About The American Hebrew

The American Hebrew

The American Hebrew was an English-language Jewish weekly published in New York City from November 21, 1879, to September 14, 1956, under that exact title, with two long periods in between when mergers gave it combined names. For decades it stood, in the assessment of the National Library of Israel's Jewish press history, as the foremost Jewish newspaper in the United States, and the Jewish Encyclopedia at the turn of the twentieth century described nearly all the prominent Jewish writers and communal workers in the country as contributors to its pages. Its history is a history of founding idealism, coverage of persecution and immigration, and a long chain of mergers that eventually carried its lineage, under other names, into the Washington Jewish Week.

Founding in New York in 1879

The first number was published in New York City on November 21, 1879. It was founded chiefly through the efforts of Frederick de Sola Mendes, who, together with Philip Cowen, the publisher from the first number, interested several other persons in forming a corporation to issue the paper. That corporation was named the American Hebrew Publishing Company. The National Library of Israel's account adds that in November 1879 nine young, native-born American Jews established the paper — a detail that captures its character as a product of a new, American-born generation rather than of the immigrant press.

In its first issue the founders explained that their work would consist of untiring endeavors to stir up their brethren to pride in their time-honored faith. The paper sought both to serve the future historian and to be sought by the best classes of non-Jewish readers, and it took pride in broad coverage of Jewish life and in the amount of original material it published.

A Board of Editors and a Declared Policy

In its third issue the paper declared its policy in terms that the Jewish Encyclopedia quoted and that defined its early identity: it was not controlled by one person, nor inspired by one. Its editorial staff comprised men of diverse shades of opinion on ritual matters in Judaism who were determined to combine their energies for the common cause of Judaism. At the outset it was conducted by a board of editors, and to insure absolute impersonality the names of the board members were never published. The Jewish Encyclopedia noted that in its early decades only one change had been made in that board, made necessary by the death of a member.

Editorially, the same source said, The American Hebrew stood for conservatism in Judaism. Nevertheless its columns were open to discussion of views with which it could in no way accord, if those views might interest its readers. That combination — a conservative editorial stance with an open forum — helped it attract contributors across the range of American Jewish opinion.

Philip Cowen and the Publishing Company

Philip Cowen (1853-1943) was the paper's publisher from its first number and is remembered as the founder and head publisher of The American Hebrew. Born in New York City on July 26, 1853, he was active from 1878 to 1927, and later served as an immigration official. Reference accounts credit him and his magazine with a role in influencing the visibility of civil issues during and following the rise of Jewish immigration to the United States. Cowen died on April 20, 1943, in New Rochelle, New York, at the age of 89 — by which time the paper he had launched in 1879 had already outlived several of its rivals and absorbed others.

Romania, Russia, and the Defense of Jews Abroad

From its founding, The American Hebrew covered topics of intense Jewish interest internationally. During the persecutions of Romanian Jews that followed the signing of the Treaty of Berlin in 1878 — a treaty that had been expected to alleviate rather than aggravate their condition — the paper published a number of important letters on the subject from European writers. The Jewish Encyclopedia records that those letters led American Jews to exercise their influence on behalf of their suffering coreligionists abroad. Foreign persecution was therefore not background news for the paper; it was a founding cause, present in its first year.

The paper likewise covered the persecution of Russian Jews following the May Laws of 1881. Those events, and the Romanian persecutions before them, set in motion the migration that transformed American Jewish life, and The American Hebrew reported both the persecution and its American consequences.

Immigration and New Institutions

The paper reported on the large influx of Jewish immigrants that followed the persecutions in Romania and Russia and that significantly changed the demographics of Jewish Americans. It also covered the rise of institutions created to deal with that influx, including the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, which assisted newcomers, and the Hebrew Technical Institute, which provided modern education. In doing so it documented the building of a new American Jewish communal infrastructure — aid, education, and settlement — for a readership that included both established, largely German-origin families and the newer arrivals from Eastern Europe whose presence was reshaping the community the paper served.

That dual readership explains much of the paper's tone and ambition. Written in English rather than German or Yiddish, it addressed Jews who were already American in language and outlook, while reporting on a migration that was making American Jewry larger, poorer at arrival, and more diverse than the community of 1879 had been.

Literary Life and Emma Lazarus

In literary terms, The American Hebrew introduced and promoted leading figures in Jewish life. It covered the writing career of the poet Emma Lazarus extensively, including at the time of her death in 1887. Lazarus later became famous for her sonnet The New Colossus, which was inscribed on the base of the Statue of Liberty in 1912. The paper's attention to her during her lifetime places it among the publications that sustained a serious American Jewish literary culture in the 1880s, alongside its news and communal reporting.

Its contributor base supported that claim. The Jewish Encyclopedia's judgment that nearly all prominent Jewish writers and communal workers in the United States had contributed to its pages was made while the paper was still in its third decade. Music writer David Ewen was on its staff in 1935, an example of its continued recruitment of cultural writers well into the twentieth century. A later figure listed in reference works in connection with the paper is Bernard G. Richards, a Jewish communal writer and organizer.

Absorbing Other Jewish Periodicals

By the twentieth century The American Hebrew had absorbed several other regional and religious Jewish periodicals. It absorbed The Jewish Chronicle of Baltimore, Maryland, in 1880, only a year after its own founding. In 1886 it absorbed The Jewish Reformer, a weekly journal published for a time by Kaufmann Kohler, I. S. Moses, and Emil G. Hirsch — three leading Reform rabbis. In 1895 it absorbed Jewish Tidings of Rochester, New York. Each absorption extended its reach beyond New York and consolidated a crowded field of English-language Jewish weeklies into fewer, stronger titles, a pattern that would define the rest of its history.

Mergers and Changes of Name

The paper's later history is best told as a timeline, documented by the Library of Congress newspaper directory. It appeared as The American Hebrew from November 21, 1879, to December 26, 1902. After merging with The Jewish Messenger — a New York weekly founded in 1857 and edited successively by Samuel M. Isaacs and Abram S. Isaacs — it appeared as The American Hebrew and Jewish Messenger from January 2, 1903, to April 21, 1922. It then reappeared as The American Hebrew from April 28, 1922, to January 29, 1932.

After merging with the New York Jewish Tribune, it appeared as American Hebrew and Jewish Tribune from February 5, 1932, to October 24, 1935. It again reappeared as The American Hebrew from November 1, 1935, to September 14, 1956. That final twenty-one-year run under its original name is the longest of its later periods, and 1956 is therefore correctly given as the end of The American Hebrew as a title.

After 1956: The American Examiner and the Jewish Week Lineage

Following its merger with the Brooklyn publication The Examiner, the paper dropped its specifically Jewish title and was renamed the American Examiner, publishing from September 20, 1956, to October 15, 1970. Following its merger in 1970 with the Washington, D.C., publication The Jewish Week, it was renamed The Jewish Week and the American Examiner. In 1975 it was renamed the Jewish Week, and in 1983 it became the Washington Jewish Week. The American Hebrew thus did not so much cease in 1956 as lose its name in a merger, with its publication lineage continuing in Washington under successive titles. For cataloguing purposes, however, The American Hebrew itself is a New York weekly of 1879 to 1956, with the combined-title intervals noted above.

Place in American Jewish Journalism

The National Library of Israel's history of the Jewish press in the United States concludes that the paper set new standards in American Jewish journalism, reached out to a broad range of Jewish and non-Jewish writers, and, long after it had passed out of its original owners' hands, stood for decades as the foremost Jewish newspaper in the United States. Alongside The American Israelite of Cincinnati, it was a representative of the class of English-language Jewish weeklies that served an Americanizing community before the mass Yiddish press and, later, a new generation of English Jewish papers reshaped the field.

Its runs are preserved and studied today in part through historical newspaper collections such as ProQuest's Historical American Jewish Newspapers, which includes The American Hebrew and Jewish Messenger and describes its coverage of persecution in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe and the subsequent waves of immigration to the United States. For historians, that coverage — of Romania after 1878, of Russia after 1881, of the aid and education institutions built in response, and of figures such as Emma Lazarus — is the paper's enduring value.