(Jewish Group) Introducing the Forward 125: The American Jews who shaped our world

Some are household names: pop-culture icons and Nobel Prize winners, Supreme Court justices and superhero athletes. Others were obscure individuals caught up in events that shaped society: the Triangle Shirtwaist fire and the Tree of Life massacre, firefighters who perished on 9/11, writers and producers blacklisted by Hollywood.

Their stories, and their impact, endure. The founders of Black Lives Matter and ACT UP. The creator of the first Yiddish cookbook in the U.S. and the inventor of modern jeans. Poets and publishers, actors and activists, rabbis and rabble-rousers, purveyors of kosher hot dogs and frozen bagels, Fanny Brice and the woman who played her on the big screen.

In celebration of the Forward’s quasquicentennial year — that’s fancy talk for 125th anniversary — we decided to take a walk back through history. Instead of compiling our annual Forward 50 list of influential American Jews, we created the Forward 125, with one entry for each year of our existence. Starting, of course, with the man who made our lists possible: Ab Cahan, the visionary founding editor who launched the Forward in 1897 with a 50-person collective, declaring: “Let’s publish a good, popular newspaper, content-rich and interesting.”

Putting together the list was a group project, with nearly every journalist on our staff, as well as our archivist, Chana Pollack, nominating candidates and unearthing fun facts about them. Special thanks to Matthew Litman, too, for creating the amazing photo collages sprinkled throughout this article, and Samuel Breslow, for fact-checking and copy-editing the project.

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Long read, but very interesting and informing!