Seth Lipsky - The Rise of Abraham Cahan

Dont believe that there was a time not long ago when a socialist daily newspaper in New York Citypublished in Yiddish!commanded the attention not only of millions of Jewish immigrants but also of presidents and foreign leaders? Read this magical book. It will transport you back to some of the most tumultuous decades the world has ever known, as seen through the life of a fearless newspaperman whose paper didnt simply cover events; it changed the course of them.

JONATHAN MAHLER , author Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning

A riveting account of Abraham Cahans life and times. Cahan was as complex as he was courageousJewish immigrant, social democrat, labor organizer, anti-communist, our earliest neoconservative. Seth Lipsky is another fearless and brilliant newsman, and no one could have told Cahans story better. This is a book to savor and remember.

PETER KANN , Pulitzer Prizewinning reporter and former publisher of The Wall Street Journal

Abraham Cahan was at the forefront of the postwar battle against communist subversion of the labor movement and powerfully helped to save Europe from the tyrannies of Stalinism, though he had arrived in America as a revolutionary socialist on the run from the Tsarist secret police. Lipsky has given his story pulsating life.

SIR HAROLD EVANS , editor at large, Reuters, and author of The American Century

JEWISH ENCOUNTERS

Jonathan Rosen, General Editor

Jewish Encounters is a collaboration between Schocken and Nextbook, a project devoted to the promotion of Jewish literature, culture, and ideas.

PUBLISHED

THE LIFE OF DAVID Robert Pinsky
MAIMONIDES Sherwin B. Nuland
BARNEY ROSS Douglas Century
BETRAYING SPINOZA Rebecca Goldstein
EMMA LAZARUS Esther Schor
THE WICKED SON David Mamet
MARC CHAGALL Jonathan Wilson
JEWS AND POWER Ruth R. Wisse
BENJAMIN DISRAELI Adam Kirsch
RESURRECTING HEBREW Ilan Stavans
THE JEWISH BODY Melvin Konner
RASHI Elie Wiesel
A FINE ROMANCE David Lehman
YEHUDA HALEVI Hillel Halkin
HILLEL Joseph Telushkin
BURNT BOOKS Rodger Kamenetz
THE EICHMANN TRIAL Deborah E. Lipstadt
SACRED TRASH Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole
BEN-GURION Shimon Peres with David Landau
WHEN GENERAL GRANT EXPELLED THE JEWS Jonathan D. Sarna
THE BOOK OF JOB Harold S. Kushner
THE WORLDS OF SHOLOM ALEICHEM Jeremy Dauber
THE RISE OF ABRAHAM CAHAN Seth Lipsky

FORTHCOMING

ABRAHAM Alan M. Dershowitz
MOSES Stephen J. Dubner
BIROBIJAN Masha Gessen
JUDAH MACCABEE Jeffrey Goldberg
MENACHEM BEGIN Daniel Gordis
THE DAIRY RESTAURANT Ben Katchor
FROM PASHAS TO PARIAHS Lucette Lagnado
YOUR SHOW OF SHOWS David Margolick
MRS. FREUD Daphne Merkin
MESSIANISM Leon Wieseltier

Copyright 2013 by Seth Lipsky

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Schocken Books, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House Companies.

Schocken Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

A portion of this work appeared in the Forward.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lipsky, Seth.
The rise of Abraham Cahan / Seth Lipsky.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references.
eISBN: 978-0-8052-4310-9
1. Cahan, Abraham, 18601951. 2. Jewish journalistsUnited StatesBiography. 3. Authors, YiddishUnited StatesBiography. 4. Forverts (New York, N.Y.). 5. Yiddish newspapersUnited States. I. Title.

PJ 5129 .C 27 Z 75 2013 839.133dc23 [ B ] 2013006773

www.schocken.com

Jacket photograph of Abraham Cahan courtesy of the Forward Association
Jacket design by Brian Barth

v3.1

For Amity

A portrait of Abraham Cahan is the first thing that greets a visitor to the Forward in New York City. It attracted me from the moment that I, then a young newspaperman in my midthirties, first stopped by the papers editorial rooms. It was early in 1983. Published in Yiddish and known as the Forverts, or Jewish Daily Forward, it had recently retreated to weekly publication with an English-language supplement. I was there on a quest to bring out a new, full-scale national Jewish newspaper in English, one that would start as a weekly, eventually become a daily publication, and most important, bear the legendary Forward name.

This was seen by many at the time as an improbable venture, but I had become an admirer of Cahan years before, though even today Im not exactly sure how this came about. I admired him as a newspaperman: in particular, as editor of the Yiddish-language daily that he had helped found one hundred years earlier and had built into one of the first national newspapers, with a circulation of more than a quarter of a million and editions in Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, and Philadelphia as well as New York. Cahan had edited the Forward for fifty years, right up to his death in 1951, and earned a place in the pantheon of Americas greatest newspaper editors.

Beyond that, I was also attracted by Cahans political story. He had stood with labor throughout its great awakening and the years during which it was being organized, but he had broken early with the hard-left factions and played a leading role in the long struggle against Communism. Although I myself was never a socialist or a member of a labor union, I had great sympathy for labor and its long march. The author to whom I thrilled as a young student was John Dos Passos. Like him, I had moved to the right over the years, and as the Jewish story began to assert itself in the last quarter of the twentieth century, I perceived Cahan and what he built at the Forward as taking on, after a long decline, a new relevance.

This was partly because of the way the denouement of the Cold War had vindicated the anti-Communist crusaders with whom Cahan had made common cause and partly because of the way Cahan had confounded a left that was emerging in league with enemies of Israel. I quickly discovered other matters on which the Forward had much to offer, from the debate over immigration to the use of quotas in the struggle for racial integration to the way New York City was governed to the problem of public education to the question of culture and its importance in the pages of a major newspaper.

This was put into sharp relief for me one day in the summer of 1984, when I was still at The Wall Street Journal and nursing the idea of an English-language Forward. My future wife and I went for Sunday brunch to the home of the editor of the