I wanted to know what sort of impression the new “Forverts” was making on the public; how they reacted to the various articles; what was good, what had to be changed, and what sort of other news it would be advisable to introduce. For this purpose, at the beginning, I often spent two or three…
Long before Eppie and Pauline Friedman — better known by their respective pseudonyms, Ann Landers and Abigail Van Buren — penned their first columns, before Dr. Joyce Brothers, Randy “The Ethicist” Cohen and Emily “Dear Prudence” Yoffe became household names, before Dr. Laura Schlessinger and “Judge Judy” Sheindlin brought their bullheaded brand of advice to…
I had always wished that the Forverts would receive stories from “daily life” — dramas, comedies or truly curious events that weren’t written at a desk but rather in the tenements and factories and cafés — everywhere that life was the author of the drama.… How to do this? Not an easy task — much…
The fire has begun. The Angel of Death is executing his entire program — the program that Hitler and his fellow dictators have laid out in the depth of the night. The fire began with the bombing of cities. This war is not like any prior one. Battlefields used to be far away. Now the…
During my brief time at the Commercial Advertiser, an event occurred that was connected to the trial of Capt. Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish artillery officer in the French Army. The incident took place in the long editorial room on Saturday, September 9, 1899. I first heard about Captain Dreyfus in 1895. It was a Sunday….
Police Headquarters was then on Mulberry Street, near Houston. The daily newspapers had special offices there — in a few old buildings located opposite the police. The head reporter for the “Evening Sun” was at that time an immigrant from Denmark named Jacob Riis, known as a brilliant writer in the world of journalism. Several…
Whatever else he was, Abraham Cahan was a lifelong socialist. As a critic, he helped to shape the literary and theatrical tastes of the Yiddish-speaking immigrants. As a novelist, he interpreted the immigrant community to the English-speaking public. But it was his role as editor in chief of the largest socialist daily in the United…
The first day that I spent in Police Headquarters, an important meeting of the Police Board was supposed to take place. Riis [Danish American journalist, social reformer and documentary photographer Jacob Riis] led me down into the hall where such meetings were held. Everything was new for me. At this meeting, the Chief of Police…
By the end of the first decade of the 20th century, the Forverts, aka the Jewish Daily Forward, was not only the best-selling Yiddish daily in New York, but was also a center for political action and social reform. At the helm of this project was the paper’s founder and editor, Abraham (Ab.) Cahan, a…
It’s more than a peculiarity that the people of a nation whose survival has defied the odds, who made good on the promise of making the desert bloom and who invented the Pentium chip, still find it impossible to form an orderly queue. In the eight years since I was last in Israel, there has…
The formation and nomination of Elena Kagan, President Obama’s choice to fill the vacancy on the Supreme Court, is the subject of this week’s Forward Reporters’ Roundtable. Here, Josh Nathan-Kazis speaks with the Forward’s senior columnist and blogger J.J. Goldberg and with Sisterhood contributor Sarah Seltzer about the implications of having three Jews on the…
נאָך איר מאַנס טויט אין 2003 האָט זי געהאָלפֿן אַרויסגעבן זײַן לעקסיקאָן פֿון די ייִדישע שרײַבער אין ראַטן־פֿאַרבאַנד.
