The CANVAS Compendium: Dispatches from the New Jewish Renaissance
CANVAS is excited to support Jewish arts and culture networks and distribution channels in Canada, and we hope to strengthen the connections between Jewish artmakers throughout North America. With this in mind, we invited the editors of Niv to introduce Compendium readers to compelling Jewish artists north of the border.
Orly Zebak is the managing editor at Brick, A Literary Journal, and co-founder of Niv. She writes and makes things in Toronto. Clarrie Feinstein is a business reporter for Toronto Star and cofounder of Niv. — Ed.
Niv is an independent, not-for-profit online magazine focusing on Jewish culture and creative work in Canada and abroad. We founded Niv at the height of the pandemic in Toronto, and since 2020, we continue to foster a platform for the Jewish perspective, in all its diverse, pluralistic, and ever-changing forms of expression. Every issue of Niv highlights emerging and established artists and creatives in their respective fields.
We’re delighted to bring you a sampling of outstanding Canadian Jewish artists and cultural citizens who are forces of change in the North and beyond.
—Clarrie Feinstein and Orly Zebak
Tamar Ilana & Ventanas
From left to right: Derek Gray, Benjamin Barrile, Jessica Hana Deutsch, Tamar Ilana, Demetrios Petsalakis, Tyler Emond. Photo: Oleg Leikin.
Ashkenazi music often dominates mainstream Jewish culture, but there’s a whole world of untapped Jewish music. That’s exactly what Tamar Ilana & Ventanas commit to showing Jewish and non-Jewish audiences—Jewish music is global.
Founded in 2011, the six piece Toronto-based band is fronted by vocalist and dancer Tamar Ilana. They perform in over twenty languages such as Ladino, Spanish, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Hebrew, French, Romani and Arabic, interweaving flamenco, Sephardic and Balkan music and dance, and their own original compositions.
Offering contemporary interpretations of ancient ballads, the band’s mix of musical influences offers a glimpse of the rich and vibrant mosaic of Jewish and world music. Find out where to buy their albums or learn about upcoming shows here.
Primrose Madayag Knazan
Photo: Vilai Pinasouc.
Based in Winnipeg, the Filipinx-Canadian and Jewish writer Primrose Madayag Knazan often explores themes of Jewish identity and belonging in her plays and novels. Her parents are Filipino, and she grew up Catholic, but she left the church during her teenage years. Later in her adult life she converted to Judaism after meeting her husband’s “compelling” rabbi.
Knazan’s plays have been performed at the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre and Winnipeg Fringe Festival. Precipice, which won the 2021 Canadian Jewish Playwriting Competition, follows the protagonist Sharrah’s conversion to Judaism, from her introduction to Jewish traditions at her future in-laws Seder table to a synagogue in the Philippines. Her 2021 novel, Lessons in Fusion (Great Plains Publications) follows a 16-year-old investigating her cultural identity during a popular cooking competition.
Gila Münster
Gila Münster performing at her 2022 8 Gays of Channukah Queer Jewish Variety Show. Photo: Elliott Raben Productions.
Gila Münster refers to herself as “Toronto’s cross-stitching, cross-dressing Jewish American Princess.” Since 2019, she has been performing at venues across the city, including in libraries and schools: she is the first drag performer approved as a vendor and partner for the Toronto District School Board. And in June 2023, she was selected to march with the Toronto Public Library in the Toronto Pride Parade in the fight for intellectual freedom, protesting the troubling wave of book banning, which is on the rise in Canada as well.
Jewish joy is a common theme through her work: for the past five years, Münster has hosted 8 Gays of Channukah, a queer Jewish variety show benefiting Machane Lev, Canada’s first queer Jewish overnight camp.
The Podemski Sisters
From left to right: Sarah Podemski, Jennifer Podemski (sitting), Tamara Podemski. Photo: George Pimentel.
The Podemski sisters, Tamara, Jennifer, and Sarah, are making waves—writing, producing, and acting—in the film and television industry in Canada and the U.S. In fact, you can find them all on the series Reservation Dogs, created by Sterlin Harjo and Taika Waititi. The series, which unfortunately came to an end after three seasons, was a breakthrough in Indigenous representation—every writer, director, and series regular on the show was Indigenous.
Tamara can currently be seen on the new season of Outer Range and will be in the upcoming series Murderbot on Apple TV. Sarah recently wrapped filming on the Jewish summer camp comedy Floaters. Jennifer’s series Little Bird, which she co-created with renowned Canadian Jewish playwright Hannah Moscovitch, follows the story of Esther Rosenblum, a First Nations woman adopted into a Montreal Jewish family, who discovers she was a victim of the Sixties Scoop, a government policy that forcibly removed Indigenous children from their homes.
Through the roles they play and the stories they tell, the Podemskis—who were born to a Jewish father and Anishnaabe mother—continuously advocate for expansive conversations surrounding identity and representation.
Stuart Ross
Photo: Stephen Brockwell.
Stuart Ross does it all—and with gusto. The Toronto-born, Cobourg-based talent is a fiction writer, poet, editor, translator, and creative-writing instructor; he also heads Anvil Press’s surrealist poetry imprint, A Feed Dog Book.
He is the author of twenty books of fiction, poetry, and essays, writing uninhibitedly and freely: “When I write, I simply don’t bother obeying laws of reality,” he said. You can find examples of his humorous, surreal work on his blog; we also recommend his most recent work, The Book of Grief and Hamburgers, which won the 2023 Trillium Book Award, Ontario’s top literary prize. The book is highly personal work written between his brother’s passing and the impending death of a close friend; the CBC describes it as “a kind of literary shiva.”
Shira Spector
Photo: Zoë Gemelli.
In 2021, Shira Spector’s debut graphic memoir, Red Rock Baby Candy, made a splash. Up until then, the Toronto-based cartoonist and writer’s work was most well-known in Canadian circles, but with Baby Candy, which was eleven years in the making, Spector went international (praise from O, The Oprah Magazine surely helped).
The artist describes herself as “an infertile, high-femme, low-income, non-biological Jewish mom, dyke drama queen, and ectopic pregnancy survivor.” The years she covers in her graphic memoir are colored by struggle, pleasure, heartbreak, and joy—trying to conceive, mourning past relationships and her father.
The Wandering Chew
Sydney Warshaw seated, Kat Romanow standing left, and Gillian Sonin. Photo: Rachel Cheng.
Ever wondered what Iraqi Jewish food is? Or Jewish food from Mexico? The Wandering Chew will tell you all about it. Founded in 2013 by Sydney Warshaw and Kat Romanow, the Wandering Chew offers events and recipes that explore the diversity of Jewish cooking from the Diaspora. In 2018, they were joined by Gillian Sonin.
The mission is to preserve and revitalize Jewish food traditions, from the already well-known, like bagels and pastrami, to less well-known dishes such as the Mexican-Jewish community’s Gefilte a la Veracruzana and Iraqi-Jewish sambusaks, or savory pastries. The events include pop-up dinners, cooking workshops, cookbook launches, and holiday celebrations.
Food is a key to understanding different cultures; the Wandering Chew allows Jews and non-Jews to discover the diversity of Jewish cooking and Judaism.
Sara Yacobi-Harris
Photo: Lorenzo Colocado.
Sara Yacobi-Harris has quickly become a sought-after voice in Canada’s Jewish community and abroad. As a multidisciplinary artist and educator, she highlights pressing issues pertaining to Jewish identity, antisemitism, and anti-Black racism. Most recently she produced five episodes of a new six-part CBC documentary called For the Culture with Amanda Parris, exploring social issues impacting Black lives around the world. Yacobi-Harris is also the co-founder of No Silence on Race, an organization that delves in anti-Black racism within the Jewish community and the marginalization of Jews of Color. Their short film, Periphery, which showed at numerous film festivals last year, allows audiences to “bear witness to ethnic diversity in the Jewish community.”
YidLife Crisis
From left to right: Jamie Elman and Eli Batalion. Photo: YidLife Crisis.
Since 2014, when their web series YidLife Crisis premiered, Montrealers Eli Batalon and Jamie Elman have been using comedy to “wade through” their “Yid-entity crisis.” The series is an ode to yiddishkayt, both celebrating and poking fun at Jewish culture—dating, Chinese food on Christmas, eating on Yom Kippur at Montreal’s holy temple of poutine—in Yiddish, French, and English.
YidLife Crisis has garnered over three million online views and received four Canadian Screen Award Nominations. Now based in Los Angeles, the pair have taken their act on the road, and they have a new gig: hosting YIVO’s online course on the history of Jewish comedy in America. Wherever they’re performing or teaching, Batalon and Elman infuse their work with Jewish joy.
Don’t miss these fascinating upcoming events from CANVAS grantees…
Alliance for Jewish Theatre is hosting the AJT Bake-Off: A Short Plays Experience. Participants will write short plays on an assigned theme and collaborate with actors and directors. It kicks off April 18. More info here.
The Council of American Jewish Museums 2024 conference, Museums and Democracy: Elevating Civic Engagement, will be in DC and Baltimore, May 14-16. Registration and agenda info here.
Jewish Book Council in partnership with the Jewish Museum and Tablet Magazine is hosting “Always the Other: The Continued Rise of Antisemitism from Dreyfus to Today,” April 18 at the Jewish Museum. Rabbi Diana Fersko and author Maurice Samuels will discuss the persistence of the world’s oldest hatred. Details here.
The Museum of Jewish Montreal’s famous walking tours resume April 19. Sign up here.
Canadian flag: Jared Grove, via Wikimedia.
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