The New York Times :
Pete Hamill’s favorite walking tour of Lower Manhattan nowadays is to a spot he calls the Place of Three Shrines.
The first two shrines are the Seward Park Public Library and the Educational Alliance. The third is the imposing 12-story building on East Broadway that housed The Jewish Daily Forward, the legendary Yiddish newspaper. All three shrines share a common legacy: they initiated generations of immigrants into the English language and American culture.
Even today, more people speak Yiddish in New York than anyplace else, nearly 100,000 at last count. That’s more New Yorkers than speak Russian or Korean or Greek or Polish or Arabic at home. Still, starting in the 1920s, government quotas on immigration placed a stranglehold on The Forward’s circulation.
My friend Jerry Adler eloquently described that shrinking readership in an article he wrote for The Daily News in 1977. It began: “The Jewish Daily Forward, the only Yiddish daily left in America, turned 80 just a few years ahead of most of its readers.”
Thanks to Seth Lipsky, the editor in the 1990s, his colleagues and investors, The Forward was revived with a weekly English edition in addition to the Yiddish version. Presumably, most of its readers these days are a lot younger than the newspaper, which was founded 110 years ago on the Lower East Side.
Its heritage, and New York’s, are celebrated in a new book of photographs edited by Alana Newhouse, the paper’s culture editor. It’s titled “A Living Lens,” and it’s being published in conjunction with a companion exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York.
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