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(JTA) — Ruth Seymour, who as executive director of Los Angeles public radio station KCRW produced a historic Yiddish news series, died Friday after a long illness. He was 88.
His daughter, Celia Hirschman, showed his death.
“He was a determined person, not the easiest to deal with, but she had the seykhl, a remarkable kind of sense and judgment, and not unusual,” said Aaron Lansky, founder of the National Yiddish Book Center.
The Yiddish Book Center and KCRW co-produced the 1995 radio series “Jewish Short Stories from Eastern Europe and Beyond. “The 13-part series was directed by Joan Micklin Silver and included readings by prominent Hollywood actors, including Lauren Bacall, Alan Alda, Rhea Perlman, Jerry Stiller, Elliott Gould, Julie Kavner and Walter Matthau. The original music was composed by the Klezmer Conservatory Band, conducted by Hankus Netsky of Boston.
“All the actors we contacted agreed to read for us,” Lansky recalls. “Everyone was very excited about this. “
Lansky, who met Seymour through film critic Kenneth Turan, credits him with the title of his 2004 memoir, “Outwitting History,” about his efforts to save Yiddish books destined for the trash bin. Seymour, who studied at the City College of New York with Max Weinreich, said he asked the famous Yiddish linguist how he could continue training with only 3 students in his class. “That’s not a problem,” Weinrich allegedly responded. “Yiddish is magical. It will frustrate history.
KCRW produced a second Jewish short story series in 1998, “Jewish Stories from the Old World to the New,” which was repackaged as an audiobook.
“KCRW has sold more of those collections than anything else in our history,” Jennifer Ferro, the station’s current manager, wrote in a thank you to Seymour posted on KCRW’s website.
For 28 years, Seymour hosted KCRW’s “Philosophers, Fiddlers and Fools,” a three-hour special that aired on a Friday afternoon on Hanukkah. It played music she called the successful Second Avenue parade, read short stories by Jewish writers, and included a memorial to those who suffered the Holocaust. Some exhibits were held in Yiddish and Seymour offered an English translation. She called it “a tribute to a culture and its other people — my other people — to its indomitable spirit, its irrepressible humor and inventiveness. their capacity for wonder, their staying power, and their faith. “
Ruth Epstein grew up in the Bronx and, from the age of seven, attended one of Sholom Aleichem’s Yiddish schools.
Her grandfather, an observant Jewish furrier on the Lower East Side, was broken-hearted that the younger generation of his family did not keep the Sabbath. Her parents met at the progressive New School for Social Research, which offered college-level courses to new immigrants. She described her father as an atheist and a socialist.
At the age of 16, she enrolled at City College, where a mutual friend, Judith Rossner, led her to a poet named Jack Hirschman. Epstein and Hirschman married and started a family, lived in New Hampshire when Hirschman was training at Dartmouth and then moved. to Southern California, where Hirschman accepted a college position at UCLA in the summer of 1961.
Seymour’s radio career began that year at KPFK, Pacifica’s left-wing station in Los Angeles, where she served as director of theater and literature. The family moved to Europe in 1964, where they left pieces for KPFK. While abroad, the Hirschmans lived on the Greek island of Hydra, where singer Leonard Cohen befriended. In an interview with the L. A. Times in 1987, Seymour said there were “about 30 very busy, demented people running around absolutely naked. “
After returning to the U.S. in 1968, she worked as a social worker for the state of California before becoming KPFK’s program director in 1971. Over the course of her tenure there she put the Firesign Theater comedy troupe on the air and decided to broadcast live a 1974 raid by the FBI and LAPD on the radio station, which had received a “communique” from the Symbionese Liberation Army. The militant leftist group claimed credit for the abduction of the heiress Patricia Hearst.
Seymour and station manager Will Lewis were fired in 1976 in one of the periodic reorganizations of the Pacifica workforce body described by insiders as “coups. “She came to KCRW in 1977, helping to build the Santa Monica Station with its first fundraisers and make it bigger. his sign on the other side of Los Angeles.
In 1973 she divorced her husband; Some twenty years later, he abandoned his calling and updated it with Seymour, adapting into English the call of his paternal great-grandfather, a Polish rabbi known as Reb Simcha of Pultysk. In a July 1993 article in the KCRW newsletter, Seymour wrote that Reb Simcha was so respected that devotees “were convinced that he was conversing with the Almighty. “The article noted that two cities reportedly fought over the right to bury the rabbi.
Seymour will also be remembered as a trailblazer in public radio’s embrace of digital platforms and an important player in campaigns to raise funds for NPR’s news operation.
Under Seymour’s leadership, KCRW’s iconic music show, “Morning Becomes Eclectic,” has become a huge influence in the world of popular music. KCRW’s audience was filled with showbiz personalities: writers, directors, actors, and musicians who would call the station to find out. what music was playing.
Seymour’s voice, with its unmistakable Bronx drawl, was familiar to KCRW listeners who heard it not only in Hanukkah specials, but also at donation drives and when she read the New York Times daily in her early years at the station, when there was little to go. the form of locally produced public affairs programming.
“It felt like your mom or aunt was scolding you,” said Sarah Spitz, who served as the station’s director of exposure and worked with Seymour for 27 years. “Ruth may be changeable and difficult, but she was certainly a visionary. We may never see your likes again.
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