Forverts/Forward

Forverts (the Jewish Daily Forward or The Forward) was a Yiddish-language newspaper based in New York City that appeared as a daily for eighty-six years. It was the largest and most influential Jewish newspaper in the world, the most widely read socialist daily in the United States, and the foreign language newspaper with the largest distribution in the United States. Launched on 22 April 1897, Forverts was founded by a group of Yiddish-speaking members of the Socialist Labor Party (SLP). Abraham Cahan (b. 1860–d. 1951) was appointed its first editor. He left after a few months but returned in 1902 to lead the paper for some forty-eight years, until his death. Although Forverts was a Socialist paper, its readership encompassed the broad masses of eastern European Jewish immigrants in early-20th-century America, regardless of their political orientation. As many scholars have argued, Forverts played an important role in the Americanization of its readers, providing them with useful information about their new country and helping them integrate into American life. But it was an immigrant paper in a much deeper sense, too. By adapting ideological ideas and cultural trends from eastern Europe to the American reality, Forverts became instrumental in developing a new kind of secular Jewish identity. Its editorial policy was to preserve a socialist and nonreligious tone, to use simple Yiddish, to publish a range of articles—some more serious, others light—and to serve as a platform for both high-quality and popular literature (shund). As a result, Forverts contributed a great deal to the development of Yiddish literature, and many great Yiddish writers, including Isaac Bashevis Singer, published in its pages. The paper’s advice column—“a bintl brief” (a bundle of letters)—was especially popular. It regularly printed readers’ questions about important aspects of everyday life together with the editor’s responses reflecting his views on Jewish society and family life in America. No less important was the women’s page, which encouraged women to participate in the job market alongside their family roles. On the political front, Forverts supported the labor movement, participated in Jewish political debates during World War I, and fought immigration restrictions. In its early days, the paper featured anti-Zionist views, though this changed after the Balfour Declaration (1917) and Cahan’s trip to Palestine (1925). Demographic changes following immigration restrictions in the 1920s caused a gradual decline in its distribution. The paper continued as a daily until 1983, when it became a weekly. In 1990 an English-language weekly joined the Yiddish newspaper. Since early 2019, both the Yiddish and the English editions are entirely digital.