Write Your Canadian Jewish Story!  

The Canadian Jewish Life Writing Project is a national annual initiative to collect, archive, and digitally exhibit short autobiographical life stories of Canadian Jews from a wide range of ages, regions, and social, cultural, and religious experience.

Inspired by a rich historical legacy of grassroots ethnographic and folkloristic studies on Jewish cultural life, the project aims to both create and preserve first-person narratives that reflect the diversity, complexity, and singularity of Canadian Jewry.  

The project encourages Jewish Canadians to think deeply and critically about their own pasts; about the entanglements of their Jewish and Canadian identities at the intersection of personal, familial, local, and national communal histories; and how their experience as Jews has informed their sense of understanding of what it means to be Canadian, and vice versa.  

The project is designed to empower Jewish Canadians to write their life stories while offering insight into on-the-ground realities of daily life that might otherwise go undocumented. 

This collection of autobiographical writing will be housed in perpetuity at the Alex Dworkin Canadian Jewish Archives in Montreal, and exhibited digitally in an online database hosted by the Association for Canadian Jewish Studies. 

We expect the essays to be of interest to scholars, writers, filmmakers and other creative professionals; museum professionals and archivists, genealogists, educators; and anyone interested in the lived Canadian Jewish experience.  

While all submissions will appear in the archive, the top three—as selected by our advisory board—will be published separately on the ACJS website. Authors will be recognized at a launch event in spring 2027.  

2026 Theme 

Our theme for 2026 is “Growing Up Jewish in Canada.” We invite autobiographical essays that engage with the experience of childhood and young adulthood from a Jewish and Canadian perspective. You may write about this period of your life from beginning to end in chronological fashion; isolate just a few years; or choose to focus on one or more specific moments that capture the experience of coming of age. 

Your essay might address your Jewish or secular education, summer camp, a Jewish life cycle event, Jewish holidays, a travel or immigration experience, your relationship with siblings or friends, a first love, and more.  

While we encourage you to interpret the theme on your own terms, here are a handful of prompts intended to spur your thinking. (Important! These prompts are merely here for guidance and are not meant to structure your essay.)  

  • How did geography (your town, province, or region) shape your experience of growing up Jewish? 
  • How did your family’s background (e.g. immigration history, religious or cultural practices, or language) influence your upbringing? 
  • What role did community institutions (synagogues, schools, camps, youth groups) play in shaping your sense of self or the trajectory of your life?  
  • What did you value, learn, or suffer during your Canadian Jewish childhood? 
  • Did you face pressures to conform—to Jewish norms, Canadian norms, or both? How did you navigate those pressures? 
  • How did broader social or political events in Canada or around the globe affect your Jewish coming-of-age experience? 
  • Who are the individuals, Jewish or non-Jewish, who played particularly important roles in your development? 
  • How did you relate to your non-Jewish ethnic or religious neighbours growing up? 
  • How does your story of growing up Jewish in Canada help reflect or recast your larger family story, the story of the Canadian Jewish community, or the story of the Jewish people?  
  • What aspects of your upbringing feel most distinctly “Canadian,” most distinctly “Jewish,” or uniquely both?  

Regardless of your approach, we ask that you fill your narrative with rich detail—names, dates, places, professions, physical features, and so on—while remaining mindful that your work will become part of a publicly accessible archive. (Important! If you have privacy concerns or wish to discuss restricting any personal information in your essay, please write to us at the emails below.)  

Eligibility 

  • Writers must be over the age of 13. 
  • The project has no residency or citizenship requirements for writers, but the essay must have a clear Canadian setting for at least part of your experience “growing up” to be included in the archive. Each submission will be reviewed for thematic relevance.  
  • Submissions based on recorded testimony are permitted. For instance, you may submit an essay based on a relative’s life provided you clearly state the relationship between you and your subject. Please see “How to Submit” for more information.  
  • Submissions must not have been previously published. 
  • Submissions based on already written but unpublished memoirs are permitted, so long as they have been edited and modified to meet the criteria of this project.  
  • There is no limit on the number of essays you may submit. 

How to Submit 

SUBMIT YOUR ESSAY HERE
  • We recommend your essay fall between 4,000 and 6,000 words (roughly 15–25 double-spaced pages), though we will accept both shorter and longer submissions. 
  • Please submit your essay in double-spaced Times New Roman 12-point font. 
  • The submission form will only accept essays in .docx format. 
  • You may write your essay in your preferred language.  
  • Your essay should include your name, the month and year it was written, the place it was written, and, if you wish, a title. 
  • You are encouraged to include images (photos, artwork, etc.) in your essay. Inquiries about submitting additional relevant digital or physical material should be directed to Janice Rosen, archives director of the Alex Dworkin Canadian Jewish Archives, at jrosen@cjarchives.ca. 
  • Important! In addition to your essay, you must upload a signed and dated release form (found below) permitting the ACJS and the Alex Dworkin Canadian Jewish Archives to archive your work. If your essay is co-authored, all authors must sign the release; likewise, if your essay is based on recorded testimony, both the writer(s) and the source(s) must sign the release. 
  • Important! The Canadian Jewish Life Writing Project team will not fact-check or copyedit the style, spelling, or grammar of your submitted work.   
DOWNLOAD RELEASE form HERE

Key Dates 

October 30, 2026: Call for submissions closes 

January–March 2027: Project advisory board reviews submissions 

April 2027: Launch of public archive and announcement of top three submissions 

Advisory Board

Arielle Berger
Azrieli Holocaust Survivor Memoirs Program

Faye Blum
Ontario Jewish Archives

Jillian Gould
Memorial University 

David S. Koffman
York University

Karen Kollins
Shalom Hartman Institute-North America

Janice Rosen
Alex Dworkin Canadian Jewish Archives

Alysa Routtenberg
Jewish Museum and Archives of British Columbia

Please direct questions about the Canadian Jewish Life Writing Project to Joshua Tapper (jtapper@yorku.ca) or Jesse Toufexis (jtoufexi@uottawa.ca)