Forward through history

The Forward has been through many incarnations since it was founded in 1897.

It retains its DNA — it’s a Jewish newspaper that aims to reach the entire Jewish community — but otherwise the Forward today would be entirely unrecognizable to its founders.

Back then, it was a Yiddish-language daily, aimed at the immigrants and immigrants’ children who made up most of the Jewish community. It was printed — had anyone suggested the possibility that one day it would be available online, that person would be ignored at best, and more likely shunned as insane and babbling gibberish. (What’s this “online”?) Presumably it was printed with cheap ink on cheap paper and stained its readers’ fingers.

Of course, over time, everything changed. The American Jewish community became more settled, more broadly American. Yiddish never disappeared — in fact, it’s resurging a bit now — but it no longer was the lingua franca. And the vanishing readership made a daily publication harder to sustain. So in 1990, the Forward began publishing in English, as a weekly.

Sam Norich is the Forward’s former publisher and CEO; he’s retired from those active positions now, but he’s the president of the Forward Association. On Thursday, November 21, he’ll talk about the Forward for a meeting of the Bergen County section of the National Council of Jewish Women. (See below.)

He plans to discuss the ways in which “the digital revolution has transformed media consumption, and the way that people read or look at images.” Should a news source be a daily or a weekly? A news cycle is about a minute long now, so it has to publish constantly. And social media is omnipresent.

“The outcome of all of this is that instead of having three or four sources to look at for news and information, people have hundreds of sources,” Mr. Norich said. “And that makes a person budget time far differently, more carefully — or not. People might simply choose to be bombarded by whatever TikTok sends their way. For some people, that means that they don’t read anything regularly, and for other people it means that they choose how to apportion their time.

“It’s really time that you’re competing for as a publisher, far more than eyeballs. The difference between time and eyeballs is how much time people actually spend with you, and how often they come back. It is a question of engagement rather than the number of drive-by viewers who see one of your articles and never come back again.”

So how does it work?

“It means that if a digital publication wants to grow its engagement with its readership, it has to understand the readership. It has to be part of the news cycle, meaning that it has to post its information on a topic that is in fact being discussed by many others, perhaps for a few hours, or perhaps even for a few days, but it has to be current. So that imposes constraints on the type of writing, on the breadth of the coverage, on the staffing — all those things are affected.”

The Forward today “has the largest circulation among American Jewish publications,” Mr. Norich said, although the largest-circulation Jewish publications are Israeli. He’s talking about English-language news sources, he clarified; most Israeli news platforms make their profits by also printing Hebrew-language actual rather than virtual newspapers.

Today’s Forward is online only. After becoming a for-profit publication in the late 1960s, in 2001 it reclaimed its status as a nonprofit; most of its funding comes from memberships, although it does sell advertisements and has other revenue sources as well. It used to own a radio station, WEVD — its call letters came from the initials of the Socialist leader Eugene V. Debs, although by the time the Forward acquired the station, in 1931, its politics became more centrist. The Forward’s own political leanings had made that same journey.

In order to stay afloat during one of its more tenuous periods — it’s had a few of them — the Forward sold WEVD in 2003. “A lot of people resented selling it, but that sale was essential to maintaining the newspaper,” Mr. Norich said. And because the Forward’s audience, American Jews, is niche, narrowcasting rather than broadcasting “makes more sense, and that is what a print and digital newspaper and podcasts do.”

The Forward is not rooted by geography; it’s not a local newspaper and is free to tell whatever stories it chooses. The flip side of that can be the lack of a cohesive community, although it doesn’t necessarily have to be. Or, as Mr. Norich puts it, “We don’t have a local community, although someone once said to me that ‘You are local in 200 cities.’ That’s maybe because we speak to a national Jewish niche, and we tap into things that may be happening most starkly in one particular place but is a phenomenon that people understand as being local to them. What happened in Pittsburgh didn’t stay in Pittsburgh. We try to report on local events that have national significance, and I think that we do that quite well.”

Mr. Norich’s path to the Forward was logical, if lucky.

“I was born in Germany, two years after the end of World War II,” he said. “My parents were Polish Jews who survived the war.” The family lived in two DP camps near Munich and then briefly in that city before moving to the Bronx when Sam was 10. He went to a public elementary school, then to Bronx Science, and then to Columbia. The family’s language at home was Yiddish.

After college, Mr. Norwich went to graduate school at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. That’s where he met his wife, the artist Deborah Ugaretz.

“In 1971, we started a Jewish co-op on Langdon Street in Madison that we called Kibbutz Langdon,” he said. “We lived there for three years, and it existed until 1984 as a co-op for 30 Jewish students each year. When it folded, there was something like $170,000 left over, and we had written into the bylaws that the people who lived there when it closed could not divvy up the proceeds for themselves. They had to be used for a nonprofit. So we started a foundation, it lasted for another 13 years, and finally we gave away the remaining proceeds to the Jewish studies program in Madison and the local Hillel, and a few other places.”

There was a TV documentary made about Kibbutz Langdon, Mr. Norich said. When he and Ms. Ugoretz took their two then-teenaged daughters to see it, the girls were mortified by the sight of their parents as hippies, proving that they’d raised entirely normal kids, because who’d like to see their parents like that?

So there was Mr. Norich, deeply Jewish, fluent in Yiddish. What to do? Among other professional and lay positions, from 1980 to 1992 he was the executive director of YIVO, the Institute for Jewish Research that’s now headquartered on 16th Street in Manhattan. “After that, I worked solo for five years, writing studies and grant applications for the Foundation for Jewish Culture, for Yossi Beilin” — a liberal Israeli politician, peace activist, and public servant — “for the Center for Middle East Peace and Economic Cooperation. I had gigs — but not a job.”

In 1997, he was recruited to become the Forward’s publisher and CEO. In 2016 he retired as publisher and the next year he retired as CEO, moving over to the lay leadership to become president of the association. That’s the position he holds today.

“We switched to being fully digital in 2019,” he said. “That was the last big call under my leadership. And that also coincided with my decision to retire. I was not the one who should lead the Forward in the digital era. That’s why we brought in Rachel Fishman Feddersen as publisher. She had digital experience since the beginning of digital, 20 years earlier. She was the person for that. I was not.”

The chair of the Forward’s board of directors — “the responsible body,” Mr. Norich said — is Alan Silberstein of Tenafly, another Munich-born, Yiddish-speaking son of Polish Holocaust survivors. The two men and their families are good friends.

Mr. Norich and Ms. Ugoretz lived in Teaneck, in the same house, “for 30 years, to the day,” Mr. Norich said. But when the Forward moved to Maiden Lane, in way-downtown Manhattan, his commute became increasingly unpleasant, so more than a decade ago he and Ms. Ugoretz moved to Brooklyn Heights.

Mr. Norich is deeply proud of the Forward. “To understand its success, you have to look not only at what’s changed but also at what hasn’t changed,” he said. “The Forward regards the lives of common folk to be as significant and as interesting as the lives of intellectuals, wealthy people, and leaders of organizations. It looks at our lives not from above but from below, and it finds information worthy of reporting about the lives of the people who are reading it.

“Most people on the right regard the Forward as leftish. Most people on the left do not regard it as rightist or leftist. They see it as seeing both sides.

“Our editor, Jodi Rudoren, sees that as the correct way to see it. It has the intention to bring together disparate voices at a time when the Jewish community, as well as the nation, have been more divided than ever before in my memory.”

That is a goal in which the Forward succeeds, at least in his judgment, Mr. Norich concluded.

Who: Sam Norich

What: Will talk about “The Forward: Your grandparents’ and your grandchildren’s Jewish newspaper”

Where: At Temple Emeth in Teaneck

When: On Thursday, November 21, at 12:30 p.m.

For whom: The Bergen County section of the National Council of Jewish Women

How much: Members, $10; nonmembers, $20 (applicable toward $60 membership)

For more information: go to www.ncjwbcs.org or call (201) 385-4847.