‘Risalat New York,’ the Arab world’s only non-Israeli Jewish-hosted radio show, offers perspective from Brooklyn

By Joseph Braude|November 14, 2013 12:00 AM the Tablet

Sunday night for me is always Moroccan radio night. From a home office in Brooklyn surrounded by echo-absorbing foam, I write a commentary in Arabic about the week in Arab politics and then read it into a microphone. Next, I upload the sound file to a studio in Casablanca, where a producer adds the theme song, and it airs the following day to an audience of 1.75 million under the title Risalat New York—“Letter from New York.”

My show has the distinction of being the only radio program hosted by a Jew on Arab airwaves that doesn’t originate in Israel. But more than three years after the broadcast debuted, my Muslim audience now finds it ordinary, rather than aberrant, to hear a Jewish voice opine on Arab affairs in their mother tongue. In numerous Arab countries, such a situation would be revolutionary—but in Morocco, where the leadership has proactively nurtured Muslim-Jewish understanding for years, it’s merely one step forward among many. Given that the listenership has begun to spread beyond the kingdom’s borders, moreover, Risalat New York presents a case in point of how the broader Moroccan policies that keep me on the air can help spread tolerance in other places where Arabic is spoken, too.

A century ago, the region’s demographics were considerably more diverse, and considerably more Jewish. A million Arabic-speaking Jews still lived throughout the region; in some Arab cities, almost every Muslim knew at least one. Jews formed a professional class, deeply engaged in mainstream culture wherever they were allowed to be. Iraq’s national orchestra, composed overwhelmingly of Jewish musicians, broadcast a live radio performance across the region each week into the 1940s. Leila Mourad, the Barbra Streisand of Egypt, starred in some of the most popular Arabic movie musicals ever made. Jews published prolifically in Lebanese and Syrian media and contributed to the major newspapers of Baghdad, where even a Zionist daily with reporting from Palestine was licensed in the 1920s. In Morocco, Jews began publishing newspapers as soon as printing presses became available. The Hadidi brothers of Casablanca, Pinhas Assayag and David Chriqui of Tangier, and one of the country’s few female journalists, Rahma Toledano, were all well known to Muslim and Jewish readers. Some published in Spanish or French, then the languages of politics and commerce, while others wrote for a narrower audience in Judeo-Arabic—the Moroccan equivalent of Yiddish—printed in Hebrew block characters.

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Students look at a display at the Judaism Museum in Casablanca on Jan. 28, 2011. (Abdelhak Senna/AFP/Getty Images)