A sign in the window of the Voice of America’s office in Washington, D.C. Photo by Getty Images
By Benjamin Ivry
March 18, 2025
The news that the current occupant of the White House has dismantled the Voice of America (VOA) by eliminating its budget hardly surprised attentive Jewish listeners. After all, on March 17, VOA director Michael Abramowitz noted that his organization opposed “totalitarianism, tyranny and authoritarianism,” which does not seem to be a stance that appeals to the new regime in Washington, D.C.
Throughout its 83-year history, VOA has been regularly underfunded, according to historian Alan Heil. As recently as 2009, it was targeted for elimination by the administration of then-President George W. Bush for refusing to kowtow to earlier Republican Party politics.
Yet VOA, which started broadcasting in 1942 to fight Nazi propaganda, won the hearts of Jews and others internationally in dozens of languages. For decades, hearing the breath of freedom was intoxicating for oppressed Jews worldwide. Inevitably imperfect as all media outlets are, VOA nevertheless created an image of the New World as a sheltering, nurturing place far from antisemitic pogroms. VOA received its name from the playwright Robert E. Sherwood whose philosemitism developed during military service in World War I.
Severely wounded, Sherwood was impressed by the stoicism of a South African Jewish soldier paralyzed by machine gun fire. In a preface to his 1940 anti-Nazi play There Shall Be No Night, Sherwood observed that the heroism of this fellow fighter and other Jews in the armed forces revealed the “narrowness and shallowness” of his previous preconceptions about Jewish people.
Indeed, although the title of Sherwood’s play was drawn from the Christian bible’s Book of Revelation, the author attributed the concept to an “unknown Jewish mystic” who believed that the “true nature of God” is in each individual mind. He concluded: “And there shall be no night there.”
A decade earlier, Sherwood had reviewed Success, a novel by German Jewish author Lion Feuchtwanger about the impending threat of Nazism. In 1933, Sherwood’s play Acropolis would echo this foreboding about the threat to world democracy posed by the rise of Adolf Hitler. After the Nazi annexation of Austria in 1938, Sherwood jotted in his diary: “Jews & workers are being flogged into submission.”
“Oh God,” he wrote, “How I hope to live to see the day when those unspeakable barbaric bastards get their punishment.”
As first director of VOA, Sherwood continued with his heimish attitude towards Jews, appointing as vice-director James Warburg, the German Jewish banker who offered financial advice to Franklin D. Roosevelt. Sherwood may have been inspired to name the broadcaster after the 1883 lyric The New Colossus by American Jewish poet Emma Lazarus. Despite harsh anti-immigrant legislation then and now, such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, Lazarus used the Statue of Liberty to channel the voice of America: “Give me your tired, your poor,/ Your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free…”
In naming the VOA, Sherwood also would likely have been aware of other uses of the phrase, as in the Hebraist Cyrus Adler’s The Voice of America on Kishineff (1904), an account published by the Jewish Publication Society of the Kishinev massacre, an anti-Jewish riot that took place in the Russian Empire in 1903.
In hindsight, some observers have faulted VOA for not conveying the news about the Holocaust in Europe, despite the fact that the genocide was downplayed in America and internationally by most media outlets. When Sherwood ceded the VOA directorship during the Second World War, he was succeeded by the director John Houseman, born Jacques Haussmann of Alsatian Jewish origin.
Houseman’s chief news reporter was the leftist American Jewish author Howard Fast. The immensely cultured Houseman may well have focused VOA’s content more on artistic propaganda. Certainly for some years its broadcasts featured Jewish analysis on the arts as a statement to the world about the creative openness of a free society.
Perhaps paradoxically, despite all of its Jewish inspiration, VOA’s broadcasts fell rather flat in the new State of Israel. In 1952, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency announced that to “cement cultural relations between the United States and Israel,” a Hebrew-language meeting organized by the Zionist Organization of America would be broadcast to Israel by VOA. However, a few months later, the VOA discontinued this initiative, because according to the American Embassy in Tel Aviv, for whatever reason, Israelis failed to kvell over these Hebrew broadcasts.
More damagingly, in 1953 VOA would be attacked by the Jewish lawyer Roy Cohn, an acolyte of Senator Joseph McCarthy, who accused VOA of not being vociferous enough, and supposedly planning to build weak transmitting stations to sabotage their own broadcasts. This bizarre charge was dropped after court hearings proved its absurdity.
Soon afterward, within memory of Fascist Europe banning Jewish “degenerate art,” the critic Clement Greenberg presented a program on Modernist Painting that is still talked about today by mavens. In the postwar era, while Jewish-related topics were often drawn from the deadlines, especially about events in the Middle East, there was also room for human interest reportage redolent of Yiddishkeit.
And VOA addressed in more concrete ways the struggles of East European Jews in the postwar era. Mark Pomar, in an account of VOA’s Cold War broadcasts, observes that while Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty was more outspoken on such issues as Jewish refuseniks who were denied permission to emigrate, mainly to Israel, by Soviet authorities, VOA nevertheless won the hearts of a grateful audience.
Pomar, who also worked for VOA, recalled that the broadcaster received an award from a New Jersey Jewish group in the mid-1980s because a Jewish program on VOA designed for Soviet Jewish prospective emigrants “gave hope to those waiting.” The aural presence, however fleeting — and some critics kvetched that the programs should have been longer — reassured downtrodden, persecuted Jews that somebody cared about their fate.
VOA also covered the story of Jacqueline Mates-Muchin, deemed the first Chinese-American rabbi in the world. Born to a Chinese American mother and father of Austrian Jewish roots, she was promoted to senior rabbi by Temple Sinai in Oakland in 2015. Such personalities, as well as non-Jewish employees who were nonetheless impassioned by the history of the Jews, like Jaroslaw Anders, a longtime VOA editor, writer and producer, were part of its enduring impact.
Still, even silenced, the VOA’s lasting message might be Robert E. Sherwood’s indomitable promise of hope, inspired by his Jewish fellow soldiers on the battlefield: “There Shall Be No Night.”
