The first general-interest biography of the legendary editor
of The Jewish Daily Forward, the
iconic Yiddish-language newspaper of the laboring masses that inspired,
educated, and entertained millions of readers, helped redefine journalism
during its golden age, and transformed American culture.
Abraham Cahan took the helm of a failing Yiddish socialist
daily in New York City in 1902 and over the next fifty years turned it into a
national newspaper that changed American politics and earned him the adulation
of millions of Jewish immigrants and the friendship of the greatest
newspapermen of his day, from Lincoln Steffens to H. L. Mencken. Cahan—whose
tenure at the Forward spanned the
Russian Revolution, the First World War, the rise of political Zionism, the
Second World War, the Holocaust, and the creation of the state of Israel—did
more than cover the news. He led revolutionary reforms—spreading social
democracy, organizing labor unions, battling communism, and assimilating
immigrant Jews into American society, most notably via his groundbreaking
advice column, “A Bintel Brief.” Cahan was also a celebrated novelist whose
works are read and studied to this day as brilliant examples of fiction that
turned the immigrant narrative into an art form.
Acclaimed journalist Seth Lipsky, creator of the
English-language successor to Cahan’s
Forward, gives us the fascinating story of a man of profound
contradictions: an avowed socialist who wrote fiction with transcendent
sympathy for a wealthy manufacturer; an internationalist who turned against the
anti-Zionism of the left; an assimilationist whose final battle was against
religious apostasy. Lipsky’s The Rise of
Abraham Cahan is a prism through which to understand the paradoxes and
transformations of American Judaism itself. A towering newspaperman in the
manner of Horace Greeley and Joseph Pulitzer, Abraham Cahan revolutionized our
idea of what newspapers could accomplish.
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