The 37th Annual Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival represents a diversity of experiences and cultures
The online event showcases recent literature that revels in pivotal ideas of the modern world, sparks meaningful conversation
Post Sponsored by JCC Jewish Book Festival
Dara Horn (left); Jai Chakrabarti.
The Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival is back, bringing together leading authors and literature lovers online from February 6 to 10.
Now in its 37th year, the event features fascinating authors from across Canada, the U.S., Israel, Australia, and Great Britain.
The fest’s big themes emerge organically from the world around us, including the rise of the new anti-Semitism, diverse identities, and the Holocaust, while unpacking certain parallels between the Jewish and the Indigenous experience.
Featured 2022 festival authors include: Dara Horn (People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present); British comedian David Baddiel (Jews Don 't Count); and bestselling Australian author Heather Morris (Three Sisters, the last in the Tattooist of Auschwitz trilogy).
Daniel Sokatch, an expert who understands both sides of one of the world's most complex and controversial topics, the Israeli-Palestianian conflict, will present Can We Talk About Israel? A Guide for the Curious, Confused and Conflicted.
David Baddiel.
There are many quests among the books featured this year: winner of the Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Fiction, Gary Barwin brings Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted: The Ballad of Motl the Cowboy, an eccentric and deeply felt exploration of genocide, persecution, colonialism, and masculinity, saturated in his sharp wit and perfect pun-play; and U.S. author Jai Chakrabarti, whose A Play for the End of the World takes his protagonist's search all the way to India in a deeply moving reminder of the power of the past to shape the present.
Fascinating stories of artists caught in the treacherous web of WWII will be presented by two U.S. writers sharing a historical fiction subject: bestselling author Meg Waite Clayton with The Postmistress of Paris and painter/writer Michaela Carter with Leonora in the Morning Light.
Short stories will be celebrated in an event with Vancouver's Rachel Rose (The Octopus Has Three Hearts) and Montreal's Ami Sands Brodoff (The Sleep of Apples).
Other B.C. authors include Isa Milman with her memoir Afterlight: In Search of Poetry, History and Home and Rachel Mines (with her translation of Jonah Rosenfeld's The Rivals and Other Stories).
There’s much, much more.
Full details and a digital program guide are at www.jccgv.com/jewish-book-festival.
Post sponsored by JCC Jewish Book Festival.