Chana Pollack is the Forward’s archivist. Contact her at pollack@forward.com.
Chana PollackArchivist
By Chana Pollack
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News Influenza 1918, a look back: Deutsch Bros. Furniture gives flu prevention tips
On October 6th, 1918, the Forverts published NYC’s health commissioner’s latest rules to help stop the spread of influenza. All stores except for groceries were ordered to close no later than four pm. The Forverts, likely aware of skeptic LES locals — new immigrants and do-geboyrene (American born) folks alike — emphasized this decision was…
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News Influenza 1918, a look back: Homes Must Now Be Heated, Says Board of Health
FYI: Reading the Forverts of early winter 1918, with the influenza epidemic ramping up and an election forthcoming, the paper sounds eerily like today’s news. The Forverts reported nearly 3,000 cases of influenza in the city and a commissioner who thought it wasn’t serious (10/10/18). At the tail end of the article, they placed an…
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Culture ‘The Plot Against America’: How the Forward reported the transformation of Charles A. Lindbergh
Philip Roth’s “The Plot Against America” is in some ways his least speculative book. Many of the characters, including Roth, his brother and his parents, are real, and most of the events that precede his counterhistory — where Charles A. Lindbergh becomes president in 1940 — truly happened. Roth’s Newark, was a thoroughly Jewish, if…
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Yiddish World At 93, an erotic Yiddish poet finally has her moment
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Yiddish erotic poetry: Who knew? Well, if you attended a recent book party for poet Troim Katz Handler’s new bi-lingual collection, Simkhe/Celebration, you would have learned that intim is Yiddish for intimate, that bager means desire, that kitsl-tsingl is the word for clitoris and that fantasye shutef…
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Culture ‘If not for the Forward, I’d never have been born.’
“So much happened in that time. My dad was really a great guy — I guess you could say, in the end, that he was a salesman. “ This is a love story from another time, a saga that transcends borders. Our tale begins in Poland, where Harry Korniarski was born, and winds its way…
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Opinion ‘Blood Flows Like Water And People Fall Like Flies,’ The Forverts Remembers The Great War
In April, 1915, as The Great War was raging in Europe, your favorite Yiddish newspaper had 176,125 daily readers, according to the masthead’s circulation figures. The United States had yet to enter the fight, but The Forverts covered it aggressively. And on April 9th, New York-based editors and publishers of foreign language newspapers who differed…
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Culture Behold The Treasures Of Our Print Archives
Jackie Kennedy holding up a copy of The Forward; animation characters created by the Fleischer studios; Lower East Side residents in a matza riot; everyday life in Algeria, Mandate Palestine, the Upper West Side of New York and the ball fields and boxing rings of America. All of these images were created by press plates,…
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Culture Preserving Our Print Heritage On Eldridge Street
If you come to the Museum at Eldridge Street to see the Forward’s old, photo-engraved press plates dating from the 1920s to the 1950s pressed into dreamy photo-mechanical prints, shot through with half-tone black and white inky dots, you’ll get to see how our paper, and most newspapers, once presented photographs. Since metal type and…
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Yiddish World New Los Angeles Yiddish scene continues a long tradition
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