About The Jewish outlook. (Denver, Colo.) 1903-1913
Denver, Colo. (1903-1913)

The Jewish Outlook

"With a diversity of interesting contents quite unusual in a publication of its character, the first number of the Jewish Outlook has reached the public" the Denver Post reported in September 1903. The Jewish Outlook was the first Jewish affiliated newspaper published in Colorado and the unofficial organ of the National Jewish Hospital, a special charity hospital for the victims of tuberculosis who crowded to Denver for the curative powers of the Colorado air described as "an elixir to the breath and velvet to the cheek."

The publisher of the Jewish Outlook, Samuel Priess, aimed to not "deviate widely from the rules followed by Jewish publications but...to produce an up-to-date journal and to discuss matters of importance to Jews." The Jewish Outlook was published weekly in a magazine format. While primarily promoting the work of the National Jewish Hospital, the paper claimed to "stand for everything pertaining to Jewish interests, synagogal, and instrumental," chronicling the "most important foreign and domestic news and particularly concern[ing] itself with the doing[s] of Jews in the Rocky Mountain region." Despite these claims, the Jewish Outlook stridently opposed both Zionism and Orthodox Judaism.

In the paper's early years, Rabbi William S. Friedman served as editor of the Jewish Outlook. He was the young and popular rabbi of the Reform Temple Emanuel which had recently constructed a new building in Denver's affluent Capitol Hill neighborhood. Rabbi Friedman was instrumental in founding (and funding) the National Jewish Hospital and was described as "one of the most prominent workers in social reform in this country" with "a reputation throughout the country as a scholar and thinker as well as an orator."

The 1903 publication of the Jewish Outlook coincided with the formation of the Jewish Consumptives' Relief Society (JCRS), a venture launched by Denver's East European Jewish community leaders, which the National Jewish Hospital vociferously opposed in the pages of the Outlook. Rabbi Friedman endorsed a moderate approach to dealing with the teeming numbers of tuberculosis patients moving to Colorado for "the cure," by offering 90 beds for patients "who can be cured or whose condition can be sufficiently improved to fit them for work." However, in an early opinion piece, Rabbi Friedman excoriated the JCRS's plan to "help anyone afflicted with this dread disease and sent to Colorado" as "quixotic and chimerical" as well as "unwise and ill-advised." He considered the JCRS's appeal to American Jews to contribute to the work of the society as an "open invitation to the Jewish communities of the United States to send their penniless consumptives to Colorado," explaining that the "gaunt misery that now stalks our streets would be multiplied a thousand fold."

Rabbi Montague N.A. Cohen of Temple Emanuel in Pueblo, Colorado, took over as editor of the Jewish Outlook in 1907, while the following year Ben F. Rosenburg assumed proprietorship. The paper changed hands again in 1911 when it was purchased by a "syndicate of influential and wealthy gentlemen of the Denver Jewish community." At this time, Morris Friedman assumed the editorship and A. Rachofsky took over the business side. However, by 1913, unable to secure adequate support, the Jewish Outlook suspended publication, turning over its subscription list to Cincinnati's American Israelite.

Provided by: History Colorado