MONTREAL — Mention CEGEP du Vieux Montréal in anglophone circles these days and the likely response is: isn’t that where Louise Mailloux teaches?

Mailloux, the Parti Québécois candidate in Gouin, whom the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs has denounced for espousing anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and was urged by 3,000 online petition signers to step down, has, indeed, taught philosophy at the college for more than 30 years.

So, it may come as a surprise to some that Vieux Montréal has organized a two-week festival celebrating the Jewish community, which continues until April 11.

The centrepiece of La Quinzaine des Cultures, subtitled “Bonjour! Shalom!” is an exhibition in the college’s Galerie Agora of the works of 15 local, mostly emerging, Jewish artists, on until April 4.

This is the ninth edition of the Quinzaine, a biennial event designed to raise awareness of the different cultural communities in the city among the French-language college’s more than 6,000 students. “Bonjour! Shalom!” had been in the works well before the Mailloux controversy came up last month.

It has a high profile on the campus: the gallery is right off the main entrance and visitors to Vieux Montréal’s website find the Quinzaine is the first item listed.

“The contribution of the Jewish communities to Montreal history and culture is little known,” said anthropology professor and principal Quinzaine organizer Steven Légaré.

The image of Jews tends to be reduced to iconic establishments in the St. Laurent/Mile End area, the Chassidim of Outremont, or maybe the music of Leonard Cohen, he said.

Légaré wants students and other visitors to know that what Jews have contributed – and still contribute – to intellectual, artistic, economic and scientific life has made Montreal the city that it is.

He believes that the Jewish community’s development in a French milieu has lent it an identity distinct from any other in Canada, or North America.

The aim of “Bonjour! Shalom!” is to dispel the impression that the Jewish community is homogeneous, said Légaré, who finds its pluralism “a mosaic of astonishing complexity.”

The art on display in From Where We Stand/Vu d’ici certainly sets the tone. Few of the works are overtly Jewish, and the broad range of media includes painting, photography, decoupage, video, and even sound, as in Cassidy Lerman’s Coney Island Family Memory heard, not seen, through headsets.

Tamira Cahana, 24, is presenting the intriguing and symbolism-laden An Investigation of Silver Liquid/Lovestruck and Dumb, an installation centring on the real trunk of a dead tree. Cahana uses performance art to enhance its meaning.

Inspired by a dream she had, Cahana said the work is “ultimately about sexual healing.”

The exhibit was curated by Studio Beluga, a non-profit organization run by a collective of artists and art professionals.

Founder Alina Maizel said the works were selected to provide a sense of the diversity of Jewish identity and experience. “We did not want a Judaica exhibit,” she said. “We wanted something more nuanced, more complex.”

Maizel stressed that “given the current political climate in Quebec, we are especially grateful that a French-language CEGEP has invited us to curate an exhibit exploring the Jewish community of Montreal.”

As the accompanying text explains: “Jewish culture is one of otherness defined by its persecution and assimilation… Judaism has no doctrine of conversion, focusing most acutely instead on self-knowledge. From Where We Stand is a study of self-knowledge, framed by millennia of share memories” as part of the Jewish People.

Other Quinzaine programming includes the Holocaust-themed films Ma Chère Clara and Le Coeur d’Auschwitz; talks by academics Steven Lapidus and Yakov Rabkin on, respectively, Montreal Chassidim and the diversity of Jewish Israelis; visits to the Montreal Holocaust Memorial Centre and the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue; a show by klezmer-fusion musician Josh Dolgin (Socalled); and another exhibition, Hadassa, illustrations by Kevin Perron inspired by Miriam Beaudoin’s 2007 novel about a young Québécoise teaching French in a chassidic school.