In 2016, the publication of the Yiddish version changed its print format from a biweekly newspaper to a monthly magazine;[4] the English weekly paper followed suit in 2017.

A Yiddish rendition of the Leonard Cohen song "Hallelujah", translated and performed by klezmer musician Daniel Kahn, garnered over a million views.

[6] The Forward's contributors include journalists Abigail Pogrebin,[7] Debra Nussbaum Cohen,[8] Sam Kestenbaum, and Ilene Prushner;[9] opinion columnist Deborah Lipstadt;[10] art critics Anya Ulinich[11] and Jackson Arn;[12] and cartoonist Liana Finck.

[15] The paper was founded by a group of about 50 Yiddish-speaking socialists who had organized three months earlier as the Forward Publishing Association.

[20] For the next four years, until 1901, Cahan remained outside of The Forward office, learning the newspaper trade in a financially successful setting.

[21] The circulation of the paper, which was described as "one of the first national newspapers,"[22] grew quickly, paralleling the rapid growth of the Yiddish speaking population of the United States.

In 1933–34, The Forward was the first to publish Fred Beal's eyewitness reports of bureaucratic privilege and of famine in the Soviet Union,[25] accounts of the kind that much of the liberal and left-wing press disparaged and resisted.

[27] In response to the first reports of atrocities against the Jewish population of German-occupied Poland, special correspondent A. Brodie complained of exaggerated dispatches and lack of facts.

But as accounts accumulated in the winter of 1939-40 of mass arrests, forced labor, massacres, executions and expulsions, the paper discerned the outline of the unfolding Holocaust.

[28] The best-known writer in the Yiddish Forward was Isaac Bashevis Singer, who received the Nobel Prize in Literature.

In 1953, The Forward took the position that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were guilty but held that the death sentence was too harsh a punishment.

[33][34] From 2013 to 2017, prior to the current format as a monthly magazine, The Forward was published as a newspaper in separate English weekly and Yiddish biweekly editions, and online daily.

[36] In August 2015, The Forward received wide attention for reporting from Iran[38] at a charged moment in American politics, as the U.S. Congress was ramping up to a vote on an accord reached the month before to limit Tehran's nuclear ability in return for lifting international oil and financial sanctions.

Assistant Managing Editor Larry Cohler-Esses was, in the words of The New York Times, "The first journalist from an American Jewish pro-Israel publication to be given an Iranian visa since 1979.

The decision to launch a Russian Forward in the crowded market of Russian-language journalism in New York followed approaches to the Forward Association by a number of intellectual leaders in the fast-growing émigré community who expressed an interest in adding a voice that was strongly Jewish, yet with a secular, social-democratic orientation and an appreciation for the cultural dimension of Jewish life.

[citation needed] Around the same time in 2004, the Forward Association also sold off its interest in WEVD to The Walt Disney Company's sports division, ESPN.

[42][43] Alana Newhouse, who authored what The New York Times called "a coffee-table book" (A Living Lens: Photographs of Jewish Life From the Pages of The Forward), was the paper's arts and culture editor.

[79] According to the magazine's website, this is not a scientific study, but rather the opinion of staff members, assisted by nominations from readers.