2026
An evening of learning and playing Jewish music with Josh "Socalled" Dolgin
Join us for an evening to learn about and play traditional Eastern European Jewish music with pianist, accordionist, journalist, photographer, puppet maker, rapper, composer, magician, producer, and instructor, John "Socalled" Dolgin.
All are welcome.
Josh has lectured and led master classes in music festivals around the world, from Moscow to Paris, from London to LA, and from Krakow to San Francisco, and has performed on every continent. With 8-ish solo albums (and one with Vulfpeck’s Jack Stratton and Michael Winograd as Yiddishe Pirat) and 6 produced musical comedies to his name, he has performed solo or with his band all over the world for more than 25 years. Always active doing special projects, he toured Yiddish programs with Austria’s Lungau Big Band and Germany’s Kaiser Quartett, creates themesongs (like the As It Happens remix, heard every night across the country on CBC), directed and released an indie erotica film and created a special program using first world war internment camp archives at the Weimar festival of Yiddish culture.
Montreal's Jewish artists at the Visual Arts Collection
On January 13, 2026, the McGill Visual Arts Collection and the Student Affairs Liaison for Jewish Students welcomed students, staff, and faculty a special guided tour focused on the Jewish Painters of Montreal, a remarkable group of artists who helped shape the city’s cultural identity in the mid-twentieth century.
2024
Provenance and the Orphans of Offenbach
For Jewish texts, the genealogy of ownership has been subject to both the careful chronicling of ownership and vagaries like the theft of millions of books by the Nazis during the Holocaust. After the war, the Offenbach Archival Depot was tasked with repatriating three million looted books. Some libraries were returned to their caretakers in their entirety but not in those cases where libraries had been destroyed. The Jewish Public Library received the largest donation from Offenbach in Canada through a deal brokered by the Canadian Jewish Congress. By contrast, the Judaica Collections at McGill’s Rare Books and Special Collections were donated either through the families of the original collectors or in some cases through the intervention of McGill’s faculty.
