The J Presents

Join us for an illuminating lecture series at the J.

The J Presents lecture series will introduce members to fresh perspectives on media, entertainment and more with outstanding speakers. Each J Presents Session includes an hour-long lecture from one of our esteemed guest speakers, and opportunity for a question-and-answer period with the lecturer, and the chance to socialize and meet new friends.

*Light refreshments will be served

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Thursday May 11 | Michael Rubinoff: The Jewish connection to Broadway
Jewish composers and lyricists have played an important role in the establishment and history of the Broadway musical. Olivier Award winning and Tony nominated Canadian theatre producer Michael Rubinoff will examine the Jewish connection to Broadway and how that connection inspired his career and the creation of the global hit musical Come From Away, which he conceived.

About Michael Rubinoff
A Toronto based Olivier Award winning, and Tony nominated producer who conceived the longest running Canadian musical on Broadway Come From Away. In 2011 he established the Canadian Music Theatre Project (CMTP), an international incubator for the development of new musicals, where he produced and developed the first workshops of Come From Away and 29 other musicals. In 2019 he was awarded the Meritorious Service Cross by the Governor General of Canada for his role in creating the show. He is currently represented as producer and creative consultant on Come From Away on tour across Australia and North America. Upcoming: an all-new production of Come From Away in Gander, Newfoundland and Labrador, the world premiere of Johnny Reid and Matt Murray’s Maggie at Theatre Aquarius and the Charlottetown Festival and the American premiere of Matt Murray, Colleen Dauncey and Akiva Romer-Segal’s Grow. A proud graduate of Western Law. Social @mrubinoff

Thursday May 18 | Geoff Pevere: Slap Happy: An Introduction to the Screwball Comedy.
In the thirties and early forties, comedy began to sparkle in a way that it never had before. With the coming of sound, certain comedies emerged that were exceptional for their wit, sophistication and sheer playfulness. They came to be known as the screwball comedy and they marked a triumphant high point of Hollywood’s Golden era. Why? This lecture will address how screwball has endured in reputation for over eighty years.

About Geoff Pevere
Geoff Pevere has been writing, broadcasting teaching and lecturing on film and popular culture for over forty years. A bestselling author (Mondo Canuck: A Canadian Pop Culture Odyssey), Pevere is a former movie critic and columnist with the Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail. He has appeared on TVOntario, CBC radio and TV, CTV and Roger’s Television.

Tuesday May 23 | Mike Daley: Great Songs of the Folk Revival
The folk revival of the 1950s and 60s was driven by great songs that came from a variety of sources, not all of them “folk” in the pure sense. In this fascinating and tuneful presentation, Dr. Mike Daley tells the stories and sings the songs of this great era, including “Blowin’ in The Wind,” “Tom Dooley,” “Puff The Magic Dragon” and more.

About Dr Mike Daley
Dr Mike Daley is a freelance popular music history lecturer around Toronto. He holds a PH.D. in musicology and has published widely on a variety of music subjects. Mike’s well-received lectures on the Beatles, Elvis, jazz, folk music and much more have gained him a strong following in the GTA. Mike is a guitarist and singer and has toured Canada, the United Statas and England and has recorded extensively in a variety of musical styles.

Thursday June 1 | Wayne Hoffman: “The End of Her”, an Infamous Canadian Murder–Solved a Century Later
In his new true-crime family memoir The End of Her: Racing Against Alzheimer’s to Solve a Murder, award-winning novelist and journalist Wayne Hoffman tries to find out what really happened to his great-grandmother—whose brutal, likely anti-Semitic murder in Winnipeg’s Jewish North End in 1913 made headlines across Canada from Montreal to Toronto to Vancouver, in English and Yiddish newspapers, but was never solved—while watching his own mother deteriorate due to dementia. Over the course of the book, he digs into his own family’s history, but also the larger history of Jewish immigration to Western Canada.

About Wayne Hoffman
Wayne Hoffman is an American writer with Canadian roots—his great-grandparents immigrated from Russia to Winnipeg more than a century ago, and his grandmother grew up in Manitoba and Saskatchewan; his extended family today stretches from Toronto to Vancouver. As a veteran journalist, his cultural reporting on Jewish issues has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, The Forward, Hadassah Magazine, and elsewhere; he is currently executive editor of Tablet, an online Jewish magazine. He has also published three novels, including Sweet Like Sugar—about the unlikely friendship between a young gay man and an elderly rabbi—which won the American Library Association’s Stonewall Book Award.

Thursday, June 8 | Michael Posner: Leonard Cohen, Untold Stories: That’s How the Light Gets In, Volume 3
Leonard Cohen, Untold Stories chronicles the full breadth of his extraordinary life. This third and final volume in biographer Michael Posner’s sweeping series of Cohen’s life—That’s How the Light Gets In—explores the last thirty years of his life, starting with the late 1980s revival of his music career with the successful albums I’m Your Man and The Future.
Cohen’s story is told through the voices of those who knew him best—family and friends, colleagues and contemporaries, business partners and lovers. Bestselling author Michael Posner draws on hundreds of interviews to reveal the unique, complex, and compelling figure of the man The New York Times called “a secular saint.” This is a book like no other, about a man like no other.

About Michael Posner
Michael Posner is an award-winning writer, playwright, and journalist, and the author of nine previous books. These include the bestselling Mordecai Richler biography The Last Honest Man, and the Anne Murray biography All of Me, as well as the first two books in the Leonard Cohen, Untold Stories series, The Early Years, Vol. 1 and From This Broken Hill, Vol. 2. He was Washington Bureau Chief for Maclean’s magazine, and later served as its national, foreign, and assistant managing editor. He was also managing editor of the Financial Times of Canada for three years. He later spent sixteen years as a senior writer with The Globe and Mail (Toronto).

Questions? Please contact Andrea at andrea@srcentre.ca

*Please note that the rate displayed below is the regular rate; however, once you log into your member account, you will see the special membership price. If applicable.