Jewish World Review April 13, 2000/ 8 Nissan II, 5760

Eric Fettmann

Lipsky (r), with famed Yiddish writer, I. B. Singer

Forward's great
leap backward

http://www.jewishworldreview.com -- NEWS that Seth Lipsky is in the process of being forced out as president and editor of the newspaper he founded a decade ago -- the English-language edition of the venerable Yiddish paper, the Forward -- is profoundly distressing news. And not just to the New York Jewish community, which remains the paper's main target audience.

The wider ramifications of the ideologically driven campaign to oust Lipsky were immediately obvious by the prominent play that the New York Times gave last Saturday to an article on the dispute - a four-column headline at the top of page B3.

For to remove Seth Lipsky would not only be a monumental act of ingratitude, it would represent a despicable triumph for the kind of ideological fascism that demands slavish adherence to political orthodoxy at the expense of editorial independence and journalistic quality. Under Lipsky, the Forward has become a must-read paper: To miss an issue means you will miss at least one story of local and/or national political importance.

First, some background. The Jewish Daily Forward, founded in 1897, was the greatest name in Yiddish journalism in this town. Under its founding editor, Abraham Cahan, the socialist paper agitated for the rights of its working-class readership - mostly immigrants from eastern Europe - and helped them integrate into American society.

Over the past half-century, however, that immigrant generation has disappeared. Their children and grandchildren no longer speak Yiddish, and the Forward itself ended daily publication in 1983; the paper now survives as a small-circulation weekly.

As far back as 1980, Seth Lipsky - a neoconservative Wall Street Journal editorial board member and longtime Cahan admirer - had dreamed of carrying on the paper's crusading tradition, and keeping its rapidly vanishing name alive, by putting out an English-language edition for a new generation of Jewish readers.

From the start, there was dissent - on purely ideological grounds. At his first meeting with the directors of the Yiddish paper's owners, the Forward Association, he later wrote, "I felt a little like Judge Bork going before the Senate Judiciary Committee." Despite a tense interrogation, the Association eventually gave the go-ahead, and the English Forward was born in 1990.

Almost immediately, it gained a reputation for breaking important stories and developing talented young journalists - whose stories, incidentally, show no ideological bias on either side. Lipsky's editorials won notice, too - a few years back, he was the runner-up for a Pulitzer Prize in editorial writing.

But the old-line socialists and trade-union types on the Forward Association couldn't abide Lipsky's right-of-center political approach. As he wrote in an incisive 1997 article for Commentary, he was constantly "denounced as an unfit heir to Abraham Cahan." This despite the fact that Lipsky constantly went to the Yiddish Forward's old files to prove that his editorials were in sync with Cahan's own writings.

Attacked for his admiration of Vladimir Jabotinsky, the fiery Revisionist Jewish leader who was anathema to a generation of Jewish leftists, Lipsky found that the Forward had published an admiring eulogy in 1940, lamenting that Jabotinsky's death was "in the true sense of the word, a national catastrophe."

Assailed for defending America's role in Vietnam, Lipsky discovered that the post-Cahan Forward had not only endorsed the Gulf of Tonkin resolution that widened U.S. participation in the conflict, but also presciently warned when Saigon fell in 1975 that "the bloodbath will not cease, even after the cease-fire. Then the bloody revenge of the Communists against their opponents will only truly begin."

Indeed, wrote Lipsky, "every time I have dipped into the files of the Forward, I have found editorials ... hewing to what, in the contemporary context, can only be called a hard line." Certainly not conservative, of course, but without "any hint of wavering in the face of Israel's enemies."

Predictably, that hasn't assuaged his left-wing critics, who demand that the Forward adhere to the same politics that animated its founding a century ago. (Ironically, the same crowd waxes nostalgic for the New York Post's liberal past - although that ideology was 180 degrees removed from that of this paper's founder, Alexander Hamilton).

Perhaps the leading anti-Lipsky crusader has been Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, past president of the American Jewish Congress, who complains that "Lipsky is not staunchly for the welfare state" and once demanded that unless Lipsky was removed, the only "morally correct thing to do" would be "to close the paper."

That may be the end result. The Forward Association has rebuffed an attempt by its co-owner and financial angel, philanthropist Michael Steinhardt, to assume full control because he insists on keeping Lipsky. The staff, aghast at the current moves, has signed a letter warning that if Lipsky is ousted, "The Forward as we know it will cease to exist."

They're right --- and all New York would be a loser. What a shame that those who claim to be saving the Forward may end up destroying it --- by looking hopelessly backward.