A VITAL VOICE: 100 YEARS OF THE JEWISH FORWARD
New York: The Forward Association, 1997. Item #42877
1st edition. Original photographic paper wrappers, 8vo 50 pages, includes illustrations and portraits. 26 cm. Includes bibliographical references.
“The first issue of Forverts appeared on April 22, 1897, in New York City. The paper was founded by a group of about 50 Yiddish-speaking socialists who had organized three months earlier as the Forward Publishing Association. The paper's name, as well as its political orientation, was borrowed from the German Social Democratic Party and its organ Vorwärts.
Forverts was a successor to New York's first Yiddish-language socialist newspaper, Di Arbeter Tsaytung (The Workman's Paper), a weekly established in 1890 by the fledgling Jewish trade union movement centered in the United Hebrew Trades, as a vehicle for bringing socialist and trade unionist ideas to Yiddish-speaking immigrants, primarily from eastern Europe….
Chief among the dissident socialists of the Forward Publishing Association were Louis Miller and Abraham Cahan. These two founding fathers of The Forward were quick to enlist in the ranks of a new rival socialist political party founded in 1897, the Social Democratic Party of America, founded by the nationally famous leader of the 1894 American Railway Union strike, Eugene V. Debs, and Victor L. Berger, a German-speaking teacher and newspaper publisher from Milwaukee. Both joined the SDP in July 1897….
The circulation of the paper, which was described as ‘one of the first national newspapers,’ grew quickly, paralleling the rapid growth of the Yiddish speaking population of the United States. By 1912 its circulation was 120,000, and by the late 1920s/early 1930s, The Forward was a leading U.S. metropolitan daily with considerable influence and a nationwide circulation of more than 275,000 though this had dropped to 170,000 by 1939 as a result of changes in U.S. immigration policy that restricted the immigration of Jews to a trickle.
Early on, The Forward defended trade unionism and moderate, democratic socialism. The paper was a significant participant in the activities of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union; Benjamin Schlesinger, a former president of the ILGWU, became the general manager of the paper in 1923, then returned to the presidency of the union in 1928. The paper was also an early supporter of David Dubinsky, Schlesinger's eventual successor.
In 1933–34, The Forward was the first to publish Fred Beal's eyewitness reports of bureaucratic privilege and of famine in the Soviet Union, accounts of the kind that much of the liberal and left-wing press disparaged and resisted. His story corroborated that of the paper's labor editor, Harry Lang, who had visited Soviet Ukraine.
In response to the first reports of atrocities against the Jewish population of German-occupied Poland, special correspondent A. Brodie complained of exaggerated dispatches and lack of facts. But as accounts accumulated in the winter of 1939-40 of mass arrests, forced labor, massacres, executions and expulsions, the paper discerned the outline of the unfolding Holocaust.
In 1953, The Forward took the position that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were guilty but held that the death sentence was too harsh a punishment.
By 1962, circulation was down to 56,126 daily and 59,636 Sunday,[30] and by 1983 the newspaper was published only once a week, with an English supplement. In 1990, the English supplement became an independent weekly which by 2000 had a circulation of 26,183, while the Yiddish weekly had a circulation of 7,000 and falling.
As the influence of the Socialist Party in both American politics and in the Jewish community waned, the paper joined the American liberal mainstream though it maintained a social democratic orientation. The English version has some standing in the Jewish community as an outlet of liberal policy analysis. For a period in the 1990s, conservatives came to the fore of the English edition of the paper, but the break from tradition did not last. (A number of conservatives dismissed from The Forward later helped to found the modern New York Sun.)” (Wikipedia).
SUBJECT(S): Yiddish newspapers -- New York (State) -- History. Jewish newspapers -- Socialism and Judaism -- United States. Jewish socialists -- Journaux yiddish -- Histoire. Journaux juifs -- New York (E´tat) -- Socialisme et judai¨sme -- E´tats-Unis. Socialistes juifs – Anniversaires. OCLC: 37753363, with OCLC listing less than 20 holdings worldwide. Very Good+ Condition. (B) (Holo2-162-13A-XX-LCC+).
Price: $125.00