Ezra on The Forward

“the sheer journalism that the newspaper produced over the decades: a 1934 front-page story by Israel Joshua Singer describing a rally of some 20,000 American Nazi supporters at Madison Square Garden; a 1967 profile of David Ben-Gurion by Elie Wiesel; pieces by Isaac Bashevis Singer on everything from the Lubavitcher Rebbe to experiments in hypnotism and extrasensory perception.”

“It was, as he (Abraham Cahan) conceived it, not just a place to report the news, but a kind of "living novel." It told the story of its time and place from the front cover to the back page, through every news report, opinion column, cartoon, poem, recipe, essay, political polemic, and theater review. The Forward, in the end, would be his greatest work of literature. Like other newspapers of its time, the Forward published literature in a more conventional sense as well. In its early days this consisted mostly of translations-Tolstoy was a favorite-but the Forward soon became associated with the most talented Yiddish writers of the day, from Sholem Asch and Avrom Reyzen in its early decades to Isaac Bashevis Singer and Chaim Grade in later ones. Under the leadership of Cahan and his successors, the newspaper became home to serialized novels and novellas, humor sketches and one-act plays, "high literature" and sensational potboilers. Often the paper would be running two or three novels at once, in addition to short fiction, belles-lettres, and poetry. For more than a century the Forward produced an immense trove of literature”