In the mid-1990s, the Klezmer revival band Kapelye introduced into its repertoire the songs, commercials, and patter from vintage American Yiddish broadcasts that its cofounder and leader, Henry Sapoznik, had discovered on aluminum discs transcribed by radio stations decades earlier. Kapelye's “radio concerts” were nostalgic excursions into a parallel media universe that was instantly intelligible to their American audiences, who were well acquainted with the clichés of commercial radio, with its crooners and choristers intoning odes to the virtues of Barbasol shaving cream and other consumer products. It was an entirely different story, however, when the band brought these concerts to a Yiddish cultural festival in Berlin. Kapelye's renditions of Yiddish broadcasts clashed with the German audience's experiences and sensibilities. The unfettered commercialism of American radio had no equivalent in German broadcasting, and clearly, there was no Yiddish radio in that country during the 1930s and 1940s (the heyday of Yiddish broadcasting in the United States). Indeed, any nostalgia for that era would have been incongruous, if not altogether taboo, in the Berlin of the mid-1990s.

As Ari Y. Kelman would put it, Kapelye's American and German audiences belonged to radically different “acoustic communities.” This pioneering study of Yiddish radio, which serves as a point of departure for future scholarship on foreign-language broadcasting in the United States, is a most welcome addition to the growing literature on both Jewish media studies and the consumer culture of American Jews. Importantly, Kelman places the development of Yiddish radio in the broader sociopolitical framework and regulatory environment that governed broadcasting throughout the period under scrutiny (primarily the 1920s through the 1940s). Government agencies such as the Federal Radio Commission and its successor, the Federal Communications Commission, sought to ensure that broadcasters would “actively promote the assimilation of immigrant populations into the American mainstream” (20). Prevailing assumptions “held that radio in the United States would speak English” and that its mass audience “would listen to radio in the same way and absorb the same set of meanings from its programs” (5–6). Yet, as Kelman points out, “radio in the United States has been multilingual practically since the very beginning” (7). This inevitably led to mixed messages over the airwaves.

The complex interplay of cultural, political, and linguistic factors influencing the Yiddish radio audience can be illustrated by a 1936 Armistice Day program on a Brooklyn radio station, when the in-studio audience was asked to join in the singing of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” “Although the singers found their collective rhythm, they could never quite get the lyrics to sound right because, it quickly became apparent, they did not know the words,” Kelman writes. “They tried to sound American and they failed. Ironically, their improvisations and imperfections gave voice instead to the cultural contradictions of Jewish life in America” (2). This moment was showcased during the successful 2002 public radio series (produced by Sapoznik, David Isay, and Yair Reiner) to which Station Identification owes a considerable debt (http://yiddishradioproject.org/).

There were no “Yiddish radio stations” per se; rather, Yiddish programs were broadcast during limited hours—especially on Fridays and Sundays—on stations of limited wattage in several different cities. The best known of these stations was New York's WEVD (“the station that speaks your language”), owned by the pro-Socialist Forward Association. Kelman argues that Yiddish programs provided “a vital and vibrant counterpoint to accounts of radio's ‘Golden Age’ that begs a reconsideration of the relationship between language, nation, media, popular culture, ethnicity, audience, and community” (7). At the same time, he regards Yiddish radio as just one option along a continuum of broadcast choices available to Jewish listeners. The Jewish immigrant public “tuned in to hear Yiddish itself, and thus to reinforce their community through sound” (86).

Commercialism was intrinsic to the radio medium in its American incarnation, “turn[ing] communities into commodities” (135). “Yiddish radio programming relied on delicate networks of relationships among Yiddish-speaking performers, Jewish-owned stores, the Yiddish press, and locally owned radio stations,” Kelman observes (43). Specialized advertising agencies drummed up sponsors for Yiddish broadcasts. Procter (misspelled Proctor in Station Identification) & Gamble's soaps and Ralston Purina's cereals shared the Yiddish airwaves with Manischewitz's Tam Tams and the Borenstein Brothers Butcher Market's cold cuts. The ability of sponsors to meet the requirements of kashrut played a significant role in their pitches to listeners (137).

If, like its newspaper counterparts, Yiddish radio could fairly be described as an “Americanizing agency,” its voice was, nevertheless, highly distinctive. Kelman singles out several key figures involved with Yiddish-language programming, among them the actress Molly Picon (a frequent presence in the radio studio), the lexicographer and playwright Nukhem Stutchkoff (author of numerous “kitchen-sink” dramas on WEVD), and the gram-mayster Zvee Scooler (whose stream-of-consciousness rhymed monologues could be heard on WEVD into the 1980s). Other less well-known figures emerge here, too, including Der Yidisher Filosof (C. Yisroel Lutzky) and Victor Packer, roving Brooklyn reporter and host of a Yiddish amateur hour.

As Packer's case suggests, English-language programming served as a model for much of what was presented over the Yiddish airwaves. Indeed, Kelman goes so far as to assert that Packer's amateurs “participated in the fantasy of Yiddish radio by reproducing a language barrier that did not in fact exist” (156). However, to sustain such a broad claim regarding the extent of immigrant listeners' bilingualism (especially during the early years of radio), further investigation into the types of English-language programs—music, variety, current affairs, and so on—to which they most frequently listened would probably be required. (It is likely that for many of them, the daily Yiddish press remained the primary source of news on current events, for instance).

By the 1950s, it was possible for the American-born cultural critic and historian Ruth Glazer (Ruth Gay) to offer an affectionate and mildly nostalgic tribute to Yiddish radio in the pages of Commentary. Her overall appraisal of WEVD was laudatory; that station, she wrote, “maintains a remarkably high-toned and even high-minded atmosphere” (210). Nevertheless, by then the graying cohort of Yiddish speakers had become “more conservative than its radio announcers,” Kelman notes. That audience “preferred to hear itself as it once was rather than as what it had become” (211).

Kelman's primary focus is the “acoustic community” of Yiddish radio listeners; he devotes considerably less attention to the broader context of ethnic broadcasting in the United States. The extent to which these different foreign-language broadcasters influenced one another (and were influenced, in turn, by mainstream English-language radio) certainly merits the scrutiny of future researchers on the ethnic media, if for no other reason than that their programs were often aired by the same stations and from the same studios. As recently as 1962, Yiddish remained the most popular foreign language to be heard on New York City radio broadcasts (217), and WEVD continued to carry fifty hours of Yiddish programming each week into the late 1970s. Strikingly, it was the daily Spanish broadcasts of New York Yankees games that finally displaced Yiddish from its top spot on the foreign-language radio rankings. Since then, the Spanish presence on both radio and television (a new broadcast medium, which Yiddish only fleetingly penetrated in the United States) has grown ubiquitous.

Kelman's study sheds a refreshingly new perspective on Jewish immigrant culture. However, it is marred in spots by misspellings, among them, the singer “Isa Kramer” [Kremer] (45), “Delancy [Delancey] Street” (91), and “La Marseilles” (104) and “Le Marsailles” (193) [“La Marseillaise” (!)]. Kelman mischaracterizes Yiddish as “a mixture of Russian, Loshn koydesh, German, and Polish” (11); in the context of a scholarly book on aspects of Yiddish culture, a linguistically founded description of that language is clearly warranted. Here are a few other corrections: Joshua A. (not David) Fishman is the author of the book Yiddish: Turning to Life (218); Harold (not Howard) Ostroff was the head of the Forward Association (221); and Isaac Bashevis Singer (not Osip Dimov) was the author of The Family Muskat (216). And, though this might seem to be a minor technical quibble, the invention of the transistor was unconnected with the introduction of “smaller, portable radios” after World War II, which replaced “the heavy, burdensome crystal and tube radio sets that typified the home market in the 1930s and 1940s” (204). Transistor radios came on the scene only in the 1960s.

In an era when the phrase “new media” refers to the realm of the iPod, the iPhone, Hulu, YouTube, Twitter, and video games, the fate of WEVD's AM and FM outlets (which is chronicled in Station Identification) offers a tremendously ironic denouement for Yiddish radio in the United States. In 1981, the Forward Association sold its AM station to “a company that had been involved in Christian broadcasting,” and two decades later, it sold its FM station to Disney for the modest sum of $78 million (220–21). This was done in order to subsidize the Forward Association's highly unprofitable Yiddish, English, and (for a time) Russian newspapers. (The “Forward Hour” continues to air on WMCA-AM on Saturday evenings, and this program is also streamed over the Web.) One can only imagine how the members of the once-flourishing acoustic community of Yiddish radio listeners would have reacted to that peculiar development.