Adventures in Jewish Studies

The Association for Jewish Studies Podcast

Episode 35: Around the World with Jewish Newspapers

Transcript

Erin Phillips: Welcome to “Adventures in Jewish Studies,” the podcast of the Association for Jewish Studies. In every episode, we take you on an entertaining and intellectual journey about Jewish life, history, and culture, with the help of some of the world’s leading Jewish studies scholars. I’m one of your hosts, Erin Phillips, and today, we’ve got the scoop on Jewish newspapers.

You’ve probably heard of, or maybe even read, a Jewish newspaper. Publications like The Forward, The Baltimore Jewish Times, and The Jewish Chronicle have been bringing the news to the Jews for more than 100 years. Today, you can read Jewish newspapers most commonly in English or the native language of your country. But for much of the 19th and 20th centuries, diaspora Jews wrote, published, and read articles in Yiddish, Hebrew, Ladino, and other Jewish languages. It’s impossible to say for sure exactly how many of these papers have existed throughout history, but in almost any place where diaspora Jews have lived for any period of time, you can find a newspaper – often several. Studying these publications can be arduous work. Some are digitized, but many require pouring through physical archives that can be hard to access. Their language can be outdated and difficult to decipher. But the rewards of reading and analyzing them are many. Newspapers help us map Jewish communities and networks throughout history, and provide first-hand information about Jewish life in specific times and places. In their articles, op-eds, fiction, poetry, and even in their advertisements, they offer insights into the evolution of Jewish languages, ideologies, and politics. Sometimes, they illuminate deep tensions within historical communities. Today, we’ll open up four papers from around the world – Hamagid, Europe’s first Hebrew newspaper; Di Presse and Di Yidishe Tsaytung, two Argentinian Yiddish papers with a deep rivalry; and La Vara, the longest-running Sephardic Ladino paper in America. We’ll learn about what these papers covered, what they can tell us about the Jewish communities they served, and their historical impacts.

[Musical transition]

Societies have found multiple ways to distribute the news throughout history. But in the early 19th century, advancements in printing technology ushered in the era of modern printed newspapers. One of these early papers was Hamagid.

Philip Keisman: Hamagid means the preacher, or the teller, and it's founded in 1856 at the end of the Crimean War. 

Phillips: This is Philip Keisman, Director of Teen Education at The Jewish Theological Seminary, and lecturer on Jewish history at The New School.

Keisman: It's founded by a man named Eliezer Lipman Silberman, who lives in Lyck, which is a town in modern day Poland, but was at the time under Prussian occupation. 

Phillips: Hamagid was the first weekly newspaper published in Hebrew, though it began as a biweekly. For the main body of the paper, Eliezer Lipman Silberman would scour a variety of periodicals from across the continent, translating and reprinting news articles he thought would be relevant for his audience.

Keisman: Hamagid stakes a claim in its first issue to be designed to help Jews understand how the end of the Crimean War, and then, more generally, world events are going to affect them. So, you will find reports on train lines being built. You'll find reports on wars, coronations, big historical events. And then you'll also find a number of curiosities. You'll find sermons, divrei Torah. You'll find poems. I find it curious that if you open up an issue in the spring around the holiday of Passover, you'll find a poem dedicated to Passover. But you'll also, if you open up an issue on the eve of the coronation of a German Prince or the birthday of the czar, you'll find a poem dedicated to them.

Phillips: While other Jewish papers with similar aims sprung up around the same time in Yiddish and German, Hamagid’s dedication to the Hebrew language set it apart. Hebrew served two main purposes for Silberman. First, it helped to create a unified sense of Jewish identity for his readers across national borders. Second, it sent a religious message to reform-minded Jews. By the time Hamagid began publishing, thinkers from what was known as the Jewish enlightenment, or the Haskalah, had brought the study of Hebrew into the academy. They saw Hebrew as a scholarly language, a valuable gateway to analyzing texts and history. This thinking troubled Silberman.

Keisman: So that's the background in which the reactionaries like Silberman seek to maybe, like, slow down the cart a little bit. Hebrew is not just, of course, the language of philosophy. It was first the language of prayer and the language of the Torah and the language of most Jewish ritual. And it becomes a useful mechanism to reach audiences across borders without deep knowledge of European languages. So, Hebrew is imagined as a mechanism to talk across boundaries. It's a mechanism to take the battle to the Reformers on their own terms.

Phillips: Because Silberman sought to preserve the religiosity and tradition of Hebrew, he drew his word and grammar choices exclusively from the Torah, the Hebrew Bible. The language was unique and anachronistic – completely different from the modern Hebrew you’d see today in Israeli newspapers like Haaretz.

Keisman: There is no word, rakevet, which is modern Hebrew for train. And so Silberman takes two Biblical words, maslul, which means trail, and barzel, which means iron. And he says, when he refers to a train, he refers to a railroad, he refers to a maslul barzel. This is a word that will never be used. It's a little curiosity.

Phillips: Another curiosity of Hamagid was its groundbreaking distribution system. Silberman lacked the robust funding and sleek operations of many emerging papers of the time. He relied on networks of volunteers to distribute the paper, especially in the Russian Empire.

Keisman: The railway system in German speaking lands is much more sophisticated than the railway system in the Russian Empire. As a result, Silberman needs a way to get the newspaper into the hands of people in the Russian Empire who want it. And he needs a way for potential readers in the Russian Empire to get their subscription fees to him. And he creates a small army, a couple hundred people, of me'asfim, which means gatherers, who volunteer on behalf of the newspaper in order to collect sums of money, send them to Silberman from centralized locations, and then Silberman will send them a package of newspapers, and they will distribute them to local readers. 

Phillips: While the Russian Empire required the most intricate distribution system, Silberman got Hamagid into the hands of readers everywhere with the help of volunteer distributors in major cities. And in many cases, these same volunteers were also his journalists and contributors.  

Keisman: The newspaper writers do not seem to have been paid at least in the early stages through 1880 and they are not only providing volunteer labor as writers slash translators. Every time a volunteer emerges in a new city, that's a new press network to tap into. So Henry Vetiver, who would move to New York later and become a prominent Rabbi here where I'm sitting, becomes linked into Hamagid in Edinburgh as a volunteer. He begins translating local accounts of the British press, and he becomes a major conduit of those stories about Asia and Africa. So, he's not only writing, he's also translating. He's doing so for free. 

Phillips: Thanks to Hamagid’s innovative and scrappy approach to publication, reporting, and distribution, it was read during its heyday by Jews in cities around the world. Its audience was mostly men – Hebrew was predominantly read and studied by men at the time. But its ideas became universally influential nonetheless. As a result, Phillip Keisman sees Hamagid as central to an emerging cohesion among global Jewry – resulting in more organized campaigns around philanthropic, social justice, and political issues.

Keisman: 1878 is the end of the second war between the Russian Empire and the Ottomans, the Turks. It ends with the Congress of Berlin. The Jews of Germany sent a delegation to advocate on behalf of the Jews in Southeast Europe that have been conquered or are run by the Ottomans. They want the European powers to pressure the Ottomans to pledge to treat the Jewish minority well. This advocacy, this organization, can only happen because there is simultaneous, or near simultaneous encounter with the same information by Jews around the world.

Phillips: Hamagid was a key driver of emerging transnational Jewish advocacy. But its reporting wasn’t without bias or agenda.

Keisman: Hamagid is deeply enmeshed in European colonial visions, especially the British. This is both because of where it gets its news from – British newspapers – and I also think it is part of a growing understanding – maybe a growing misunderstanding, but there's a consensus that's beginning to form – that the Jewish communities in Asia and North Africa will do best if they are ruled over by European powers. And so, there's this not quite implicit – it's pretty explicit – pro colonial attitude. 

Phillips: This attitude paved the way for political Zionism to become a central component of Hamagid as it emerged in the late nineteenth century. The paper’s writers and editors, including Silberman and his successor, David Gordon, saw political Zionism as a cure for the plights of Jews around the world under what they considered, quote unquote, “uncivilized” governments.

Keisman: David Gordon is also born in Poland but then he moves to Lyck to study with Silberman. He will become famous because in 1864 in the pages of Hamagid, he will write a lengthy article that promotes the buying of land in Ottoman Palestine by European Jews, and he will eventually become a major adherent of Zionism until his death in the 1890s. He will become Hamagid’s second editor. So, he starts as Silberman's assistant. Then in 1880 he takes over as editor. There is a real political shift that takes place in the newspaper with Gordon's ascent, which is an alignment more and more with political Zionism. And that becomes a major hallmark of the paper, as it does for a lot of the Hebrew language press in the lead up to the twentieth century.

Phillips: Hamagid was aligned with many of the Jewish and Hebrew publications that emerged around it, and were often inspired by it, throughout the late nineteenth century. And while it maintained its important role as a leader and trailblazer into the 1890s, it began to face challenges.

Keisman: So there was a hiatus in August and September of 1890 and then there's a return with a letter from the editor, then Yitzhak Fuchs, who describes an ason, a disaster, prompting the move. It's not clear to me right now what that disaster was. He moves the paper to Berlin, and then shifts the content towards literature more. And then in November 1892, just about two years later, there's another two month hiatus, and then it comes back with the title Hamagid Ha-Hadash, the New Hamagid, which it will carry until its demise in 1903.

Phillips: In addition to rapidly changing leadership and location shifts, Hamagid met its end due to changing times. By the turn of the century, it had inspired and paved the way for a number of other Jewish and Hebrew newspapers who were rapidly professionalizing and modernizing. Hamagid became a relic, but its legacy lived on.

Keisman: Look, I think Hamagid is an incredible transitional moment for Jewish media. It utilizes what was, in the 1850s, really modern modes of production and consumption, distribution, in order to bring to a wider audience this idea of the news. But Hamagid, because it is so rooted in a particular model of Hebrew language, and perhaps because its funding mechanism is kind of rooted in the mid-nineteenth century and doesn't update into the late nineteenth century, it becomes less useful as time goes on. People do what Hamagid does. They do it better. But Hamagid shows us maybe a moment of transition for the Jews of Europe in their consumption of media.

[Musical break]

Phillips: Europe was not the only place, however, where twentieth-century Jews were consuming media in new ways. 

Zachary Baker: Between 1898 and 1989 there was a total of 337 Jewish periodicals in various languages that were published in Argentina during those years. Yiddish is, of course, one of the main languages during the earlier period.

Phillips: This is Zachary Baker, the Reinhard Family Curator Emeritus of Judaica and Hebraica Collections in the Stanford University Libraries and a core team member of the Digital Yiddish Theatre Project. In his extensive research of the Argentinian Yiddish press, he’s found two daily newspapers that rose to particular prominence, in part due to their salacious rivalry: Di Yidishe Tsaytung and Di Presse.

Baker: So, Di Yidishe Tsaytung – and it had a Spanish name, Diario Israelita – was first published in 1914 and it lasted for 60 years, until 1974. And although there had been earlier attempts to publish a daily Yiddish newspaper in Argentina, this was the first one that lasted. And really from the outset, it was a politically centrist and Zionist oriented newspaper, although some of its writers had started out very much on the left. Di Presse, its first issue came out at the beginning of January, 1918, in other words, four years after Di Yidishe Tsaytung. And a fair number of its early employees had seceded, if you want to use that word, from the staff of Di Yidishe Tsaytung. And the establishment of Di Presse was connected to the fact that the Jewish community of Argentina was growing and becoming more diverse politically. And it was founded also in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. And its orientation, especially in its first 20 years, was as a radical leftist and parentheses progressive daily newspaper. And the two papers were rivals, and often bitter rivals.

Phillips: While both papers reported global, national, and local news, their priorities and angles differed considerably.

Baker: Di Yidishe Tsaytung prided itself on being a newspaper with an underlining the words ‘news.’ It published fairly in depth news articles, not only about Jewish interests, but also, especially, about Argentine politics. And so, like other Yiddish newspapers in countries where Jews immigrated, like the United States, Canada and elsewhere, it was a vehicle for orienting Jewish immigrants, Eastern European Jewish immigrants in the new country, in the version of America that they had decided to settle in. In contrast, Di Presse’s news coverage – that is, its national and world news coverage – was really truncated. The front page, there'd be a banner headline about the big news story of the day, but the article about that story might be two paragraphs long, and that's that. Inside, though, you would find extensive, extensive political commentaries, coverage of Yiddish culture, literary contributions.

Phillips: While Di Yidishe Tsaytung targeted a middle-class audience in comparison to Di Presse’s working-class readers, both papers distributed tens of thousands of copies daily. Despite their healthy readerships, though, the business models that sustained them were drastically different – and in alignment with each paper’s political leanings.

Baker: Di Yidishe Tsaytung was owned by an individual named Matia Stolar. That is to say it operated under purely capitalist entrepreneurial premises, and it had an editorial board, and it had journalists who were paid, and it had correspondents who freelanced for it, both domestically and overseas. Di Presse, it started out initially as a partnership between a number of people who had previously worked for Di Yidishe Tsaytung and now came over to this new paper and others. And they didn't have a lot of capital to work with, so then they issued shares that people bought. But that, too, didn't raise the needed capital, and they eventually, just a few years after they started, turned into a cooperatively owned business. The employees, or a number of the employees, who worked for Di Presse had stakes in the business, and it was run as a cooperative. 

Phllips: With many of Di Presse’s staff defecting from Di Yiddishe Tsaytung, political and personal animosities flourished in the pages of both papers – particularly their literary and theater commentaries. Two cultural writers, Yakob Botoshansky at Di Presse, and Shmuel Rozanski at Di Yidishe Tsaytung became particularly bitter enemies.

Baker: Rozanski wrote a negative review of a play in which Botoshansky was involved in. Botoshansky responded in the pages of Di Yidishe Tsaytung that Rozanski doesn't know a thing about how to put on a play, and even what it means to be a dramatist. Di Yidishe Tsaytung actually published a doctored photograph showing Botoshansky flanked by somebody who was openly known and identified as a pimp and one of his prostitutes who worked for him. Shortly thereafter, Di Presse published the whole photograph, undoctored, and you see it's a group photograph. It was taken on a boat. And Botoshansky, in his response, called this a blood libel, and he said, at the time I did not know that this couple were involved with the sex trade.

Phillips: While these two papers were at ideological and personal loggerheads, they faced many of the same political and cultural hardships during their runs. Argentina could, at times during the twentieth century, be a difficult place for free Jewish expression.

Baker: The period 1945-55 is the Peron period – Juan Peron, who was the strong man who was president of Argentina during that period. The Peronist government set up its own Jewish establishment organization in counterpoint to the official organization, the Daya, the delegation of Jewish associations that was the, let's say, the political representation, political mouthpiece of the Argentine Jewish community. So, a parallel organization was set up by the Peron government or by Peronist elements. 

Phillips: In addition to political uncertainty at home, the middle of the twentieth century brought increasing upheaval abroad. Events in Europe changed the tone for both papers, but particularly for the leftists at Di Presse.

Baker: Di Presse, in the early 1950s, really definitively split from the Communist Party of Argentina in terms of its attitude towards the repression of Yiddish culture in the Soviet Union. And that is one factor that put it in closer affinity, if not alignment, with its rival, Di Yidishe Tsaytung. There was the whole issue of the attitude towards Israel on the part of both papers. In those years in Israel, and really until the 1970s, the Labor Party was dominant politically in Israel, the labor alignment that is. And in that respect, both papers, while supporting Israel, they're aligned politically in terms of the lay of the land in Israel itself. So, whatever differences there may have been before regarding Israel and Zionism in that period were more muted than in the past.

Phillips: As time went on, increasing social mobility among Argentinian Jews created more overlap between the audiences of the two papers, and they became less interested in polemics against each other. In fact, before they both closed up shop for good, both papers eventually wrote about each other with respect and even admiration. The 50th anniversary issue of Di Yidishe Tsaytung featured an editorial expressing warm greetings and congratulations from Di Presse. And in turn, Di Presse’s 50th anniversary issue included an article by its longtime enemy, Shmuel Rozanski, honoring one of the paper’s founders and editors. Time blunted the radicalism of both papers, allowing them to see themselves as part of one Yiddish print culture in Argentina. But time also, eventually, left both papers behind.

Baker: It reflects a process that was going on in all areas of Jewish, Eastern European, Yiddish-speaking mass immigration. A new generation arose and Yiddish was not its first language. And in fact, it was not a language that people, the younger generations, were reading anymore. You saw it in New York with almost all of the Yiddish newspapers. I saw it when I was working as a librarian in Montreal in the 1980s. The last Yiddish paper there, Der Keneder Adler, closed, I think, in 1987 it had been around for 80 years and when the immigrant generation passed on, the language was not transmitted, at least not in a mass level. And even, I would say, earlier, when the papers were still coming out daily and seemed to be viable enterprises, their cohort of writers was passing on. 

Phillips: For several decades, Di Yidishe Tsaytung and Di Presse documented the diverse and sometimes radical cultural and political dynamics of Argentinian Jewry. The Yiddish language they published in was central to their unique voices in the Jewish community of the time. Today, the copies that are available – which are admittedly limited – provide scholars like Zachary Baker a valuable window into a historical, geographical, and linguistic cross-section of Jewish history.

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Phillips: While the Yiddish press in Argentina was shifting and changing, another Jewish community in the Americas was also finding its voice. One of the most popular Ladino newspapers in the United States, La Vara, published its first issue in 1922.

Devin Naar: La Vara is published in New York on the Lower East Side, first on Forsyth Street and later on Rivington Street, which was, you know, this is like the Lower East Side, the center of like Jewish American memory. But there's also this adjacent Sephardic Jewish space that intersected with and overlapped, and in some ways, was separate from the Yiddish space. 

Phillips: This is Devin Naar, Isaac Alhadeff Professor of Sephardic Studies, Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies, and Chair of the Sephardic Studies Program at University of Washington. 

Naar: La Vara’s founders, the editors and the editorial team, are these three guys from Salonika who had varying associations with the socialist movement in Salonika, which was the largest workers movement in the Ottoman Empire, and it was a predominantly Jewish enterprise, and so coming to the United States, they get involved in labor organizing. They get involved in socialist politics. The main figures in La Vara are Albert Levy, who is the editor in chief, Moise Soulam, who is the satirist in chief, and Albert Torres, who's the business manager. 

Phillips: In addition to bringing their socialist politics to the paper, the founders of La Vara wanted to recreate the unique style of Sephardic journalism from their homeland, the Greek city of Salonika. Salonikan newspapers were funny and irreverent.

Naar: One of the defining features of La Vara was its interest and emphasis on humor and satire. And in fact, that helps us explain the title of the newspaper, which is La Vara, which means the stick or the staff. And the masthead had a figure with a big staff beating some other figures on top of the head. And the slogan, which I'm paraphrasing, is essentially to beat the hypocrisy out of those people who think that they're in charge of the community or in charge of the state.

Phillips: La Vara ‘s sharp political commentary earned it popularity around the world. While its core readership remained in New York, it had tens of thousands of readers worldwide, and agents operating in cities like Los Angeles, Istanbul, Havana, and Paris. But despite its editorial success, advertising sales alone weren’t enough to financially support the newspaper.

Naar: What seems to be the case is that what really enabled the newspaper to continue so long was its side gigs. They would print wedding announcements and invitations. They would print marriage contracts. ketubot. They would do other kinds of printing jobs for Sephardic organizations: stationery, annual gala booklets. But their main source of revenue seems to have been actually the printing of coat check tickets. Because – why? – one of the niches that Sephardic Jews wound up being overrepresented in in the early 20th century were guys who were working in the coat checks. 

Phillips: La Vara was a newspaper by and for working class Sephardim – right down to its business operations. And the paper tackled some of the most pressing questions working-class Sephardim grappled with. For example, the debate about whether to hold onto a more vernacular style of Ladino, called judezmo, that included Greek and Turkish elements; or to move the Sephardic community towards a more formal, Spanish-ized style of Ladino.

Naar: And this became ideological to a certain degree, especially in the 1930s where Sephardic Jews are trying to figure out, what is the future of our culture? What is the future of our language? Are we going to tie ourselves with the Jewish community? Maybe we'll have a better chance of perpetuating our collective selves If we tie ourselves with the broader Spanish speaking world – Spaniards, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Mexicans. And if we're going to do that, maybe we need to make our Spanish more Spanish. And what happens there is that some of the the pro hispanicizing, pro spanishizing contributors to La Vara get so involved in it that their style of writing becomes incomprehensible to some of their readers. So, some of the letters to the editor will come in – in the 1930s this really begins to happen – and say, “al estimado redactor,” to the dear editor, I cannot read your newspaper articles anymore because we speak Ladino and you are writing in Spanish that just happens to be written in Hebrew letters. And I don't know what you're saying.

Phillips: The pages of La Vara were a staging ground for some of the Sephardic community’s most important debates – not just around language, but around identity, connection to the broader Jewish community, and politics. By the 1930s, global events began to elicit shifts on the Sephardic left that were illustrated in, and in part driven by, La Vara.

Naar: By the time we get to Roosevelt, there is a pivot among two of the three main figures here to the Democratic Party, to the New Deal Democratic Party. So, they moderate their politics as a process. I mean, this is parallel to Jewish communities more generally, and some of the Jewish press, the left leaning or radical Jewish press in general. Some of it becomes a little bit more moderate, at least, you know, anti communist. And we can see that play out also among La Vara, which also in the 1930s changes its masthead and its image in response to the changing times. So, it creates a much more streamlined masthead that no longer focuses on the satire. So, the person with the staff beating the hypocrisy out of these cartoon characters is gone, and we have a masthead that focuses on emphasizing more of a sense of unity.

Phillips: La Vara still relied heavily on satire, but in the 1930s, it took a backseat as the paper’s radical politics softened. World War II and the Holocaust drove new crisis organizing efforts, as well as conversations about political Zionism in the paper.

Naar: An embrace of Zionism becomes a much stronger component once we get to the period of the war, the Second World War, where there is a real sense of crisis about where are Jews going to go, and fleeing Salonika and Rhodes and other places, not being able to get into the United States. So, there's a real, practical kind of concern that emerges in the pages of La Vara that is tied to a historical connection to the land. But the caveat around the other local inhabitants, the Palestinians, remains part of the conversation. It is not swept away completely, although there will be different approaches that are taken in the press, some that are much more interested in being cautious and reflective on the consequences of Zionism for the Palestinian population, and there are those that will embrace what their detractors call an ‘Ashkenazi Zionism,’ which is less concerned about the status of the of the Palestinian population. There is tremendous attention on the developments of the war with specific focus on Sephardic Jewish communities in the eastern Mediterranean. So, for example, even before the war itself starts, when Mussolini issues his racial laws that impact the Jews of Rhodes – which was part of the Italian Empire at the time in 1938 – there is a tremendous organizing effort among the Sephardic community to try to come to the aid of the Jews of Rhodes to help some of them get out if they can. And then when the war extends its reach into Greece in 1940 and 1941 again, tremendous emphasis on trying to raise funds to support the Jews of Salonika and of Greece.

Phillips: La Vara became a key source in mobilizing American support for Sephardic Jews abroad impacted by the war. But it also became concerned with impacts on the Jewish community more broadly.

Naar: In 1933, another thing that La Vara does is it helps organize the various Sephardic mutual aid organizations and societies to participate in the 1933 major demonstration in New York City to protest the Nazi book burning. They describe the kinds of messages that justify their participation, which say, well, it's not affecting us and our people but it's affecting fellow Jews, and we feel a sense of solidarity with them. And they also link it to the Inquisition. And they say, the burning of the Jewish books by Hitler is an echo of medieval book burnings that have directly impacted our communities. So, we have to stand up, and we have to participate.

Phillips: While this burgeoning sense of connection between Sephardim and other Jews led to powerful solidarity during the war, it also aligned with a trend towards assimilation that would mark the decline of Ladino print culture. As time marched on, Sephardim increasingly thought of themselves as American Jews, and Ladino languished, as did the newspapers that used it.

Naar: The changes that are intensified after the war are already visible, especially in the 1930s, which is a new generation coming of age, a new generation that is English oriented, that is speaking English more and more with their siblings, with their friends, certainly at school, even if, for many of them, they didn't speak a lick of English before they entered public school, even if they were U.S. born. That's changing. So, there's a great emphasis on English. And so, in the mid-1930s La Vara introduces an English language page to try to cater to a new generation, or try to cater to those that are interested in getting some of their Sephardic oriented culture in English. And the other thing that develops is the folks are getting older. And really, in the wake of the war, beginning around 1945, La Vara becomes a one man enterprise at the initiative of Albert Torres, who had been the business manager. So, these factors contribute to, ultimately, the demise of the paper in 1948 which is also symbolic, in many ways, because this is also the moment, the year of the establishment of the State of Israel. And so, in some ways, retrospectively, some of the Sephardic Jews will look at that end point of the newspaper as also the start of a new beginning, of an effort to really imagine and activate the Sephardic community as part of a broader global Jewish nation that now has an emergent homeland.

Phillips: While La Vara’s demise signified an important turning point in Sephardic relations to the broader global Jewish community, it also represented a great loss. Records indicate that La Vara may have been the last Ladino newspaper in the world. So, it's important to understand its legacy as both a historical document and a driving force behind Sephardic thought movements in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s. 

Naar: The editor of a major Ladino newspaper in Istanbul talked about how his Ladino journalism was trying to create a Torah in the current moment for Ottoman Jews, like it's the story of us now. And while La Vara’s editors did not make that same argument, that is what the newspaper did. It is the most rich and most diverse resource that we have available for entering into the Sephardic world – the Ladino speaking Sephardic world – from the 1920s through 1948. And we really get a sense of what the contours of the Sephardic community were at the time, how they shifted, what the geographic expanse is, what the ideological orientations and debates were, who the main figures were, the way in which that community saw itself, and its relationships with its adjacent communities, the broader Jewish community.

Phillips: This is the power of not only Ladino newspapers, but Jewish newspapers throughout history. Every detail in their pages provides clues about Jewish life in a particular time and place – the advertisements in their margins, the letter to the editor, the cartoons, even the news articles they choose to excerpt from other publications. For his part, Zachary Baker urges scholars to consider how newspapers not only provided an outlet for those historical debates, but how they helped influence them.

Baker: Everyone who does modern historical research goes to the press at some point, but they've kind of taken it for granted and not viewed it as an actor as opposed to as a source – an actor in history, as opposed to a source for research.

Phillips: Philip Keisman, our Hamagid expert, takes it one step further. Turning back to Jewish newspapers, as both a source and an actor in history, he argues, can not only help us understand the past. It can help us conceptualize the future.

Keisman: There's so many other things that historians can deal with. What I think I try to do, and what I think the most exciting scholars are doing with the Jewish press is they're turning a gaze back on the press that is informed by the digital turn, not just because I can get these newspapers and search them in my pajamas in New York City, but also because so much of our ideas about communication, about knowledge claims, about authorship, are being disrupted actively by social media, by AI. It raises the question, well, what were newspapers disrupting? How did the advent of this new communication technology change the ways in which Jews and people conceptualize the world? 

Phillips: Scholars will be answering that question in new ways for years to come. What we do know is that more than a century of modern Jewish print culture has left the diaspora with a vastly different linguistic, religious, cultural, and political landscape. And while their influence may not be as great as in the 1930s, papers, digital outlets, and zines continue to voice and mold Jewish thought today. Jews are often called the people of the book – but I think, and perhaps scholars would agree, that somewhere in the twentieth century, they also became the people of the newspaper.

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