To mark the beginning of Jewish Heritage Month, we are sharing Martha Rans' opening remarks from Out of the Shadows: Reclaiming Jewish Stories which was held at the Norman & Annette Rothstein Theatre and co-presented with the Chutzpah Festival on April 19, 2026. We thank Shayna Goldberg and the Chutzpah Festival for making this event a reality.

This conversation comes about as many of us are sitting in a place of cognitive dissonance with what it is to be a Jew in the diaspora post October 7th, 2023.  I have lived this through my daughter whose international law exam required walking past not only a protest demanding that the students (ages 17 - 21) “pick a side” but then through armed gendarmes in flak jackets checking identification. Eventually, she said she stopped telling people she is Jewish. Full stop.

My grandparents were survivors of the shtetl pogroms in Bessarabia and leaned strongly to the vision of what I have since come to understand as the Bund. Both of my parents grew up in homes where Yiddish was spoken and not transmitted, where Judaism as a religion was largely absent. Being Jewish was about food, cultural memory and mostly politics. My parents were opposed to zionism, not Israel per se, but rather the perpetuation of the nationalisms that led to the many wars they had lived to see and those that led them to be here in the first place.

I have always lived with some measure of anti-semitism. Growing up in London, Ontario, I was not invited to celebrate Christmas with my friends because “the Jews killed Christ”. Occasionally I became aware of neo-Nazi slogans and random vandalism of Jewish cemeteries. It did not, however, affect my Jewish identity.

October 7th, 2023 changed how I live with not anti-semitism but anti-Jew hatred. For that is what it is. Old and not so old hatreds spilling forth from shouts to shots. Literally. However we got here; we are here. Telling stories of our experiences is difficult in an environment where miseducation and disinformation about Jews is omnipresent amid a daily litany of invective and vitriol. Conversation - the telling of stories - is the ability to speak across differences. To cross this divide - to mute the dissonance - Jewish stories must be told.

Telling stories, and sharing them, is at the heart of finding empathy and leaving hatreds behind. Each of the creators you will hear from today will share their experiences telling Jewish stories in the present moment. Or rather trying to tell Jewish stories since most of you have not seen or heard some of these stories.

What follows this evening are some of those stories. This is the first time a Vancouver audience will see David Bercovici-Artieda’s The Fast Runner - we start there. An old story that has new meaning. Then to Mark Leiren-Young's (and Saul Rubinek's) Playing Shylock which opens with the cancellation of The Merchant of Venice. Another familiar story. Dr. Lilach Marom, professor of education, will share her recent research reflecting the experience of Jewish academics. Marsha Lederman, Globe and Mail columnist and writer will weave the pieces together as she moderates the conversation.  

I thank each of them for coming together with deep empathy and compassion to have a conversation about how we each must come out of the shadows and tell our stories.

Martha Rans, KC
Founder and Legal Director