"Yiddish Radio Project" to premiere on All Things Considered

Forgotten for more than half a century, Yiddish radio is back. This spring, All Things Considered presents the Yiddish Radio Project, a major series of stories about the golden age of Yiddish-American broadcasting in the 1930s to '50s. The series will debut on March 19 and will air each Tuesday throughout the spring.

The Yiddish Radio Project stems from one fateful day fifteen years ago when musician and historian Henry Sapoznik walked into an old New York City storeroom. There, among looming stacks of broken records and musty pamphlets, Sapoznik made the discovery of a lifetime: a handful of single-cut aluminum transcription disks of Yiddish radio shows from the 1930s and 40s. In the years since then, Sapoznik has combed attics, flea markets, and even dumpsters in an attempt to find and preserve all of the last surviving remnants of Yiddish radio.

"You have to remember, these are one-of-a-kind recordings," explains Sapoznik. "So much was so close to being lost forever. What choice did I have?"

The collection has grown to more than five hundred hours on 1000 fragile disks, with everything from man-on-the-street interviews and news programs to searing dramas and swinging music shows—the last recorded vestiges of a people in the midst of a cultural renaissance.

And now, the collection is ready for the radio dial. Sapoznik has collaborated with Dave Isay, the MacArthur award-winning radio documentary producer, to create the multi-part All Things Considered series celebrating these recordings and the forgotten radio geniuses who made them.

Isay didn't need too much convincing. "It was like opening up King Tut's Tomb," he says. "Taken together, the collection give us this incredibly intimate snap-shot of American Jewish life in the 1930s and 40s. You see the collision of Yiddish and American cultures, the day-to-day lives of immigrants struggling to make it in a new land, and the dawning reality of the genocide occurring across the ocean."

The series features translations of the Yiddish language broadcasts (the original programs alternate between Yiddish and English) by a cast that includes Eli Wallach, Carl Reiner, and Isaiah Sheffer, but for Isay these translations are purely linguistic—not cultural. "The shows are mostly in Yiddish, but the voices and spirit captured on them is universal."

Jay Kernis, senior vice president for programming at NPR, agrees. “We are thrilled that almost 10 million public radio listeners will be able to hear these historic recordings. This is an important part of not only Jewish history, but American history as well.”