressure to make statements related to the war, and decided to acknowledge the possibilities for coexistence that her music demonstrates, by closing out Ventanas shows with a Moroccan Sephardic number, or, with Jaffa Road, a tune in Hebrew and Arabic.

“This is music of the Sephardic Jews, Morocco, Arabic, Hebrew… an example of peace and how people can live together,” she’ll say.

But even absent political statements, audience members disrupted Jaffa Road’s performance six months ago at the 2024 Hillside Festival in Guelph, Ont., by yelling from beside the outdoor stage.

The band had to stop the show and she addressed the protesters. 

“This isn’t how you do things. You do things through conversation,” she recalls saying.

“I was trembling… it was pretty crazy.”

Tamar Ilana was also targeted with a threatening Instagram message ahead of a live show she was producing, earlier in 2024.

“I was throwing an event for Indigenous women… We got these messages about turning it into a Palestinian fundraiser ‘or else,’ basically.” She called security. (Tamar Ilana has Cree-Salteaux ancestry from her father Robert Adams, who’s a poet and photographer.)

“This is without me saying anything at all, all year, so I can’t imagine [where the threat originated]… This is from people reading my bio and seeing I’m Jewish, is the only thing I can gather.”

Tamar Ilana, who recently released Ventanas’ latest album, says she’s feeling a shift toward “looking inwards” that Jewish friends and colleagues in particular have observed.

“Friends sort of emerged who happen to be Jewish… suddenly we were looking for solidarity in each other, and just to be in a room where we felt safe and where we felt surrounded by people who understood us.

“We heard our whole lives about Jewish history, and I’ve always felt like it was like an extended Jewish family. It’s almost… the family coming together now, when we need each other—even people who you don’t know that well, but there seems to be this cord,” she said. “It’s comforting, but it’s also a little scary that we need it.”

Aaron Lightstone, the Jaffa Road bandleader and oud player, said they were performing music based on poetry by Israel ben Moses Najara, a 15th century rabbi who lived in Gaza, Safed and Damascus, when demonstrators interrupted.

“If you’re protesting Tamar and Jaffa Road, you’re either totally ignorant because you have no business protesting; don’t know what you’re talking about; or totally antisemitic.”

Lightstone is rethinking music festival submissions for 2025, and wonders if it’s safer to focus on bookings at Jewish venues exclusively.

“As much fun as they are, should I be chasing Canadian jazz and folk festivals?”

It’s an odd question, Lightstone says, for a band centring “coexistence, [and] pushing Jewish music into [the] mainstream.”

Still, he says, “it doesn’t take a lot of people to be disruptive.”

A new brand of unity

Jewish Futures, an arts and culture salon held on Nov. 24, offered conversational spaces to foster a sense of Jewish unity in the arts. (The CJN was a promotional partner for its second year.)

Kultura Collective, an initiative by UJA Federation of Greater Toronto, organized the day, including a session on exploring Yiddish cultural expressions, where visual artist Jonah Strub discussed making artwork “as accessible as possible,” often through humour. His ultimate goal is “to provide representation to other queer and Jewish people.”

During a panel discussion titled “Jewish Infusions,” four artists shared how they’ve incorporated their Jewish identity into their creative practices and output.

Erez Zobary, a Toronto singer and songwriter, was releasing her new album, which explores her identity through connecting to her Yemeni Mizrahi background and her grandmother’s story of leaving Yemen for Israel via Operation Magic Carpet. Zobary received a Canada Council for the Arts grant to visit family in Israel as part of the personal project.

The new album is a departure from her previous work, where her songs “[talked] about getting dumped on a Thursday,” she said.

Making new music that’s so “outwardly Jewish,” with Hebrew and English song titles, plus Yemeni Jewish cultural elements, allowed her to see the process in a new way.

“Before I was making music about coming of age… breakups and living in the city and trying to figure out who I am,” said Zobary.  “With this one, it definitely feels different.”

In the months following the Oct. 7 attacks, Zobary says, her writing process for the new album shifted.

“’I [had been] so excited to write this project and to share my identity with people… and then I just became so afraid to do it, and I think it took me months and months to get to a point again when I [felt] good to share it.”

Some panellists said they braced themselves for a negative reception that thankfully never came.

Playwright and actor Jordi Mand described an unexpectedly warm reception to her own work In Seven Days from audiences in London, Ont., where her family lives. The play unfolds as a family contends with their father opting for Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID), and includes a rabbi among the play’s five characters.

“The father goes through with ending his life … [it’s about] how we say goodbye to people we love, but it’s also about MAID in the context of Judaism.”

Thank you to everyone who joined us for Jewish Futures 2024 on Sunday! It was a beautiful afternoon of conversations, art-making and connecting as a creative community. @thethmuseum @ProssermanJCC
Photos @shaymarkowitz_ pic.twitter.com/96tIa8Si0K

— Kultura Collective (@kultura_TO) November 26, 2024

Mand lives in Toronto but says she remains connected to her synagogue in London, and was apprehensive when her play was mounted in a city where the Jewish community is less prominent.

“I was absolutely terrified about sharing an unabashedly Jewish story there,” specifically, when the show’s run started last February at the Grand Theatre.

But the London response was “overwhelmingly positive,” she says.

“It really taught me a lot about where we are in place and time… [with] stories where there is such universality.”

Painter and jeweller Edith Barabash, who had been working as a lawyer in Victoria, B.C., started making and selling art out of a camper van two years ago. While there wasn’t much Jewish content at first, she now makes earrings of challah, babka, and matzah, and paints shofar-blowing scenes.

She lost online followers after releasing work with Jewish symbols.

“People who didn’t resonate with that, just unfollowed me immediately as soon as I started posting anything related to Judaism, Israel… a lot of the following that I built up until then was gone. And then a new following came.”

Barabash says she now feels called to bring community connections to her work—and now, she tends to stick to Jewish markets. She agrees “we’re becoming more insular.”

She also finds beauty in Jewish artists leaning into Jewish culture.

“When the world is more ready to hear those stories and see that art, we’re going to be so much stronger as a community, and our stories are going to be stronger.”

Josh Saltzman, a screenwriter whose recent short film is a horror set at a shivah, said he encounters antisemitism constantly in his industry, including social media posts from his crew members. It has led him to prepare for potential disruptions at film festival screenings.

When asked later if the antisemitism has worsened, Saltzman wrote in response: “I do believe it’s been worse since Oct. 7. Although I can’t say if antisemitism is spreading or people are just emboldened to be louder about it.”

However, he remains unapologetic about making space for Jewish culture.

“Every culture should get to share their stories… if people are going to unfollow any of us, any artists … their loss. Let them unfollow.”

While antisemitism is probably making Jewish artists more insular, that shouldn’t silence them, he says.

“I don’t want to let that stop me from making Jewish stories, because some people hate Jews. That’s the history of the world. So keep making art.”

Saltzman’s uplifting tone closed out the panel with a call for collective support.

“I feel like more than ever, I want to be more provocative with my work… I encourage any of you that are artists or have anything to say or even just how you live your life to spread [your] wings more,” said Saltzman.

“I am scared to do it, but I’m trying to and I want to… I feel like if I see other people spreading their wings, I’m more encouraged to do it as well,” he said, to a room of nodding respondents.

In the concluding conversation at the salon, Indigenous and Jewish actor and director Jennifer Podemski called stories her bridge-building effort, including Little Bird, the TV series she co-created about a First Nations woman adopted by a Jewish family during Canada’s Sixties Scoop, who tries to reconnect with her birth family and heritage.

“I am fascinated and dedicated to sparking humanity through story… that sparks something in someone else that they connect to, that creates a bridge,” said Podemski. “And in that bridge, you can build a conversation and from that conversation, you can have a dialogue.

“As much as I really didn’t like or enjoy being Native and Jewish pretty much most of my life… I realized that it was on purpose that I was this thing at this time and doing this work… to find humanity in some way, and tell the stories that can connect people.”

Now more than ever, she said, Jewish expressions may be sparking difficult conversations.

“Nobody cared about it before. Right now people care about [Jewish identity] because they don’t like it, and they don’t want you to exercise your Jewishness anymore… so I want to exercise it more.”

Pride in the face of prejudice

Sam Mogelonsky is director of Arts, Culture and Heritage at UJA Federation of Greater Toronto and runs Kultura Collective, which has now produced two Jewish Futures conferences since Oct. 7.

“Everyone’s approaching this moment differently,” said Mogelonsky.

Pride in being Jewish might look different for each person: Self-identifying in a website bio, for instance, as a Jewish Canadian or Israeli Canadian artist, “where maybe that word Jewish wasn’t there before,” said Mogelonsky, although she notes “some people have taken that wording out of their bios.”

Graphic artist Miriam Libicki has been banned by Vancouver Comics Arts Festival due to her past service in the IDF https://t.co/pJpK5tYTc7 h/t @JesseBrown

— The Canadian Jewish News (@TheCJN) May 29, 2024

There’s a sense of seeking out “like-minded creatives,” she says, which runs parallel with fears about “how you are going to be perceived by the wider community… that potentially, doors might close on you if you are outward with that identity.”

It’s both a complicated moment, and a sad one, says Mogelonsky, with fears about additional security needs, or perceptions that venues aren’t interested in Jewish cultural content.

“There’s many reasons why people may not want to be as open about their connections to being Jewish,” she said. “At the same time that we’re finding so much pride and joy in sharing these Jewish stories… we’re also finding moments of complication around that.”

Jewish Futures, she hopes, offered inspiration, helped grow connections, or simply allowed artists to hear “that other people are feeling the same way that you are.”

Mogelonsky developed the cultural salon concept following discussions she and UJA colleagues were having with artists during a previous event series called Art Schmooze, where informal gatherings—usually held at art galleries—brought artists together over wine and cheese.

Now, in some pockets of Toronto, gallery events are helping Jewish artists forge new connections outside the fraught, one-sided alignment of many left-leaning elements of independent arts communities.

Gillian Lahav and Zack Rosen were booking a show at a Dundas Street West gallery when the venue declined to host a Jewish-themed show. The painter friends instead ran a cat-themed exhibition, and invited friends for an Art Shabbat evening on a Friday in November. (The gallery says it’s open to hosting more Shabbat events.)

“It’s kind of difficult to find homes for Jewish work right now,” said Rosen. “There’s a sense in the broader world that to engage with Jewish work right now is unsafe for the venue holding it.”

He says the explicitly Jewish gathering provided an important—if also informal—Jewish community space.

“The scariness… some of the heaviness of the world around us now has brought us together,” says Rosen. “And that’s not a terrible thing.”

Lahav says Jewish artists have experienced a level of fear around how they will be received in such spaces.

“[People] are very quick to jump to one side of a binary that we know is nuanced but unfortunately the broader art world forgets is nuanced,” she said.

“When [they] go out of their way to assert which side [of the] boundary they land on,” that can alienate Jewish community members.

“At the same time, it’s an opportunity to see where we are welcome.” Community-based art galleries are where she feels “everyone knows they can have a home.”

Art Shabbat was a way to gather without “the weight we carry around all week.”

Petrina Blander launched her photo exhibition at the She Said Gallery, housed inside a laundromat at 384 Roncesvalles Ave., with a Friday night candle-lighting and challah blessings.

Shabbat Shalom Toronto, which continues to Jan. 8, is not an explicitly Jewish-themed exhibition, she says, although some of the images relate to Judaism, and Blander’s artist bio references her Israeli background.

But the photos were secondary to the gathering itself, according to Blander.

“The primary purpose was to bring people together… a safe space to break bread and connect.”

It’s a community where a nearby viaduct had been spray-painted “Fuck Zionists” in huge letters in the weeks after Oct. 7, as Israel’s military attacked Hamas in Gaza.

Blander says she isn’t religious, but found resonance in the idea expressed via the Netflix show Jewish Matchmaking, about how “‘there’s 15 million Jews and there’s 15 million different ways of being Jewish.’”

“I can’t tell you what part of this is Jewish [to me], because to me it doesn’t really matter… we all connect to it in a different way,” she said.

“There was prosciutto on the table… and two ginormous challahs, and they were blessed.”

Blander’s co-organizer Elise Kayfetz, who’s also the thrifting proprietor behind Vintage Shmatta, said Shabbat Shalom Toronto brought together “all walks of life, from Israel to down the street.”

“I haven’t been in a room with this many Jews since my bat mitzvah,” she said at the gathering.

Blander leaned over to Kayfetz: “This is my version of a shtetl in the heart of Toronto.”

The post Jewish artists in Canada turned inward during 2024—and discovered bolder identities to share for 2025 appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News.