[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 110 (Wednesday, July 30, 1997)]
[Senate]
[Pages S8380-S8382]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                        100 YEARS OF THE FORWARD

 Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, on July 22, 1997, the Washington 
Post contained a moving tribute to the Forward, a New York City 
journalistic tradition currently celebrating its centennial year.
  The Members of the Senate are probably aware of the Forward's 
magnificent history; this daily Yiddish newspaper once enjoyed a daily 
circulation of over 250,000. It did its job of helping new arrivals 
assimilate and become Americans so very well, that its original 
readers' descendants can now enjoy the newspaper's superb English 
language edition, while a wave of new immigrants are being introduced 
to the nuances of American life by the newspaper's Russian edition.
  The Forward's legacy lives on, not only in its three current 
editions, but with the tens of thousands of families whose ancestors 
learned about this country in the pages of Abraham Cahan's remarkable 
publication. On May 22, New York Mayor Guiliani hosted a reception at 
Gracie Mansion to mark the one- hundredth anniversary of the Daily 
Vorwaert's first issue. I sent a message to this reception which was 
reprinted in the Forward's Yiddish, English and Russian editions:

       I have long believed that the Forward renders an invaluable 
     contribution to American

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     society. Your dynamic newspaper should be appreciated by all 
     who cherish our national heritage of respect for intellectual 
     creativity and journalistic integrity. Even those of us who 
     couldn't enjoy A Bintel Brief in the original were long ago 
     aware of the Forward's power to captivate, educate and 
     inspire. Your vigorous English edition is a worthy companion 
     to the historic Yiddish Forward.
       Please accept my great congratulations on this magnificent 
     milestone.
       With my best wishes to the ``gold standard'' of ethnic 
     journalism.

  The Forward has played a significant cultural and educational role in 
its first century and I trust that the members of the Senate join me in 
wishing similar success to the three editions that so ably carry on the 
historic Forward tradition.
  Mr. President, I ask that the text of the Washington Post article on 
the Forward's centennial be printed in the Record.
  The material follows:

               [From the Washington Post, July 22, 1997]

New Voices for a New Century--Newspaper of an Exodus Speaks a Language 
         Its Children No Longer Hear, but Reaches Out in Others

                          (By John M. Goshko)

       New York.--Some of this city's most prominent 
     editorialists, academics and intellectuals lately have been 
     waxing nostalgic about a New York institution now personified 
     by a half-dozen elderly men hunched over rickety, ancient 
     typewriters in a charmless office.
       These men--not all in the best of health and able to put in 
     a full day's work--are what remains of the Yiddish staff of 
     the Forward, or Der Vorwaerts, once celebrated as the most 
     influential foreign-language newspaper in the United States. 
     Now marking its 100th anniversary amid growing uncertainty 
     about its future, the Forward is known as the paper that did 
     its job so successfully that it has come to the brink of 
     putting itself out of business.
       To survive into a second century, the Forward has had to 
     start thinking about ways to reinvent itself. It actively is 
     experimenting with moves away from Yiddish, seeking to 
     attract new audiences with editions in English and Russian.
       The English edition, in particular, has aroused 
     considerable interest because of its aggressive, no-sacred-
     cows coverage of Jewish affairs under editor Seth Lipsky, a 
     graduate of the Wall Street Journal's editorial page, and his 
     staff of young reporters. The English version doesn't always 
     sit well with many old-line readers who find Lipsky's 
     combative conservatism jarringly at odds with the Forward's 
     foundations in socialism and trade unionism. They say that 
     while the name on the masthead of the English edition may be 
     the same, the newspaper itself is not. To them, he Forward's 
     identity cannot be separated from the language and culture 
     that the great waves of turn-of-the-century immigration 
     brought to this country from East European Jewish communities 
     destined to perish in the Holocaust.
       More than 2.5 million Yiddish-speaking Jewish immigrants 
     poured into New York between 1880 and 1925, and many learned 
     how to Americans from the Forward. At the height of the 
     newspaper's influence, its daily circulation of more than 
     250,000 stretched from New York into the sizable immigrant 
     communities of Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago and Los Angeles. 
     And it used this influence to become a key player in shaping 
     the modern American labor movement and leading the exodus of 
     Jewish immigrants from European-inherited socialist politics 
     to the New Deal.
       ``For people like me, the Forward is part of a culture; 
     something that's in my genes,'' said Hyman J. Bookbinder, 
     long the American Jewish Committee's representative in 
     Washington. ``I was brought up in a Forward home, where my 
     parents, who came from Poland as teenagers, looked to the 
     Forward for what amounted to their high school and college 
     education.''
       In 1947, the Forward's 50th anniversary celebration packed 
     Madison Square Garden. Today, the editor of the Yiddish 
     Forward, Mordechia Shtrigler, worries that the paper, which 
     became a weekly in 1983, might have to cut back further and 
     go biweekly or even monthly. The grandchildren and great 
     grandchildren of the original faithful have moved on. For the 
     Yiddish edition, there remain only a geriatric generation 
     whose imminent passing effectively will mark the dying out of 
     Yiddish as a language with any currency in the United States.
       ``It's not just that the young people don't read or speak 
     Yiddish,'' said Shtrigler. ``We are almost out of people who 
     can write commandingly and persuasively in Yiddish about 
     politics and literature and culture. Many weeks I have to 
     write more than half the newspaper myself. I fear what the 
     future will be.''
       His anxiety is, in many ways, a testament to the certain 
     vision of Abraham Cahan, an autocratic but brilliant editor 
     who ran the paper for more than 50 years. Cahan arrived in 
     New York from Lithuania in 1882 and quickly acquired a gift 
     for writing in English that enabled him to become a star 
     reporter for English-language newspapers. He gained even 
     wider notice by writing two novels about Lower East Side 
     ghetto life: ``Yekl,'' which in the 1970s became the basis 
     for the film ``Hester Street,'' and the ``Rose of David 
     Levinsky,'' acclaimed at the time as a minor masterpiece of 
     genre realism.
       Both books dealt with the theme of assimilation as 
     necessary and inevitable for survival in the new world, even 
     when it meant a melancholy loss of one's youthful ideals. 
     That was the message that Cahan carried over into the pages 
     of the Forward. Cahan built a devoted readership from 
     sweatshop laborers and pushcart peddlers with detailed, 
     colorful coverage of New York's politics and its nascent 
     labor movement. And he added a high-toned side, publishing 
     the work of the best Yiddish poets and novelists. One, Isaac 
     Bashevis Singer, published almost all of his stories in the 
     Forward before their book publication.
       But the Forward's basic message was underscored by Cahan's 
     lead editorial on his first day as editor: ``Send Your 
     Children to College if You Can, but Don't Let Them Become 
     Disloyal to Their Parents.'' It set the tone for future 
     Forward articles that would attempt to act as a bridge 
     between America and the shetl. They covered every conceivable 
     subject including one, ``Fundamentals of Baseball Explained 
     to Non-Sports,'' which came complete with a diagram of the 
     Polo Grounds.
       By far the most popular and famous feature was the ``Bintel 
     Brief'' (``Bundle of Letters''), where readers wrote in to 
     seek advice about their most personal concerns and 
     aspirations.
       The letters included such pre-``Dear Abby'' trivia as one 
     from ``The Unhappy Fool,'' who confessed that he considered 
     the girl be loved flawed because she had a dimple. The 
     Forward's tart reply:
       ``The trouble is not that the girl has a dimple in her chin 
     but that some people have a screw loose in their head.''
       But others were what has been called ``a cry from the 
     depths of immigrant life'': the new arrival's anguish at 
     leaving his aged parents in Europe, the plight of the young 
     mother deserted by her husband, the despair of a tenement 
     janitor condemned to eke out his days in `` a place where the 
     sun is ashamed to shine.''
       If the people who wrote to the ``Bintel Brief'' have a 
     present-day counterpart, it is the immigrants from the now 
     defunct Soviet Union, whose population in the New York area 
     has swelled to almost 400,000 in recent years. An estimated 
     95 percent of them are Jewish, and in December 1995, the 
     Forward began a weekly Russian edition to cater to their 
     needs, with a circulation now of 10,000.
       It carries a heavy dose of news about the Russian immigrant 
     community, particularly its problems of adjustment. It even 
     carries a Hebrew lesson in each issue.
       As to the descendants of those earlier immigrants who were 
     the Forward's original audience, they are largely successful 
     business and professional people who have graduated to the 
     suburbs and Manhattan's tonier neighborhoods. The English 
     edition, a weekly established in 1990, is hoping it can lay 
     the foundations for a new kind of paper by establishing with 
     the new generation the same bonds of passion for Jewish 
     issues that existed between their forebears and the Yiddish 
     Forward.
       It has a ways to go. Its circulation is only about 25,000, 
     and it hemorrhages red ink at the rate of about $1 million a 
     year. Still, Lipsky optimistically insists that it is not 
     unrealistic to harbor hopes of someday becoming a daily. In 
     pursuit of that dream, he has hired a constantly revolving 
     team of your talent.
       Although they work just down the hall from the Yiddish 
     staff, there is a respectful but clear separation between the 
     two. The English edition does not use any material from its 
     older sibling. And the younger staff members, their accents 
     and sensibilities betraying the stamp of places like 
     Berkeley, Cambridge and New Haven, have only the foggiest 
     notions of the Talmudic arguments about assimilation and 
     schisms in the socialist movement that preoccupied earlier 
     generations of Forward editors and reporters.
       Collectively, they turn out a newspaper distinguished by 
     sophisticated arts coverage and a more probing, sometime 
     sensationalist approach to Jewish issues than most other 
     American Jewish publications, whose ties and funding sources 
     generally cause them to tread cautiously around Jewish 
     charities and organizations. The Forward also is unlike its 
     competitors in that it frequently is willing to take some 
     critical looks at Israel.
       This attitude has earned the English edition a substantial 
     number of enemies among Jewish organizations and individuals 
     who feel the paper has treated them unfairly. Inevitably the 
     biggest share of brickbats has been aimed at Lipsky's 
     editorial positions which reader nostalgic for the old 
     Forward consider an unpalatable mix of Reaganomics and Cold 
     War rhetoric.
       Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, a professor of humanities at New 
     York University, accused Lipsky of trying to turn ``a 
     newspaper of socialists and social democrats [into] an echo 
     of the Wall Street Journal.'' Jack Sheinkman, former 
     president of the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers 
     Union, expressed outrage at Lipsky's unapologetic defense of 
     American involvement in the Vietnam War, and the literary 
     critic, Alfred Kazin, protested that a Forward proposal to 
     bomb North Korea's nuclear weapons facilities had no place in 
     ``a paper founded a century ago on the blood and toil of 
     peaceful laboring people who believed in harmony with people 
     like themselves.

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       Lipsky takes the criticism in stride: ``A lot of people 
     tiptoe around our ideological battles as through its 
     something to be embarrassed about. Actually, I find it a 
     matter of great zest.'' He even wrote an article in a recent 
     issue of Commentary magazine arguing that ``Abraham Cahan 
     would have perfectly well understood the contours of the 
     struggle we are in today and have responded in the spirit in 
     which we carry on.''

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