Louis Miller and Di Warheit ("THE TRUTH")

This book tells the story of Di Warheit ("The Truth"), a Yiddish daily established in New York in late 1905. Its founder, Louis Miller (1866-1927), emigrated from Russia to the US in 1884, and by 1897 was the leader of a group that established the Forverts, later to be the most successful Yiddish newspaper in the United States. Common wisdom depict Miller's social leaning as stemming from ego and opportunism, but Ehud Manor suggests that his publishing philosophy was based primarily on ideological and political grounds. Why to begin his story in 1905? Because in that year 'The Jewish Question', especially in Russia with its pogroms, turned dramatic. Miller understood that the time had come for a paradigm shift. The result was labelled Klal-Yisruel Politics, a combined nationalist all-Jewish effort to ameliorate the Jewish condition' wherever Jews suffered or were oppressed. The drive behind Miller's decision to run Di Warheit was his eagerness to promote a progressive, non-radical and pragmatic political mind set among his immigrant brethren. This somewhat forgotten chapter in American Jewish history is told here in chronological order, mainly through the texts of Miller's newspaper. Each chapter is dedicated to the main issue that drove Miller's publishing effort at a specific time period, and in response to external events impacting on Jewry, until the management forced him out of Di Warheit due to his non-conventional interpretation of the war that broke out in Europe in 1914. This long-awaited book tells the story of a Yiddish-speaking socialist, who, after denying the very existence of a specific Jewish people, was open-minded enough to re-examine his beliefs and courageous enough to publicly change his mind. But he paid the price for telling, or at least trying to tell, that truth.