Encyclopedia of American Journalism History

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Cahan, Abraham (1860-1951)
(Yiddish-language Journalist and Editor)

      Abraham Cahan was one of the founders and for 43 years the editor of the Jewish Daily Forward, the most widely read Yiddish-language newspaper in the world. The Forward schooled its half million readers on Socialist solutions to the struggles of New York's underclass. No paper was seen as more significant in representing Jewish working class life to the nation or more central in assimilating the Jewish immigrant in America.
      Cahan was born on July 7, 1860 in the shtetl of Podberezya, a Jewish slum in Vilna, Lithuania, when the region was ruled by the Russian Empire. He was the son of Hebrew teachers, Schachne and Sarah Goldarbeiter Cahan, and the grandson of a rabbi. He graduated the Vilna Teachers Institute in 1881 but was forced to flee to Switzerland because of his anti-Czarist activities.
      Cahan arrived in New York on June 6, 1881, settling within an immigrant influx on the city's Lower East Side. There, he became a community leader by organizing labor unions and lecturing on socialism while writing articles for the Yiddish and Russian-language as well as the English press. His reporting and editing work at the Neie Tzeit, a Yiddish-language socialist weekly, combined story-telling and social theory. His hope in Workman's Advocate (May 15, 1889) was to create news stories of "life-likeness" that stimulated a sympathetic reaction to the plight of the poor. Beginning in 1890, his editing of Arbeiter Zeitung, the newspaper of the United Hebrew Trades, reflected the influence of Cahan's mentor Frederick Engles.
      Cahan's reporting for Charles Dana's New York Sun used ironic vignettes of "artistic re-creation" designed to depict "life itself" on the Lower East Side (Sept. 2, 1888). Cahan's realistic portrayal of working class life for the New York World, New York Press and New York Star became the basis of his first book, Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto (1896). The World's literary critic William Dean Howells hailed the depiction of "a new New York" and considered Cahan the nation's "new star of realism."
      Between 1897 and 1902, Cahan joined Lincoln Steffens and Hutchins Hapgood as a police reporter at the New York Commercial Advertiser, where he was encouraged to track social problems to their source. The culturally informed reporting that followed interpreted the turbulent spirit and rich complexity of New York's immigrant community to the paper's cosmopolitan audience. Readers learned of the city's 1,500 pushcart peddlers "hardly earning $5 a week," yet forced to give 50 cents of it in bribes to police to continue operating (June 29, 1898). Readers are also introduced to Rabbi Jacob Joseph, once a revered Talmudic scholar, who becomes "a hopeless invalid" in the New World after being discarded by a community seduced by American secularism (Jan. 24, 1901). "Above the babble of a thousand voices" lives the East Side housewife, Cahan writes. She refuses to succumb to "the fetid odors and heat glare from the street below," and prepares herself "to go hungry again" so she can feed the children (June 29, 1902).
      Cahan's Jewish Daily Forward, which he first edited on March 16, 1902, became must reading over breakfast tables throughout America's Jewish community. The paper's mission became "unfolding the thousands and thousands of life stories of the tenement homes" that increasingly dominated the industrializing nation's urban landscape (Dec. 21, 1903). This conviction transformed the paper from a seldom-read organ of the Socialist Labor Party into a daily guidebook for Yiddish readers anxious to enter the American experience without abandoning their traditions and common history. In his enormously popular "Bintel Brief," Cahan counseled society's downtrodden for more than forty years: a tubercular afraid of suicide; an abandoned wife fearing the loss of her children; a worker who scabs to buy his wife medicine; a 13-year-old raincoat maker docked two cents for arriving ten minutes late; a barber who thinks of cutting his customers' throats; and the cantor who wondered what would happen to him since he no longer believed in God. When 146 ghetto residents died in the Triangle Factory fire on March 25, 1911, the Forward's special edition spoke in behalf of "a whole people who are in mourning."
      The Forward's 20,000 circulation in 1900 would increase to top 130,000 in 1918, and then grow to a quarter million by the middle of the next decade. The fact that the paper was passed along to non-subscribers made its penetration of the immigrant community far greater. One million Jews settled on New York's Lower East Side in the three decades leading to the outbreak of World War I. Fewer than one in 25 returned to the Old World. For those who remained, few figures were as significant as Abraham Cahan. His writing and reporting during the first half of the twentieth century captures the cultural shock of the early immigrants followed by a careful chronicling of their struggle and sacrifices that would allow a later generation to flee the limitations of the ghetto altogether. Cahan would live to see the substantial integration of the immigrant Jew into the American mainstream, a journey of transition described and thoughtfully encouraged in the pages of the Daily Forward.

BRUCE J. EVENSEN

Further Reading
Cahan, Abraham. Bleter Fun Mein Lebe, Leaves from My Life. New York: Forward Association, 1926.
Chametzky, Jules. From the Ghetto: The Fiction of Abraham Cahan. Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 1977.
Evensen, Bruce J., "Abraham Cahan." In A Sourcebook of American Literary Journalism, edited by Thomas B. Connery, Westport: Greenwood, 1992.
Marovitz, Sanford E., Abraham Cahan. New York: Twayne, 1996.
Rischin, Moses. Grandma Never Lived in America: The New Journalism of Abraham Cahan. Bloomington: Indiana University, 1985.
Stein, Leon, Abraham P. Conan and Lynn Davidson. The Education of Abraham Cahan. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1969.
Zlotnick, Joan, "Abraham Cahan, a Neglected Realist." American Jewish Archives, April (1971).

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