Yiddish Forverts Seeks New Audience Online
Dear Readers,
Do you speak or understand some Yiddish? Would you like to comprehend more of the mameloshn?
We invite you visit the new website at yiddish.forward.com to sample podcasts, English-subtitled videos and articles with pop-up translations from the new Comprehensive Yiddish-English Dictionary, all to make the vibrant and diverse world of Yiddish culture and language more accessible to you. The new yiddish.forward.com will go live February 4, 2013.
These enhancements are part of a significant transformation of the 116-year-old Yiddish Forward, or Forverts, to offer more and better coverage of the Jewish world in Yiddish, and to provide a more lively, accessible and timely portal for a worldwide community of Yiddish readers, speakers, learners and lovers.
After 30 years as a weekly newspaper, the Forverts is returning to its daily roots by once again publishing new material five days a week on the Internet. The Forverts already reaches more people online than in print, and we see great potential to further expand and diversify our audience through a more contemporary and cosmopolitan website.
In print as well as online, the Forverts’ lively new pages will continue addressing topics that our loyal readers have told us they love to read about: news and current affairs; art and culture; literature, language and folklore.
New blogs will present a wider range of Yiddish voices and opinions, and allow you to participate in the conversations. We hope to draw more Haredi readers and writers into the conversation with a blog we’ll call “Yiddish With an Aleph.” (Haredi writers spell the word Yiddish with an aleph, instead of a yud.) You can pick up, and share, ideas on making a haimish home on “No Place Like Home.” And you’ll see “Vayter,” our publication for Yiddish students, transformed in a more timely and interactive medium.
Added to our treasury of videos, you’ll find “Week By Week,” marking milestones on the calendar connected to Yiddish personalities and events; “It‘s a Living,” exploring the wide spectrum of Jewish professions and practitioners; and “The Shane Show,” featuring popular Yiddish actor and raconteur Shane Baker. Of course, you’ll still find favorites, such as “Travels of a New York Jew,” “Eat in Good Health” and “A Guest at the Forverts.” And we’ll guide you to the latest and best Yiddish videos that others are creating.
Every day, we will also accentuate the spoken word for you in a new series of Yiddish radio reports from around the Jewish world, with correspondents based in the United States, Israel, Russia, Poland, France, Argentina and Australia.
To allow our staff to accomplish this enormous expansion of our service on the Internet, we will print our newspaper every other week, beginning with the first issue in February.
Only with the financial support of readers like you can the Forverts sustain its critical role at the heart of Yiddish culture. We are especially grateful to the Max & Anna Levinson Foundation for a generous grant for the revitalization of our website. We ask that you join them by making a tax-deductible donation at yiddish.forward.com/join.
We are confident that this realignment of our efforts will allow us to honor our nearly 116-year commitment to quality journalism in Yiddish, and, with your support, to better serve the global Jewish community for the next 120 years.
Boris Sandler is the editor of the Forverts. Samuel Norich is Publisher and CEO.
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