T HEY CAME , for the most part, from a cloistered world that time and tragedy have dissolved. It was circumscribed by dogma and poverty and revolved around ritual. From homelands with names that have faded from maps of Europe—Galicia, Bessarabia, the Pale of Settlement—they traversed hostile countryside, boarded trains to Hamburg and Bremen, and packed into ships bound for di goldene medine.

Between 1880 and 1924 as many as 2.5m Jews came to America from eastern Europe. They were not the country’s first Jewish citizens: Sephardim (Iberian Jews) arrived in small numbers in the colonial period, and among the immense 19th-century wave of German immigrants were around 250,000 Jews. But this later cohort formed the foundation of what grew into a recognisably Jewish-American culture.

On the whole the immigrants were poor but relatively well educated: Judaism prized argument and exegesis, which require literacy. In daily life they spoke and read Yiddish (Hebrew was the language of prayer), a hybrid tongue perfectly suited to expressing what Irving Howe, a Jewish-American historian, called the “distinctive traits of the modern Jewish spirit at its best…an eager restlessness, a moral anxiety, an openness to novelty, a hunger for dialectic, a refusal of contentment, an ironic criticism of all fixed opinions.”

In 1897, a decade and a half after arriving in New York from Vitebsk (now in Belarus), a young socialist and writer named Abraham Cahan founded the Jewish Daily Forward—the Forvertz in Yiddish, the language in which it was published. By the mid-1920s its daily circulation was higher than that of the New York Times. Mostly read in and around New York, it had followings in Boston, Chicago, Detroit and Philadelphia and as far afield as Buenos Aires, Berlin, Warsaw and Tel Aviv. No Jewish periodical anywhere had a larger circulation than the Forward until Maariv, an Israeli paper, overtook it in 1968. It was based in the Lower East Side, the epicentre of Jewish America, but had bureaus across the country. An array of Jewish writers contributed, including Isaac Bashevis Singer, the sole Yiddish Nobel laureate for literature, who maintained his Forward column until 1991.

The Forward expanded into radio. Its station, WEVD , was named in honour of Eugene V. Debs, a five-time presidential candidate from the Socialist Party of America. The paper, and its readers, were so steeped in Yiddish that it did not publish an English edition until 1990. But it was not parochial. As Seth Lipsky, who launched that English edition, explains: “It was a general-interest daily in the Jewish language.” Unsurprisingly, it thrived on argument, and never shied from slaughtering a sacred cow. Despite his early socialist views, Cahan swiftly turned on Bolshevism; he visited the Soviet Union in 1927 and found life there even worse than it had been under the tsars.

The newspaper had an intimate side. It ran an advice column called “A Bintel Brief” (“A Bundle of Letters”), which began answering readers’ questions about their bewildering new country in 1906. The letters, and their answers, took a deeply Jewish, morally practical tone. “I am a ‘greenhorn’, only five weeks in the country,” explained one young man. “I come from Russia, where I left a blind father…I promised that I would send him the first money I earned in America.” The writer has managed some modest savings, but his work is tenuous. “I want you to advise me what to do. Shall I send my father a few dollars for Passover, or should I keep the little money for myself,” as a safeguard against future penury? “The answer to this young man”, explained the editor paternally, “is that he should send his father the few dollars [because] he will find it easier to earn a living than will his blind father in Russia.”

Another correspondent, another sticky situation. He is “a Russian revolutionist and a free thinker” who is about to marry. The problem is that his in-laws are still hooked on the opiate of the masses. Should he stick to his principles and alienate them, or grit his teeth through a synagogue marriage? The Forward’s advice—“there are times when it pays to give in to old parents”—will resonate with anyone who has endured overbearing elders.

The Russians were coming

Jewish immigration slowed after Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1924, which admitted newcomers in proportion to their nationality’s presence in America in 1890. During the second world war millions of potential emigrants were reduced to ash. Meanwhile second- and third-generation Jews whose families had made it to the golden land began to assimilate (including in their reading matter), as the Germans and Irish did before them. Yiddish became the language of the dwindling older generation—viewed from Jewish suburbs with affectionate nostalgia, as an ornament of comedy sketches rather than an everyday tongue. By the 1980s the Forward’s acculturative function was becoming superfluous. Some Jews were still arriving, but as J.J. Goldberg, who succeeded Mr Lipsky as the editor of the English edition, summarises, “they were assimilated Russians coming to become assimilated Americans.”

For a time the Forward published a Russian edition. A Jewish-American journalist who worked under Mr Lipsky fondly recalls the mix of staff: Hasidim from Brooklyn who laboured in Yiddish; secular American Jews who put out the English edition; fast-talking, conspiracy-minded Russians who wrote in their language. Even as the Yiddish readership aged and the Russian edition was sold in 2004, the Forward soldiered on. But paper is expensive, the industry is changing and everything must end: the last print copies will roll off the presses in April or May. The building in Manhattan that was once the paper’s headquarters now houses condominiums.

This does not mark the end of the Yiddish press: Di Tzeitung is published weekly in Brooklyn and caters to Hasidim, many of whom still reserve Hebrew for liturgy as their ancestors did, and wish to hold the secular American world at bay. Nor, even, does it mark the end of the Forward, which will continue as an online publication in both English and Yiddish. The business, says its publisher, Rachel Fishman Feddersen, remains “on firm financial footing”, committed to its mission “to create the best independent journalism and protect the Jewish-American soul”.

But in an age of atheism and intermarriage, what is that soul, and how best to protect it? That is the beginning of an argument—one that Abraham Cahan would surely have loved.