Photo: http://www2.wwnorton.com/catalog/spring07/006269.htm

Library hosts new pictorial of Jewish life

By Susie Davidson

If a picture equals a thousand words, then the Norton release "A Living Lens: Photographs of Jewish Life from the Pages of the Forward" is a veritable cultural encyclopedia. The compendium of photos, letters and mementos discovered on the eve of the national Jewish newspaper’s 100^th anniversary will be showcased on May 9 at the Newton Free Library. Forward Arts and Culture editor Alana Newhouse, who edited the collection, will appear at the event. A book signing will follow.

An introduction by former New York Post and Daily News editor-in-chief Pete Hamill and contributors, who include Ruth Wisse, Deborah Lipstadt, J. Hoberman and Nathan Glazer, lend historic and philosophic perspective to the visuals. While the Forward originated on the Lower East Side and the pictured artifacts reflect the associated push-cart immigrant life that sprung from the shadows of the shtetl, they also encompass Jewish film and theatre stars, early immigrants to Palestine, labor rallies, baseball players and the Holocaust. Newhouse says that the book, like the Forward, has not only international and universal content, but local appeal as well.

“The paper has always been national in both its coverage and its readership,” she says, as she points out page 67’s shot, taken at a meeting of the Century Club at the Hebrew Home for the Aged in Dorchester, Mass.

Newhouse says this is no accident. “The Forward had fully staffed offices and local printing and distribution operations in six cities outside New York: Boston, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago and LA,” she says. Forward staff, she adds, were also present in Havana and Mexico City, along with full-time correspondents in London, Paris, and Israel, and part-time stringers in over a dozen other cities in Australia, Latin America, Europe and South Africa. (In the early 1920s, The Forward’s daily circulation surpassed that of the New York Times.)

Newhouse and archivist Chana Pollack designed the 9 by 12, 352-page hardcover in chronological fashion. From pogroms in Eastern Europe, to the diaspora, to Ellis Island, to educational and social advancements and outgrowths, to Matisyahu and Madonna, its pages chronicle the manifestations of the Jewish experience in this country.

“We hope readers see in this book what we do,” says Newhouse. “It is a remarkable visual history of Jewish life during one of its most dynamic centuries, as seen through the lens of the newspapers that have been there every step of the way.”

The Newton Free Library is located at 330 Homer St. in Newton Centre. For information, please call 617-796-1360.