September 1981: My first month in Denver, I flip the radio dial to KOA, the largest station in the Rocky Mountain region. A radio junkie for 25 years–in New York and Chicago, in Kansas and Texas–I think I have heard everything the medium has to offer, until today. It is Yom Kippur: for Jews, the holiest of days, a day set aside for prayer and fasting and the atonement of sins.
“I know there are anti-Semitic people out there among you gentiles,” the man on the radio is saying, his voice like sandpaper. “I know that you’re listening. I want you to call me and tell me why you don’t like Jews. Let’s not pretend this doesn’t exist. Let’s stir it up. You’re anti-Semitic, and you know it, and you’ve got real feelings about this, and I want to find out what they are.”
I am certain the man on the radio isn’t sitting at a desk but standing over a microphone and pointing at the studio walls, flailing his arms like a psychotic. At any moment, I think, the microphone will go dead, and he will be jerked off the air.
