A Living Lens: Rockland County, N.Y.
Three anecdotes from my event at the Rockland County JCC:
2. What the F!: Vera Boehm never spoke or read Yiddish. And so, when her grandfather asked her to go to the store and pick up his copy of the Forverts, she had to think fast. How would she know which one it was? Young Vera came up with a great solution while staring at the paper’s masthead: She zoomed in on the shape of the pheh, the first letter of the word Forverts in Yiddish, figuring she’d just hunt for its replica on the newsstand. Unfortunately for Vera, there was another newspaper at the time that started with a pheh — the communist paper known as the Freiheit. She can still hear her grandfather yelling…
3. Calendar Chaos: Natalie Stein’s mother came to America from Russia in 1908, at age 4. By the time she got to middle school, she noticed something amiss, and decided to turn to the Forverts for help: “When,” she asked in a letter to the editor, “is my American birthday? I know I was born on erev Shavuos 1904.” Sure enough, a reply came soon after: May 29, 1904.
Alana Newhouse, the Forward’s Arts & Culture editor, is touring the country, speaking about her new book “A Living Lens: Photographs of Jewish Life From the Pages of the Forward.”
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.
Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and the protests on college campuses.
Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.
Make a gift of any size and become a Forward member today. You’ll support our mission to tell the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
