The Forward: News and advice in Yiddish, Daily

One hundred years ago today … the Forward (in Yiddish: “Forvert”) was the leading daily newspaper for the Jewish immigrant community in New York.

Founded in 1897, the Forward was published in Yiddish, the lingua franca of Jews from Eastern Europe–areas that are now Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania, and Hungary, and more–who made up the the bulk of the wave of Jewish immigration from the end of the Nineteenth and beginning of the Twentieth Centuries. It played “an important role in helping the Eastern European Jewish immigrants transplant and adjust themselves. to American life,” according to Isaac Metzker (10). Reflecting its target audience, the newspaper took a progressive, socialist stance toward US politics and culture.

A popular feature of the Forward was (and continues to be) “A Bintel Brief” (“bundle of letters”). Started in 1906, the section published letters from readers seeking advice, and answers from the newspaper’s publisher and editor, Abraham Cahan.

One letter from 1920 read as follows:

Dear Editor,

I want to hear your opinion about the behavior of a woman I am acquainted with, who belongs to progressive groups and considers herself a radical.

Not long ago I was invited to their home by the woman and her husband, and I spent a pleasant evening with them. When the time came to eat supper, everyone went into the dining room to sit down at the table, and the poor woman who works for them ate in the kitchen.

Since I know the couple and I know they consider themselves radical people, I wondered why the servant didn’t eat at the table along with everyone. I took the liberty of telling the woman of the house that she ought to call the maid in to eat with everyone in the dining room because it wasn’t right for her to sit alone in the kitchen. Then my friend answered me that it has to be this way, that the woman who works for them must eat separately.

For me, this was not the right answer from such a woman, and it seems that one of us does not understand the ethics and morals of the socialist viewpoint. Therefore I ask you to explain to us which one is right.

—With socialistic regards, A Reader

The editor responded:

We are in agreement with the writer, and not with his friend. Progressive people should not discriminate between the servant and the members of the family. When everyone eats in the dining room and the maid is left sitting in the kitchen, they are wronging her because this is really degrading.

(Reprinted in Commentary, Mar., 1971. CommentaryMagazine.com.)

The Forward now publishes weekly. “A Bintel Brief” continues to be an object of historical interest, the subject, for example, of a recent book of cartoons by Lydia Frinck.

Sources/further reading:

Metzker, Isaac, ed. A Bintel Brief: Sixty Years of Letters from the Lower East Side. New York: Schocken Books, 1971.

WRITTEN BY JONATHAN GOLDMAN, JUNE 19, 2020.

TAGS: immigration, Jews, Yiddish, newspapers, Lower East Side