Re: WEVD (was WFAN New York)

[Dan Strassberg <dan.strassberg@worldnet.att.net>]

At 08:30 PM 8/4/97 +0000, you wrote:
>On 3 August 1997 at 11:30 p.m., you wrote:
>
>>Let's put the shoe on the other foot: if "Jews for Jesus" tried to buy time
>>on  WEVD, owned by the Jewish Daily Forward
>
>Does WEVD broadcast Jewish programming as its regular format? I saw an ad
>on the back of a New York City bus promoting WEVD and its airstaff, but I
>did not get a close look at it.
>
Remember the following: 1. The Forward Association, which owns WEVD, is NOT
a religious organization. 2. Jews are both an ethnic group and a religious
group. A better way of saying it might be that Jews are an ethnic group and
they happen to share a common religion. 3. Therefore "Jewish" programming
can be (and when it exists these days, usually is) completely secular.
Moreover, in the US today, Jewish-oriented radio programs, when they exist,
are almost always broadcast in English. 4. If we were in Minnesota or North
Dakota, the situation with regard to people of Norwegian extraction would be
almost the same. There is a very large concentration of people of Norwegian
extraction in the northern midwest. Norwegians are nearly all Lutheran. In
Norway, they speak Norwegian. In the US, they speak English. A program aimed
at people of Norwegian descent in, say, Bemidji MN, _could_ be a Lutheran
church service, but it also could be a secular program in English playing
some Norwegian records, talking of goings on in Norway, and carrying
public-service announcements about Lutheran church groups and civic
organizations in and around Bemidji. The "Jewish" programs I've heard on
WEVD during occasional trips to New York during the last few years have been
of this last type--except they were aimed at a Jewish, rather than a
Norwegian-American audience. I don't know whether WEVD still carries any
program of this type. Since WEVD is mostly, if not entirely, a brokered-time
station, I'm sure the station would carry such programs if it were
approached by producers. The producers may have found, however, that
programs of this type aren't profitable. 

In the 40s, there were large numbers of Jews in New York who were relativly
recent immigrants and who preferred to speak Yiddish. In those years, WEVD
(1330) was the "Jewish" station. Even then, most of the programming was
secular, but the language at that time was Yiddish, rather than English.

- -------------------------------
Dan Strassberg (Note: Address is CASE SENSITIVE!)
ALL _LOWER_ CASE!!!--> dan.strassberg@worldnet.att.net
(617) 558-4205; Fax (617) 928-4205

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