This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. As a 21st-century staff writer at the Yiddish Forward, it’s always interesting for me to see how the newspaper was portrayed in other media during its heyday. If the Yiddish film “The Living Orphan” is to be believed, being a newsboy selling the Forverts was no easy…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. The Forward Association recently made the difficult but unavoidable decision to end the printed editions of the English and Yiddish Forward. Beginning in April, both periodicals will exist exclusively online. The reason is sadly understandable: The cost of maintaining a traditional news organization is simply too high….
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. It’s not a secret that the Forward historically promoted Jewish assimilation into broader American culture, encouraging its readers, among other things, to speak English, learn to make apple pie and play baseball. Still, I was a bit taken aback when my colleague, Forward archivist Chana Pollack, showed…
It’s 1947, and Abraham Cahan is sitting in his office at 175 East Broadway, listening to the radio broadcasts from London. Trumpets blare, crowds cheer on the grainy recording: Across the Atlantic, a jubilant Britain celebrates the nuptials of Princess Elizabeth to Philip Mountbatten, Duke of Edinburgh. “Half a million people stood in the streets…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Bad Rabbi: And Other Strange but True Stories from the Yiddish Press By Eddy Portnoy Stanford University Press, 280 pages $15.25 When the study of Jewish history began in the 19th century, it had two goals: To create an objective picture of the Jewish past and to…
The long-running slogan “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing” and the jingle “Pop pop, fizz fizz, oh what a relief it is,” secured the Alka Selzer brand into the consciousness of millions of Americans. But before “Plop plop, fizz fizz” there was a rabbi talking to a glass of the heartburn and hangover…
I would have sworn that the pumpkin-spice megatrend was started by Starbucks. But I would have been wrong. In an ad for condensed milk that appeared in the November 17, 1947 issue of the Forverts, alongside a recipe for coconut pumpkin chiffon pie, is ad copy says, “If you like pumpkin spice flavored pie…” The…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. A strand of DNA is a lot like computer software; it’s the blueprint for the complex computations that cells perform, and like a coding error in a computer program, a single mutation—either a deletion, insertion, or duplication—to the strand can cause cells to malfunction. But DNA doesn’t…
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