Behold The Treasures Of Our Print Archives
Jackie Kennedy holding up a copy of The Forward; animation characters created by the Fleischer studios; Lower East Side residents in a matza riot; everyday life in Algeria, Mandate Palestine, the Upper West Side of New York and the ball fields and boxing rings of America. All of these images were created by press plates, which were part of the press making machinery that helped to transfer photographs onto newsprint.
The Forward Archive still has a few thousand press plates. While they seem to be static and pretty much one dimensional, at the same time, they seem to be animated as if containing deep-held secrets of life long ago and far away.
Looking at these images, imagine yourself in a noisy, clanging, hot, dusty, dangerous press room where your news was being generated, and where at the end of a day or a week or a month—all those now old, unnecessary metal pieces of type and press plates were re-melted to be used again. Somehow, miraculously ours survived and we’ve been preserving them and now they’re yours to see at the Museum at Eldridge Street.
THE FORWARD BUILDING
.THE TYPESETTERS OF 1897
.SINGER BIDS FAREWELL
.BENE ISRAEL MEN
.NEWSPAPER SELLER
NEW YORK GIANT ANDY COHEN
Chana Pollack is the Forward’s archivist.
“Pressed: Images from the Jewish Daily Forward” runs through Spring 2020 at the Museum at Eldridge Street.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO