Living in a small town in California can make it challenging to maintain a Jewish identity. Today I find a great new way to stay connected is by turning on Jewish radio and television.
Some of my favorite music stations are from New York, Buenos Aires and Montreal. I tune into Jerusalem every day to get Israeli radio and TV news. Recently I watched a live telecast of the Israeli Knesset’s special session in honor of the late prime minister Yitzhak Rabin; it was incredibly moving.
It has not always been this easy to stay connected. I previously have lived in some major centers of Yiddishkeit – New Jersey, Los Angeles, Montreal, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC – without ever having access to Jewish radio or television.
The Jewish world today is in an early stage of an exciting transformation brought on by developments in communications technologies and I am thoroughly enjoying it. The great change involves the Internet, which now includes audio and video capacities.
“Webcasting” refers to broadcasting over the web, whether it’s live or pre-recorded audio or video programming. Anyone with basic computer skills, an inexpensive computer and Internet access can become a webcaster to the world, or part of a webcast audience.
Radio and television – commonly referred to as “mass media” – have entered the age of “microcasting” to small audiences, such as the Jewish community. Previously insurmountable economic barriers to Jewish radio and television have fallen like the walls of Jericho.
Webcasting opportunities already are being exploited by pioneering Jewish organizations, entrepreneurs and hobbyists. Jewish webcasters today number well over 150 and many of them offer multiple channels of excellent programming. While some of the programming is live, including a large number of Israeli radio stations, the vast majority of the programming is pre-recorded so that it can be accessed at any time that is convenient for the user.
Whatever a Jew’s interests are – news, Torah, music, children, Yiddish, Israel, cooking, Hebrew – they can be found in webcasts.
What about the latest Mideast news from an Israeli source? The “Voice of Israel,” as well as a variety of commercial Israeli radio stations, offers news via the web in Hebrew, English and other languages, in radio and television formats.
If a commentary on this week’s Torah portion is of interest, it’s there, and from many points of view.
Lovers of Jewish music can find treasures. There are now dozens of Jewish music webcasts from Israel, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Canada, Brazil and Germany. They offer a variety of genres (chassidic, Klezmer, Israeli, Yiddish, children’s, Sephardic, Jewish rock, chazzanut) in English, Hebrew, Yiddish, Russian, French, Spanish and German.
Other webcasting sites offer such gems as story telling for children, Yiddish programming with simultaneous translations by a “Yid-O-Matic,” and even an Israeli “virtual cinema” with rare Israeli films from the Spielberg archive at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
There are a variety of tools to find the web addresses to these webcasting sources, such as the major general interest search engines, Yahoo (www.yahoo.com) and Google (www.google.com), and the major Jewish search engines, MavenSearch (www.maven.co.il) and Shamash (www.shamash.org).
More direct access is available via a new and specialized directory to Jewish webcasting, the “Jewish Webcasting Guide” (www.JewishWebcasting.com). It lists more than 100 webcasters and provides links and detailed descriptions of their content. It also has the webcasters categorized by subject areas and offers information about how to use webcasting software.
While Jewish webcasting has made great strides, there is much more to look forward to. We are in just the first phase of Jewish webcasting. Possibly the biggest untapped webcasting opportunity is for Jewish news programs tailored for an American Jewish audience in radio and television formats. While there is some Internet news programming today, it is very far from offering the depth and quality of news coverage that American Jewish audiences are accustomed to. The Leon Charney Report (www.charneyreport.com) and Isracast (www.isracast.com) are examples of the best work of this type.
A major policy issue is the role of American Jewish communal institutions vis-a-vis funding support for Jewish webcasting. American Jewish webcasting is a cottage industry comprised of small non-profits and entrepreneurs. While these pioneering webcasters have produced some respectable programs, their economic bases are small and prospects for profitability are not great. This, unfortunately, will limit the growth of Jewish webcasting.
It seems likely that major communal institutions, such as the United Jewish Communities and local Federations, will be confronted with the question of whether there is a role for them in advancing communal values via Jewish webcasting.
This is no small issue: The National Jewish Population Survey of 2000 indicates that the Internet – just about nonexistent just a decade ago – is now used for Jewish purposes by 50 percent of adults of child-rearing age (this is a level of use which is roughly four times the level of use of the Internet by all Americans for religious purposes). For this generation, Internet usage for Jewish purposes already is at a higher level than the use of CDS, tapes or movies, and is 82 percent the level of book use and 72 percent the level of newspaper use.
Possible models for Jewish communal involvement range from disorganized and minor grant making to major involvement in the creation of a Jewish version of such institutions as National Public Radio or the Voice of Israel. In light of webcasting’s relatively low costs and extremely
broad potential impact, it seems that webcasting could be very strategically and cost-effectively addressed with national solutions for the Jewish community.
Notwithstanding the pace of progress on such issues, right now there is much for Jewish webcasting audiences to enjoy and there are historic opportunities for Jewish webcasters. So there is no need to wait to log-on: it’s fun, informative and the price is right – they’re giving it away!
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