The Forward’s Top Stories of 2016

It was a year that ended with everything upended.

As we put together some of the Forward’s top stories of the past year it was remarkable to observe the degree to which the context and import of many of them have been completely transformed by the election of Donald Trump as president. Whether it was Israel correspondent Naomi Zeveloff’s investigation into the Palestinian Authority’s subsidies to the families of terrorists; the stories by her and special correspondent Natan Odenheimer on the rise of Israel’s messianic right, or editor Larry Cohler-Esses’s investigation of his own past when he helped procure an illegal abortion for a close friend before the advent of Roe versus Wade, the changes Trump promises to bring to American policies at home and abroad. seemed to only increase the significance of the issues behind these stories.… [Read more]

Other top stories, such as the Forward’s investigation into how the country’s top Jewish fraternity, AEPi, is systematically pressuring its campus chapters to weed non-Jews from their ranks, or the growth of Judaism in Africa, represented our own unique commitment to bring readers enterprise stories they will find nowhere else.

These, then, are our top stories from 2016.