Founding , patriarch of
The Forward until 1946 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. This paper had been merged into a new Yiddish daily called
Dos Abend Blatt (The Evening Paper) as its weekend supplement when that publication was launched in 1894 under the auspices of the
Socialist Labor Party (SLP). It was this centralizing political pressure which had been the motivating factor for a new publication. 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 Forward was notably the only socialist newspaper/group that supported the
Spanish-American war.
The Forward organized a May Day, 1898 parade, calling on Jewish workers to support the war. This parade was allowed by the authorities, while the antiwar parade organized by the
Socialist Labor party was not.
Early years Despite this political similarity, Miller and Cahan differed as to the political orientation of the paper and Cahan left after just four months to join the staff of
The Commercial Advertiser, a well-established
Republican newspaper also based in New York City. For the next four years, until 1901, Cahan remained outside of
The Forward office, learning the newspaper trade in a financially successful setting. He only returned, he later recalled in his memoir, upon the promise of "absolute full power" over the editorial desk. 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. 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.
After World War II 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, and by 1983 the newspaper was published only once a week, with an English supplement. 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.)
21st century The Yiddish edition has recently enjoyed a modest increase in circulation as courses in the language have become more popular among university students; circulation has leveled out at about 5,500.
Boris Sandler, one of the most significant contemporary secular writers in Yiddish, was the editor of the Yiddish
Forward for 18 years, until March 2016; the new editor who succeeded him is
Rukhl Schaechter. Between 2013 and 2017,
The Forward published an online edition and English weekly and Yiddish biweekly editions, each effectively operating independently. Jane Eisner became the first female editor in chief of the English
Forward in June 2008, following
J. J. Goldberg. In August 2015,
The Forward received wide attention for reporting from Iran at a charged moment in American politics, as the U.S. Congress was ramping up to a vote on an accord reached the month before to limit Tehran's nuclear ability in return for lifting international oil and financial sanctions. Assistant Managing Editor
Larry Cohler-Esses was, in the words of
The New York Times, "The first journalist from an American Jewish pro-Israel publication to be given an Iranian visa since 1979." In the fall of 1995,
The Forward launched a
Russian-language edition under the editorship of Vladimir Yedidowich in response to demand for "a strongly Jewish, yet with a secular, social-democratic orientation and an appreciation for the cultural dimension of Jewish life" from the
fast-growing émigré community. The Russian edition was sold to Russian American Jews for Israel in 2004. In contrast to its English counterpart, the Russian edition and its readership were more sympathetic to right-wing voices. In March 2007, it was renamed the
Forum. Around the same time in 2004, the Forward Association also sold off its interest in
WEVD to
The Walt Disney Company's sports division,
ESPN. The name of the publication was shortened to
The Forward in April 2015. On January 17, 2019, the publication announced it would discontinue its print edition and only publish its English and Yiddish editions online. Layoffs of its editor-in-chief and 20% of its editorial staff were also announced.
The Forward began publishing in English in the 1980s, and a 2019 review observed that both Yiddish and English were being produced for its online edition. Funding for the English edition became available when
The Forward sold its FM radio station. and the actualization of an English edition as an ongoing paper in 1990, ==Content==