The cover illustration of the fall issue of The Canadian Jewish News Magazine drew hundreds of responses from readers across the country.
The image depicted a fictional family gathered for Rosh Hashanah. This family included a matronly woman in an apron wearing a yellow ribbon in support of bringing the hostages home; a young girl with a dog tag necklace in support of the Israel Defense Forces; two bearded men in a heated discussion; someone looking at footage of an explosion posted to Instagram on their smartphone; one woman clutching her forehead in apparent disappointment or frustration; and, most controversially, a young woman sporting a keffiyeh and watermelon earrings—a symbol of Palestinian solidarity.
The magazine’s editor-in-chief, Hamutal Dotan, joined Rabbi Avi Finegold and Phoebe Maltz Bovy, hosts of The CJN’s opinion and debate podcast, Bonjour Chai, for a robust discussion of the logic behind the drawing. Listen to the full episode here.
Avi: Can you give us a 10-second resume of what brought you to everything leading up to The CJN Magazine and what is your vision for it?
Hamutal: I’ve been an editor based in Toronto for about 15 years. Before that, I was doing my grad work in philosophy, specifically in ethics, and I was brought in to reconceive The CJN’s magazine. We’re launching with a redesign in the spring, which is very exciting. And this issue is the first that I think really starts the shift towards the range of coverage that we’re looking at developing.
Avi: This issue was conceived as a one-year anniversary response to where Jews are one year after October 7. Is that correct?
Hamutal: This Rosh Hashanah is not going to be like a typical Rosh Hashanah. There are only a few days between the holiday and the October 7 anniversary. And it didn’t seem either accurate or responsible to gloss over the complexities of this moment and just do a straightforward happy holiday issue the way that we might have in other years.
Phoebe: So the magazine, in its new direction, is going to be a more complex, wide-ranging portrait of Jewish life.
Hamutal: That is certainly our aspiration. What we’re really hoping to do, over time, is to explore in a very serious, reported way the issues and situations that the community is finding itself in. We are not here to take sides on anything. We don’t have house views on matters of politics or religion. What we’re here to do is to put the Jewish community in conversation with itself, to put Canadian Jews in conversation with other Canadian Jews, and to be a forum where we can all learn more about the diversity and complexity of the Canadian Jewish experience.
Avi: And this leads us to where we are now, with the magazine cover.
Hamutal: The thinking behind the cover was very simply to depict reality. This is a Jewish family: multiple generations, different points of view about what is happening in the world, what has been happening for the last year. They are all gathered for the holidays. They are all at the same table. They are all talking. Many of them are laughing. There are many Jewish families that will look like this this year. And this is also representative of the Jewish family writ large.
Phoebe: When you say “the thinking”, you mean your thinking or the artist’s thinking—or both?
Hamutal: This was a concept that I developed with the art director of the magazine. And then she had conversations with the illustrator and we refined it. The cover went through a number of iterations, as covers generally do. And there were various tonal shifts and changing elements. This is where it wound up.
This is what the Jewish world looks like. This is what many Rosh Hashanah tables will look like. And it’s a really beautiful and distinctly Jewish thing. One of the things about Judaism that I’ve always really loved and appreciated is that built into the very foundation of the religion is this idea of disagreement and divergence of opinions on what being Jewish means and what we’re called on to do as Jews. This is what the Talmud is: it’s a bunch of Jews disagreeing, trying to talk and working through what it all means.
I think that’s wonderful. I think a lot of Jewish resilience stems from that. I think it’s something that’s beautiful about our tradition. And while this period of history is incredibly fraught and incredibly sensitive, there is something incredibly powerful and pertinent right now in that.
There’s a fascinating phrase in Pirkei Avot, “Machloket l’shem shamayim”, which means, “A dispute for the sake of God.” It’s written specifically about Hillel and Shammai, right, these two sages in Jewish tradition who disagreed about things and also loved each other. And this is a moment where Jews are very much disagreeing about things—but, hopefully, still loving each other.
Avi: Yeah, the first thing that I noticed—aside from the woman with the watermelon earrings and keffiyeh—was that nobody at the table seems to mind that she’s there. And she is happy. She is not sitting there, pontificating and spouting, “You guys are all evil.” It’s like, “This is family and I belong here.”
And that leads us to the first thing that I really want to get into when thinking about this cover. There was a bit of backlash in some sectors of the Jewish community, but just as much, there were many, many people that were saying, “Thank you for showing us; I never really felt represented by The CJN.” Can you talk us through some of the pushback we’ve gotten, and what’s been heartwarming to hear?
Hamutal: What it amounts to is critics saying, “It is inappropriate to have a person in a keffiyeh and watermelon earrings represented”—to which I would say, that person is Jewish also. We are not here to pick and choose about which Jews get represented and which don’t.
In terms of supportive messages, there have been, as you said, Avi, some lovely notes from people who wrote in to say that they hadn’t previously felt included or represented in The CJN. People who said, “This is what my table is going to look like.” People who said, “I wish my table looked like this, because we’re actually either going to be fighting more or not everyone is welcome. Not everyone is invited this year. And what you’re showing in the cover is something that our family is aspiring to, which I thought was both heartbreaking but also important.” And people who wrote to just simply say “thank you” for not sweeping this under the rug.
Phoebe: So can I ask a couple of things? First is, I want to know why the men have no politics. It’s fascinating, visually. I know the women have their accessories that are showing their politics and the men are just these sort of apolitical—
Avi: I don’t know. I look at these two men and, based on how they are acting, their body language, their attitudes, I know exactly what they’re thinking.
Phoebe: But you don’t, is the thing.
Hamutal: Some of the people who’ve been writing in, they describe what they are seeing in the illustration—and they are interpreting it in different ways. And this is always the case with any artistic medium, but certainly with visuals.
There’s one person who wrote in—it was fascinating to me—who was very supportive of the cover and thanked us for depicting a brainwashed person, because she had that in her family and it was a struggle, but it was accurate.
Phoebe: That actually brings me to my next point, which is about people bringing their own understanding of the situation. I saw the cover and liked it, despite—as I have been telling people—I do not have the politics or the aesthetics of somebody who would do purple buns, a keffiyeh and watermelon earrings on any occasion. But I like the cover. It’s a kind of aspirational representative, you know, we can all still talk to each other. We should all still talk to each other.
And then I went on Twitter and did a foolish thing. I shared a positive response to the cover and saw this sea of people saying, finally, the anti-Zionist Jews get some representation. And I thought about how these things play out, because, to some extent, the responses play off one another.
People are responding to what they’ve already seen people posting in whichever forums—Twitter, WhatsApp. If you’re seeing responses that say, “This is a cover that is bringing warm fuzzies to anti-Zionist Jews,” then maybe some of the people who are saying, “Look at this anti-Zionist cover” are responding to the people who are saying, “I’m so happy, finally an anti-Zionist cover.” And I don’t get it at all. I agree with you that this is not taking a stance either on any of their positions.
Hamutal: It’s also really important to note that when we’re talking about responses on social media and the responses we’re getting by email, to a certain extent, we’re never going to know who they’re coming from and how many of those responses are even from humans. There have been a lot of emails that we’ve received from email addresses in the U.S., people who are not subscribers, people who have never interacted with The CJN before in any capacity. It’s hard to detangle, but to the extent that we’ve been able to figure out, a significant percentage of the feedback that we’re getting is not in Canada and not from people who have any relationship with The CJN at all. I’m always wary of drawing firm conclusions from the digitally mediated responses.
Avi: The negative reactions to the cover were basically saying, “I wish this wasn’t in the community. These people are such a tiny minority. Take this woman out of the picture and everything’s fine.” And the people that are thanking The CJN for this cover are basically saying not the opposite—which is, “I want you to represent a table filled with people with keffiyehs celebrating Rosh Hashanah”—but just, “I’m glad that I am included in this picture, because that’s all that I’m asking for.”
And that’s really telling, because I think that that was the main gist of the rest of the magazine, was to say, there are many Jews that are Zionist, there are many Jews that are not, and this is what we want to represent. And here are articles, and here are thoughts, and here are ideas that are related to that and their reflections on the past year. Is that fair?
Hamutal: I think that that’s fair. It’s important, though tricky in this conversation, to distinguish between people who have a negative reaction to the cover because they don’t think that it should have been published, and people who have negative reactions because they are uncomfortable with the actual reality that it depicts. And those are two hopefully separable things.
There’s been polling done about this, in the last year, that shows the percentage of the Jewish community that is uncomfortable with Israel and with Israel’s current course of action has grown. This is something that many other Jews find very difficult, and it absolutely can be uncomfortable to be confronted with a visual depiction of that. For any media outlet, it’s important to separate how people are feeling about the actual state of affairs versus how they are feeling about the depiction of that state of affairs.
Phoebe: Avi, I want to ask you to ask about the religious angle, because some of the pushback that I have seen has been like, “There’s somebody in a keffiyeh, where’s the shtreimel? Where is the visual of observant Judaism?”
Avi: Clearly there is at least somebody with a shtreimel at that table and they got up once the phones came out because they didn’t want to be at the Rosh Hashanah table with phones out, but they were still at the table beforehand. That is my interpretation and I’m going to stick with it.
That being said, I think it’s probably true that the majority of people who are 100 percent holiday-observant and Sabbath-observant might not have somebody who is wearing a keffiyeh at the table.
This image, to me, is more representative of what Canadian Jewry does look like. People that have the traditions, people that have the apples and the honey and the pomegranates and the wine and the round challahs, and then when discussions start happening at the table, phones will come out. That’s the line I always tell Americans about what Canadian Jewry is like: the synagogue they drive to on Shabbat better be Orthodox.
Hamutal: I know people who pull out their phones to read a dvar at their Shabbos tables.
Avi: Yeah, so I’m not complaining about that, because to me, it’s who some people are.
This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity. Listen to the whole thing at thecjn.ca/watermelon-shtreimel
