Mizrahi Jews with radios still listened less than Ashkenazim who owned them.

Evidence

The reasons for these differences are not hard to establish; Middle Eastern Jews were often desperately poor and, with the happy exception of the Iraqi Jews, were usually placed in immigrant or transit camps, where access to radio was difficult and acquiring one all but impossible. As Tsvi Singer, the director of broadcasting, explained in 1956, there was supposed to be a radio in the social hall of each camp, preferably in the social hall, but the immigrants were reluctant to leave their homes in the evening. But a cross-analysis of the figures I provided above, combined with other data, suggest that Middle Eastern Jews who did own radios were less likely to listen than Ashkenazim. In 1956, 83 percent of Ashkenazim who owned a radio listened regularly as opposed to only 67 percent for orientals. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 709

Categorization

• QUESTION: The residual listening gap even among radio owners hints at cultural distance from the programming content itself, not just access — worth chasing whether surveys probed content preferences.