Anti-semitism’s rise gives The Forward new resolve
NEW YORK — The Forward newspaper has chronicled the experiences of Jews in the United States for 120 years. Initially published as a Yiddish-language lifeline for those who fled hatred and strife in Europe, in recent years it had to work harder to stay relevant to a community now largely assimilated, finding new stories to tell about transgender rabbis, the challenges of interfaith marriage and even the “secret Jewish history of The Who.”
Then came 2016, and a sudden clarification of its mission that would be strikingly familiar to the publication’s founders: covering the rise of public displays of anti-semitism.
“There’s something different happening now,” Jane Eisner, The Forward’s editor in chief, said in a recent interview in her office, where a photo of the publication’s founder, Abraham Cahan, peered from the wall. “And here I’m speaking not just as a journalist, but as a close observer of the American Jewish scene. I feel it’s my responsibility as a writer and editor to illuminate that for people.”
Since the summer of 2016, about a year before The Forward went from being a weekly newspaper to a monthly magazine, it has beefed up its coverage of the so-called alt-right; assigned a reporter to go to white nationalist rallies like the one in Charlottesville, Va., in August, which featured chants like “Jews will not replace us”; and pursued more investigative reporting.
The latter effort led to The Forward’s report in March that claimed that Sebastian Gorka, a national security spokesman for the Trump administration until resigning in August, was a mem- ber of Vitezi Rend, a Hungarian nationalist group with a history of Nazi collaboration. The coverage has helped give The Forward a more than 60 percent lift in both donations and web traffic over the last year, according to Rachel Fishman Feddersen, the publisher and chief executive of The Forward, and Michael Sarid, the chief development officer.
“They bring what no one else can sell, and they can bring it and bring it, day after day,” said Ken Doctor, a news industry analyst. “They delve into things that are really in the background for others.”
According to the Anti-defamation League, there was a 34 percent increase in anti-semitic incidents in 2016 compared with the year before, and an 86 percent increase in the first quarter of 2017.
The Forward’s staff has firsthand experience. Eisner said the threats directed toward the staff during the presidential race — often through emails or social media — had invoked Holocaust imagery like gas chambers and included images of the anti-semitic meme Pepe the Frog.
“These are not creative people,” said Dan Friedman, the executive editor.
Still, “to some staff members, it was a little terrifying,” Eisner said at the publication’s Financial District headquarters, several blocks from The Forward’s birthplace on the Lower East Side.
The threats were serious enough that Feddersen decided to add more security measures, including a third door that requires an ID to pass through before reaching the office. When threats are made, The Forward now has a set process on how to report them to the police and the FBI; the whole staff has gone through emergency drills.
“We really took it seriously, and it wasn’t fun,” Feddersen said. “It was not why anybody gets into this business. But that comes with the job, so we kind of have to doit.”
It was especially jarring for The Forward’s roughly 25-person editorial staff of mostly young journalists, for whom anti-semitism in the United States had been something on the fringes that could be easily ignored — a generation that, in Eisner’s words, “grew up in Obama’s America” and took inclusion as a given. But it can be jarring even for Eisner, 61, who recalled recently walking by a church around the corner from her home on the Upper West Side that rents space to a synagogue, and seeing swastikas drawn on it.
“I’m written about on neo-nazi blogs. David Duke talks about me on his Twitter feed,” said Sam Kestenbaum, a reporter who focuses on anti-semitism and the alt-right, the far-right fringe movement that advocates a range of racist positions. “I knew that individuals received email threats, and certainly I did.”
When he tried to interview Andrew Anglin, the founder of the neo-nazi website Daily Stormer, Kestenbaum was told, “I don’t talk to Jews on the phone.” Kestenbaum emailed Anglin questions instead.
Kestenbaum has also written about the white nationalist Richard B. Spencer and tracked a group of Jews who embraced white nationalism.
The Forward also has Ari Feldman and Larry Cohler-esses, a senior investigative reporter, who wrote the article about Gorka and recently examined how President Donald Trump’s father was once arrested at a Ku Klux Klan rally. Feldman’s coverage has included reports about viral moments like students at an all-girls Catholic school who posted on social media about playing swastika beer pong and an analysis of how the line between alt-right and neo-nazi has thinned.
“What I’m sensing now is the commitment to doing the work,” Eisner said.