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The Forward at 110

Sat, 07 Apr 2007 00:00:00 EST

1897, the year the Forward was born, was a year of wrenching, epochal change in America and around the world. For Jews especially, this was the year that the 20th century truly dawned. It was a moment of millennial beginnings that were destined to transform history. It was the perfect time for a new journal to arrive on the scene and set about chronicling the cataclysms to come.

110 Years of News in the Forward

Fri, 06 Apr 2007 22:00:00 EST

Since the Forward began sending out reporters 110 years ago, the paper has been on top of nearly every major news event. The Forward’s mission was political but its first commitment was to telling its readers what they needed to know and telling them straight. Here is a selection of seven particularly decisive stories of the last century and a quick glimpse at how the Forward’s coverage stood out.

A Newspaper That Was No Mere Newspaper

Fri, 06 Apr 2007 21:00:00 EST

The men and women who founded the Jewish Daily Forward were not business people out to make a buck. They were socialist intellectuals and labor activists who wanted to create a new tribune for Yiddish-speaking workers. On January 30, 1897, they met in a rented hall on Orchard Street to make plans.

A Friend to Those Who Struggle — Then and Now

Fri, 06 Apr 2007 16:53:00 EST

‘Victory!! Bravo, Hurrah, Cap Makers! Cheers to the entire Jewish quarter, which helped win this amazing battle! Hurrah to all the unions!” Thus read the Jewish Daily Forward’s front page in 1905 in response to a huge victory by the cap makers’ union. The Forverts published in red ink to honor the workers’ victory.

A Community of Readers

Fri, 06 Apr 2007 16:49:00 EST

For the thousands of Jewish immigrants who flooded into America during the late 1800s and early 1900s, the Jewish Daily Forward was far more than a newspaper — it was a lifeline, an advocate and a basis of community. Led by its legendary founding editor, Abraham Cahan, the Forverts helped generations of newcomers adjust to life in America. Unabashedly leftist in bent, the paper tirelessly chronicled the hardships of life in New York’s fetid factories and cramped tenements, while boosting trade unionism and socialism.

Forverts!

Fri, 06 Apr 2007 16:26:00 EST

For this week’s anniversary issue, I’ve been asked by the editors of the Forward to write about how the paper got its name. This is in some ways easy to do and in some ways not. What gave the Forward’s founder, Abraham Cahan, the idea of calling his new Yiddish paper Forverts when it first appeared in 1897 is no mystery. Why he made that choice, however, definitely is a mystery, there being, to the best of my knowledge, no record of any debate having taken place over it, whether between Cahan and his editorial board or between Cahan and himself. And yet a debate there must have been, because the name was problematic.

On the Radio

Fri, 06 Apr 2007 16:24:00 EST

Since 1922, when radio was exceedingly new, Forward business manager Boruch Charney Vladeck had dreamed of a transmitting tower atop the Forward building — already the most imposing structure on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.

The Newspaper That Speaks Your Language

Fri, 06 Apr 2007 16:22:00 EST

In 1970, soon after my bar mitzvah, at the instigation of my uncle — late Yiddish linguist Mordkhe Schaechter — I joined in a demonstration with family and friends in front of the old Forward offices on East Broadway, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, demanding that the paper clean up its language. No, it was not a question of vulgarity in the language that offended us, but such issues as the use of an English word or two in every Yiddish sentence, what some called “potato Yiddish,” and the old-fashioned spelling in the paper that was heavily influenced by German and English. The Forward had lost touch with Yiddish orthographic changes over the previous 50 years and was a living dinosaur in that respect.

110 Years of Sports in the Forward

Fri, 06 Apr 2007 16:20:00 EST

From baseball to boxing to football, Jews have been shining stars on American sports teams for generations.

April 6, 2007 — Forward Memories

Fri, 06 Apr 2007 16:12:00 EST

The Loveliest Face of Them All My mother appeared on the Forverts’s rotogravure page sometime in the l930s. She graduated from college in l933, like Marjorie Morningstar. Unlike Marjorie, though, she went on to earn a master’s degree at Columbia University in psychology, and got a job in Macy’s personnel department.

The Commemorative Issue

Fri, 06 Apr 2007 16:04:00 EST

This month is set to be a historic one for the Forward. It is, of course, our 110th anniversary — cause enough for celebration. But we are marking this milestone in a uniquely symbolic way: Rather than simply looking back at our first century, we are inaugurating several projects that will bring us, thrillingly, into our second.

Yente at the Telephone

Fri, 06 Apr 2007 15:55:00 EST

Recently one of my next-door neighbors ran into my drugstore. Her name is Yente. The same Yente that gets written about in the papers, whose husband‘s name is Mendel Telebende and who has a son — Pinye.

The Showdown Between Two Forward Icons

Fri, 06 Apr 2007 15:50:00 EST

Ask most people to name someone associated with the Jewish Daily Forward, and they will likely mention one of two men: Legendary editor Abraham Cahan, or the most celebrated writer to graduate from his pages, Isaac Bashevis Singer. What much of the public does not know, however, is that our newspaper’s two iconic figures did not exactly get along. Indeed, theirs was a thorny relationship.