Ashkenazi Jews listened to radio far more than Mizrahi immigrants into the 1960s.

Evidence

The public pressures that led to the expansion of Mizrahi programming points to one of the most challenging aspects of the study of popular culture: gauging the reception, rather than merely transmission, of cultural products. Thanks to listeners’ surveys, we can get at least some understanding of the gaps separating oriental and Ashkenazic Israelis’ access to and use of radio. Ashkenazim were far more likely to listen to the radio regularly than oriental Jews. In 1950, in the early phases of the great wave of immigration from the Middle East, less than 30 percent of oriental immigrants listened regularly, as opposed to 51 percent of immigrants from Poland. In 1956, the percentage of oriental Jewish listeners was about the same as in 1950, but the numbers for Polish and German Jews were 71 percent and 78 percent respectively. By 1965, although 90 percent of the Israelis in the sample listened to the radio regularly, more than two-thirds of nonlisteners were of Middle Eastern origin. Finally, in 1956 veteran Israelis and recent immigrants from Europe were more than twice as likely to own radios than immigrants of Middle Eastern origin (78 percent versus 39 percent). — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 708

Categorization

• QUESTION: The reception-vs-transmission gap in broadcasting audience research is a useful method question; worth tracing whether similar ownership/listening gaps appear in other state broadcaster studies.