The Very Model of a New York Intellectual

“If I had to select a single person to stand for East European Jews in America, it would be Abraham Cahan.”—Nathan Glazer

Nathan Glazer’s choice of who best represents the millions of American Jews from Eastern Europe highlights a profession as well as an individual. Was Cahan a politician? Rabbi? Business entrepreneur or philanthropist? Glazer himself was a sociologist, writer, and editor, so not surprisingly he singled out someone in the world of ideas. Abraham Cahan, co-founder of the Yiddish daily Forverts in 1897 and its editor from 1903 until his death in 1951, was one of the greatest newspapermen of that great age of newspapers, but he was more interesting to Glazer as an independent thinker, the first of a new American-Jewish breed. That recent events have revealed great moral, aesthetic, and political confusion in our own age suggests that Cahan’s model of intellectual life could use remembering and learning from—or at least remembering and lamenting its demise.

The twenty-two-year-old who landed in New York in June 1882 was in some respects typical of the Jews who immigrated in what turned into, over the next quarter-century, the largest migration in Jewish history. Young, single, and raised in a traditional Jewish home, he couldn’t wait to exercise the freedoms that he had been denied in Russia, which included release from Jewish observance now that he was away from the supervision of family and community, and the right to preach revolutionary ideals that were forbidden in his native land. Though Cahan had no part in the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in St Petersburg on March 13, 1881, the roundup of suspected radicals in its wake had dictated his rapid departure from Russia. His political ideas had been formed under Russian political oppression.