The Stupification of The Forward: Becoming the Foghorn of the Secular Satmar

In 1988, shortly before Paul Novick, the last editor of the communist Morgen Freiheit died, I played a tape of a program I did on the Voice of Israel in Yiddish about his newspaper’s support of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in 1939, which gave Hitler the green light to attack Poland and start the Holocaust. He was an honest man and admitted that the Freiheit made many mistakes, including following Moscow’s party line in justifying the Palestinian Arab pogroms in Hebron in 1929 and 1930. This bloodletting decimated this ancient Jewish community. The communists justified the murder of Orthodox Jewish men, women and children by branding them as “Zionist agents of British Imperialism”.

The Communist Party’s justification of this atrocity was so vehemently condemned by the Forward’s newspaper and its radio station WEVD, that it inspired violence. Newsstands selling the Freiheit were vandalized and even set on fire, and Freiheit delivery trucks sabotaged. Mr. Novick was a principled man, and he eventually broke with Moscow and re-directed his paper towards support of the Jewish homeland.

Oddly enough, many years later in a meeting with Sam Norich, the general manager of the Forward, he was surprised when I asked him if his paper had become anti-Israel. I then told him that I remember that the front page of the Forwards was blue and white the day Israel declared its statehood. I even remember intermissions in programming of WEVD, so Tzvi Schooler could read kapitlach Tehilim (Psalms), when Israel was at war. What I couldn’t remember was one instance of the Forwards or WEVD aiding or abetting the Grand Mufti’s disciples, Arabs or Jewish ethnic dropouts, by providing them with free or even paid advertising. At that time extreme leftists like Naomi Dann’s rantings wouldn’t even be provided space in its dumpster. Yesterday’s Yiddish Daily Forwards strongly condemned a treaty with an Austrian Hitler, while this confused English weekly supports a treaty with an Iranian Hitler. It has degenerated into being the Jewish Jazeera.

With Jewish blood being spilled on a daily basis by Arab fundamentalist nazis, the Forward’s convoluted and terminally misguided form of journalism makes it one of them, and not one of us.(Netanyahu and Trump: A Shared Focus on Terrorism) (It’s Complicated: Politics of the South Africa-Israel Apartheid Analogy)

Please keep in mind that rags can be turned into good quality paper —- but they have succeeded in turning a good quality paper into a rag.

Daniel Levinson