1. Abraham "Abe" Cahan was a Lithuanian-born Jewish American socialist newspaper editor, novelist, and politician.
18 Facts About Abraham Cahan
1. 2.
Abraham Cahan was born July 7,1860, in Paberze in Lithuania, into an Orthodox, Litvak family.
3.
Abraham Cahan's grandfather was a rabbi in Vidz, Vitebsk, his father a teacher of Hebrew and the Talmud.
4.
The devoutly religious family moved to Vilnius in 1866, where the young Abraham Cahan studied to become a rabbi.
5.
Abraham Cahan was appointed as a teacher in a Jewish school funded by the Russian government in Velizh, Vitebsk, in the same year.
6.
Abraham Cahan arrived by steamboat in Philadelphia on June 6 of 1882 at the age of 21 and immediately traveled to New York City, where he would live for the rest of his life.
7.
In July 1882, barely a month after arriving in the United States, Abraham Cahan attended his first American socialist meeting, and a month later he gave his first socialist speech, speaking in Yiddish.
8.
Abraham Cahan taught at the Young Men's Hebrew Association and often incorporated socialist speeches into his lesson plans.
9.
Abraham Cahan briefly taught in the English Department at the Orthodox Etz Chaim Yeshiva.
10.
Abraham Cahan formally joined the Socialist Labor Party of America in 1887.
11.
In keeping with his socialist politics, Abraham Cahan believed that immigrants needed to combine formal learning with informal studies about local life and community customs to achieve not only an education but integration into American society.
12.
Abraham Cahan encouraged women to use labor and education to elevate their status in society.
13.
Abraham Cahan founded the Forward while he was still juggling several newspaper jobs and published its first issue in 1897.
14.
The horror of the Kishinev pogrom, which the Forward covered extensively, prompted Abraham Cahan to take on leadership of the Forward full-time in 1903, taking over total editorial control and running the newspaper full-time until 1946.
15.
Abraham Cahan received criticism from fellow Jewish journalists because he didn't limit the Forward to Jewish topics, but wrote on a variety of themes and was one of the more temperate voices in the Socialist Party of America, respecting his readers' religious beliefs and preaching an increasingly moderate and reformist form of socialist politics as time progressed.
16.
Abraham Cahan distinguished himself through not only Yiddish literature but his English fiction that dealt with the sociological and historical process of immigrants becoming Americans.
17.
Abraham Cahan died of congestive heart failure on August 31,1951, at the age of 91, in Beth Israel Hospital in New York City.
18.
Abraham Cahan was buried in Mount Carmel Cemetery in Queens, New York.