1860-1951
Editor and Novelist

An Exiled Russian Radical.

Born in Lithuania, Abraham Cahan immigrated to New York in 1882 to escape persecution for his socialist views. A fiery speaker, he helped to organize the first Jewish tailors' union on the Lower East Side in 1884. Cahan dominated the intellectual and public life of the rapidly expanding Jewish immigrant community on the Lower East Side of New York City from 1900 to 1920 as editor of the Jewish Daily Forward. He was brilliant, with a grim temperament, and could be quite spiteful. He both symbolized and shaped the power of the immigrant press at a time when 20 percent of the nation's population was foreign born.

The Forward.

The Yiddish-language daily the Jewish Daily Forward was founded on 22 April 1897 with Cahan as editor. He soon resigned over conflicts with its publishers about who wielded ultimate control of the paper. The publishers wanted...