Forward Building

Forward Building

The chronicle of émigré life for European Jews making new American lives in the bustling immigrant metropolis of the Lower East Side, the Forverts (also known as the Jewish Daily Forward), was published here, on East Broadway, throughout the first half of the twentieth century. At its peak, the paper was among the most widely read newspapers in the country, serving the two million Jews who arrived in New York from Russia, Poland, Austria-Hungary and the Balkans between 1880 and 1920, helping integrate those immigrants, who frequently arrived in groups that had comprised whole villages or towns, into the wider, urban Jewish culture that was bubbling forth in the New World. The Forverts was not merely a rag of Americanization, however, but a formidable organ of contemporary social crusades, championing the causes of democratic socialism and trade unionship in the first half of the twentieth century, as well as introducing a new wave of Yiddish and Jewish writers to a consolidated, increasingly well-educated, public in New York (Isaac Bashevis Singer, Israel Singer, Sholem Ash are among the most well known today). The ten-story building, when erected in 1911, was the king of "Yiddish newspaper row," which stretched along East Broadway. In later years, as the Jewish population of New York gradually left the Lower East Side, so too did the paper--relocating in 1972 to a less impressive, midtown building, where the Forverts became a weekly, not a daily, and first began publishing an English edition.