Temple Emanu-El

Radio Jewish June-15-2006

Back in the day, when Stan Asher first dreamed of a Jewish radio station, Christian super-stations were still pipedreams and Bill Gates & Co were filling out their applications to Harvard.

It was the mid-70’s. A radio buff touring Paris and fiddling with his radio dial, Asher was stunned to find that there were 4 Jewish stations in Paris alone, many more throughout western Europe. He’d discovered an acoustic world in which his Jewish culture, language and history were front and center, not an afterthought, tacked on to a low frequency station during hours when no-one really listens.

This was radio ‘All Jewish, All the Time.’

That discovery set him on a track that would take more than 30 years and is about to reach fruition. In late March, Radio Shalom was granted a license to begin broadcast by the Canadian Radio and Telecommunications Commission, roughly the equivalent of the FCC. The Montreal station, for which Asher is the Vice President of English Programming, is slated to begin broadcasting at 1650kHz on the AM band by the end of the summer.

In the years between that trip to Paris and the launch of the station, Asher produced hundreds of Jewish-themed shows for community radio. He taught radio production courses at a local college and arranged for student work to go on air. One day he was approached by Robert Lévy, who was connected with the Radio Cholom stations in France, inviting him help bring Jewish AM radio to North America.

The project took 5 years and two attempts at a license. Licenses are extremely hard to get on Canada’s highly regulated airwaves, and the station needed to assure the CRTC that, among other things, there would be religious diversity in the broadcast week. “And they don’t mean the diversity of including Orthodox or Reform views,” Asher explains. “Since we’re classified a religious station, even though we’re really doing cultural broadcasting, we needed to assure the CRTC that we would provide ‘balance’ in our programming. "

"We needed to make room for other religions," he adds. "So we worked out arrangements to turn our station over to some other religious and ethnic groups on Friday night and Saturday until sundown, when we respect Shabbat and Jewish holidays by airing no programming of our own at that time.”

With a staff of 2 fulltime employees and a large roster of volunteers, Radio Shalom has been webcasting via the Internet for several years. At any time there are as many as 800 people listening via the web.

Programming for the station reflects Montreal’s unique multilingual and multicultural mix: French (60 per cent), English (30 per cent) and Hebrew (10 per cent). Most of the staff and volunteers at the station come from a Sephardic, non-English-speaking background. Asher jokes he’s the ‘token Ashkenazi.’

Stan aims for the kind of airtime mix he’s heard on Israeli stations. “But here, in North America, and available to non-Hebrew speaking audiences. When we go to air, we’ll be the only full time, pluralistic station broadcasting Jewish content in North America,” Stan believes. “Even in New York, there are some programs at some times in the day, but not 24/7, which we will be."

In the heyday of Yiddish broadcasting, there were more than 20 Yiddish-language stations in New York City alone. The best known, WEVD was created in 1927 by the Socialist Party to honor Eugene Debbs, and was taken over in by the Yiddish newspaper, The Forward. It was probably the first listener-supported radio station.
Now, not even the BBC has Hebrew language broadcasts.

Asher has cobbled together a varied menu of programs. “This is not just going to be rabbis praying and gloomy news about Israel,” says Stan. “There’ll be talk shows, phone-in shows, interviews, music, hourly news. It’ll sound like a regular radio station, not some propaganda machine. Like you hear on mainstream AM stations, but from a Jewish point of view.”

He plans to include anything that has some interest to the community even if it takes him further afield than exclusively Jewish sources or subjects. Asher’s interviewee on April 3 was Mark Abley, author of Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages, one of which is Yiddish.

“It’s like that ad ‘You don’t have to be Jewish to love Levi’s rye bread’ --- you don’t have to be Jewish to want to listen, or be involved in, Jewish community radio.”

Looking ahead, Stan’s excited but not completely sanguine about own future at the station. Relying as it does so heavily on community support, there has been pressure by some funders to see their own doctrinal views reflected in the programming. "At first, some of the more Orthodox didn’t want women’s voices on the air,” Stan sighs. ‘If things go in that direction, it may be hard for me to continue. It’s just like working in other Jewish organizations. You have to respect lots of different points of view."

"I’ll have to see if I can stay involved. If not, well. I’ve got a lot of other projects on the burner. And it will be fun to listen to, won’t it? That’s what started this whole thing, for me.”

*********
Other Stations or Programs with Jewish Programming:

http://www.jmwc.org/jmwc_radio.html

http://www.kol-israel.com/ --- Links to various Israeli media, including radio, tv and newspapers. Arab news from Jordan, Syria, Egypt and Palestinians.

http://www.klezmershack.com/contacts/klezradio.html
A guide to radio stations broadcasting. Six different stations from Israel. Everything from Israeli "top-40-style" to Chassidic music.

http://shalom-am.com/index.asp --- Shalom America Sunday through Friday on the Internet. Website features streaming audio, midi selections and samples of recordings.

http://shmaisradio.com/ --- Lubavitcher Radio with news and music. Continuous music.

http://www.wbrs.org/--- Brandeis University's radio station has three Sunday programs. 11:00, Kol Yisrael; 12:30PM Just Like You talk and music about Palestinian and Israeli music; 2:00, The Yiddish Hour.

http://www.inn.co.il/
--- Live Radio from Israel, including news, music and ads.

http://www.wbur.org/special/jewsandblues/
A radio documentary from WBUR in Boston, an NPR station, originally airing in 2001. It shows how the Jewish and African-American music became merged in America. The entire documentary can be heard on WBUR's website.

http://fivetownsradio.com/ --- Jewish music, Sunday through Thursday, 9pm-10pm with the "Best Jewish Music Mix" during the day until 9pm and 10pm-midnight. Station is run very much like a teenage top 40 radio station except the recordings are Orthodox tunes.

http://www.hagalil.com/shirim/index.htm--- A really exciting site from Munich, Germany promoting Israeli, Jewish, Yiddish and Klezmer music as well as other cultural activities of Judaism from central Europe. Direct Streaming Sound 24 Hours as well as recordings of popular Israeli artists, old recordings, chazzanuth etc..

http://www.sabranet.com/theisraelhour/-- The Israel Hour is a radio program produced in New Brunswick, NJ, Sundays,1-2.

http://www.israelradio.org/--- All non-Hebrew broadcasts are now on the REQA network. Reshet Alef and Reshet Moreshet have amalgamated.

http://www.jewishbroadcast.com/ --- The first & only all-in-one online Jewish radio station featuring 5 channel streaming audio 24 hours a day. Featuring Chassidic, Israeli, Yiddish and Klezmer.

http://www.jewishinternet.tv
Jewish Internet TV is dedicated to providing a platform for the Jewish voice in America and the promotion of Jewish artistic, political, educational, and intellectual leaders

http://www.jmintheam.org/ --- Nachum Segal hosts this very popular program. 6-9am Monday thru Friday, on 91.1FM (NY/NJ); 90.1FM in the Catskills. Much of the music is aimed at the frum community, but all kinds of music is aired. Archives of the show are available at: http://wfmu.org/playlists/JM. Article from NY Times: http://www.jmintheam.org/pages/nachumnyt.htm

http://www.live365.com/stations/53860 Nusach Maven is 24/7 Cantorial music online. Radio can be heard at 11am and 10pm eastern time. It is a show "dedicated to the art of the chazzanut both classical and modern." Host is Winston Weilheimer.

http://www.wprb.com/
-- 103.3 FM in Princeton, NJ can be heard on Thursdays 3pm to 5pm.

http://israelvisit.co.il/ohradio/index.html--- Ohradio is a music website sponsored by IsraelVisit. Ohradio is a new Jerusalem-based producer of music CD's and audio dramas. The first two releases are The Mysterious Golem of Prague, a full length audio drama, starring Leonard Nimoy (Startrek's Mr. Spock), and PROPHECY, Music from the Kabbalah.

http://www.jewishbroadcast.com/--- A five channel streaming audio 24 hours. Includes music from Mostly Music, news, concerts, interviews and a anew releases area.

http://radiohazak.com/ --- Includes music and translations to songs

http://www.wnur.org/
--- Jewish music from every corner of the globe every Friday 12:30-2:00pm. Music on the show was recorded as far back as 1910. Spin Magazine called WNUR "the 1# station on the web

http://yiddish.forward.com
--- The Yiddish Forward Hour, every Saturday from 9-10 PM, is likely the longest running Jewish radio program in the US.

http://www.yv.org/
--- The Yiddish Voice is a local Boston Jewish music radio program heard on WUNR, Brookline, MA. Wed. 7:30-8:30. Yiddish-language radio program, featuring Jewish music, especially Yiddish and Cantorial, but also news,interviews, current events, comedy, public service announcements, etc.

http://www.102fm.co.il/Front/default.asp ---Live Radio from "top 40" style station in Israel

http://www.yiddishradioproject.org/exhibits/history/ --- Documentaries on NPR of the Yiddish radio Project.

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