Dara Horn on The Forward

“The Forward had been conceived as a newspaper for the future. But by dint of its language, the successful assimilation of its earliest readers, and the mass murder of the majority of the world's Yiddish speakers, within fifty years it had become a newspaper of the past.”

“this is what really made the Forward the newspaper of record for Ashkenazi Jews the world over: its record of private emotional experiences that would never make headlines. This record exists in the paper's published literary fiction...in the Forward's fiction we find something greater and truer: a psychological record of the invention of American Jews.”

“For the better part of a hundred years, the Forward was the newspaper of record for American Jews-and not merely for American Jews, but for Ashkenazi Jewish culture as a whole. While many other Yiddish-language publications thrived in the Americas, in pre-Holocaust Europe, and elsewhere in the world, none came close to the Forward's reach. At its peak, the Forward's daily circulation exceeded 250,000 copies, a number that all but a handful of English-language publications today would envy. With size came stature and influence. This marquee publication had the power to attract the most talented writers of the time both domestically and overseas, and even in some cases to sponsor them for American immigration. The Forward's journalistic mission went deeper than just reporting current events. The paper's most influential editor, Abraham Cahan, used it to change the Yiddish language itself, teaching immigrant readers English while they were still reading in Yiddish. The appearance of such Anglicized expressions as makhn a lebn (to make a living), which did not exist in European Yiddish, were not merely descriptions of how readers spoke, but prescriptions for how they should speak. A Forward reader was expected to become an American as quickly as possible, with help from the Forward. With its foreign correspondents, coverage of matters ignored by the English-language press, advice columns for new Americans, even the adjustments to the Yiddish language-all this would suffice to make the Forward the "paper of record" of the Ashkenazi world.”