The Press: The Victim of Success

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On Manhattan's drab Lower East Side, a group of aged journalists made a momentous break with custom. For the first time in its 65 years, the Jewish Daily Forward, a Yiddish language paper, began printing part of each issue in English. This was no territorial raid on the city's strike-silenced newspaper giants; it was a humble effort by the Forward to stay alive. Said Business Manager Adolph Held, a little sadly: "Now, maybe, our readers will show the Forward to their children."

The children of Forward readers do not read the paper, because they cannot. As the second-generation sons and daughters of Jewish immigrants, they have forgotten the mother tongue, that backward-running curious cross of Hebrew and medieval German. Like Yiddish itself, the Forward is an anachronism, born in a departed past to meet a need that no longer exists.

A Loss of Scholars. That purpose was to tell the Jewish immigrant, in his own language, about life in the bewildering new world. During its early years the Forward had a strong Socialist bent, but its paternalism was even stronger. "Since when is Socialism opposed to clean noses?" said the late Ab Cahan, editor from 1902 until his retirement in 1950, after some party member objected to an editorial that urged mothers to keep their kinderle stocked with clean handkerchiefs. Socialist polemics were leavened with simple lessons on civics, American history and the Constitution. Readers ventilated their problems in "Bintel Brief"—literally, bushels of letters—a service started by Cahan that still survives.

The Forward rose to great influence on the tidal waves of immigrants that broke over New York before and just after World War I. By 1918, it was strong enough to help break Tammany's hold on the Lower East Side and elect a Socialist, Meyer London, to the U.S. Congress. It encouraged and often led the organized movement of garment workers out of the city's sweatshops and into the I.L.G.W.U. In 1922 it reached a circulation of 225,000. But already the future had begun to close in. Restrictive new immigration quotas, enacted in the 1920s, dammed the Forward's transatlantic reservoir of new readers. The annual flow of Jews to the U.S. ebbed from a 1921 high of 119,000 to 11,000, and then to 7,000. Old readers, schooled by the Forward, confidently plunged into the new life, leaving their instructor behind. The Forward discovered that, too often, to Americanize a subscriber was to lose him.

Today, Forward circulation is down to 56,126 daily and 59,636 Sunday, and still dwindling. The paper has tried to meet its problems by emphasizing its role as a comprehensive general newspaper that just happens to print in Yiddish. It has fulltime correspondents in London, Paris and Israel, subscribes to both the A.P. and U.P.I, as well as the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. Among its 40 contributing editors and writers—most of whom speak Hebrew. Yiddish and English—are men who write in such specialized fields as theater, labor, TV and society. Socialism has softened into liberalism. The Forward looks with favor on John Kennedy, medicare and tax cuts, with disfavor on such traditional liberal targets as federal aid to parochial schools, the McCarran Act and racial segregation.