Thursdays, 5pm
Shlepping and Shmoozing is presented by Alex Dafner and Leon Gettler and consists of a hard-news chat show covering the week’s main news events from Australia, the world, Israel, the Jewish world and the Australian Jewish community. At the end of the program there are reviews of books, films, TV, theatre, concerts, albums, etc, and cultural news and announcements. In between these items you can hear music and songs by some of the best-known Jewish performers from around the world.

Alex Dafner was born in Lodz, Poland, to a Yiddish-speaking family and attended the local I. L. Perets Jewish school, before migrating to Australia in 1959 at the age of 10. He has presented the Kadimah Yiddish Show and co-presented Shlepping and Shmoozing, with Leon Gettler on J-AIR, almost from its inception. He joined J-AIR after a 33-year career as executive producer and presenter of the Yiddish-language radio program and trainer of journalists at SBS Radio Melbourne.
He was also the instigator, curriculum writer and teacher of VCE Yiddish in Victoria at Mount Scopus College and the King David School and was a long-serving president of the Jewish Cultural Centre and National Library Kadimah.

Leon has worked in journalism for 45 years. He has worked for the Truth, The Sun News-Pictorial, The Age, The Australian and AAP. As a freelance journalist, he has contributed to magazines such as CFO, CRN, ProPrint, Management Today, Charter Magazine, BRW and Business Spectator. He runs a weekly podcast Talking Business. He has also written three books: An Unpromised Land, Organisations Behaving Badly and Ten Ways to Survive the Corporate World. He is working as a research assistant for the RMIT Blockchain Innovation Hub. He is now doing a PhD on newspapers, innovation and communities.
He does two programs for J-AIR: Talking Tachless which presents all the week’s news, along with great music, and Shlepping and Shmoozing with Alex Dafner which looks at all the week’s news, what’s happening in the Jewish world, a discussion of books, films and TV to watch, along with great music.
Listen On Demand

7 Feb 2025, 10am Kadimah Yiddish Show Alex Dafner presents current events reports from Australia and we recall the wonderful author Y Y Singer e”h and hear the first chapter of his monumental novel “The Brothers Ashkenazi”.

27 Dec 2024, 10am Kadimah Yiddish Show Alex Dafner presents current events reports from Australia and we celebrate Chanukah the Festival of Lights, hear a little about its history and a happy short story of its celebration in Sholem Aleichem’s time.

20 Dec 2024, 11am Kadimah Yiddish Show Alex Dafner presents current events reports from Australia and we remember the wonderful Yiddish poet and playwright H Leyvik e”h on the occasion of his upcoming death and birth anniversaries. A Happy Hanukah!!

13 Dec 2024, 11am Kadimah Yiddish Show Alex Dafner presents current events reports from Australia and we recall the awarding of the Nobel Prize for Literature to the Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer e”h in December 1978 hear a little of that ceremony and a little about him and his reading of two of his humorous short stories.

6 Dec 2024, 5pm Kadimah Yiddish Show Alex Dafner presents current events reports from Australia and we recall the “grandfather” of modern Yiddish literature, Mendele Moykher Sforim e”h, on the occasion of his yortsayt-death anniversary, which falls on this Sunday the 8th December and hear a couple of his fine short stories.

29 Nov 2024, 10am Kadimah Yiddish Show Alex Dafner presents current events reports from Australia, we remember the anniversary of the Partition Plan of Palestine of 1947 and the yortzayt, death anniversary of the chief architect of the Jewish State, Israel, Dovid Ben Gurion e”h, and hear him reminisce in Yiddish.