Doc Chat Episode Fifty-Four: Exploring 125 Years of the Forverts, New York City's Legendary Yiddish Newspaper
On April 28, 2022, Doc Chat wrapped its spring 2022 season with a glimpse into an influential Yiddish newspaper.
Morris Huberland, Forward Building, New York, NY, circa 1970; NYPL Digital Collections, Image ID: 5750794.
A weekly series from NYPL's Center for Research in the Humanities, Doc Chat pairs an NYPL curator or specialist and a scholar to discuss evocative digitized items from the Library's collections and brainstorm innovative ways of teaching with them. In Episode Fifty-Four, NYPL curator Lyudmila Sholokhova and NYU Professor Gennady Estraikh analyzed selections from the New York City-based Yiddish daily newspaper Forverts (Forward) and discussed its tremendous impact on generations of readers—and generations of scholars—since its founding in 1897.
A transcript of this episode is available here.
Below are some handy links to materials and sources suggested in the episode.
Episode Fifty Four: Primary Sources
The Forward/Forverts newspaper is available online and is OCR searchable. It is a part of the Historical Jewish Press Project and hosted on the website of the National Library of Israel.
Episode Fifty Four: Readings and Resources
Gennady Estraikh, Transatlantic Russian Jewishness: Ideological Voyages of the Yiddish Daily Forverts in the First Half of the Twentieth Century (Academic Studies Press, 2020).
Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976).
Ehud Manor. Forward: The Jewish Daily Forward (Forverts) Newspaper: Immigrants, Socialism and Jewish politics in New York, 1890–1917 (Sussex Academic Press, 2009).
Tony Michels, “‘Speaking to Moyshe’: The Early Socialist Yiddish Press and Its Readers” Jewish History, vol. 14, no. 1 (2000), 51–82.
Jacob C. Rich, The Jewish Daily Forward: An Achievement of Dedicated Idealists: The Extraordinary Story of a Unique Newspaper and Its Publisher, the Forward Association. (Knight Print, 1967).
Moses Rischin, The Promised City: New York’s Jews, 1870–1914 (Harvard University Press, 1962).
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