Incorrigible Mideast maven rides the California air waves
KCRW radio general manager Ruth Hirschman acknowledges that she has occasionally gone berserk while on the air. In October, for instance, she gave the regional director of Americans For Peace Now, Uriel Masad, a thorough drubbing on her daily noontime news and interview radio show for suggesting that the Gulf crisis might precipitate a speedier resolution to the Arab-Israeli dispute. Hirschman, enraged by his cheery optimism, virtually badgered him off the air. "When Peace Now tells me that things are getting better," says Hirschman, "I get deranged." Masad does not, however, begrudge Hirschman her one-upmanship. He has learned to accommodate the woman whom one associate has called "Rosa Luxemburg, a little bit of Marjorie Morningstar, Stella Dallas and Natasha what's-her-name in War and Peace.'" Says Masad affectionately: "She is quite mad, but she does an excellent job." In a town that lacks solid radio news coverage, Bronx-born Hirschman has made KCRW-FM the region's premier fix for local talk radio junkies. It has become, in the 12 years since she took it over, the most influential radio station in Southern California. Hirschman's show features news broadcasts from the BBC, a daily readingin her gloriously undiluted Bronx accentof pieces from the New York Times, and phone interviews with an eclectic stable of international commentators. In recent months, she has repeatedly interviewed the Times's A.M. Rosenthal, David Shipler and Thomas Friedman, as well as a range of other commentators on the Middle East seldom heard on the West Coast, including such dovish Israeli literary lights as Amos Oz and David Grossman.
Hirschman's tirade against Peace Now, however, plunged many who thought they knew her politics into ideological confusion. In Southern California, the very term public radio denotes a left-wing bias. And Hirschman, who came to the National Public Radio affiliate from KPFK-FM, a Pacifica Radio Network station that sometimes still refers to Israel as "the Zionist entity," had made no secret of her disdain for most Israeli government policies. Recently, for instance, she championed Mike Wallace's "60 Minutes" characterization of October's violence on the Temple Mount as a "police riot." Yet Hirschman can be surprisingly hard-nosed and independent-minded when it comes to Middle Eastern affairs. Whether interviewing a Palestinian editor or an Israeli reporter articulating his anger at the Palestinians for brutalizing Jerusalem, Hirschman challenges inborn assumptions with vigor. Hirschman notes that KCRW still receives more mail about its Mideast coverage than any other facet of its programming, which includes a broad range of music as well as radio drama. Opinion remains split among the correspondents as to whether KCRW is a den of anti-Zionism or a spawning ground for Jewish conspiracies. Hirschman says at this point she is inclined to send one camp the mail posted by the other. She seems far more interested, however, in the new audiences she appears to be reaching. Most recently, she has become aware of her station's popularity among the many Ethiopian cabbies in L.A., fans of the station's news coverage and its weekly "African Beat" Program. Hirschman's yearly Hanukkah special features three hours of Yiddish music. This year, Hirschmann's 88-year-old mother came down to the station for the 11th annual production. After it was over, her mother asked why she had translated so many of the lyrics into English. She was astonished, recalled Hirschman, to learn that so many of the listeners were not Jewish. "In her mind," said Hirschman, "the listeners are elderly people, and the program is an evocation of their youth. But I walked into a little boutique, where the owner said all of her seamstresses, who are from Guatemala and Mexico, look forward every year to the Hanukkah program. And they dance around the room and get her to make potato latkes. The appeal of this show is the way it connects with people's sense of memory. What's strange is that it's not just Jewish memory."