On April 22, 1897, New York’s Lower East Side welcomed a new daily newspaper—one that, though few realized it at the time, would go on to become a legendary name in American journalism and a revered institution in American Jewish life. Under the leadership of founding editor Abraham Cahan, the Jewish Daily Forward — or Forverts, as it was known to its Yiddish-speaking readers — fought for social justice, cultivated Jewish literature on these shores, and aided generations of Eastern European Jews in their quest to enter American life. It was, quite simply, the voice of the immigrant.
Now, for the first time, the newspaper has opened its historic photographic archives to the public, making available more than 500 pictures — one of the finest photographic accounts of Jewish life in America ever published. “A Living Lens” features classic photographs of the sort one might already associate with the Forward — Lower East Side pushcarts, Yiddish theater, labor rallies — along with gems no one would expect ¾ Harry Truman’s haberdashery, Carpathian mountain musicians, and Mussolini’s Jewish portraitist. It offers an astonishing portrait of Jewish life from the late nineteenth century through the early twenty-first, ranging from far-flung diaspora communities and British-ruled Palestine to the Holocaust, the Soviet Jewry movement, and the emergence of the suburban Jewish middle class; from Fiorello LaGuardia and Fanny Brice to Barbra Streisand, David Ben-Gurion, Woody Allen, and Madonna. For a slideshow, please click here.
Readers will be walked through these 100-plus years with trenchant essays by some of today’s leading intellectuals and historians, including legendary New York writer Pete Hamill. Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of The New Republic; J. Hoberman, the film editor of the Village Voice; renowned sportswriter Roger Kahn; and Deborah E. Lipstadt, historian and author of Denying the Holocaust. For a full list of essays, please click here.