The Jewish author and journalist Abraham Cahan (1860-1951) was a prominent Socialist leader and union organizer among Jewish immigrants in the United States.

Abraham Cahan was born in Podberezhie, near Vilna, Lithuania. His father was a storekeeper and later rabbi at Vidz, Vitebsk. In 1866 the family moved to Vilna, where Cahan was educated for the rabbinate and also studied Russian literature. After graduating from the Teachers Institute at Vilna in 1881, he taught for a short time. But, because he belonged to a Jewish idealist group connected with an assassination plot against Czar Alexander II, in 1882 he fled from Russia to the United States.

In New York, Cahan became a journalist and soon founded two Jewish journals, Die neue Zeit (1886) and Arbeiter-Zeitung (1890). From 1894 to 1897 he was editor of the Yiddish journal Zukunft; in 1897 he became the first editor of the Socialist Daily Forward. The following year he joined the...