Page 111 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

tions pay a great deal of attention to their needs and problems. Although man-
agers are uneasy about allowing them to speak on air when they phone in, the
emphasis given to family problems—and family solutions—re®ects women’s
presence in the audience. Some speakers allow women on the air (but only “so
long as they keep to the point”) while others only allow them to leave messages—
questions that are read out and answered, and that listeners can then follow
up with requests for further clari¤cation. In response to frequent requests for
advice in overcoming family con®icts, speakers tend to recommend patience,
long-term commitment, and love in the family. For these broadcasters, even
major political problems have their solution in the rebuilding of the family,
helped by a more observant lifestyle. This re®ects the much-discussed collapse
of family values and parental authority among Israel’s Sephardi population. A
man wants more children but cannot convince his wife; a woman wants to
convince her household to adopt stricter observance but encounters resistance
among her menfolk; men and women call to ask advice in resolving family con-
®icts. The responses tend to focus on “peace-building” in the home, especially
by advising women not to respond to their husbands’ inconsiderate or offen-
sive behavior. Thus a woman calls to complain that her husband shouts at her
constantly. In response, the speaker (somewhat counterintuitively) tells a story
about a rabbi who gave a woman an amulet to put in her mouth and keep it
there. As a result she could not speak, of course, but each day her husband came
with more and more generous presents—®owers, a diamond ring, and so on.
Eventually the rabbi tells her that the “amulet” is nothing but an empty card.
Independent of the content of such advice, the allusion to an amulet provides a
ready referent to the world of Israeli Sephardim.
Listeners identify quite readily with “their” station, to the point that, when
asked to place themselves on a religious spectrum, they may use the name of
their preferred radio station as a shorthand response. The format makes the sta-
tion an extension of the home, helped in this by the unof¤cial status of the
station, and the friendly, helpful, “can-do” responses of the speakers. Some
daytime programs are for children, often using cautionary tales to convey a
message.
Thus we see a range of mechanisms whereby the activities of radios, when
combined with other organizations and, of course, with politics, are redrawing
some of the boundaries which separate—although, by emphasizing religious be-
longing and encouraging religious and political activism, also integrate—the
multiple ethnic, religious, and cultural enclaves of Israeli society. Listeners can
¤nd a radio that uses a particular style of speech, plays a certain type of music,
emphasizes certain themes, and enables them to combine religious observance
with an engagement with the media—something quite uncommon in the haredi
world until the t’shuva movement took hold. The intimacy of radio—both in
the sense that it can be heard in private and in the home, and also that its style
is designed to make listeners feel at home among an audience with whom they
have a strong social and implicitly ethnic af¤nity—redraws boundaries in a
society where these are unusually important in daily life. The airwaves are used

100 David Lehmann and Batia Siebzehner