Rabbi Aaron Rotenberg realized at a young age he was drawn to Jewish studies. After graduating from Jewish day schools around Toronto, he decided to attend the Jewish Theological Seminary, a Conservative rabbinical school in New York City, for five years—only to end up a Renewal rabbi years later, ordained just this month.

As the spiritual leader of the Annex Shul in downtown Toronto—and one of a handful of Renewal rabbis in the city—his goal is to connect with younger audiences. That means leading unconventional services including music, dance parties and an emphasis on Earth-based Judaism.

Just ahead of Tu b’Shevat, Rabbi Rotenberg sat down with Ralph Benmergui on Not That Kind of Rabbi for a lengthy discussion about the Renewal movement, eco-spirituality and the age-old relationship between Jews and the land.

Credits

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

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With the recent news of a ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas and the eventual return of the remaining Israeli hostages, tensions remain high between pro- and anti-Zionist communities here in Canada, who've stood sharply divided on the foreign conflict for 15 months. Members of those communities may still be holding hatred or anger in their hearts—leading to increased depression, anxiety and isolation.

But according to Dr. Robert Enright, forgiveness is a choice rooted in mercy—and doesn't come at the expense of moral justice. As the co-founder of the International Forgiveness Institute, Enright has dedicated his career to studying forgiveness and the effects it has on the human brain and body. He joins 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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Once upon a time, Toronto was a sleepy city. The atmosphere shut down at night. Red tape and cultural meekness kept things status quo. But through the 1970s and 1980s, the city's younger generations changed how things work—and one of the biggest players behind the scenes was Gary Topp.

A music promoter and independent movie theatre operator, it was Topp—along with his colleague, Gary Cormier, together known as the Two Garys—who first brought and promoted The Ramones, The Police, Slayer and other countercultural icons to Canadians for the first time. Topp also began operating the Roxy Theatre, an art deco building on the Danforth, for punk concerts and movie screenings that wouldn't be shown anywhere else in the country.

Last month, Topp's transformative career was printed in a coffee table book, He Hijacked My Brain: Gary Topp's Toronto, recalling legendary stories and performances from decades past. He joins his old friend Ralph Benmergui (who also grew up in Forest Hill, not far away) for a walk down memory lane in exploring his influence on the cultural fabric of the city—and what's changed in the music scene today.

Credits

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

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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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