About The American Israelite

The American Israelite

The American Israelite was founded in Cincinnati, Ohio, on July 15, 1854, as The Israelite, a weekly newspaper created by Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise. Wise had arrived in Cincinnati in April 1854 to serve Congregation B'nai Yeshurun, the congregation later known as Isaac M. Wise Temple, and he began work on a newspaper almost immediately after taking up that pulpit. The paper was renamed The American Israelite in 1874, and it outlived repeated predictions of an early death to become the oldest English-language Jewish weekly in America, second in age only to London's Jewish Chronicle, which had been founded in 1841.

At the moment of its founding, the venture looked improbable. No Jewish journal was then published west of the Alleghenies, and the number of American Jews who read English comfortably was still comparatively small, since much of the immigrant community read German or other languages. Wise nevertheless intended a national newspaper from the start, describing his aim as a weekly devoted to the religion, history and literature of the Israelites, and he built the paper around correspondents who sent dispatches from Jewish communities across the country.

Founding in Cincinnati in 1854

Wise, who had emigrated from Bohemia in 1846 and had previously served a congregation in Albany, New York, before moving west, brought to Cincinnati a programme that reached far beyond one synagogue. The Israelite became the printed instrument of that programme. Its first issues were published by Charles F. Schmidt, but the arrangement was brief and costly: the paper lost six hundred dollars in its first year, Wise repaid the publisher from his own funds, and Schmidt then ended the relationship.

From the issue of July 27, 1855, publication passed to Edward Bloch and the Bloch Publishing Company. Bloch was Wise's brother-in-law, and he went on to become a major figure among American Jewish publishers. That family connection gave the young weekly a more durable business base, even though its early finances remained precarious and its editor was also carrying the duties of a congregational rabbi.

A Motto and Two Stated Purposes

From its first appearance the newspaper carried the Hebrew motto rendered in English as Let There Be Light, a motto it retained. Behind that device stood two practical purposes. The first was to spread the principles of Reform Judaism, the movement of which Wise became the leading American organiser and which later generations described him as fathering in the United States. The second was connective: to keep Jews who lived singly or in communities of only two or three families in small towns in touch with Jewish affairs and with their own religious identity.

That second purpose explained much of the paper's geography. Its influence ran well beyond Cincinnati, into the growing Jewish communities of the Midwest and the South, where a weekly arriving by mail could be the only regular link between an isolated family and organised Jewish life. The paper was read in places that had no rabbi, no Jewish school and no other Jewish publication, which gave its religious instruction and its community news a weight that a purely local journal would not have carried.

Die Deborah and the German-Language Companion

In 1855, a year after the founding, Wise started Die Deborah as a German-language supplement to The Israelite. The supplement recognised the reality that many of his intended readers were German-speaking immigrants for whom an English weekly alone was not enough. Die Deborah later appeared as a separate journal in its own right.

The pairing of an English weekly and a German companion helped the two publications attract a large combined circulation, and historians of the Reform movement have credited both with helping that movement spread across North America in its formative decades. Die Deborah did not long survive Wise's death in 1900, whereas the English paper, by then long renamed, continued under his sons.

Content: Dispatches, International News and Serial Fiction

A typical issue in Wise's lifetime mixed several kinds of material. Correspondents filed reports on Jewish communities around the United States, the paper carried international news of Jewish interest, and it published historical and theological articles alongside ordinary news items from across the Jewish world. For readers in remote settlements, that mixture served simultaneously as newspaper, religious teacher and communal bulletin board.

The front page had a distinctive character during Wise's editorship: it was devoted primarily to instalments of serialized novels of Jewish interest, written by Wise himself and by others. Wise wrote a number of novels that appeared first as serials in his own paper. Fiction, in other words, was not filler in The Israelite; it stood at the front of the paper, on the assumption that a story would hold the household readers whom the editor also wanted to instruct and organise.

A Voice Against Prejudice

The paper also functioned as a defence organ. Wise later recalled, in his own account of the paper's early years, how cheap fiction and the general press of the day trafficked in hostile caricatures of Jews, and how little protest those caricatures had drawn. His response in The Israelite was deliberately combative: he answered attacks on Jews, Judaism and the Talmud in forceful, sometimes pugnacious editorials, and he credited that fighting posture with silencing some opponents, winning recognition for the paper beyond the Reform camp alone, and encouraging readers who had concealed their identity to stop being ashamed of being Jews.

That defence work sat alongside the paper's religious advocacy. Reference works summarised the combination by noting that, besides serving as the leading organ of American Reform Judaism, The American Israelite forcefully defended the civil and religious rights of all Jews, whether or not those Jews shared Wise's Reform theology. A rival paper, Isaac Leeser's The Occident, had greeted the new weekly in 1854 by predicting that it would prove short-lived; The Israelite survived, while The Occident and the other Jewish papers of that moment did not.

The Paper as an Organising Tool

Wise used his columns to campaign for institutions that did not yet exist. For years he urged American ministers and congregations to form a union that could end what he saw as religious disorganisation, and in July 1873, at a meeting in Cincinnati, the Union of American Hebrew Congregations was organised, beginning with twenty-seven synagogues. The organisation later became the Union for Reform Judaism.

A second long campaign in the paper pressed for an educational institution to train American rabbis. That campaign succeeded in 1875, when Hebrew Union College opened in Cincinnati with Wise as president of its faculty, a post he held for twenty-five years. In 1889 he also founded the Central Conference of American Rabbis. The newspaper, the union, the college and the rabbinical conference formed a connected set of creations, and the paper was the medium through which the other three were first argued into being.

Everyday Reach in the South and West

The paper's practical usefulness to distant congregations can be seen in small items as well as in manifestos. In 1858, for example, members of Congregation B'nai Israel in Memphis, Tennessee, advertised in The Israelite for their first rabbi, at the same time as they advertised for a kosher butcher. A single advertisement of that kind captured the paper's role: it was the noticeboard through which a new congregation in a river city could recruit both spiritual leadership and the basic services of Jewish communal life.

Because its correspondents and advertisers were scattered nationally, The Israelite remained national rather than local in scope for decades. That breadth was still its character through the 1920s, long after many other Jewish weeklies had settled into serving a single city.

Renaming and Physical Form in the 1870s

Beginning with the issue of July 3, 1874, The Israelite was renamed The American Israelite. The change was intended to bring the title into line with the ideas the paper represented, presenting it explicitly as an American Jewish journal rather than a congregational or regional one. The renaming did not narrow its coverage, which continued to address Jews in the United States and Jews around the world.

By 1879 a typical issue ran to eight pages of a very large format, twenty-eight by forty-two inches. A subscription then cost four dollars a year, or five dollars if the four-page Die Deborah supplement was included. A sister publication, The Chicago Israelite, was started in 1885, extending the family's publishing operation into the other great Jewish centre of the Midwest, and the two papers promoted themselves to advertisers on a reputation for accepting only clean advertisements from reputable houses.

The Wise Family Succession

The paper remained in the Wise family for more than seventy-five years. Wise's son Leo Wise became business manager in 1875, served as publisher in 1883 and 1884, and then again permanently from 1888 after an apparent rupture with Bloch. Leo gradually took over the principal editorial functions from his father, although Isaac Mayer Wise remained active on the paper until his death on March 26, 1900, writing an editorial for it only a few days beforehand; the issue of March 29, 1900 announced his death to readers.

Ownership then passed to Leo Wise, who was editor and publisher from 1900 to 1928, with his brother Isidor Wise also associated with the paper from 1907 to 1928. By 1900 The American Israelite, combined with The Chicago Israelite, claimed a circulation of more than thirty-five thousand, about twelve thousand of it in Ohio and Illinois and the rest spread across almost every other state as well as Canada and Mexico. The trade publication Printers' Ink credited the papers with the largest guaranteed circulation of any Jewish newspaper in the United States, and a book published in 1902 described The American Israelite as the leading Jewish newspaper in the country and a national journal of the Jews.

Sale, the Segal Era and a Local Turn

In 1928 Leo Wise sold the paper within the family, to his brother Rabbi Jonah Wise of New York and to his sister, Mrs. Adolph S. Ochs, the wife of the publisher of The New York Times. Jonah Wise edited the paper from 1928 to 1930. In 1930 the two sold it to Henry C. Segal and his brother A. L. Segal. Henry Segal had joined as managing editor in 1928 and became editor and publisher in 1930, remaining in that role until his death in 1985; his brother subsequently left the paper for the printing business.

The paper's scope narrowed in the same period for structural reasons rather than editorial choice. By the 1930s many American Jewish communities had established papers of their own, so The American Israelite no longer carried the network of correspondents' dispatches from other communities that had defined it in the nineteenth century. Instead it concentrated on news of Cincinnati's Jewish community together with national and international news of interest to Jews living there, and by the middle of the twentieth century reference works described it, in reduced form, as a local community bulletin.

Survival into the Twenty-First Century

Despite that contraction, the title that Schmidt had published at a loss in 1854 and that The Occident had expected to die quickly lasted into the twenty-first century. As publishing technology changed, it added a website and a podcast, adapting the same weekly habit of addressing a defined Jewish readership to new media. Its longevity rested on the foundations laid in its first two decades: a clear religious programme, a national network of correspondents, a willingness to defend its readers in print, and a family succession that kept an editor named Wise at the paper from its founding in 1854 until 1930.