Barry Farber
Encyclopedia
Barry M. Farber is an American conservative radio talk show host, author and language-learning enthusiast. In 2002, industry publication Talkers magazine
ranked him the 9th greatest radio talk show host of all time. He has also written articles appearing in the New York Times, Reader's Digest
, the Washington Post, and the Saturday Review. He is the father of journalist Celia Farber
and singer-songwriter Bibi Farber.
.
After nearly failing Latin in the ninth grade, that summer Farber started reading a Mandarin Chinese language-learning book. A trip to Miami Beach, Florida
to see his grandparents coincidentally put him in the midst of a large number of Chinese navy sailors in training there. His Chinese rapidly improved. Back in Greensboro, he took up Italian, Spanish, and French on his own before summer vacation was over. He started taking French and Spanish classes in his sophomore year and also learned Norwegian on his own while in high school. He graduated in 1948 from Greensboro Senior High School (see Grimsley High School
).
He then attended the University of North Carolina
, where he learned Russian. As a delegate from the National Student Association to what he later called a "Tito propaganda fiesta called the Zagreb Peace Conference", he found other Slavic languages were closely related to Russian. A 16-day boat trip back to the United States with Yugoslavs allowed him to practice his Serbo-Croatian. After covering the Olympic Games in Helsinki one year in the 1950s, he learned Indonesian on another boat trip back to the U.S.
As a newspaper reporter in 1956, Farber was invited by the United States Air Force
to cover the airlift of Hungarian refugees from the uprising in Hungary that year. In an Austrian border village, Farber later wrote, he so impressed a Norwegian man, Thorvald Stoltenberg
, with knowledge of the man's native tongue that he was allowed to go on one of the covert missions smuggling Hungarians into Austria.
Barry Farber has knowledge of more than 25 languages, including the ones mentioned above. He has published a book titled How to Learn Any Language that details his method for self-study. It is based around a multi-track study of the language, the use of memory aids for vocabulary, and the utilization of "hidden moments" throughout the day.
Farber prefers to say that he is a student of a certain number of languages, rather than saying that he speaks them. Of the languages he has studied, half he "dates" and the other half he "marries". According to Farber: "By languages I date, I mean no grammar and no script, languages like Bengali
."
Aside from Bengali, the 25 foreign languages he has studied include these 19 ("marriage" or "dating" specified, when known): Danish
, Dutch
, Finnish
, French
(marriage), German
, Hebrew
, Hungarian
, Indonesian
, Italian
, Mandarin, Norwegian
(marriage), Portuguese
, Russian
(marriage), Serbo-Croatian
, Spanish
(marriage), Swedish
and Yiddish
, as well as Bulgarian
and Korean
.
His book, "How to Learn any Language" never specifies all of the 25 languages that his publicity materials say he has studied. He says in the book that when he was inducted into the U.S. Army in 1952, he was "tested and qualified for work in fourteen different languages" and has since learned more in some of those languages as well as the others. He mentioned in the 2005 interview that he still constantly learns bits and pieces of new language—some Albanian phrases or a new phrase each time he went into a grocery store where a Tibetan woman works.
in the mid-1950s at 10:30 PM to Midnight, Monday through Friday. William Safire
hired Farber as a producer. Farber eventually hosted his own show on WINS
. Begun in 1960, his first talk show was called "Barry Farber’s WINS Open Mike". It was the only talk show on what was then a rock n’ roll station. He left that job for an evening talk show on WOR AM
in 1962, and then became an all-night host in 1967. In 1970 he ran for Congress in New York City's 19th district on the Republican
ticket, but was defeated by Bella Abzug
. Farber left his talk-radio career for a time in 1977 to delve into politics, running for mayor of New York City
, but was defeated.
In November 1977, Kaiser Broadcasting
debuted a weekly talk show hosted by Farber as a replacement to its program hosted by Lou Gordon, who died earlier that year; it was only short-lived.
Farber then joined WMCA
for an afternoon drive time talk show, which lasted about 10 years. In 1990 he became a national talk-show host on the ABC Radio Network, which was trying to build a group of nationwide talk shows at the time. Lynn Samuels
was forced to share her show with Farber, resulting in her departure from the station. ABC's project later was abandoned, and Farber, Michael Castello, and Alan Colmes
got together and quickly formed their own independent network called Daynet. He is now on CRN Digital Talk Radio, weekdays, and on the Talk Radio Network
, hosting a one-hour weekend show and filling in for TRN's weekday hosts, most commonly on The Laura Ingraham Show
. Early in the 1970s, Farber was an adjunct professor of journalism at St. John's University, New York. Often his former students are heard calling his radio program with admiring words and memories.
On the radio, Farber became easily identifiable by his unique combination of drawn-out Southern drawl, intense delivery, verbose prose, and quick wit. Sponsors loved his ability to deliver a live commercial spot, often ad-libbed, and make whatever the particular product was sound tantalizing; he always sounded like he truly believed in the product.
In 1991 he was named "Talk Show Host of The Year" by the National Association of Radio Talk Show Hosts.
In 2008 Farber married Sara Pentz, a television news reporter and journalist.
Talkers magazine
Talkers Magazine is a trade industry publication related to talk radio in the United States. Its slogan is "The Bible of Talk Radio and the New Talk Media"...
ranked him the 9th greatest radio talk show host of all time. He has also written articles appearing in the New York Times, Reader's Digest
Reader's Digest
Reader's Digest is a general interest family magazine, published ten times annually. Formerly based in Chappaqua, New York, its headquarters is now in New York City. It was founded in 1922, by DeWitt Wallace and Lila Bell Wallace...
, the Washington Post, and the Saturday Review. He is the father of journalist Celia Farber
Celia Farber
Celia Ingrid Farber is an American print journalist and author, best known for her part in the campaign which denies that AIDS is an infectious disease...
and singer-songwriter Bibi Farber.
Early life and language learning
Born in Baltimore, Maryland, Farber is Jewish and grew up in Greensboro, North CarolinaGreensboro, North Carolina
Greensboro is a city in the U.S. state of North Carolina. It is the third-largest city by population in North Carolina and the largest city in Guilford County and the surrounding Piedmont Triad metropolitan region. According to the 2010 U.S...
.
After nearly failing Latin in the ninth grade, that summer Farber started reading a Mandarin Chinese language-learning book. A trip to Miami Beach, Florida
Miami Beach, Florida
Miami Beach is a coastal resort city in Miami-Dade County, Florida, United States, incorporated on March 26, 1915. The municipality is located on a barrier island between the Atlantic Ocean and Biscayne Bay, the latter which separates the Beach from Miami city proper...
to see his grandparents coincidentally put him in the midst of a large number of Chinese navy sailors in training there. His Chinese rapidly improved. Back in Greensboro, he took up Italian, Spanish, and French on his own before summer vacation was over. He started taking French and Spanish classes in his sophomore year and also learned Norwegian on his own while in high school. He graduated in 1948 from Greensboro Senior High School (see Grimsley High School
Grimsley High School
Grimsley Senior High School is a public high school in Greensboro, North Carolina. Formerly known as "Greensboro Senior High School," It is part of the Guilford County Schools system. The school has an enrollment of around 2,000 students in grades 9-12...
).
He then attended the University of North Carolina
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is a public research university located in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, United States...
, where he learned Russian. As a delegate from the National Student Association to what he later called a "Tito propaganda fiesta called the Zagreb Peace Conference", he found other Slavic languages were closely related to Russian. A 16-day boat trip back to the United States with Yugoslavs allowed him to practice his Serbo-Croatian. After covering the Olympic Games in Helsinki one year in the 1950s, he learned Indonesian on another boat trip back to the U.S.
As a newspaper reporter in 1956, Farber was invited by the United States Air Force
United States Air Force
The United States Air Force is the aerial warfare service branch of the United States Armed Forces and one of the American uniformed services. Initially part of the United States Army, the USAF was formed as a separate branch of the military on September 18, 1947 under the National Security Act of...
to cover the airlift of Hungarian refugees from the uprising in Hungary that year. In an Austrian border village, Farber later wrote, he so impressed a Norwegian man, Thorvald Stoltenberg
Thorvald Stoltenberg
Thorvald Stoltenberg is a former Norwegian politician. His ancestors stem from Northern Germany and emigrated to Norway in the 17th century. He served as Minister of Defense and Minister of Foreign Affairs in two Labour governments.From 1989 to 1990 he was appointed Norwegian Ambassador to the UN...
, with knowledge of the man's native tongue that he was allowed to go on one of the covert missions smuggling Hungarians into Austria.
Barry Farber has knowledge of more than 25 languages, including the ones mentioned above. He has published a book titled How to Learn Any Language that details his method for self-study. It is based around a multi-track study of the language, the use of memory aids for vocabulary, and the utilization of "hidden moments" throughout the day.
Farber prefers to say that he is a student of a certain number of languages, rather than saying that he speaks them. Of the languages he has studied, half he "dates" and the other half he "marries". According to Farber: "By languages I date, I mean no grammar and no script, languages like Bengali
Bengali language
Bengali or Bangla is an eastern Indo-Aryan language. It is native to the region of eastern South Asia known as Bengal, which comprises present day Bangladesh, the Indian state of West Bengal, and parts of the Indian states of Tripura and Assam. It is written with the Bengali script...
."
Aside from Bengali, the 25 foreign languages he has studied include these 19 ("marriage" or "dating" specified, when known): Danish
Danish language
Danish is a North Germanic language spoken by around six million people, principally in the country of Denmark. It is also spoken by 50,000 Germans of Danish ethnicity in the northern parts of Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, where it holds the status of minority language...
, Dutch
Dutch language
Dutch is a West Germanic language and the native language of the majority of the population of the Netherlands, Belgium, and Suriname, the three member states of the Dutch Language Union. Most speakers live in the European Union, where it is a first language for about 23 million and a second...
, Finnish
Finnish language
Finnish is the language spoken by the majority of the population in Finland Primarily for use by restaurant menus and by ethnic Finns outside Finland. It is one of the two official languages of Finland and an official minority language in Sweden. In Sweden, both standard Finnish and Meänkieli, a...
, French
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
(marriage), German
German language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
, Hebrew
Hebrew language
Hebrew is a Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family. Culturally, is it considered by Jews and other religious groups as the language of the Jewish people, though other Jewish languages had originated among diaspora Jews, and the Hebrew language is also used by non-Jewish groups, such...
, Hungarian
Hungarian language
Hungarian is a Uralic language, part of the Ugric group. With some 14 million speakers, it is one of the most widely spoken non-Indo-European languages in Europe....
, Indonesian
Indonesian language
Indonesian is the official language of Indonesia. Indonesian is a normative form of the Riau Islands dialect of Malay, an Austronesian language which has been used as a lingua franca in the Indonesian archipelago for centuries....
, Italian
Italian language
Italian is a Romance language spoken mainly in Europe: Italy, Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City, by minorities in Malta, Monaco, Croatia, Slovenia, France, Libya, Eritrea, and Somalia, and by immigrant communities in the Americas and Australia...
, Mandarin, Norwegian
Norwegian language
Norwegian is a North Germanic language spoken primarily in Norway, where it is the official language. Together with Swedish and Danish, Norwegian forms a continuum of more or less mutually intelligible local and regional variants .These Scandinavian languages together with the Faroese language...
(marriage), Portuguese
Portuguese language
Portuguese is a Romance language that arose in the medieval Kingdom of Galicia, nowadays Galicia and Northern Portugal. The southern part of the Kingdom of Galicia became independent as the County of Portugal in 1095...
, Russian
Russian language
Russian is a Slavic language used primarily in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics...
(marriage), Serbo-Croatian
Serbo-Croatian language
Serbo-Croatian or Serbo-Croat, less commonly Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian , is a South Slavic language with multiple standards and the primary language of Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Montenegro...
, Spanish
Spanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
(marriage), Swedish
Swedish language
Swedish is a North Germanic language, spoken by approximately 10 million people, predominantly in Sweden and parts of Finland, especially along its coast and on the Åland islands. It is largely mutually intelligible with Norwegian and Danish...
and Yiddish
Yiddish language
Yiddish is a High German language of Ashkenazi Jewish origin, spoken throughout the world. It developed as a fusion of German dialects with Hebrew, Aramaic, Slavic languages and traces of Romance languages...
, as well as Bulgarian
Bulgarian language
Bulgarian is an Indo-European language, a member of the Slavic linguistic group.Bulgarian, along with the closely related Macedonian language, demonstrates several linguistic characteristics that set it apart from all other Slavic languages such as the elimination of case declension, the...
and Korean
Korean language
Korean is the official language of the country Korea, in both South and North. It is also one of the two official languages in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in People's Republic of China. There are about 78 million Korean speakers worldwide. In the 15th century, a national writing...
.
His book, "How to Learn any Language" never specifies all of the 25 languages that his publicity materials say he has studied. He says in the book that when he was inducted into the U.S. Army in 1952, he was "tested and qualified for work in fourteen different languages" and has since learned more in some of those languages as well as the others. He mentioned in the 2005 interview that he still constantly learns bits and pieces of new language—some Albanian phrases or a new phrase each time he went into a grocery store where a Tibetan woman works.
Radio career
His radio career began in New York City, working as the producer for the Tex and Jinx interview program from Peacock Alley in the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, a live remote broadcast over WNBC AMWFAN
WFAN , also known as "Sports Radio 66" or "The FAN", is a radio station in New York City. The station broadcasts on a clear channel and is owned by CBS Radio...
in the mid-1950s at 10:30 PM to Midnight, Monday through Friday. William Safire
William Safire
William Lewis Safire was an American author, columnist, journalist and presidential speechwriter....
hired Farber as a producer. Farber eventually hosted his own show on WINS
WINS (AM)
WINS , known on-air as "Ten-Ten Wins", is a radio station in New York City, owned by CBS Radio. WINS's studios are in the combined CBS Radio facility at 345 Hudson Street in the TriBeCa section of Manhattan, and transmitting towers in Lyndhurst, New Jersey.WINS is one of the nation's oldest...
. Begun in 1960, his first talk show was called "Barry Farber’s WINS Open Mike". It was the only talk show on what was then a rock n’ roll station. He left that job for an evening talk show on WOR AM
WOR (AM)
WOR is a class A , AM radio station located in New York, New York, U.S., operating on 710 kHz. The station has a talk format and has been owned by Buckley Broadcasting since 1987, after the station was sold by RKO. The station has conservative, or right-of-center hosts.Its call letters have no...
in 1962, and then became an all-night host in 1967. In 1970 he ran for Congress in New York City's 19th district on the Republican
Republican Party (United States)
The Republican Party is one of the two major contemporary political parties in the United States, along with the Democratic Party. Founded by anti-slavery expansion activists in 1854, it is often called the GOP . The party's platform generally reflects American conservatism in the U.S...
ticket, but was defeated by Bella Abzug
Bella Abzug
Bella Savitsky Abzug was an American lawyer, Congresswoman, social activist and a leader of the Women's Movement. In 1971, Abzug joined other leading feminists such as Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan to found the National Women's Political Caucus...
. Farber left his talk-radio career for a time in 1977 to delve into politics, running for mayor of New York City
New York City mayoral election, 1977
The New York City mayoral election of 1977 occurred on Tuesday, November 8, 1977.Incumbent mayor Abraham Beame, a Democrat, was challenged by five other Democrats, including Representative Ed Koch, New York Secretary of State Mario Cuomo, and feminist activist and former Representative Bella Abzug...
, but was defeated.
In November 1977, Kaiser Broadcasting
Kaiser Broadcasting
Kaiser Broadcasting was the name of an entity that owned and operated broadcast television stations in the United States from 1958 to 1977.-History:...
debuted a weekly talk show hosted by Farber as a replacement to its program hosted by Lou Gordon, who died earlier that year; it was only short-lived.
Farber then joined WMCA
WMCA
WMCA, 570 AM, is a radio station in New York City, most known for its "Good Guys" Top 40 era in the 1960s. It is currently owned by Salem Communications and plays a Christian radio format...
for an afternoon drive time talk show, which lasted about 10 years. In 1990 he became a national talk-show host on the ABC Radio Network, which was trying to build a group of nationwide talk shows at the time. Lynn Samuels
Lynn Samuels
Lynn Margaret Samuels is an American radio personality based in New York City who currently hosts a weekend talk show on Sirius XM Stars channel 107.-External links:****...
was forced to share her show with Farber, resulting in her departure from the station. ABC's project later was abandoned, and Farber, Michael Castello, and Alan Colmes
Alan Colmes
Alan Samuel Colmes is an American radio/television host, liberal political commentator for the Fox News Channel, and blogger. He is the host of The Alan Colmes Show, a nationally syndicated talk-radio show distributed by Fox News Radio that also airs throughout the United States on Fox News Talk...
got together and quickly formed their own independent network called Daynet. He is now on CRN Digital Talk Radio, weekdays, and on the Talk Radio Network
Talk Radio Network
Talk Radio Network is an American radio network providing talk radio programming, with an emphasis on conservative talk on weekdays and variety/general interest talk radio on weekends. Some of the most recognizable personalities in American radio, such as Laura Ingraham and Michael Savage, are...
, hosting a one-hour weekend show and filling in for TRN's weekday hosts, most commonly on The Laura Ingraham Show
The Laura Ingraham Show
The Laura Ingraham Show is a three-hour American radio show hosted by conservative commentator Laura Ingraham on Talk Radio Network. , the show is broadcast live on Channel 2, from 9 a.m...
. Early in the 1970s, Farber was an adjunct professor of journalism at St. John's University, New York. Often his former students are heard calling his radio program with admiring words and memories.
On the radio, Farber became easily identifiable by his unique combination of drawn-out Southern drawl, intense delivery, verbose prose, and quick wit. Sponsors loved his ability to deliver a live commercial spot, often ad-libbed, and make whatever the particular product was sound tantalizing; he always sounded like he truly believed in the product.
In 1991 he was named "Talk Show Host of The Year" by the National Association of Radio Talk Show Hosts.
In 2008 Farber married Sara Pentz, a television news reporter and journalist.
Books by Farber
- Making People Talk: You Can Turn Every Conversation into a Magic Moment (William Morrow & Co: 1987) ISBN 0-688-01591-3
- How to Learn Any Language: Quickly, Easily, Inexpensively, Enjoyably and on Your Own 172 pages, (Carol Publishing Corporation: 1991) ISBN 0-8065-1271-7 (paperback)
- How to Not Make the Same Mistake Once (Barricade Books: 1999) ISBN 1-56980-132-0