Owner(s) | Forward Association |
---|---|
Publisher | Rachel Fishman Feddersen |
Editor | Jane Eisner |
Managing editors | Dan Friedman |
News editor | Larry Cohler-Esses |
Opinion editor | David Wallis |
Founded | April 22, 1897 |
Political alignment | Progressive |
Language | English |
Headquarters | New York City |
Circulation | English: 28,221 (March 2013) |
Website | forward |
The Forward (Yiddish: פֿאָרווערטס; Forverts), formerly known as The Jewish Daily Forward, is an American magazine published monthly in New York City for a Jewish-American audience. The organization publishes two magazines, in English (The Forward) and in Yiddish (Yiddish Forward or Forverts) and websites updated daily in both languages via a pay model.
The first issue of Forverts appeared on April 22, 1897, in New York City. The paper was founded by a group of about 50 Yiddish-speaking socialists who organized themselves approximately three months earlier as the Forward Publishing Association. The paper's name, as well as its political orientation, was borrowed from the German Social Democratic Party and its organ Vorwärts.
Forverts was a successor to New York's first Yiddish-language socialist newspaper, Di Arbeter Tsaytung (The Workman's Paper), a weekly established in 1890 by the fledgling Jewish trade union movement centered in the United Hebrew Trades as a vehicle for bringing socialist and trade unionist ideas to non-English speaking immigrants. This paper had been merged into a new Yiddish daily called Dos Abend Blatt (The Evening Paper) as its weekend supplement when that publication was launched in 1894 under the auspices of the Socialist Labor Party (SLP). As this publication established itself, it came under increased political pressure from the de facto head of the SLP, Daniel De Leon, who attempted to maintain a rigid ideological line with respect to its content. It was this centralizing political pressure which had been the motivating factor for a new publication.
Chief among the dissident socialists of the Forward Publishing Association were Louis Miller and Abraham Cahan. These two founding fathers of The Forward were quick to enlist in the ranks of a new rival socialist political party founded in 1897, the Social Democratic Party of America, founded by the nationally famous leader of the 1894 American Railway Union strike, Eugene V. Debs, and Victor L. Berger, a German-speaking teacher and newspaper publisher from Milwaukee. Both joined the SDP in July 1897.