41 years ago today, the Jewish Student Press Service (the wire service that preceded New Voices Magazine and the name of the organization that still publishes New Voices) was front page news in The New York Times.
Yesterday morning, I went by the American Jewish Historical Society, with the current JSPS board chair, Mik Moore. Back when Mik was the editor of New Voices (in the photo to the right, Mik appears in the Jewish Week in 1996), he handed the JSPS archive over to the Historical Society. One of the things we were there to do yesterday morning was look through that archive.
As we learned when we got there, the JSPS materials are part of a current project they’re doing to properly catalog their archive of the alternative Jewish press.
Seven boxes of JSPS materials on a cart were wheeled into a room with a conference table so Mik and I could poke around. I just happened to pull a box off the cart that just happened to have a folder in it with the New York Times clipping you see above and below. The fellow in the Times photo is David Twersky (of blessed memory) a legend of the American Jewish press and a founder of JSPS.
I’ve included a couple more photos below, where you can actually read a lot of the article. And if you’re not sure it’ll be worth your time to look at the enlarged photos and ready the story, let me give you a little spoiler: One part of the article discusses “a figure called ‘Uncle Jake,’ a kind of Jewish Uncle Tom who is so busy serving other people’s causes that he neglects the cause of his own people.”
If you click on these two photos you’ll be able to view the text a much larger, less squint-inducing size:
