On Oct. 9, around 2,500 strangers packed Montreal's Place des Arts concert hall to sing Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" in surprisingly perfect harmony. The melody was beautiful. In a video recording posted online, tears and smiles are visible as people sing out the familiar chorus. You could say it was a spiritual performance—unless you're Nobu Adilman, who co-organized the event, for whom this mass choir has always been about enjoying life. While people often feel tapped into a higher power, Adilman is more pragmatic about the whole thing.

Adilman, along with his artistic partner, Daveed Goldman, founded the group Choir! Choir! Choir! in a living room more than a decade ago. The idea was simple: strangers singing songs together. Those first contributors had so much fun, Adilman and Goldman decided to keep it going. The group grew in popularity until they amassed hundreds of thousands of social media followers and tour dates that rack up hundreds, even thousands of paying attendees.

And before all that, Adilman worked at CBC with a young Ralph Benmergui. Adilman reconnects with his old mentor on Not That Kind of Rabbi to discuss the origins of his hit group and the innate spirituality of music.

Credits

• Host: Ralph Benmergui
• Producer: Michael Fraiman
• Music: Yevhen Onoychenko

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Mark Leiren-Young wrote Shylock in 1996, a play using Shakespeare's controversial Jewish character in The Merchant of Venice to explore modern-day cancel culture. While the script saw productions aorund the world, Leiren-Young was wary of giving the rights away too quickly, knowing it was complex, sensitive subject matter that required an intellectual approach.

So when he met the acclaimed actor Saul Rubinek, who proposed that Leiren-Young rewrite the script to tailor it to his own real life, Leiren-Young jumped at the chance. A fan of blending fact with fiction, the B.C.-based writer began researching Rubinek's life and updating the nearly 20-year-old script to match a post-pandemic view of what "cancel culture" really means.

The result is Playing Shylock, running at Canadian Stage until Dec. 8 in Toronto. Leiren-Young sat down with his old friend Ralph Benmergui to discuss how this show came to life, what it was like creating the production during and after Oct. 7, and how he got his start in writing—including an early break writing an unconventional pacifist episode of the '90s CGI cartoon Beast Wars.

Credits

• Host: Ralph Benmergui
• Producer: Michael Fraiman
• Music: Yevhen Onoychenko

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Growing up, Allan Novak assumed his family was fairly ordinary: modest, witty, hardworking Jewish immigrants who found a new live in Canada after the war. That his mother was one of four sibling survivors was noteworthy, but the outside world did not take notice.

That is, until the siblings all began reaching the age of 100.

Once international reporters and Holocaust foundations discovered the story of the world's oldest survivor siblings, Novak—a veteran director who worked with Canadian comedy icons in the 1980s and '90s—decided to turn the camera on his own family. The result is a 30-minute documentary called Crossing the River: From Poland to Paradise, featuring intimate and insightful interviews with his aunts, uncle and mother, the youngest of whom is 96-years-old. The film has been touring the festival circuit this year and is currently available on-demand.

Novak sat down to share his family's remarkable story with his longtime friend and collaborator, Ralph Benmergui, on the latest episode of Not That Kind of Rabbi.

Credits

• Host: Ralph Benmergui
• Producer: Michael Fraiman
• Music: Yevhen Onoychenko

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Michael Coren has lived many lives. Born to a Jewish cab driver in England, Coren converted to Catholocism in the 1980s, then Evangelicalism in the '90s; he grew into a bombastic right-wing Christian talk radio and TV personality with shows on the Sun News Network and the Crossroads Television System; then he came back to embrace the Catholic Church, before finally leaving again to become not just an Anglican—but an Anglican priest.

Coren's spiritual malleability—including open repentance for insulting comments he made about queer people decades ago, and the journey he's taken to fundamentally change various political opinions—is at the heart of his new memoir, Heaping Coals: From Media Firebrand to Anglican Priest, published in October 2024. In it, he recounts how he never considered how hard it was for his parents when he left his home country for Canada, and how his perspective on Christian values has changed, while the role of Christiandom has shifted in the broader Western world.

Coren sits down with fellow former broadcaster Ralph Benmergui for a frank talk about his numerous mea culpas, handling backlash on social media and the profound difficulty in forgiveness.

Credits

• Host: Ralph Benmergui
• Producer: Michael Fraiman
• Music: Yevhen Onoychenko

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Both of Eva Almos's parents were Holocaust survivors. Her mother, from Lithuania, was a kind and gentle soul who went out of her way to uplift strangers and support her daughter. But her father was the opposite: a traditional Greek man with chauvinist ideas who was hardened by the horrors of the Holocaust. The duality sent Almos into therapy, where she spent years trying to piece herself together.

All this time, she was making a career in the Los Angeles entertainment industry. She's worked on numerous cartoons from the 1980s to today, including Care Bears, Pinky and the Brain and the popular current PBS show Wild Kratts. But her latest project has a very different vibe. Almos voices numerous characters in The CJN's new original audio drama, Justice: A Holocaust Zombie Story, including a survivor whose voice she styled after her late mother.

To explain more about her inspiration and life, Eva Almos sat down with her old friend Ralph Benmergui for a candid conversation about the impacts of generational trauma and the new zombie audio drama, available at thecjn.ca/zombies.

Credits

• Host: Ralph Benmergui
• Producer: Michael Fraiman
• Music: Yevhen Onoychenko

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Devon Spier has long COVID. The artist, poet and spiritual guide has spent days bedridden, feeling ill and angry at God. But that forced pause gave her time to reflect on her life, art and beliefs, and she began to realize more emphatically how God, for her, exists in liminal spaces—in the wilderness, in small moments of peace and beauty between devastation and pain.

These thoughts led her to create a new exhibit that blends art, design, poetry and spirituality. "18 Plus One" is on display at the Gerrard Art Space in Toronto from Oct 2 - 9, ahead of a fuller exhibit at the JCC Ann Arbor in Michigan from December 2024 to February 2025.

Spier joins Ralph Benmergui—who is, like Spier, also not a rabbi but kind of vaguely close to one—on Not That Kind of Rabbi for a fulsome conversation about artistic expression, humanistic empathy and the meaning of God.

Credits

• Host: Ralph Benmergui
• Producer: Michael Fraiman
• Music: Yevhen Onoychenko

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Growing up in the Orthodox movement, Neshama Carlebach would hear it a lot: "It's a shame your father never had sons." The father in question, the acclaimed Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, instead had two daughters—and the implication was that his legacy as a prolific songwriter, whose repertoire includes the popular 1965 folk anthem "Am Yisrael Chai", would die with him.

Neshama didn't let those comments stop her—in fact, the opposite became true. After growing up in Toronto, Neshama ended up following in her father's footsteps, first becoming an acclaimed singer, teacher and songwriter, and now embarking on a years-long journey to becoming a rabbi. Her theological studies changed tone after Oct. 7, sparking a new desire in her to be "a rabbi who fights" for her community. But what's remained consistent has been her stubborn defiance of societal expectations.

Neshama joins Ralph Benmergui on Not That Kind of Rabbi to discuss her life and music, and explain what it's like raising two sons to carry on the Carlebach legacy in an increasingly antisemitic world.

Credits

• Host: Ralph Benmergui
• Producer: Michael Fraiman
• Music: Yevhen Onoychenko

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In the aftermath of Oct. 7, Jesse Brown—who has risen to prominence as a media critic and muckraker with his Canadaland podcast and digital media company—once again stirred up controversy online. But it wasn't a big news investigation that sparked outrage; it was a series of posts about antisemitic attacks on Canadian Jewish-aligned institutions, from synagogues and community centres to bookstores owned by Jews.

Brown was shocked at the response he got from his own progressive supporters. As he saw it, he was doing what he'd always done: report in objective terms about the ongoing harassment of an ethnic minority on Canadian soil. But not everyone saw it that way. Every day, by the dozens, his supporters dropped off, boycotting him and pressuring his advertisers to do the same.

Ralph Benmergui invited Brown onto Not That Kind of Rabbi to hear what it's been like going through this public flogging—and also chat about the evolution of news media and where podcasting fits into everything.

Credits

• Host: Ralph Benmergui
• Producer: Michael Fraiman
• Music: Yevhen Onoychenko

Support The CJN

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