Rabbi Mark S. Golub was not new to Jewish broadcasting when he began developing Shalom TV in 2003. In 1991 he had already created a Russian language Jewish television channel to serve the wave of Soviet Jewish immigrants arriving in the United States who did not yet speak English, and he had spent years producing Broadway theater, including Tony winning revivals of Porgy and Bess and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, work that gave him an unusual set of production instincts for a rabbi building a television network.
Shalom TV went from development to broadcast slowly by television standards, first reaching viewers on August 31, 2006, three years after Golub began building it. The concept was deliberately ambitious in scope: rather than serve one Jewish denomination or one theological position, the channel set out to reflect the full diversity of Jewish religious and cultural life, Orthodox alongside Reform, secular Jewish culture alongside traditional text study, in a single continuously running network. Golub described the aim in a phrase that stuck with critics and viewers alike: imagine PBS if it were Jewish themed.
His own program, L'Chayim, anchored the network from very early on, itself a continuation of a talk format Golub had originated on radio back in 1979, decades before Shalom TV existed. That continuity, a host who had been talking with Jewish guests on air since the late 1970s now doing it on his own television network, gave the young channel an identity and a voice from its very first broadcasts rather than one it had to build from scratch.