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Ruth Seymour, public radio pioneer devoted to Jewish culture, dies at 88
(JTA) — Ruth Seymour, who as general manager of the Los Angeles public radio station KCRW produced a landmark series on Yiddish short stories, died Friday after a long illness. She was 88.
Her daughter, Celia Hirschman, confirmed her death.
“She was a determined person, not always the easiest to work with, but she had seykhl, a kind of remarkable common sense and judgment about her,” said Aaron Lansky, the 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 consisted of readings by A-list Hollywood actors, among them Lauren Bacall, Alan Alda, Rhea Perlman, Jerry Stiller, Elliott Gould, Julie Kavner and Walter Matthau. Original music was composed by the Klezmer Conservatory Band, led by Boston’s Hankus Netsky.
“Every single actor we approached agreed immediately to read for us,” Lansky recalled. “They were all quite excited about it.”
Lansky, who was introduced to Seymour by the film critic Kenneth Turan, credits her with providing the title for his 2004 memoir, “Outwitting History,” about his efforts to rescue Yiddish books destined for the dumpster. Seymour, who studied at the City College of New York with Max Weinreich, said she asked the renowned Yiddish linguist how he could keep teaching with just three students in his class. “It’s not a problem,” Weinrich reportedly responded. “Yiddish is magic. It will outwit 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 sold more of those collections than anything else in our history,” Jennifer Ferro, the station’s current manager, wrote in an appreciation of Seymour published on KCRW’s web site.
For 28 years Seymour hosted KCRW’s “Philosophers, Fiddlers and Fools,” a three-hour special that aired on a Friday afternoon during Hanukkah. She played music she referred to as the Second Avenue hit parade, read short stories by Jewish writers and included a memorial to the victims of the Holocaust. Some of the shows were done in Yiddish with Seymour providing an English translation. She called it “an homage to a culture and its people — my people — to their indomitable spirit, their irrepressible humor and inventiveness, their capacity for wonder, endurance and faith.”
Ruth Epstein grew up in the Bronx. From the age of seven she attended one of the Sholom Aleichem Yiddish folk 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, the writer Judith Rossner, introduced her to a poet named Jack Hirschman. Epstein and Hirschman married and started a family, living in New Hampshire when Hirschman taught at Dartmouth, then moving to Southern California where Hirschman accepted a faculty position at UCLA in the summer of 1961.
Seymour’s radio career began that year at KPFK, the left-leaning Pacifica station in Los Angeles, where she served as drama and literature director. The family moved to Europe in 1964, where she filed stories for KPFK. During their time abroad the Hirschmans lived on the Greek Island of Hydra, where the singer Leonard Cohen became a friend. In a 1987 interview with the L.A. Times, Seymour said the island had “about 30 highly charged, demented people running around stark 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 ousted in 1976 during one of the periodic Pacifica staff reshuffles insiders described as “coups.” She came to KCRW in 1977, helping build the station in Santa Monica with its first fund drives and extending its signal across Los Angeles.
In 1973 she divorced her husband; some 20 years later she decided to drop his surname and replace it with Seymour, anglicizing the first name of her paternal great-grandfather, a Polish rabbi known as Reb Simcha of Pultysk. In a July 1993 article in KCRW’s newsletter, Seymour wrote that Reb Simcha was so revered that congregants “were convinced he conversed with the Almighty.” The article noted that two towns 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 stewardship KCRW’s signature music show “Morning Becomes Eclectic” became a huge influence in the world of popular music. The KCRW audience was chock full of showbiz movers and shakers: writers, directors, actors and musicians who frequently called the station to find out what music was being played.
Seymour’s voice, with its unmistakable Bronx accent, was familiar to KCRW listeners who heard her not only during the Hanukkah specials but also during pledge drives and when she did daily readings of the New York Times in her early years at the station when there was little in the way of locally produced public affairs programming.
“She sounded like your mother or aunty who was scolding you,” said Sarah Spitz, who served as the station’s publicity director and worked with Seymour for 27 years. “Ruth could be mercurial and she could be difficult but without a doubt she was a complete visionary. We will not see her likes again.”
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The post Ruth Seymour, public radio pioneer devoted to Jewish culture, dies at 88 appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Anti-Zionists Are Excluding LGBTQ+ Jews From Pride Spaces, New Report Says
Jews of Pride members are seen marching in the Pride parade 2025, part of LGBTQ+ community’s Midsumma Festival. Photo: Alexander Bogatyrev / SOPA Images via Reuters Connect.
Anti-Israel activists in the LGBTQ+ community are subjecting Zionist Jews to extreme levels of discrimination, including expulsions from major progressive groups and even physical assault, according to a new report by the nonprofit A Wider Bridge.
The release of the report — titled “Unsafe Spaces: Addressing Antisemitism Against LGBTQ+ Jews and Ensuring Pride Safety” — comes as LGBTQ community members across the Western world observe Pride Month, a period of festivities which celebrate the expansion of social and legal rights that have allowed gays to live more freely and authentically than ever in human history. For pro-Israel Jews, however, Pride Month 2025 is a challenging moment, as anti-Zionism has creeped into and crowded out many queer spaces which once welcomed them with open arms.
From online forums to the streets, the maltreatment and “erasure” of Jewish queer identity is severe, the report explains. Eighty-two percent of LGBTQ Jews have reported being expelled from social media channels or harassed on them, A Wider Bridge noted.
Earlier this year, NYC Dyke March, a public demonstration held by members of the lesbian community in New York City, banned self-proclaimed “Zionists” from its annual event, citing a desire to stand against the so-called “genocide” occurring in Gaza. Last year, the NYC Dyke March came under scrutiny after organizers settled on “genocide” as the theme of its 2024 event. In a statement, decrying “ethnic cleansing, violence, and dehumanization,” the organization compared the ongoing war in Gaza, to mass killings occurring in Ethiopia, Myanmar, and Sudan.
Also in 2024, the Dyke March Committee formally barred “Zionists” from participating in the Pride March, and during the event Jews were attacked and heckled after being seen wearing the Star of David on their clothing. That same year, an LGBTQ-friendly bar in the Brooklyn borough of New York City refused to hold a screening party for the Eurovision talent competition due to the participation of an Israeli contestant.
Forced, mass exiles are taking place in response to this new reality, the report added. Forty-three percent of queer Jews say they are leaving online forums; 40 percent abstain from participating in LGBTQ social events; and 30 percent said their decision was driven by precipitous deterioration of the manner in which they are treated. The only conclusion to draw, the report said, is that the Pride movement is “no longer universally safe or inclusive.”
“What we have found since Oct. 7 and what the report points to is that the explosion of antisemitism that the whole Jewish community has experienced has in some ways grown even more exponentially in the LGBTQ community,” Rabbi Denise Eger, interim executive director of A Wider Bridge and former president of the Central Conference of American Rabbis, told The Algemeiner during an interview on Friday. “What we’re seeing around now as Pride marches and organizations put on their celebration s is institutional discrimination and outright boycotts.”
Eger went on to note that antisemitism in LGBTQ communities is all the more distressing due to the outsized contributions, legal and political, which Jewish gays and lesbians have made towards fostering a society that is more inclusive of non-heteronormative identities and relationships.
“Look at who were the early leaders of the LGBTQ civil rights movement — Harvey Milk, one of the first openly gay elected officials in the US, was a Jewish man. Edith Windsor, who brought one of the first marriage equality cases that we won at the Supreme Court, and her attorney, Roberta Kaplan, who won it — these are LGBTQ heroes, not just LGBTQ ‘Jewish’ heroes and heroines,” Eger continued. “So, for LGBTQ Jews to be continually shut out of these spaces is paralyzing, shocking, and horrifying, and LGBTQ Jews are asking where is their home.”
She added, “These are difficult times, but together, the whole Jewish community, including the LGBTQ part of the Jewish community, can stand strong and be resilient in the face of all this, just as the Jewish people have done throughout our history. We have the tools within our tradition to keep us strong and to help us educate. And yes, I believe so much, as a rabbi, that we can and must help change the world for the better. That’s what we are called to do as the Jewish people.”
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, recorded incidents of antisemitism in the US continue to increase year over year, breaking all previous annual records.
In 2024, as reported by the Anti-Defamation League’s (ADL) annual audit, there were 9,354 antisemitic incidents — an average of 25.6 a day — across the US, creating an atmosphere of hate not experienced in the nearly thirty years since the ADL began tracking such data in 1979. Incidents of harassment, vandalism, and assault all increased by double digits, and for the first time ever a majority of outrages — 58 percent — were related to the existence of Israel as the world’s only Jewish state.
The Algemeiner parsed the ADL’s data, finding dramatic rises in incidents on college campuses, which saw the largest growth in 2024. The 1,694 incidents tallied by the ADL amounted to an 84 percent increase over the previous year. Additionally, antisemites were emboldened to commit more offenses in public in 2024 than they did in 2023, perpetrating 19 percent more attacks on Jewish people, pro-Israel demonstrators, and businesses perceived as being Jewish-owned or affiliated with Jews.
“Hatred toward Israel was a driving force behind antisemitism across the US, with more than half of all antisemitic incidents referencing Israel or Zionism,” said Oren Segal, ADL senior vice president for counter-extremism and intelligence. “These incidents, along with all those documented in the audit, serve as a clear reminder that silence is not an option. Good people must stand up, push back, and confront antisemitism wherever it appears. And that starts with understanding what fuels it and learning to recognize it in all its forms.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post Anti-Zionists Are Excluding LGBTQ+ Jews From Pride Spaces, New Report Says first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Two UK Men Convicted, Jailed Following November Antisemitic Harassment
Illustrative: A pro-Hamas march in London, United Kingdom, Feb. 17, 2024. Photo: Chrissa Giannakoudi via Reuters Connect
A court in the United Kingdom on Thursday sentenced Hussein Altamimi, 22, and Ali Alanzi, 30, to prison sentences of eight months and seven months respectively, for charges stemming from an incident at London’s Western Marble Arch Synagogue in November 2024, according to British media.
The two men received convictions for yelling at four Jewish worshipers such phrases as “Jews aren’t welcome here,” “you don’t belong here,” and “f—king Jew.” They also repeatedly screamed “free Palestine.”
The incident grew violent when Altamimi hit one victim’s arm to try and prevent her from filming the abuse. Alanzi also hurled liquid from an alcoholic drink toward one person. When police arrived to arrest the pair, he assaulted one of the officers.
The court convicted both men of four counts of religiously aggravated public order offenses and religiously aggravated assault. Alanzi also received a conviction for attacking the officer and will endure an additional 12 weeks’ incarceration due to a previous suspended sentence.
On Friday, the Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA) described its reaction to the hate crime prosecutions on X in one word: “Vindicated.”
Altamimi also faced additional charges and guilty verdicts related to a July 2023 incident which included racial abuse and striking a police officer.
“The CPS is working closely with the police to tackle hate crime, making sure that perpetrators who target victims because of their religion, race, sexuality, gender identity, or disability are brought to justice,” Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) lawyer Anna Hindmarsh said following the trial. “We know that hate crimes have a significant impact on victims and the wider community, and we will continue to support victims and witnesses who come forward to report any examples of hate crime they have experienced.”
The convictions against Altamimi and Alanzi are part of a historic surge in antisemitic acts in the United Kingdom.
The UK experienced its second-worst year for antisemitism in 2024, despite recording an 18 percent drop in antisemitic incidents from the previous year’s all-time high, according to a report released in February.
The Community Security Trust (CST), a nonprofit charity that advises Britain’s Jewish community on security matters, released data showing it recorded 3,528 antisemitic incidents for 2024, a drop of 18 percent from the 4,296 in 2023. These numbers compare to 1,662 antisemitic incidents in 2022, 2,261 in 2021, and 1,684 in 2020.
In the 12 months following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, invasion of and massacre across southern Israel, CST counted 5,583 antisemitic incidents in the UK, an increase from 204 percent from the same period the previous year.
Many of the incidents involved violence targeting the Jewish community.
Last month, On May 26, a group of six or seven men attacked three Jewish boys at the Hampstead Underground Station in North London, requiring hospitalization for one. CAA said that “this report is yet another stark reminder of the growing threat facing Jewish communities, including children.”
Another antisemitic assault occurred in Manchester in February, when an unidentified individual hit a Jewish man with what was believed to be a bottle, shattering the victim’s glasses.
The heavily Orthodox Jewish neighborhood of Stamford Hill in Hackney saw an antisemitic act last week when vandals targeted a Jewish-owned investment firm, smashing its windows and splashing red paint. The group Palestine Action claimed responsibility for the crime, as it had done previously for similar acts at the University of Cambridge’s endowment fund headquarters and the BBC’s New Broadcasting House.
“This should be treated as [an] antisemitic incident without any doubt. [The owners] are visibly Jewish people; the people who run the business and this business itself have nothing to do with Israel,” said Rabbi Herschel Gluck, president of Jewish security service Shomrim’s branch in Stamford Hill.
Days earlier, residents of Brighton in southeastern England discovered antisemitic vandalism at a memorial created to honor the victims of the Hamas-led Oct. 7 terror attacks.
“There have been over 40 attacks on the site including vandalism, theft, and graffiti. The abuse has been relentless,” Heidi Bachram, who volunteers to maintain the memorial, told The Jewish Chronicle at the time. “It’s shocking that grief for innocents is met with such violence. The hate won’t stop us, and every night, a different victim’s story will be told [at the memorial]. We will never let them be forgotten.”
In April, according to prosecutors, Abdullah Sabah Albadri, 33, attempted to climb a wall outside of the Israeli embassy in London while carrying a “martyrdom note.”
Prosecutor Kristel Pous said that Albadri told police that he wanted to “do something to send a message to the Israeli government to stop the war.”
The Israeli embassy stated in response to the foiled attack that “we thank the British security forces for their immediate response and ongoing efforts to secure the embassy.” It vowed that “the embassy of Israel will not be deterred by any terror threat and will continue to represent Israel with pride in the UK.”
The post Two UK Men Convicted, Jailed Following November Antisemitic Harassment first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Large Pro-Israel Event in Texas ‘Indefinitely Postponed’ Due to Threats of Terrorism
A protester holds a sign that reads, ”From the river to the sea Palestine will be free” during a pro-Palestinian emergency demonstration outside the Consulate General of Israel in Houston, Texas, on March 19, 2025. Photo: Reginald Mathalone via Reuters Connect
The 2025 Israel Summit in Dallas, Texas has been indefinitely postponed in response to what organizers described as intensifying threats of terrorism.
Prior to the cancellation, the event was expecting over 1,000 attendees. The Israel Summit had already undergone a last-minute venue change due to mounting safety concerns. The gathering, scheduled for June 9–11, was set to feature prominent voices from both the Jewish and Christian pro-Israel communities.
Former US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman, who had been scheduled to speak at the event, commented on the cancellation on social media: “This is what America looks like in 2025. A peaceful pro-Israel gathering with more than a thousand participants had to be scrapped because of threats from violent extremists.”
Ten days prior to this year’s event, local police and intelligence officials in Dallas alerted organizers that the gathering had been upgraded to a “high-threat event.”
According to Josiah Hilton, host of the Israel Guys show, which was scheduled to co-host the event with HaYovel, the organizers had to produce “a mandatory security plan with a substantial budget estimated in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.”
The organizers then moved the Israel Summit to a facility in an isolated area of Kenneth, Texas. However, the event was forced to cancel after the Palestinian Youth Movement Dallas and Jewish Voice for Peace, a pair of anti-Israel, pro-Hamas organizations, revealed its location to their followers.
“[T]he Genocide Summit had to change plans last minute in desperation due to them claiming to be ‘under attack.’ The reality is they understand DFW’s commitment to confronting the extremist ideology that is Zionism,” Palestinian Youth Movement Dallas wrote on Instagram.
However, the organizers stated that they are going to hold the pro-Israel event “in the near future,” and vowed to “come back bigger and stronger, with more people.”
Hilton said that the cancellation reflects “the growing normalization of antisemitic threats and anti-Israel extremists, which are fueling intimidation and silencing voices of support for Israel across the United States.”
The cancellation of the Israel Summit also reflects growing concern regarding potential violence against supporters of the Jewish state. Last month, two Israeli embassy staffers, Yaron Lipschinsky and Sarah Milgrim, were murdered while exiting an event hosted by the American Jewish Committee (AJC) at the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, DC. Then this past Sunday, an assailant firebombed a pro-Israel rally in Boulder, Colorado, injuring 15 people and a dog.
The post Large Pro-Israel Event in Texas ‘Indefinitely Postponed’ Due to Threats of Terrorism first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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