Between 2018 and 2022, Marnie Salsky travelled around Toronto, taking photographs of her Jewish community. The project was meant to capture the diversity and reality of Jewish life in a rapidly changing world. But then Hamas terrorists attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and the entire tenor of her project shifted. She continued snapping photos, but this time captured images of police guarding synagogues, anti-Israel posters around her neighbourhood and defiant Jewish community members showing their pride.

The final book project, A Peoplehood | Amiut Yehudi, was released June 2026. Salsky now joins Phoebe Maltz Bovy on The Jewish Angle to discuss why the work and her sensitive editorial decisions, including why she left interview subjects anonymous, how photographs of ordinary Jewish life sit alongside images of security and hostility, and how creatives can make Jewish art about anything other than antisemitism in a post-Oct. 7 world.

Transcript

Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Hi, this is Phoebe Maltz Bovy, and you’re listening to The Jewish Angle, a podcast from The Canadian Jewish News. Shortly after Oct. 7, a sign went up on my block in Toronto. It was one of those paraglider flyers whose meaning was immediately apparent, at least to me. This place that I walked by every day with my own young Jewish children had up on it a reminder that someone, for all I knew, a neighbour, was glorifying the then-quite-recent Hamas attacks.

Soon after, signs along these lines, as well as counter signage, as well as more ambiguous signage, really started to dominate my experience of public space like had never happened before. I’d never experienced the likes. I became keenly aware of which local shops and homes wanted to free Palestine, which ones really wanted to free Palestine, and which outliers were putting up signs about the hostages or even Israeli flags. I found myself wondering what everyone who put up Free Palestine meant by this, whether they meant versions of it that I could get behind, namely peace, or ones that meant eliminating Israel.

The signs were just ubiquitous, people did not seem as bothered about anything else, local or otherwise, and it was just this sort of all-consuming experience of moving through space that I found very hard to articulate. So I would take the occasional photo of these items, generally for The CJN to accompany my column, or just to text to friends and family because it was interesting, but I am not a professional photographer. And by the time it occurred to me that somebody should really be documenting this properly, it was probably sort of winding down. So I was stunned and thrilled to see that this exists in book form.

It’s a book called A Peoplehood | Amiut Yehudit. It is by the photographer Marnie Salsky. I met her by happenstance at the indigo on Bay and Bloor, and I am so pleased to have her on The Jewish Angle. Welcome, Marnie.

Marnie Salsky: Thank you. And thank you for having me, Phoebe. I’m really happy to be here.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy: So we’re mainly gonna talk about your book, of course, but I just wanted to ask about your own background, be it your Canadian background, Jewish background, professional background, however you choose to answer the question is all good.

Marnie Salsky: Sure. So I am a second generation Canadian. And my Jewish background is that I would consider myself right now a secular cultural Jew and I would consider—I don’t know why I said right now because I’ve always been that way. I grew up in a very mixed neighbourhood and by that I mean it was mixed in cultural and religious backgrounds, had a fairly significant Jewish community, maybe 40, 50 percent, but also it was very diverse in socioeconomic status, it was very diverse in family makeup, and it was you know, looking back now, it was the ’70s, the ’80s, it was a very idyllic time, and I often describe it.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Sorry, do you mind if I just interrupt to ask where was this neighbourhood? What, in Toronto or somewhere else? Okay.

Marnie Salsky: In Toronto, yeah. In Toronto. And what I what I mean by it was idyllic, I mean we all reflect upon our childhood, maybe not all of us, but you know, often we reflect upon it as an idyllic time. But what really stands out is that people stood up for things that were wrong, and didn’t stay within their quote-unquote party lines.

So, you know, kids stood up for each other and protected each other, and if something was wrong, they either beat up a person or said it like it didn’t just stay, you know, within a minority’s community issue. It was everybody’s issue. My professional background is I’m a photographer and a documentary media maker. And this is a long-form, long-term project that I started about 15 years ago.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy: So I was gonna ask about how you decided to do the project because reading it now and looking at it now, because it’s a mix of text and images, it’s very much a part of a post-Oct. 7 wave, boom, whatever of Jewish artistic and cultural production, right? It seems in some ways a reaction to Oct. 7, but it’s not a reaction. Yeah.

Marnie Salsky: No, it’s not whatsoever. So the primary source material in the book is from 2018 to 2022. And then there’s post-Oct. 7 material that’s woven in. So to take it back a few steps, I originally was inspired to create this documentary project when I was restoring about 15 years ago, a series of historical photos from the 1890s to the 1930s of a small Jewish shtetl in Poland.

And what struck me at the time was just how diverse the community was. And this was far enough back that you know, AI and Photoshop tools weren’t as developed as they are now that you could just click a button and restore an old photo. So you know, speck by speck, I was taking out the dust marks and restoring the cracks. And so I really spent a lot of time on these photos and with the people that were in it.

And I was struck by just how diverse the community was. So different levels of religious observation, different socioeconomic statuses, rural community, urban community. And it made me start to think about the parallels of Toronto’s Jewish community, which is much larger than that town. That was a town of 5,000 Jews.

But I wanted to go more than just document the community that was here. I wanted to look at what the impact of antisemitism was on one’s identity. And the as we all know, this huge torrent of antisemitism that’s been unleashed since Oct. 7, it’s not new.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Was there ever any possibility that it would have come out before Oct. 7, or was it that Oct. 7 kind of like was there a version of this that would have been before?

Marnie Salsky: So there is a version of before, but it’s not in book form. So it in 2021, it was a multimedia gallery installation work. And the main part of the gallery installation was this two-channel nonlinear film. And that film went on to have a life in the Film Festival Circuit.

So mainly small festivals, but it was featured at the Toronto Jewish Film Festival in 2023. In June, that would have been 2023. So then I was working on translating the material into book form, which was something I had always anticipated the project to be. And at one point it was that in a very simple form and I was revisiting going back to that idea.

And I was in the midst of working on that when Oct. 7 happened.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy: And what was your response at that moment?

Marnie Salsky: Creatively or humanly?

Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Yeah, creatively. I mean emotionally I think, you know, I mean it yes, but

Marnie Salsky: Creatively, it really you know, it made me pause and really look at what was this material that I had that I had been so immersed in and had developed into various artistic forms. And what it did is it made me realize that the material from 2018 to 2022 really captured a community on a precipice. So they were aware, you know, that things were not as they were 25 years ago. But unaware of, you know, as any of us would be, that there was this horrific attack on Oct. 7 and that it would unleash so much hatred towards Jews throughout the world.

So I really look at it as a moment in time. Like it’s right at the cusp before everything really went so horrific for Jews. I do incorporate post-Oct. 7 material into the book. In the book it’s not delineated which images are pre and post because it actually doesn’t matter.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Yeah, I thought that was so interesting. And I wanted to ask you about that part of your book, that aspect of your book in general. So the passages, quotations from different people, they’re not attributed. They’re just it’s sort of poetically put on the page.

I’m not good at describing this, but it’s like I’m trying to think of how to describe it in a way where I don’t seem completely like the—like it’s a different margin, so it’s clear who that it’s different speakers, but it’s not in quotation marks. There’s no “said so-and-so on such-and-such date.” Some of them from the context of the book appear to come from longer interviews because they—that you print at the end of the book. Do all of them come from those longer interviews or are these from additional people as well?

Marnie Salsky: They’re from additional people. So I probably interviewed around 18 different people. And they in the film, their voices are the soundscape of the film. So they’re overlapping at times, at times saying something similar, and then at times something that goes against what other people are saying, kind of rises up and then subsides.

And it depends on ages, background, you know, various forms of identity of why differing things are said. So when I was translating it into book form, I played around with a lot of different ideas. Like, do I want to say this person is 19 years old and male and identifies as a conservative Jew? Like I played around a lot of—what’s the best way?

And in the end, I decided to take out any of those descriptors because I wanted it to be just you know, the person kind of fills in the blanks. It doesn’t really matter how the speaker identifies. What matters more is the words that be that are being used by them. In the end, where you’re talking about the extended transcripts, so I have three speakers that I had interviewed in 2020.

And then I went back and interviewed them again in a few months after Oct. 7. So maybe six to eight months afterwards. And the reason why I chose just three is because it is more a photobook, a visual book, as opposed to a heavily text book. And so I felt that those three interviews showed that there is a cross section of various feelings and expressions of identity.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy: I mean, it’s interesting, right? Because it’s it’s all it the anonymity really comes through even on the cover, right? So it’s

Marnie Salsky: He

Phoebe Maltz Bovy: It’s the image of seemingly a woman’s face, but you couldn’t tell who she is, apart from a Star of David necklace indicating a certain Jewishness about her, perhaps, but or solidarity. One never knows. But yeah, so what are you aiming to sort of convey artistically with the lack of specificity. Is it sort of the mood of a moment or just the—something?

Marnie Salsky: It was the interviews, the people that were interviewed are not photographed at all. So when I interviewed them, they were completely anonymous. They knew they weren’t gonna be photographed, they knew that they weren’t gonna be videoed, and because of that, they were extremely candid in what they chose to share with me. And some of them were these interviews The 2020 ones took place during COVID, so that in itself was an interesting time.

And they took place outside and because of the restrictions. Most of them were people that were complete strangers to me. I had done a broad call for people to participate. And then when I was focusing on the cover image of what was going to be on the cover, I really wanted to keep that sense of anonymity.

And that’s why it’s not a person’s face. But it was—sorry—their full face. But it was important to me that it be an image of a human because it is a human story. And because it’s a profile picture, it looks as if she’s about to talk or is maybe listening to a conversation, the lips are very prominent.

So all of those were really intentional decisions about the book is a conversation and The image on the cover is also, there’s a little bit of tension in it. Like the lips are cropped a bit higher than perhaps what would be comfortable when you look at a profile picture. And again, that tension is just an allusion to what you’re going to be coming to in the books. And then the typeface of all the different types of ways people identify as being Jewish kind of take you through the cover and then you end up on the Jewish star.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Mm-hmm. I mean, I think it’s interesting and it it works really well, I think, because

Marnie Salsky: Thank you.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy: I mean, my own sort of where I come from professionally, I’m it’s always about like who said what, when, in all of this in journalism, academia before that, like I’m constantly like there’s just these walls of text. And I think here in this paring that down, you really get the message more clearly and it makes the photos kind of jump out more—photos and also. So there’s a lot in your book. There are images of newspaper articles past and present.

There’s visual evidence of Canadian antisemitism of yore. So it shows, you know, that this isn’t just an entirely new thing. But there are certain photos I think that really capture this moment. And there was one that to me really did, and I’ll say which it was, and I was wondering then—I’ll ask if there was one that for you like most captures kind of the moment we’re in.

And for me it was the police gathered around in front of Beth Tzedec. It just—the idea to me that jumped out the most because it’s both this entirely ordinary thing of there being a congregation, you know, but then it’s like the idea of having to be so protected, having this apparatus. You know, and also so soon after the sort of defund the police moment to be this community so associated with police protection. It’s just so awkward among other things and painful and it you know, it’s just and so unsettling in all these different ways.

And that really stood out to me, just the sheer number of police gathered, just ugh, I don’t know, like that really did. But I was wondering if for you there’s any specific image.

Marnie Salsky: You know, it’s funny that you say that one because I was—that would be for me the same image that really I think captures this moment that we’re in and the moment that we were shortly in before Oct. 7. But I also the reason why I particularly am drawn to that image is not just the police, but the signage that’s on the shul itself. So it talks about like it has big you know almost billboard-size posters of join our congregation and in those posters is you know different ages different skin colours different family makeup so it—just everything about like the building those posters on it about, you know, be part of this community, not just the Jewish community, but this synagogue’s community. This is who we welcome, then the amount of police.

And that image is from one week after Oct. 7. So it you know now we’re kind of a bit more used to huge masses of police in front of Jewish spaces at different times. Or in front of certain Jewish events, but that was the first time that I saw such a mass of police presence, and that it was just one week after Oct. 7.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy: So something I wanted to ask was just sort of balance, because something that you definitely both are going for at and I think succeed at is having Jews of a great range of different backgrounds, political ideologies, and so forth. But another form of balance is it’s not just about antisemitism. So how did you decide to include and how much to include of just sort of ordinary or even joyful aspects of Toronto Jewish life.

Marnie Salsky: And I’m really glad that you brought that up because usually it’s me that says that and I completely forgot to. So, yes, this is not a book or project just about antisemitism by any means whatsoever. I start off the book with, you know, more positive, uplifting themes, then it delves into darker issues. And then it’s important for me to always end with imagery that rises back up.

Because the truth is we’re living through this time and we’re experiencing life and it’s important to you know, not just focus on the antisemitism and the hatred, but also to focus on all the joys of life and all the things that our families and individuals are continuing to go through in a positive way.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Yeah, I think that’s I think that’s important, positive and even just neutral, like or just unrelated to antisemitism, you know what I mean? Because I think this is something that it’s true really across a whole bunch of different fields. There’s discussion in academia about Jewish studies versus antisemitism studies. There’s discussion in journalism, you know, like how much antisemitism should Jewish media outlets cover versus, you know, anything that is not that.

You know, so this is a really big topic at the moment. And I think it’s I appreciate that it’s not just about antisemitism because that is not the only thing that’s going on, obviously, for Jews at this point in time, I wanted to though talk about kind of where things are at nowadays in terms of like visual signifiers and so forth because where I live, there’s still somebody putting giant free Palestine in chalk. Sometimes somebody puts sprays and obscenity against this in the same location. It’s all sort of a bit ongoing but seems to be petering out.

But it is also kind of like surprisingly persistent. I don’t know what what do you see?

Marnie Salsky: Yeah, it is surprisingly persistent, but I think it’s I think perhaps what felt at one point a huge outpouring of people or society doing it now feels much less so. And I think that I think that the saddest part is is just that there’s not people outside the community you know, expressing outrage at some of the stuff that’s put on our streets.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy: I mean, I think what I’ve found the most challenging myself is the ambiguity, right? Like a flyer that’s showing a paraglider appearing on like Oct. 9 or whatever. Okay, that’s pretty clear-cut. That’s pro-Hamas.

There’s no question. Somebody putting free Palestine could mean anything. You know what I mean? It depends Where it’s located, it depends the context.

And then also, yeah.

Marnie Salsky: I think it depends most on the person who wrote it. You don’t know, right?

Phoebe Maltz Bovy: But you don’t know, right? So one thing that I remember talking about it, I think, on this podcast at one point was I think it was 2024. I’d gone away with my family for a couple weeks. We came back to Toronto, and every single shop on the main street where I live, with maybe like a couple exceptions, like the occasional like hardware store something didn’t have it, had Parkdale High Park for a free Palestine.

And I thought, okay, like the volume of this was just interesting. Even if some of the people are just like, somebody handed them a sign and they put it out, they’re not even thinking about it. Even if some of them think there should be peace, which I also think there should be, it just felt a little bit like, why is it all about one thing? You know, like there was just something about it that but yeah, the ambiguity, because I feel like that’s part of what makes solidarity challenging, is you get people saying, well, I think there should be peace in the Middle East.

Why am I complaining, it’s like, well it depends what you’re seeing and in what context And yeah.

Marnie Salsky: I mean, I think there should be peace as well. Who wouldn’t want peace in the Middle East, right? Like I think I don’t think it’s that complicated and sometimes I think it’s like you could people could hold, you know, multiple truths at the same time. Like you could want a free Palestine in my meaning when I would use that phrase, it would mean: free from Hamas, free to have a democratic government, free to, you know, live peacefully and be peaceful to the countries that are neighbouring them.

To me, that would be a free Palestine. As well, Israel should be able to live in borders that they’re able to defend, not be attacked, and you know, Jews should not be slaughtered. And all these things could all be true at the same time. So it’s just interesting that it’s you know, a singular message, whereas I find Jews are able to articulate the multiple truths of how some Jews of how they wish they would see things, and we don’t hear that as much from other people.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy: well, I think sometimes something becomes the topic of the moment and people who haven’t necessarily been thinking about it always start to. So I wanted to ask, who is your book’s intended audience?

Marnie Salsky: So I would say the intended audience is actually threefold. So I think the most obvious is people that are Jewish and in the Jewish community. And what I’ve had people say to me in when it was a film and when it was in the gallery and within the book is that, you know, I see myself in these pages or I see myself in this film, even though I don’t say these things or agree with everything in it. I see myself and I see my community.

So that’s one audience. I think another audience would be you know, people of Toronto, because there’s so much of the cityscape that’s in the photos, you’re able to kind of identify places that feel a little bit familiar if you live in Toronto, as well as some of the images, especially of the storefronts that I have on Bathurst. To me, they remind me of my bubbe’s neighbourhood—who lived in Montreal. So in Côte-Saint-Luc, when I go and visit, it’s the same, you know, just the same feel to it.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy: So you and I are both authors in Toronto, with new books at the same time, more or less, at a very weird moment in book publishing for Jewish authors. So I wanted to ask what your experience has been getting a project like this specifically, but also just as a Jewish author, visibly Jewish author. I don’t mean like phrenology, I mean like it is a Jewish topic, right? It is called A Peoplehood | Amiut Yehudit.

Marnie Salsky: Right. Exactly.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy: My own book is not on Jewish topics particularly, but I work for The Canadian Jewish News and that’s it’s in the name, you know what I mean? And I host The Jewish Angle, right? So I was just wondering like what your experience has been as a Jewish author at this point in time.

Marnie Salsky: It hasn’t been great, and I’ll widen the lens a little bit more of not just for being a Jewish author, but just being Jewish in the art space. So I originally had the idea for this project back in let’s say 2010, 2012. I went back and did my MFA at what was then called Ryerson, now Toronto Met U. And in my MFA program, which is really for visual professionals. So it was an MFA in documentary media.

You have a body of work that you apply with, you have a project that you’re working on and workshopping and all of that for the two years that you’re there. You have to professionally show it at the end. So I was the only Jewish person in my cohort. And the level of I’m not gonna say indirect antisemitism, but I am gonna say indirect antisemitism because I don’t really have the word for it, was you know, surprising.

And also, as you said, my subject, it’s about Jewishness, right? So, you know, that’s what I’m talking about. That’s what I’m workshopping. And some of the comments that would come back from people, I would be like, you know, you just how are you not getting it?

And how are you a fully formed adult and you’re still not getting it? And gallery spaces are not very open to this type of subject matter even before Oct. 7. So I’ve heard other Jewish artists describe it as like a spidey sense, like it’s a spidey sense. So it’s not that they come out and say, we’re not gonna host it because either you’re Jewish or the subject matter is Jewish.

But there’s the work has enough pedigree behind it now that it some of the places where it should have been accepted have not been accepted.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy: The creative world is full of rejection. It’s full of hearing no for no particular reason. So, you know. Anytime something disappointing happens, one can always which is going to happen to everybody regardless.

Marnie Salsky: Which happens lots of times. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy: And you know, ha like I guess I’m just wondering how you can ever sort this out, you know?

Marnie Salsky: I don’t think you can like 100 percent, right?

Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Like does anybody ever say anything direct, like about I don’t know. Like for for example, like do people assume that

Marnie Salsky: Okay, yeah.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy: You’re trying to make a particular point about the Middle East, which I don’t think your book particularly is, but yeah.

Marnie Salsky: No, it’s not at all. There are people okay, so when it came to the publishing world, so I was as I mentioned, I was working on translating it into a book form. I had I needed to work with a or I strongly desired to work with a photobook designer as well, because there’s a whole language that goes into making an engaging artistic book and especially because I had so much text that I wanted to weave in and as you said have it poetic so the way it’s placed on the page and all of that. So I worked with a gentleman, Caleb Cain Marcus, who’s quite a renowned photobook designer, and I was very fortunate to work with him.

When it came time to look for a publisher, I had said to Caleb that, you know, of course I’m gonna be approaching publishers and letting them know that we collaborated together because he’s a name, I’m not a name, right? And he told me, and he also pitched it to publishers that he’s worked with and that he knows. He had said he had never had so much difficulty getting one of his projects that he had worked with an artist on to a publisher, and also. When we would talk about things, he would say there’s some publishers they won’t touch it at all because they will not work with anything Jewish.

They won’t even use ink for a Hewlett-Packard printer because part of it is made in Israel, right? So there’s those people, then there’s publishers that won’t touch it because they don’t want to alienate who supports their books. So from a business perspective, they won’t touch it. And then in the end, I found a wonderful publisher who was on my top list and who has wholeheartedly supported the work.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy: What are you working on next and where can people find you? Those are the wrap-up sorts of questions.

Marnie Salsky: Right. Well, right now I am just working on taking care of my new puppy. So I do not have an artistic project at the moment. And—

Phoebe Maltz Bovy: I hope you are taking a lot of pictures of your new puppy.

Marnie Salsky: I’m taking lots of pictures of her. And I’m taking a well-deserved bit of a creative break because this project’s been a lot of years and it’s also been a hard subject matter. So a lot of things I’ve had to keep at a distance because I just was wanting to accomplish the creative vision that I was striving out for. So I think I’m going to take a little bit of time just to kind of process what these last few years have really meant.

And you can find the book at Indigo Amazon wherever you buy books online and also on my website for more information which is www.salskyphoto.com.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Thanks so much, Marnie. This was great. And thanks for your great book.

Show Notes

Credits

Host: Phoebe Maltz BovyProducer and editor: Michael FraimanMusic: ” Gypsy Waltz ” by Frank Freeman, licensed from the Independent Music Licensing Collective

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