Abraham Cahan was a spellbinding speaker, a fine writer, a brilliant editor, and a deep and creative thinker. Cahan dominated the thinking of the immigrant Jewish community on the Lower East Side of New York City in the first two decades of this century; the newspaper he edited for nearly fifty years, the Jewish Daily Forward, commanded a widespread loyalty among the immigrant Jewish society. Yet, according to Irving Howe, Cahan had "a rather grim and acrid temperament, as if all Jewish frustrations had come to rest on his soul. He could be narrow, philistine and spiteful; his personal culture was limited; but when it came to apprehending relations between the immigrant Jews and the world surrounding them, his mind was wonderfully keen." Cahan's accomplishments were impressive: he brought the Forward from obscurity to dominance; he was constantly in demand as a speaker, especially for labor and socialist...