July 8, 2011

100 Years In The Forward

Of the numerous strange hobos who populate Manhattan’s Jewish Lower East Side, none, perhaps, is stranger than the man known only as “Moyshe,” who occupies a stoop on Chrystie Street near the corner of Broome. Known as the “mayor” of Chrystie Street, Moyshe sits on his stoop every day of the year, in both the heat of summer and the deep freeze of winter. He wears the same bizarre outfit every day: hundreds of rags strapped to his body with rope and strips of leather, topped off with a white sanitation worker’s hardhat. He also keeps a thick wooden stick to beat off potential attackers. Moyshe refuses to speak to anyone, especially newspaper reporters, but people that live on the street say he used to own a jewelry store on the Bowery and lost everything in a robbery, thereby reducing him to poverty and insanity.

75 Years In The Forward

Something strange is afoot at the liberal, progressive weekly The Nation. Since millionaire bankers purchased The Nation, the publication has gone communist. Take, for example, Theodore Dreiser, who was an excellent, liberal-progressive author; he also went communist. And around the same time, he became an anti-Semite. Not long ago, The Nation published a series of letters that Dreiser wrote to writer Hutchins Hapgood, in which the former discussed his dislike of Jews. In the letters, he worries about the large numbers of Jews in New York City and about how they don’t engage in actual labor but are always middlemen with an obsession for money. According to Dreiser, Jews also lack integrity.

50 Years In The Forward

The state-controlled newspaper in Madrid, S.P., commented that Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem was “ridiculous and disgusting.” In an editorial, Spanish journalist Rodrigo Roro wrote, “The Nazi-fascists were not as bad as the Jews have portrayed them. If there were attacks on the Jews by Nazis, there were also attacks by Jews on Nazis which were much worse…. There were also no gas chambers to murder Jews. I was in a Nazi gas chamber and they were created for the army to test gas masks on soldiers. Everything that has been said about them is pure invention.

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