What would the legendary newspaper editor do in journalism today, when the business model that served him — and all of us — so well for so long has been completely upended? When readership is fragmented, attention spans have shrunk, and anyone with a blog address and an opinion can call himself a journalist? I…
All About Ab (Cahan) from Jewish Daily Forward on Vimeo. The push and pull between the hot embrace of a native community and the exhilarating freedoms of America has riven nearly every immigrant group in this country — not least of which the Jews. Many of the Yiddish-speaking arrivals who came by the boatload in…
All About Ab (Cahan) from Jewish Daily Forward on Vimeo. Fannie Jacobson remembers Abraham Cahan as a brilliant man who wrote like a dream and had a commanding presence in what was then the Forward’s headquarters on East Broadway. His special lair was the newsroom on the ninth floor of the 10-story tower. But he…
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…
Republished together by Dover in 1970, Cahan’s 1896 novella “Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto” and his 1898 collection, “The Imported Bridegroom and Other Stories of the New York Ghetto,” are not “Dubliners.” Cahan overwrites. In fact, he is guilty of crossing the street — crossing the street and jumping on a trolley…
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