A Season for Reflection: Revisiting the Stories that Shape Us

The Sound of Music directed by Robert Wise

In theatres September 12, 2025

THE HILLS are still alive: celebrating its sixtieth birthday, the Rodgers-and-Hammerstein–penned The Sound of Music is returning to the big screen. This ambitious, big-budget musical adaptation stars Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer and lovingly retells the real-life story of the Trapp Family Singers. Taking us back to the Jewish contributions to Broadway’s golden age, its iconic songs have been stuck in fans’ heads for decades. But another element of the film continues to resonate: its confrontation with fascism. As white supremacy and antisemitism once again rise around the world, The Sound of Music’s message — to climb every mountain and stand up to injustice — feels more urgent than ever. Sophia Hershfield

The Smashing Machine directed by Benny Safdie

In theatres October 3, 2025

THINGS MAY BE a bit awkward at the Safdie Shabbat table since the filmmaking breakup of brothers Josh and Benny Safdie: both are set to make their solo sports-themed directorial debuts before the end of the year. Josh’s comedy, Marty Supreme, starring Timothée Chalamet and loosely based on the true-life tale of table tennis star Marty Reisman, will hit theatres in December . Benny, meanwhile, is taking a more dramatic route with The Smashing Machine, a biopic about former wrestler and MMA champion Mark Kerr. Starring Dwayne Johnson, in his first departure from comedy, and Emily Blunt, The Smashing Machine promises to explore the deep emotional and physical toll of professional fighting. Sophia Hershfield

Mile End Kicks directed by Chandler Levack

Premiering on September 4, 2025

FOLLOWING the breakout success of her debut feature I Like Movies (2022), Chandler Levack returns to the Toronto International Film Festival with her highly anticipated second film, Mile End Kicks. Loosely inspired by her own experiences as a young female music critic, this romantic comedy is set in Montreal’s Mile End neighbourhood at the height of the vibrant indie music scene in 2011. Though now primarily associated with tattooed hipsters, it was once a home for working-class Jewish immigrants, and music has always been a part of its creative identity, from klezmer to Grimes. Produced by the team behind Canadian indie darling BlackBerry, Mile End Kicks will embrace the messiness and fun of love triangles, dating musicians, and 20-something angst. Sophia Hershfield

Nuremberg directed by James Vanderbilt

In theatres November 7, 2005

AFTER GETTING its world release at the Toronto International Film Festival in September , this courtroom drama will go into wide release later in the fall. From the writer of Zodiac and The People vs. O.J. Simpson, Nuremberg follows chief prosecutor Robert H. Jackson (Russell Crowe) and a Jewish-American investigator (Rami Malek) as they assemble the case against Nazi leadership. With survivor voices and camp footage presented as evidence, the film captures a turning point in legal history: one in which the world was forced to find language for crimes it had never dared to name. Alex Rose

Nobody Wants This created by Erin Foster

(Netflix)

October 23, 2025

NAVIGATING an interfaith relationship is not easy, especially when dealing with fraught families, concerned congregants, and parasocial podcast fans. In this rom-com series that confronts the tension between Jewish community and the secular dating world — soon returning for a second season — Kristen Bell plays Joanne, an agnostic sex and relationship podcaster who falls for young, quirky Rabbi Noah (Adam Brody). Some Jewish feminists have taken issue with the show’s portrayal of its Jewish women, and there’s been some controversy about the series’ use of the word shiksa to describe Joanne. Still, Bell and Brody’s undeniable chemistry has landed the show a whopping 95 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, and a second season for Adam Brody’s Hot Rabbi.  Sophia Hershfield

The Shabbat Effect: Jewish Wisdom for Growth and Transformation by Alan Morinis

(Bloomsbury Publishing)

November 13, 2025

SHABBAT, like Kaddish and Jewish delis, is a topic that inspires many writers to wax rhapsodic about its history and ability to catalyze deep personal meaning. In the hands of Alan Morinis, a leader in the revival of Musar, the subject gets a more pragmatic treatment with a focus on developing practice. Musar was a movement of growth through self-examination in nineteenth-century yeshivot, and Morinis has made it a modern phenomenon by focusing less on the self-flagellation and more on spirituality. You won’t find a kugel recipe, but you may learn how to find yourself in the kugel. Avi Finegold

Moroccan Jews in France and Canada by Yolande Cohen

(University of Ottawa Press)

October 22, 2025

FOR MANY Canadian Jews with familial origins in Montreal, being Jewish meant being part of the Anglo population — one that, by and large, departed for Toronto and elsewhere with francophone ascendence. This shift did not mean an end to Jewish Montreal, but rather a shift toward a more francophone Jewish population. For those curious about the origins of some of Canada’s francophone Jews, Yolande Cohen’s book, Moroccan Jews in France and Canada, offers backstory. With contributions from Sara Cohen-Fournier , Noureddine Harrami, Martin Messika, and Stephanie Tara Schwartz, the book includes oral history, personal testimony, and historiographic analysis of this unique diaspora. Phoebe Maltz Bovy

Every Body Beloved by Minna Bromberg

(Wayne State University Press)

September 9, 2025

RABBI Dr. Minna Bromberg, a sociologist-turned-spiritual-leader, is the founder of the group Fat Torah, which connects Jewish practice with body positivity. Bromberg’s book, Every Body Beloved, is a continuation of this work, using Judaism as well as her own personal experiences to offer new perspectives on how to combat fatphobia and increase accessibility for those of all sizes. There’s something in it for you, whether you’re a larger-bodied Jew in search of religious affirmation and liberation or someone looking to see how Judaism could help you challenge your biases on the subject. Phoebe Maltz Bovy

The Art of Fantastic Four by Jack Kirby and Stan Lee

(Dark Horse Books)

September 23, 2025

ORIGINAL ARTWORK and stories by Jack Kirby (born Jacob Kurtzberg) and Stan Lee (born Stanley Lieber) — two of the great Jewish comics creators, who launched Fantastic Four in 1961 — are featured in this reprint. It’s widely thought that Kirby put some of his own story into that of The Thing (a.k.a. Ben Grimm). Marvel Comics confirmed Grimm is Jewish in a 2002 story in which The Thing returns to Yancy Street, his old stomping grounds, based on Delancey Street in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, where the character (and Kirby) grew up. Recently, the real-life corner of Delancey and Essex streets was renamed Yancy Street/Jack Kirby Way. Jonathan Rothman

Sources of Pride: Jewish Views on Gender and Sexuality by Abby Chava Stein

(Ben Yehuda Press)

September 2, 2025

FOR THE UNINITIATED, Abby Stein is a rabbi, activist, and author of the 2019 bestselling memoir Becoming Eve: My Journey From Ultra-Orthodox Rabbi To Transgender Woman. Born in the strictly religious, largely Yiddish-speaking Hasidic enclave of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Stein is a tenth-generation descendant of the Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism. She spent the first 18 years of her life pickled in the rich culture, education system, and rituals of Hasidic life, and, as the first-born scion of a dynastic rabbinic family, would have been poised to be a future leader of that community. That very particular identity — as someone with both a deep, embodied knowledge of life in the Hasidic world, and of life as a transgender woman — gives Stein a rare perspective on the material. Zachary Kauffman

Bob Dylan: Things Have Changed by Ron Rosenbaum

(Melville House)

October 21, 2025

ROSENBAUM began his career as a Village Voice journalist and has been covering and interviewing Dylan for decades. Here, he dives into not only the catalogue but also the context of the artist’s life in which the music was created, including Dylan’s peregrinations into Christianity and return to a form of Judaism. The detailed biography delves all the way back to events like Dylan’s father bringing a rabbi to rural Minnesota to serve as his son’s bar mitzvah tutor. The resulting analysis of the songs and their detailed backstories makes this one for the mega-fans and the Dylan-curious alike.  Jonathan Rothman

Kaplan’s Plot by Jason Diamond

(Flatiron Books)

September 16, 2025

JASON DIAMOND’S debut novel is made up of two parallel storylines. The first concerns Elijah Mendes, a 30-something schlemiel, forced to move back in with his mother in Chicago after his Silicon Valley start-up dreams go bust. He then discovers a rabbi is trying to cajole his mother into selling a large piece of property, bought by his grandfather, that he never even knew their family owned: a Jewish cemetery.

The second storyline tracks the life of Mendes’s grandfather, Yitz Kaplan, who arrives in di goldene medina as a child fleeing pogroms and scrabbles up Chicago’s criminal underworld into the midwestern middle class. Between these two narrative threads, Diamond seems poised to fall into a long tradition of writers that includes the likes of Mordecai Richler, Philip Roth, and Jonathan Safran Foer: Jewish men whose stories are filled with sharply funny dark humour, and characters plagued by nervous conditions, unachieved potential, and intergenerational angst. Zachary Kauffman

Queen Esther by John Irving

(Simon & Schuster)

November 4, 2025

IN HIS FIRST novel in over a decade, John Irving returns to characters from The Cider House Rules with a story that spans generations and centres on Rachel — known to those closest to her as “Queen Esther.” Raised in a Jewish orphanage and trained as an obstetrician, Rachel’s life unfolds against the backdrop of twentieth-century American upheaval, touching on themes of identity, survival, and chosen family. True to form, Irving weaves faith, fate, and fierce independence into a novel as sprawling as it is intimate.  Alex Rose

Chaim Soutine: Genius, Obsession, and a Dramatic Life in Art by Celeste Marcus

(Public Affairs)

October 28, 2025

BASED IN WASHINGTON DC, Celeste Marcus, who’s also managing editor of the journal Liberties, has been at work at this first-ever full-length biography of the Minsk-born painter. Soutine was part of the Paris Jewish artists’ colony in the 1920s and 30s, along with the likes of Marc Chagall, Amedeo Modigliani, and Pablo Picasso. He fled the city during the Nazi invasion and eventually died at their hands. Known for his obsessive, eccentric approach, Marcus attempts to chronicle his life while also showing how his work reverberates through to contemporary painters and techniques. Jonathan Rothman

Other Evolutions by Rebecca Hirsch Garcia

(ECW Press)

October 7, 2025

GARCIA’S FIRST NOVEL, Other Evolutions, tells the story of a young girl of Jewish and Mexican heritage who lives in Ottawa. Alma Alt learns that her sister, in Montreal, is passing as white. In the book, Hirsch Garcia, also author of The Girl Who Cried Diamonds & Other Stories, explores themes of family conflict and post-accident trauma. The novel offers a timely exploration of coming of age in an interfaith, interracial Canadian household from an up-and-coming Canadian Jewish writer.  Phoebe Maltz Bovy

Heavyweight by Jonathan Goldstein

September 18, 2025

HAVE YOU HEARD the good news? Yes, friends, the neurotic Jew with a cult following and an obsession with other people’s sins, Canada’s own Jonathan Goldstein, is returning.

On the podcast, Goldstein acts as a kind of nudgy, meddlesome life coach. Each episode focuses on a guest who wants to resolve some moment from their past: a falling out, a withheld secret, an unsolved mystery. In a way, it is a show concerned with teshuvah, returning to some broken piece of the past in the hopes of repair.

Goldstein is an audio storyteller whose career is a kind of microcosm of the entire industry. Much like the industry, his podcast has suffered its own slights, most notably being acquired by corporate audio giant Spotify, which then cancelled Heavyweight in a round of mass cuts in 2023. Its welcome return signals some hope for the type of earnest, narrative storytelling shows that have all too often been squeezed out. Zachary Kauffman

The Brooklyn Nets

(TSN and Sportsnet)

Starting October 21, 2025

IN THE 2024-25 SEASON, the National Basketball Association had approximately one Jewish player: the Israeli-born Deni Avdija. (“Approximate” because it’s not publicly known whether three-time all-star Domantas Sabonis has finished the conversion process he began in 2023 after marrying his wife, Shashana.) This year, however , the number of hooping Hebrews will jump by 200 percent, as two Jewish players, Ben Saraf and Danny Wolf, were drafted in the first round. Also unprecedented: they were drafted back-to-back by the same team, the Brooklyn Nets. Could there be a greater example of basketball beshert? Saraf, whoseparents were pro basketball players in Israel, wears number 77, the gematria of mazal, while the seven-foot-tall Wolf was born in Illinois but gained Israeli citizenship to represent the Holy Land in the 2023 FIBA U20 European Championship, where he helped lead Team Israel to a silver medal. Crown Heights will be a raging simcha if either one scores a triple-double this year. Michael Fraiman

In Good Faith by The CJN

September 3, 2025

CAN A ZIONIST and a Palestinian be friends? Many Jewish-Muslim interfaith groups and personal relationships broke down after October 7; two years later, bridges are slowly being rebuilt. In a new podcast miniseries by The CJN, in partnership with the Canadian Race Relations Foundation and the Ronald S. Roadburg Foundation, two co-hosts — Modern Orthodox rabbi Avi Finegold and Palestinian peace activist Yafa Sakkejha — will hold challenging, honest, good-faith conversations with fellow Canadians whose lives have been torn apart by the Middle Eastern conflict. As online polarization pushes both Jewish and Muslim communities deeper into their respective echo chambers, this project aims to re-humanize each side, dispelling myths and opening a frank dialogue at a time when Canada needs it most. Michael Fraiman