TITLE: Hear, O Israel: Yiddish-American Radio 1925-1955
SPEAKER: Henry Sapoznik
EVENT DATE: 10/14/2009
RUNNING TIME: 57 minutes
DESCRIPTION:
While all other aspects of Yiddish culture existed wherever Ashkenazic Jews lived, it was only in America that radio realized its greatest and most fulfilling use by and for Jews. Yiddish scholar Henry Sapoznik discusses and shares some of the most memorable and powerful moments in this nearly lost world of ethnic American broadcasting. By exploring amazingly broad category of Yiddish radio shows -- from rabbinical advice programs to live Yiddish theater acts, from man-on-the-street interviews to the news of the day in verse -- we encounter a vibrant and vital Jewish-American popular culture at its creative apex and on the eve of its terrible devastation.
Speaker Biography: Henry Sapoznik is a record producer with four Grammy nominations, a radio documentarian, an author, and a performer of traditional Yiddish and American music. He received a 2002 Peabody award for his ten-week National Public Radio series on the history of Jewish broadcasting, The Yiddish Radio Project, the 2000 ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for Music Scholarship for his book Klezmer! Jewish Music from Old World to Our World, and an Emmy nomination for his score to the documentary film, The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg. He founded the Max and Frieda Weinstein Archives of Recorded Sound at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, as well as Living Traditions' annual KlezKamp: The Yiddish Folk Arts Program.
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SERIES: Benjamin Botkin Lecture Series
