The Arts at The Emanuel / The Emanuel Players presents Forward!
New York – especially the Lower East Side – holds a special place in the imagination of American Jews. It was where many of our forebears got off the boat from Europe to start a new life in America. They struggled to rise, adapting their Judaism along the way. Guiding them was their Yiddish newspaper, the Forward. The paper and the neighborhood embodied an energy and spirit that lives on in American Jews today.
The Forward proved to be the newspaper that best understood and served an immigrant population eager to go from being “greenhorns” to being Americans. The play traces the origins of the newspaper in the strife-torn Yiddish labor movement from 1890-1903, as its longtime editor, Abraham Cahan, fights for control, and ultimately wins because his vision for the paper matched that of its readers.
