JBS, Jewish Broadcasting Service

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.

On September 24, 2014, eight years after its first broadcast, Shalom TV renamed itself the Jewish Broadcasting Service, a change that marked less a shift in mission than an attempt to describe the network more plainly. The new name, and the JBS abbreviation that came with it, positioned the channel explicitly alongside PBS in a way its own founder, Rabbi Mark Golub, had already been describing informally for years: a nonprofit, donor funded broadcaster built to educate and connect a whole community rather than sell to it.

Distribution grew steadily through the years around the rename. The network reached Comcast subscribers starting in 2008, expanded to Roku in 2012, added DIRECTV in 2016, Verizon Fios in 2017 and Charter Spectrum between 2018 and 2023, and joined Xfinity in 2020, each addition widening a reach its own reporting put at more than forty million homes across North America by the mid 2020s. Programming grew alongside distribution, adding live coverage of services from Manhattan's Central Synagogue, Hebrew instruction through From the Aleph Bet, and children's programming through Shalom Kids, alongside Golub's own long running L'Chayim.

Golub died in January 2023, having led the network from its earliest development through nearly two decades on the air. Rabbi Justin Pines succeeded him as CEO in February 2024, taking over a network whose most recent original production, the 2025 documentary Blind Spot on campus antisemitism, showed it continuing to produce the kind of current, community facing programming Golub had built the channel to deliver from the start.