Online trivia league poses question about the Forverts
When asked what language the paper is in, respondents gave various answers including Tagalog which is spoken in the Philippines
The front page of the first issue of the Forverts, April 22, 1897 Photo by the Forward
LearnedLeague, a web-based, invitation-only global quiz league with over 28,000 members worldwide, recently featured the Forverts in a question, worded as follows:
The newspaper called Forverts that was founded in 1897, and provided socialist-oriented content on politics and government as well as columns aimed at familiarizing its readers with American culture, was published in what language?
Only 29% members of the League correctly answered: “Yiddish.” Among the other guesses were Esperanto, Norwegian, German and Tagalog — a language spoken by the ethnic Tagalog people who comprise a quarter of the population of the Philippines.
This isn’t the first time the Forward was featured in a trivia question posed by LearnedLeague. In 2019, members received the following question:
Lithuanian-born Abraham Cahan was a founder in 1897 of what Yiddish-language newspaper, which was a vital resource for many Jewish immigrants as it reached a circulation of over 275,000 by the early 1930s?
Even fewer people got that one right: 15%. So if you answered both questions correctly, you deserve a mazel tov! You’ve just outperformed thousands of trivia experts.
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