Oral Tradition
Yiddish radio was booming in the 1930s and ’40s. A scholar looks back.
Advertisement for Der Hoyz Fraynd
CREDIT: Courtesy of The Forward
In the 1930s and ’40s, airwaves in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and other major cities were filled with Yiddish-language shows which offered a mix of news, advice, cantorial music, and radio plays. They gave foreign-born listeners, many of them refugees, a chance both to learn about life in their new country and to be entertained. Ari Y. Kelman, a professor of American studies at the University of California, Davis, and the author of Station Identification: A Cultural History of Yiddish Radio in the United States, talks with Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry about how Yiddish programming both mimicked and deviated from its English-language counterpart—and about its family-centered melodramas, rabbi-adjudicated court shows, and performing lady cantors.
A Nation of Commentators
We are all Rashi’s heirs, but what, exactly, is our inheritance?
Unveiling
A photographer discovers Jewish gravestones at a tony golf course
False Witness
A play examines the notion that Nazis made soap from Jewish flesh
