The ‘Forward’s’ woes deal the Jewish world a blow to the kishkes

ANDREW SILOW-CARROLL

He recalled how the Forverts would arrive at his family’s home in New York state’s rural Orange County, one of his parents’ few links to the bustling Jewish community downstate, and a window into a wider world.

“My father learned to be American from reading the Forverts,” dad told me.

I came to the Forward in its second generation as a revived weekly dedicated to treating its subject matter – the Jews – with the seriousness and curiosity they deserved. Seth Lipsky had reimagined the paper as a quality Jewish journalistic enterprise a decade earlier. His successor, JJ Goldberg, kept that spirit of inquiry alive, and as his managing editor, I managed to work with an array of people far more talented than I.

Under Jane Eisner, the Forward remained an incubator and farm team for excellence in writing about North American Jewry in the post-immigrant, postmodern and, as some warn ominously, post-Zionist era.

The news last week that the Forward, already reduced to a monthly magazine, is stopping its print operations altogether, and that key senior staffers, including Eisner, are being laid off, hit all of us in the industry hard. Personally, many of those let go are my friends. Professionally, it is an ominous sign of the state of Jewish journalism.

But you don’t have to be a Jewish journalist to bemoan the diminution of a storied news enterprise. Love it or hate it (and many people do), the Forward represents the kind of serious conversation that Jews need to be having in turbulent times. Its reporters have held Jewish organisations and leaders accountable to the people they serve. Its opinion pages raise important questions that we might otherwise be reluctant to discuss in public. They give voice to those – Jews of colour, Mizrachim, women, Jewish “renegades” – who too often are left out of the communal conversation. Most of all, it reminds us to think like adults, and put aside the kitsch and pablum that sometimes defines the Jewish discourse.

This week I took part in a Muslim-Jewish dialogue sponsored by the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America. The focus was the media’s treatment of our respective groups. I was reminded how lucky we are as Jews to have a mature and robust tradition of communal self-scrutiny. The Muslims in the room represented their communities’ critical thinkers, in all senses of that term. More than a few quietly bemoaned the lack of outlets for an honest and often uncomfortable discussion of the challenges facing them and their coreligionists. Although the Jewish discourse can often be coarse, and the intramural fighting ugly, I am always proud as a Jewish journalist to be in the thick of it.

As an industry, Jewish journalism is on the ropes. Weekly newspapers have been shrinking, many dying, for more than a decade, the result of the double jeopardy of economic and ethnic upheaval.

I wish the Forward, its staff and its alumni only good things. The Jewish world needs them. And if you doubt that, or are gloating over the Forward’s financial woes, you are arguing for a community that cannot discuss its most pressing issues honestly. You are trusting professional and volunteer stewards of multimillion-dollar nonprofits – your money, in other words – to police themselves. You are okay with tuning out political and ideological views with which you don’t agree. You are trusting the Jewish story to outsiders, and will not have the answers when others confront us with their versions of the truth.

The Forverts taught my Jewish immigrant grandparents how to be American. The revived Forward taught all of us how to think Jewishly in an era of assimilation and acculturation.

I hope a new Forward, and all of Jewish journalism, can rebound to teach us how to argue with one another, learn from one another, and love one another.

• The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the views of JTA or the SA Jewish Report.