Yiddish Newspapers
The Messenger
The Messenger was established by a Rabbi and American immigrant, Samuel Myer Isaacs. Isaacs was from London, and was one of the first Rabbis to lead services in America in English when prior options were Hebrew or German. Isaacs and his sons Myer, Isaac, and Abram assisted their father in establishing The Messenger, a bimonthly paper written by the Isaacs and Samuel Myer Isaac’s students. Eventually becoming a weekly newspaper, The Messenger took favor to Reform Judaism in the years it was edited by Isaac’s son Myer. The paper was absorbed by The American Hebrew in 1903.
The edition on display covers The Dreyfus Affair, one of the most notable cases of anti-semitism in history, where Alfred Dreyfus, the sole Jewish French Army captain at the time of defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. Investigators saw that the Germans were aware of French deployment into Germany in advance, and Dreyfus was pinned as a spy, sending a wave of anti-semitism across France. Correspondents from all over the world came to cover Dreyfus’ trial, where he ultimately was found guilty.
The Forverts
The Forverts (The Forward in English) came forty years after The Messenger and were published in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The editing portion of the paper was taken over by Abe Cahan, born in Lithuania and coming to New York at the age of 1922. He was initially a journalist with the Socialist Labor Party and wrote articles for their paper, the Arbeiter Zeitung. The left-leaning Forverts featured news stories, photography, and aimed to boost unionism and socialism.
The paper also featured a section called “A Bintel Brief” (A Bundle of Letters). Readers wrote their own stories in the pages, and were able to communicate and be reunited after traveling to America, find new homes, or just write down the difficulties of struggling to get by in America. Currently, the paper is being produced in English, with bi-weekly Yiddish editions as well. The paper used to be called The Jewish Daily Forward, but received the name change as part of an overhaul to make the paper more relevant to modern readers.