by Seth Lipsky
Cahan and his wife, Anna, on their return to New York from a trip overseas in the late 1920s. The two were married for more than sixty years, until Anna’s death in 1947. (Forward Association)
The Forward’s headquarters at 173–75 East Broadway was a ten-story Beaux Arts building that one historian described as seeming “to bestride the Lower East Side like a colossus.” On the front of the building, just above the second floor, a series of reliefs depicted Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Ferdinand Lassalle, and Friedrich Adler. (Forward Association)
Cahan moved the Forward into rotogravure printing, which enabled newspapers to reproduce photographs on newsprint. The rotogravure section became one of the Forward’s most popular features by carrying scenes of Jewish life throughout the world. It was but one of the reasons Oswald Garrison Villard, the longtime editor of The Nation, wrote, “Which is the most vital, the most interesting, the most democratic of New York’s daily journals? … In my judgment it is the Forward.”
“Our Beauty and Charm Contest.” From the Forward’s rotogravure section, June 16, 1929. (Forward Association)
“Pictures of Jewish Life and Characters.” From the Forward’s rotogravure section, August 3, 1924. (Forward Association)
V. I. Lenin (top, left, in 1920) received Cahan at Cracow, Poland, in 1912 and presented him with copies of Pravda, which he was editing. (Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division)
Alfred Dreyfus, by then cleared of treason, received Cahan at Paris in 1912 and spent two hours with him. (Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, George Grantham Bain Collection)
Rabbi Yissachar Dov Rokeach, head of the Belzer Hasidic dynasty, received Cahan at Belz, Poland, in 1912. The sage spoke admiringly of Theodore Roosevelt, but dismissed Zionism, unions, and newspapers.
Eleanor Marx, daughter of Karl, received Cahan at London in 1892. “We Jews have a special obligation to devote ourselves to the working class,” she told him.
Friedrich Engels, father of Marxist theory, was finishing volume three of Das Kapital when Cahan visited him at London in 1892. “If the Jews would drink more, they would be even better people,” he told the abstemious editor.
Leo Frank was arrested in 1913, at Atlanta, for the rape and murder of a fourteen-year-old employee of the National Pencil Factory, where Frank was superintendent. The Forward threw everything it had into covering the story. Cahan himself traveled to Atlanta, where he interviewed Frank, who had been convicted on perjured testimony from the actual murderer. Frank was lynched in 1915 by a mob who had kidnapped him from prison. “In no other country in the world,” Cahan wrote, “will it be understood how Frank’s death was possible.” (Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, George Grantham Bain Collection)
In 1914 Meyer London (center, addressing striking Brooklyn streetcar workers in 1916) became the second socialist to be elected to the United States Congress. When the news was announced to a crowd of forty thousand gathered in front of the Forward Building, a band played La Marseillaise and “people fell on each other’s necks and kissed each other with tears of joy.” London mocked the Balfour Declaration that would lead to a Jewish state, saying, “Let us stop making fools of ourselves about the Jewish future.” (Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, George Grantham Bain Collection)
Vera Figner (pictured here in 1880) had once conspired against Alexander II, but years later was driven into silence by the Soviet dictatorship. When Cahan visited Russia in 1927, she gave him whispered warnings about the true nature of the Soviet regime and introduced him, sotto voce, to surviving members of Narodnaya Volya as “one of us.” Cahan called his meeting with Figner “one of the most moving moments” in his life.
Eugene V. Debs founded the Socialist Party of America and would receive one million votes as its presidential candidate in 1912. “His words come from a human heart,” Cahan effused, “words of light, truth, and hope!” Debs was jailed in 1919 for his opposition to America’s entry into World War I, but his sentence was commuted by President Warren Harding in December 1921. On his way home from prison, he and Cahan visited Harding at the White House (pictured here). (Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, George Grantham Bain Collection)
David Ben-Gurion and his wife, Paula, in 1918. When Cahan made his first visit to Palestine in 1925, the future founding prime minister of Israel spent hours with the editor. “The great public draws its ideas mainly from the Forward,” Ben-Gurion had written in his diary. (Government Press Office, State of Israel)
Palestine in 1924, photographed by the Polish photographer Alter Kacyzne, whose images of Jewish life in Eastern Europe and Palestine were popular with readers of the Forward. (Alter Kacyzne/Forward Association)
Abraham Cahan was lampooned in the satirical paper Der Groyser Kundes (The Big Stick) for exploiting his writers at the Forward (YIVO Institute for Jewish Research) and in the communist daily Freiheit as a scourge hectoring his readers from atop the Forward Building. (Courtesy of The Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary/NC1429.G7 A5 1927)
Vladimir Jabotinsky, leader of Revisionist Zionism, looks out the window of a train at Split, Croatia, in 1937, three years before he delivered, at the Manhattan Opera House, the speech that Cahan would ridicule for its call to evacuate six million Jews to Palestine from Europe. A few months later the Forward called Jabotinsky’s death “in the true sense of the word, a national catastrophe.” (Courtesy of the Jabotinsky Institute, Israel)
David Shub (far right), one of Cahan’s closest deputies at the Forward, wrote of his editor: “Cahan until his last breath remained a convinced Social Democrat. But in the last few decades he would put the accent on the last word—democrat. He put political and spiritual freedom of the person in first place.” Standing between Cahan and Shub are the economists Wladimir and Emma Woytinsky (he was one of the architects of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Social Security policy) and Lazar Fogelman (next to Shub), who edited the Forward between 1962 and 1968. (Forward Association)
Jay Lovestone, who quit the Communist Party after a feud with Stalin in 1929 and vowed to bring down the Soviet Union, was given a cubicle at the office of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union, the Forward’s arm in the labor movement. From there he helped organize an international movement of free trade unions with which there affiliated a little-known trade union in Gdansk, Poland, called Solidarity, which rose up to crack Soviet rule in the Eastern Bloc. (Jay Lovestone Papers, Envelope E, Hoover Institution Archives)
Sholem Asch, in his day the Forward’s most famous writer. Asch’s novel The Nazarene was rejected by Cahan, who erupted in fury over its blurring of the differences between Judaism and Christianity. (Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division)
Isaac Bashevis Singer won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978 for stories that first appeared in the Forward. His brother, Israel Joshua Singer, who had been hired by Cahan in 1921 to serve as the paper’s Warsaw correspondent, was the better-known sibling prior to his death in 1944. (Forward Association)
Cahan in the late 1930s, when the Forward maintained a clear-eyed view of Nazism, calling the 1938 Munich Agreement a “shameful document” and referring to Hitler as the “Fascist devil” who had “made a fool of his terrified opponents, of the democratic countries, and of the whole civilized world.” (Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division)
Some twenty thousand readers and friends packed Madison Square Garden on May 25, 1947, to pay tribute to the Forward on its fiftieth anniversary. By then the glory days of Yiddish newspaperdom were past. (Forward Association)
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