We are saddened by the passing of our founder, Phil Blazer, on August 25, 2020 in Burbank, California, at the age of 76.
Phil Blazer’s broadcasting career began at the age of 21 when legendary disc jockey Wolfman Jack gave him a chance to host a show about Jewish culture and music at KULX in Minneapolis. Over the next five decades, Phil continued as a radio host while building a media empire that included a nationally syndicated television show and a national newspaper, Israel Today. His lifelong dream of creating a TV network dedicated to Jewish life and culture was achieved in 2006 with the creation of JLTV. Today, JLTV broadcasts 24-7, seven days a week on Bell, Comcast, DirecTV, Spectrum and other video providers, reaching nearly 50 million homes throughout North America.
Phil was an early activist and visionary community leader who thrived on bringing together people of all faiths to battle hate, racism and anti-Semitism. His own career as an activist was born in 1973 when he urged his listeners to cut up an oil company’s credit cards to protest its anti-Israel stance. Thousands responded, mailing enough cards to fill numerous trash bags, which Phil then deposited at the company’s headquarters. The dramatic stunt made the CBS evening news with Walter Cronkite, impressing upon Phil the powerful impact of activism.
An inveterate risk taker, he relished his role in helping a rabbi smuggle a Torah into Leningrad under the noses of the KGB. Later, he organized the Skokie Skytrain to bring counter-protesters from California to confront neo-Nazis threatening the safety of Holocaust survivors in Skokie, Illinois in 1978.
Phil considered “Operation Joshua” the highlight of his advocacy to “make a difference.” In 1985, he per sonally appealed to Vice President George H. Bush to rescue 1,000 Ethiopian Jews starving in Sudanese refugee camps after fleeing a genocidal dictator amidst one of the worst famines of the 20th Century. To bolster his case, Phil did something unthinkable by today’s standards. He leveraged his relationships with politicians and brokered a bipartisan appeal to the Reagan administration. Within 38 hours, all 100 U.S. Senators had signed a letter urging a U.S. airlift. The secret mission was carried out by the CIA and U.S. Air Force on March 22, 1985.
Not all of Phil’s activism involved such derring-do. But all were straight-from-the-heart. Among them was Phil’s arranging for his close friend Oscar® winning producer Branko Lustig to become a Bar Mitzvah at Auschwitz, the concentration camp where he was held during the Holocaust. Phil also worked tirelessly with legislators in several states to include Holocaust education in schools. And when elderly Jews in Los Angeles, many of whom were Holocaust survivors, were subjected to anti-Semitic attacks, Phil established the volunteer Peace Force to patrol their neighborhoods.
With a flair for show business and an innate understanding of what made a good story, he organized celebrity visits to Israel, acting as something between a media fixer and informal tour guide to such luminaries as Ben Kingsley, Sammy Davis Jr., Peter Strauss, Elizabeth Taylor, Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden.