In this presentation, Samuel Norich, president of the Forward Association, the not-for-profit publisher of the Forward and the Forverts, will provide an overview of the role the Yiddish Forward has played for American Jews for the past 120 years. He will examine the features and innovations that made it the most widely read Jewish publication in the world for the first six decades of the 20th century, and now make it a resource for historians and others delving into the Jewish communities of America and Europe of those times.
Samuel Norich has distinguished himself as an analyst of American Jewry's communal structures. He is the author of "What Will Bind Us Now? A report on the institutional ties between Israel and American Jewry." He is the youngest person ever to have been elected a vice president of the World Jewish Congress, a position he held from 1975 to 1981. From 1980 to 1992, he was executive director of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, the world's pre-eminent institution devoted to the documentation and study of the modern history and culture of East European and American Jewry. During his two-decade tenure as chief executive of the Forward Association, its publications broadened their reach, raised their already acclaimed journalistic quality, and took the lead among American Jewish publications in meeting the challenges and capitalizing on the opportunities of digital media.
Born in a Displaced Persons camp in Germany in 1947, the son of Polish Jews, Mr. Norich emigrated to the U.S. with his family in 1957, and was educated at Columbia, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and at the University of Wisconsin. He and his wife Deborah Ugoretz have two daughters and live in Brooklyn.