BOLDLY REVIVING A CULTURE: Leonard Nimoy takes listeners on a journey into Jewish music on KUNR

Most people know him as "Star Trek's" Mr. Spock, but before Leonard Nimoy donned pointed ears, he was grabbing the spotlight in Yiddish musical theater productions.
Nimoy, who has long expressed pride in his Jewish heritage, learned Yiddish as a child. In the late 1940s, he won roles in support of Jewish stars.
"I was put in touch with occasional Yiddish theater stars from New York who would come out to Los Angeles to do a weekend or a week of performances," Nimoy said. "They would hire local talent in Los Angeles to work in their plays... And because I could act and could carry a tune and could also speak Yiddish, I always got the juvenile roles."

Recently, he recaptured the wonder of singing those old Yiddish tunes by hosting "American Jewish Music From the Milken Archive," a radio program debuting this week on KUNR 88.7 FM. The two-hour show, which will air over the next 13 weeks, looks at a variety of music related to Jewish culture. At the heart of the show is the Milken Archive, created by businessman Lowell Milken around 1990.

"He'd been trying to come up with a way to make the world aware of the breadth and the enormity of Jewishly related music," said Neil Levin, artistic director of the archive. "He realized that the way to do it... would be CD recordings."

Among other things, the archive has been commissioning recordings of Jewish music from all eras and releasing CDs on the Naxos American Classics label.

"Almost all of the music we recorded has never been recorded before or certainly not in its entirety or in its intended form," Levin said. "Most of it has never been recorded at all, no matter how famous the composer."

So far, the archive has recorded enough music for 90 CDs, and the first phase is already on the market. That gave the archive a broad base of material to draw from for the radio show, which is divided into themes. This week's program provides an overview of American-Jewish music and its influence on all musical genres. Along with introductions from Nimoy, the program includes musical discussions between Levin and Seattle Symphony conductor Gerard Schwarz.

Nimoy, who has a home at Lake Tahoe, said he was pleased to be part of the project.

"I love the music," he said. "It goes back to my roots. A lot of it is music that I grew up hearing when I was a kid, particularly the contemporary stuff... I sang in choirs in synagogues on the high holidays when I was 11, 12, 13, 14 years old."

Although Nimoy had an interest and background in Jewish music before working on the program, he said the experience was enriching.

"There's a lot of it that I was not aware of because they have really done an amazing job of digging into this world of music over the last 300 years," he said. "Some of the music goes all the way back to Revolutionary times. So, I can't say that historically I was aware of it all, but I'm familiar with the tradition of most of it."

The program is already airing in some areas, including Los Angeles, where Nimoy spends much of his time. The feedback, he said, has been great. "People that hear it, love it," he said. "It's a delicious idea, and I'm really given a lot of credit because not only have they researched to find this wealth of material and to preserve it and save it, but they have gone to great pains to see to it that every piece of music that's recorded is done in the best possible way it can be done by the people who are most appropriately qualified to do it. By that, I mean they've hired symphony orchestras, they've hired Broadway show singers, they've hired choruses that were the best of their kind."