The Chicago Sun Times :
For exactly a century now, The Forward has been a vital newspaper -- a New York-based publication designed to chronicle Jewish life in America and beyond.
Initially known as the Jewish Daily Forward, it was published in Yiddish -- the principal language of a vast number of Eastern European Jews. Its Yiddish readership began to plummet as assimilation became the byword of Jews in this country, and the Holocaust wiped out much of the population that fed the language at the source.
So the paper became a weekly in 1983, with an English language supplement included. By 1990, however, that supplement was transformed into an engaging, intellectually challenging English language periodical -- one that continues today to deal with the full range of political, social and cultural issues of Jewish life worldwide. A Yiddish edition of the paper is published separately and has developed quite a following as a result of a recent rebirth of interest in the language.
To celebrate the 100th anniversary of The Forward, editor Alana Newhouse and archivist Chana Pollack have put together a book of more than 500 black-and-white photographs drawn from the more than 40,000 in the paper's archives. A Living Lens (with an evocative introduction by Pete Hamill), is fascinating on many counts. Arranged chronologically, it serves as an eye-opening visual history of a century of Jewish life throughout the entire Diaspora.