The Forverts did not care much for the Balfour Declaration, the November 2 letter that pronounced British support for a Jewish home in Palestine, in the heat of World War One. Forverts editor Ab Cahan discounted the Declaration, issued by Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour to express his support for “the establishment in Palestine of a…
The Leo Frank case, a century old now, seems like an unlikely subject for a musical. Nonetheless, in “Parade” Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Alfred Uhry and composer Jason Robert Brown took on the story of the northern Jew who was accused of murdering Mary Phagan, one of the young employees of the Atlanta pencil factory…
The day after the Forverts published an article marking the eruption of a massive meat strike that began on May 15, 1902, the paper’s editor-in-chief, Abraham Cahan, wrote an editorial praising the women “who participated in the fight against the blood-soaked tyranny of a gang of meat thieves…” He wrote, “Whether or not these women’s…
Ann Landers and Susan Sontag. Allen Ginsberg and Isaac Bashevis Singer. Gertrude Stein and Shel Silverstein. And a pioneering journalist named Ab Cahan. When the American Writers Museum opens on the second floor of a Chicago office building this week, Jewish visitors will find themselves well-represented. Jewish names loom large here, from a “Visionaries and…
The year 1897 was a momentous one in Jewish history. Theodore Herzl attended the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland, giving birth to the movement that founded the Jewish State. In Vilna, a group of socialist activists met in secret to create a Jewish workers association that became known as the Bund. And, on April…
Dear Reader: Today we’re kicking off an exciting celebration – and we’re thrilled you’re part of it: The Forward turns 120 this month — it’s a milestone in Jewish years, and it’s a momentous birthday for us. We’ve come a long way: From 1897’s scrappy Yiddish broadsheet to our award-winning, digital-first, 24/7 news organization today….
Forward founding editor Abraham Cahan’s 1896 novel about the immigrant experience, “Yekl,” is set for a new adaptation. The book was brought into the late 20th century by the 1975 film “Hester Street,” which made a star out of Carol Kane; now, playwright Sharyn Rothstein will adapt that film for the stage. As The New…
● A Bintel Brief: Love and Longing in Old New York By Liana Finck Ecco, 128 pages, $17.99 The advice column known as “A Bintel Brief,” meaning “a bundle of letters,” was the brainchild of Abraham Cahan, the founder of the Forverts, the original Yiddish-language incarnation of this very publication. In 1906, when the paper…
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