When she was 16, KCRW General Manager Ruth Seymour was captivated by her studies with the Yiddish scholar Max Weinreich. \”Yiddish is magic,\” he told her. \”It will outwit history.\”
Some people take lemons and make lemonade. Selma Schimmel took a diagnosis of cancer and turned it into a vast support network which has changed the lives of thousands of people.
To Israel Radio\’s ear, the Reform and Conservative message \”There\’s more than one way to be Jewish\” may be too \”ideologically controversial.\”
My father Illya Pinhkus Kirtsman was born in 1909 in Odessa, Ukraine, the youngest of 11 children. His older sister and brother immigrated to America in 1912. The whole family planned to follow them. It was their dream for many years. In the 1930s, my father received few letters from his American siblings, and only after W.W.II did he establish communication with them again. By this time, only he and his sister Sonia (the 10th child) were alive. When we received a letter, my father took it to a translator (letters were written in Yiddish) and the whole family would listen to the news from America. We kept the door to our apartment locked. My mother was afraid that people from the KGB might come over, see us reading the letters, and put us in jail.
In 1995, Ruth Seymour and KCRW teamed up with the National Yiddish Book Center to create \”Jewish Short Stories,\” a National Public Radio series read by actors such as Leonard Nimoy and Jeff Goldblum. The program was a peculiar excursion in time-travel: back to the days of golems and rebbes and schlemiels all living together in the shtetl.
It\’s a sunny Santa Monica afternoon, and Ruth Seymour, station manager and program director of KCRW, is sitting in the Rose Cafe, neatly turned out in a dark pant suit.
There\’s a new singing cowboy in town, and his name is Ken Kunin.\n\”I\’ve been in this crazy industry for about 10 years,\” says the lead vocalist/songwriter. And he\’s about to turn up the heat.
Before films such as \”Radio Days,\” Woody Allen had his television days.
Several years ago, Yvette Lowenthal\’s friend, ICM agent Doug Zandoren, thought her low rasp would make her a good candidate for radio spots. He was right.
Rabbi Stewart Vogel and Dr. Laura Schlessinger devoted nearly a year to working on \”The Ten Commandments\” — no small feat, considering their busy schedules.
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