Ruth Seymour, public radio pioneer devoted to Jewish culture, dies at 88
Ruth Seymour, raised in the Bronx, turned KCRW in Los Angeles into a public radio powerhouse and produced a series of programs on Yiddish short stories. (Marc Goldstein)
(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.
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.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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