VIDEO: A Yiddish Newsroom During the Eventful Summer of ‘76

Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts.
In the summer of 1976, against the backdrop of the dramatic Entebbe Operation, the Bicentennial celebrations on the Hudson River and the nomination of Jimmy Carter for President at the Democratic National Convention in New York, the Yiddish Forward, then located at its historic building in the lower East side, continued to provide its readers with the latest news in Yiddish, as well as essays and serialized novels by Isaac Bashevis Singer and other acclaimed writers.
In this video, Lillian Silver Weber, a daughter of then editor-in-chief Simon Weber, and Jewish historian Dr. David Fishman, who worked as a summer intern there that summer, present a portrait of the editor and the mood in the newsroom during that eventful summer.
The video is in Yiddish and English, and includes English subtitles.
It’s our birthday and we’re still celebrating!
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news.
This week we celebrate 129 years of the Forward. We’re proud of our origins as a Yiddish print publication serving Jewish immigrants. And we’re just as proud of what we’ve become today: A trusted source of Jewish news and opinion, available digitally to anyone in the world without paywalls or subscriptions.
We’ve helped five generations of American Jews make sense of the news and the world around them — and we aren’t slowing down any time soon.
As a nonprofit newsroom, reader donations make it possible for us to do this work. Support independent, agenda-free Jewish journalism and our board will match your gift in honor of our birthday!
