The Past, the Present and the Forward

There are brushes with extinction and ironic twists in this newspaper tale. It is dark and dramatic, often paradoxical.

For above all, the story of the Forward is a very Jewish story--a compelling comeback yarn.

Just as Jews remade themselves from immigrants to Americans over the last 100 years, the Forward that everyone read in Yiddish at the beginning of this century has transformed into the Forward that increasing numbers of Jews are reading in English at the end of this century.

And what happened to the Forward offers an object lesson to newer immigrants--whether in New York, Los Angeles, Miami or elsewhere--struggling to become American without forgetting who they are and where they came from. The Forward’s story begins in 1897 on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, where legions of immigrant Jews are choking the slums. Although there are four daily Yiddish newspapers, the most popular is the secular rag known in Yiddish as the Forverts.

It is the voice of trade unionism and Socialism. But mostly it is the conscience of the working man, delivering yellow journalism alongside elegant literature by Flaubert, Chekhov and Isaac Bashevis Singer.

The best known feature, “A Bintel Brief (Bundle of Letters),” is a column of personal letters from readers, mostly women, seeking advice. The paper is also an immigrant guide to American culture, giving instructions on the use of the handkerchief and seamy news of Jewish prostitutes along Allen Street.

“In my home the Forward was treated like the Bible,” an old socialist immigrant told Irving Howe in “World of Our Fathers.” “You didn’t tear, cut or muddy the pages of the Forward any more than you did the Torah. In fact we boycotted a storekeeper who once wrapped two pounds of carp in pages of the Forward. For too many centuries barbarians had desecrated our word; we were not about to patronize a modern barbarian.”

But that was two generations ago.

In time, the Forward dooms itself by encouraging Jews to soak up American culture. By urging them to learn English and such basics as baseball, Abraham Cahan, the mythic editor of the Forward for its first 50 years, helps condemn his own newspaper to oblivion. As Yiddish culture fades, the Forward loses readers and writers.

By the late 1980s, circulation has dipped to a mere 15,000 from a peak, during World War I, of 250,000. It is no longer the daily Forward; it is weekly. It is no longer a broadsheet; it is a tabloid. Instead of breaking news, the paper mostly translates wire services. And where once there were new crops of eager writers, there is a dwindling group of graying men delivering shakily handwritten stories in Yiddish.

Along comes a young man named Seth Lipsky. Well, he’s not so young--just half the age of the octogenarian editor, Simon Weber. He is a Harvard graduate with 19 years experience at the Wall Street Journal. He’s an old-school journalist with a sharp mind and quirky sense of humor who has always had a dream to start a newspaper. He desperately wants Weber’s approval to start an English language newspaper called the Forward, an offspring of the Yiddish paper but with an updated mission.

“It seemed to me that the time had come where the Jewish struggle was going to need all the partisans it could find,” says Lipsky. “There was a well of sympathy for Jewish causes after the Holocaust that had evaporated in the politics of the struggle for the Jewish state. I thought the challenge to this next generation was a tremendous story.”

Lipsky appeals to Weber over several years. Nothing works. Finally, Lipsky calls him at a Brooklyn hospital in the winter of 1987. “Si, you’re on your deathbed,” Lipsky recalls telling him. “In a matter of months you’ll be gone and the newspaper is going down with you.”

Lipsky acknowledges he was harsh. “I had to get him to listen.” Weber dies soon after, but not without first making a commitment to Lipsky’s vision of the Forward. Now Lipsky has to win over the Forward’s Socialist board members.

“To them I was this right wing weirdo from the WSJ editorial board,” says Lipsky. “I felt like Robert Bork going into the Senate Judiciary committee.”

Lipsky’s most persuasive argument--that without an aggressive new Forward, the old paper’s tradition and mission will die--wins them over. They finance the new paper in English and cover the ongoing deficit of the old paper in Yiddish by trading an FM radio station for an AM station, thereby, raising $40 million in capital.

In fact, the first issue of the new Forward, which comes out in spring, 1990, instantly raises the quality of Jewish journalism.

The paper prints so much high-brow writing in its Arts & Letters section that an editor of a competing newspaper complains that it makes “The New Republic” read like Danielle Steel.

“We don’t talk down to our readers,” says Jonathan Rosen, the paper’s first cultural editor and a fledgling novelist himself. “We assume they’re smart.”

*

It has been one of the great paradoxes of Jewish life in America that the largest, most literate and wealthiest Jewish community in the world has been unable to produce a newspaper of prominence.

Most papers are subsidized by major Jewish organizations and act as their instruments. With exceptions, these papers rely on bland stories about who gave how much at the latest fund-raising dinner.

The new Forward has broken out of this conventional mode by going out on a limb and breaking stories.

On the front page of the April 23 edition, there were two scoops that became national news. In one, the Forward wrote about the controversy over a Jewish University of Pennsylvania student who said he was condemned for calling a group of African-American women “water buffalo” in Yiddish. In the other, the paper’s Washington correspondent--it also has bureaus in Moscow, Jerusalem and soon, in Los Angeles--was the first to charge that Lani Guinier, a candidate for the nation’s top civil rights post, had advocated election law reform along racial lines in her writings.

Inside, the paper premiered its new feature section, “Fast Forward” with a Rosh Hashanah special report, including a humorous first-person account of the inner workings of a gefilte fish factory.

Lipsky tried to get features editor Ilene Rosenzweig to name the section “The Jewish Woman” but she resisted, explaining she wanted a name that was sophisticated and hip. Rosenzweig, who wrote a book called “I Hate Madonna,” says Jewish ideas are always the unifying thread in the section’s stories.

“As much as the old Forward explained to immigrants how to be Americans, we’re trying to do the opposite by showing how Jews can belong to their culture and be modern,” she says.

In the meantime, the paper has scored several literary coups.

It serialized Art Spiegelman’s comic strip of the Holocaust “Maus” for 70 weeks and the strip won the Pulitzer. The paper also ran the first excerpts from Philip Roth’s novel “Operation Shylock.”

While several Jewish leaders praised the high literature, they expressed concern with what one called “a high-handed” attitude toward the Jewish establishment.

“These are large complex communities and issues,” says Steve Solender, executive vice president of the United Jewish Appeal Federation of New York. “Sometimes the paper’s gadfly relationship to the Jewish community is not balanced and is outright vindictive.”

Jeffrey Goldberg is the Forward’s premier scoopmeister. He is bright, dogged and 27; he worked for 1 1/2 years at the Washington Post until he quit to become a soldier in the Israeli Army.

His experiences on the Forward have taught him that many establishment leaders simply aren’t used to a paper that is not “a house organ.”

Goldberg recalls an angry phone call he received from a high-profile leader when he was working on a front-page story listing the salaries of presidents leading top Jewish organizations.

The person complained that the story would be “bad for us,” according to Goldberg. “I said, ‘What do you mean by us?’ ” Eventually Goldberg suggested the person talk to his editor if he wanted to kill the story.

“So you’re only following orders?” the leader snickered at the young reporter. The remark, Goldberg says, disgusted him.

“There’s still an expectation that Jewish newspapers will keep quiet on unsavory subjects in cause of The People. That’s a ghetto mentality.”

In fact, the paper received dozens of angry complaints over the story but no one threatened to cancel a subscription.

Still, if the Forward is going to fulfill its potential to become the binding that allows the often dispirited and disparate Jewish community to communicate with itself, it has a ways to go.

There are 10,400 subscribers and another 3,000 papers sold at newsstands. But Lipsky insists they are an important 13,400 readers.

“Don’t underestimate the impact you can have with a small circulation,” he says, name-dropping Jewish leaders who read the paper.

*

If there is a fitting legatee to founding editor Abe Cahan it is Lucette Lagnado who became executive editor of the paper last month.

Which leads to yet another ironic twist. For Lagnado, 35, has more in common with Cahan and the four white-haired men who still put out the the Yiddish Forward than Lipsky and most of the other English-edition staffers.

Like Cahan, Lagnado is an immigrant. She was born in Cairo and came to this country with her family when she was 6. Although she grew up in an Orthodox household, like Cahan, her ambition led her into the world of journalism.

Just as Cahan spent five years at the beginning of his career working for a maverick paper edited by prize-winning muckraker Lincoln Steffens, Lagnado’s first job in journalism was as an investigative reporter for Jack Anderson. This led her on a journey to write about the twins on whom experiments were done by Nazi doctor Joseph Mengele. She was the first reporter to assemble stories of these survivors and later put them in a book. Lagnado also worked for the New York Post and most recently was an investigative reporter for the Village Voice.

Oddly, though, she talks about her work and success with mixed feelings.

A part of her thinks she should be living where her parents did, she says, in Brooklyn among other Egyptian immigrants instead of on the fashionable Upper East Side. A part of her thinks that going to Vassar was a mistake because it took her away from her family. Yet she also seems to enjoy the attention she has been receiving since being named editor. The proprietor of Elaine’s never noticed Lagnado though she has been eating there for years. Now, she is greeted like other celebrities.

Actually, her divided loyalties between her Jewish culture and her secular success sound a theme about immigrant guilt that Lagnado says she hopes to filter into stories in the Forward.

But she restrains herself from being overly nostalgic.

“I have to ask myself what would my Jewish boyfriend’s family from (the suburbs) think of such an idea,” she says. “They would recoil from something too religious so I have to find the perfect formula if I want the Forward to have that passion it once had and yet speak of the present.”