A portrait of Abraham Cahan (1860-1951) is the first thing that greets a visitor to the offices of the Forward in New York. It attracted me from the moment I first stopped by the editorial rooms in 1983; the paper, originally published in Yiddish and known as the Jewish Daily Forward, had recently retreated to weekly publication with an English-language supplement, and I was on a quest to bring out a new, full-scale Jewish weekly in English that would bear the Forward name.

I had become an admirer of Cahan years before, though even today I’m not exactly sure how. I admired him as a newspaperman—in particular as editor of the Yiddish daily which he had helped found 100 years ago and built into a national newspaper with a circulation of more than a quarter of a million copies a day and editions in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Philadelphia as well as New York. Cahan edited the Jewish Daily Forward for 50 years, right up to his death in 1951. A bronze bust of him stands outside the boardroom on the second floor of the Workmen’s Circle Building where the paper now maintains its headquarters. But I prefer the painting, a warmly colored canvas in which a stern-looking Cahan strikes a confident pose.

Early in my tenure at the Forward, this picture would provide what for me proved to be an illuminating insight. The occasion was a visit by Judith Vladeck, who served as general counsel not only to our newly-launched weekly but to the Yiddish Forward as well. As she entered the premises I was startled to see her lift her hand to avoid looking at the portrait of Cahan. Later she explained that, like others connected with the paper’s traditions, she was not altogether an admirer of Cahan. Her own hero was B. Charney Vladeck, who, in the interwar years, had served as the old Jewish Daily Forward‘s business manager. She admired him not merely because he had been her father-in-law but because his politics were quite a bit to the Left of Cahan’s.

Although hardly the first moment I was made aware of political tensions at the paper, this conversation brought home to me that my own personal relations with Cahan and his inheritance might prove a good deal livelier than I had anticipated. But I am already slightly ahead of my story.

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Cahan had come to America from Lithuania in 1882, at the age of twenty-two. After contributing to a variety of Yiddish- and English-language newspapers (including Joseph Pulitzer’s World), he helped found the Forward in 1897, when he was nearly forty. Months later, he left the paper on the grounds that it was nothing but an organ of the Socialist party. Of course, he was himself a socialist, and a radical trade-unionist, but he wanted editorial independence and he stayed away for nearly five years until he gained it. With his return in 1902, the Forward became the bridge which hundreds of thousands of East European immigrants crossed to become Americans.¹

With the success of the paper, its proprietor, the Forward Association Inc., became a rich institution—albeit one that boasted carved likenesses of Karl Marx, Friedrich Adler, Ferdinand La Salle, and Friedrich Engels on its building on the Lower East Side. In its early years, the newspaper opposed Zionism, argued against American entry into World War I, and gave guarded support to the Russian Revolution. But in the 1920’s, the Forward, while remaining unmistakably a voice of the social-democratic Left, turned bitterly against Communism, not only in Soviet Russia but also in America, where the Communists were seeking to take over the labor movement. Following Cahan’s visit to Palestine in 1925, the paper also began to swing behind the idea of a Jewish homeland.

It may well be that a careful student could delineate the turnings of Cahan’s life by marking the points where, upon encountering a conflict among the various causes to which he devoted his astounding energies, he steered for the Jewish shore. An illuminating story to this effect is told in a new short history of the Forward by the veteran labor journalist Gus Tyler. It seems that in 1891, still six years away from the paper’s founding, Cahan had been sent as a delegate of the United Hebrew Trades to the second congress of the Socialist International. There, he promptly proposed that the assembled delegates determine the stand of “the organized workers of all countries concerning the Jewish Question.”

At the time, Tyler notes, there was a rising tide of anti-Semitism in Europe, and “many workers, raised on a hand-me-down anti-Semitism,” had come to “identify capitalism with Judaism.” Yet several leaders of the European socialist parties, including the Jews among them, told Cahan they preferred that the issue not be raised, lest the International be “tarred as part of a Jewish conspiracy to destroy Europe’s Christian culture.” An incensed Cahan would not be appeased. He insisted on a debate, and the matter finally ended in only a wan resolution condemning both anti-Semitism and philo-Semitism—“a not so subtle suggestion,” as Tyler puts it, “that while hating Jews was improper, it was necessary to see to it that the Jews did not take over.”

For Cahan, the question all this raised was simple enough: to paraphrase Tyler, if being a socialist did not inoculate one against anti-Semitism, how could anyone guarantee that once the working class came into power, it would not use that power to discriminate against Jews? I believe that the lesson Cahan learned from his experience at the second congress of the Socialist International informed his work at the Forward for the rest of his days.

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The idea of bringing the Forward out in English had begun to gel in my mind in 1980, when I returned to America from an assignment in Asia for the Wall Street Journal. But it was not until 1983, well into the Reagan years and after my first tour as a member of the editorial board of the Journal, that I actually approached the paper. I did this not despite its liberal-Left politics but in large part because of them. I sensed opportunities for synthesis.

One early encounter occurred in July 1984, when I was wooing not only the Forward but also a colleague of mine at the Wall Street Journal, Amity Shlaes. She and I had become friends with Simon Weber, one of Cahan’s successors as editor of the Yiddish-language Forward. We had gone to his apartment in Brighton Beach at the edge of Brooklyn for a little lunch in honor of the novelist I.B. Singer. As we settled in at a table of smoked fish and other delights, I mentioned an editorial the Wall Street Journal had run a few days earlier asserting that the ideal way to deal with immigration in America was to pass a constitutional amendment mandating open borders. “Oy,” said Singer, looking up from his plate of vegetables. “All those Mexicans!”

I was appalled, and banged the table. “I can’t believe my ears,” I exclaimed. “Here I am, in the home of the editor of the newspaper that lit the way for the greatest wave of immigration in our history, having lunch with the greatest immigrant writer of the century, and when I tell you the Wall Street Journal is calling for open borders, you turn around and say ‘Oy!’ ” Weber motioned me out onto his balcony, which offered a magnificent view in one direction of Coney Island beach and in the other of the bustling community of newly arrived Russian Jews. He shook his finger in my face. “I know you guys from the Wall Street Journal,” he declared. “All you want is cheap labor.”

This struck me at the time as a great irony. Aside from everything else the Wall Street Journal stood for, it had argued consistently that wage increases, in and of themselves, were noninflationary and a good thing. Nor could I recall a single editorial against the right of labor to organize.

What I am trying to say is that in pursuing the Forward, I saw at least a potential concord of views between it and the Journal on issues ranging from immigration to the containment of Communism to the defense of Israel to American race relations. But it is also true that, even as I moved deeper into the neoconservative camp, I still continued to cherish certain liberal ideals held by many of my family and friends in an earlier generation. I relished the chance to find a way to resolve the remaining contradictions, and editing an English-language Forward seemed to offer it.

Up until 1987, Weber was in opposition to my project. Whatever he thought of my politics, mainly he viewed what I had in mind as a distraction from the nurturing of the Yiddish language. But he finally came around to our argument that a successful English-language paper would not necessarily spell the end of the Yiddish paper and might even help sustain it. We sealed our understanding with a hug in the same apartment where three years before he had shaken his finger in my face.

By the time I gained an audience with the board of the Forward Association in November 1987, a failing Weber was too ill to attend. Given what I already knew of the place, I felt a little like Judge Bork going before the Senate judiciary committee; but the meeting itself went swimmingly—at least until the moment when Samuel Pisar, an international lawyer and survivor of Auschwitz who had been helping me, interjected that the directors were less interested in the easy questions than in the difficult ones. “Like what?” I asked. “Like Jabotinsky,” Sam replied.

You could feel the chill come over the room. Sam knew of my enthusiasm for the journalist, soldier, poet, and visionary who had lobbied Great Britain for the formation of a Jewish Legion to fight alongside the Allies in World War I, organized the first Jewish self-defense units in Palestine, and then, in the 1930’s, broken with the labor- and socialist-led Zionist movement over what he saw as its dangerously placatory and temporizing stance toward the British Mandatory power. As the founder of Revisionist Zionism, Jabotinsky had become the nemesis of the forces in the world Zionist movement led by Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion, and hence of many, if not most, American Jews. Clearly, Sam had thought it best to get everything out on the table.

I took a deep breath. “I know how Vladimir Jabotinsky appeared to members of your generation and of your movement at the time of the events,” I said, referring to the Forward‘s socialist leanings in the 30’s and 40’s. “But to my generation, or at least to me, looking back, the outstanding fact of Vladimir Jabotinsky’s life is that he called for the evacuation of the Jews from Europe in 1932.”

Our ideological discussion masked a good bit of support in the room for an English-language paper. But as things unfolded, Jabotinsky was to figure in subsequent bouts of combustion, quite a few of which centered on the question of Abraham Cahan and what he stood for.

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The first time I was actually denounced as an unfit heir to Abraham Cahan was in the fall of 1990. The episode began with the appearance of an issue of the Dartmouth Review, a satirical right-wing undergraduate paper, that carried a quotation from Mein Kampf on its masthead. In the ensuing brouhaha I sent a reporter to New Hampshire to investigate, and I also called the editor of the Review, Kevin Pritchett, whom I’d met when he was a summer intern at the Wall Street Journal. Pritchett obliged me by writing a piece in which he explained to readers of the Forward that someone had maliciously stuck the quotation on the masthead as an act of sabotage, and no sooner had the prank been discovered than the Review recalled its entire press run.

I was already suspicious of the efforts of the college administration at Dartmouth to paint this incident as evidence that the Review was itself anti-Semitic. The paper had in fact been one of the few voices on campus speaking up for Israel. When Angela Davis, a genuine and openly pro-Soviet Communist and hater of Israel, was brought to speak at the college without (needless to say) a peep of protest out of the administration, only the Review had taken it upon itself to rebut her poison. So in an editorial we suggested, rather mildly, that the Mein Kampf incident was going to test the college administration’s capacity for fair-mindedness.

All this, however, so outraged Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, then teaching at Dartmouth, that he sent a formal letter of protest to the Forward Association. He had had, he wrote, the privilege of knowing Abe Cahan and a number of the other editors of the Yiddish Forward, and “they did not create and maintain a newspaper of socialists and social democrats for their inheritance to become now, in English, an echo of the Wall Street Journal.” In Hertzberg’s view, the “morally correct thing to do [was] either to return the English edition of the Forward to the liberal traditions of the founders of the Forward Association, or to close the paper.”

The letter was duly circulated among the board but found no takers. For my part, I wrote Hertzberg and invited him to lunch with the editors. In his note of refusal he asserted that I was “miscast as heir, even in part, to Abe Cahan.”

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Nor was Hertzberg alone in his sentiments, as I was to be reminded by a parallel incident in 1992. During the Democratic presidential primaries that year, Senator Robert Kerrey of Nebraska, who holds the Medal of Honor for courage under fire in Vietnam, tried to force a debate on the issue of Bill Clinton’s draft-dodging. Dealing with the matter in an editorial entitled “Clinton’s War,” we noted:

What voters want to know is whether the candidates have grown to understand Vietnam in its full tragedy—that even if strategists differ on whether we could have prevailed, America turned out to be right, after all.

We went on to say that the last candidate to tell “an American audience . . . that ours in Vietnam was a noble cause” had been the Republican Ronald Reagan, and that, in our opinion, no Democrat had gotten the issue straight since Hubert Humphrey. Finally, we opined that a President who could not understand in retrospect who had been right and who wrong in Southeast Asia could not be counted on to distinguish right and wrong anywhere else, including in the Middle East.

The paper was out for a few days when I received a letter from Jack Sheinkman, then president of the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union and for years one of the heroes in the Forward‘s firmament. Sheinkman wrote that he was “shocked and dismayed” at the editorial. The Amalgamated, which had played an early role in opposing the war in Vietnam, bowed to no one in its hatred of totalitarianism, but “recognized that wars should not be fought to prop up dictators of the Right or the Left.” He concluded: “ ‘My country, right or wrong’ is not a sentiment I ever believed I’d see expressed in a newspaper founded in the spirit of Eugene Victor Debs and Norman Thomas.”

I published Sheinkman’s letter with an editor’s note—and I also resorted to a device that would serve me well on other occasions. As part of the note, I included in English translation the full text of two editorials from the Jewish Daily Forward. One, dated August 10, 1964, strongly endorsed the Tonkin Gulf resolution which gave congressional backing for American forces to enter the war in Southeast Asia. The other was dated April 30, 1975—the day Saigon fell to Communist North Vietnam. “To the final minute,” it said,

the Vietnamese Communists did not stop their murderous bloodshed. . . . It is as if a mountain of about a million Vietnamese victims in the long and bloody war was not enough for them. And the bloodbath will not cease, even after the cease-fire. Then the bloody revenge of the Communists against their opponents will only truly begin.

Had people simply forgotten just where the Forward stood when it was at its apogee? It certainly seemed so. Another stalwart of the Left with selective memory, I soon discovered, was the literary critic Alfred Kazin, who reacted angrily to an editorial we published in April 1994 suggesting that Bill Clinton could end the national preoccupation with trivialities like Whitewater by doing something important; our own proposal was that the United States bomb North Korea’s nuclear-weapons facilities, thus delivering a salutary blow to that country’s warmaking capacities just as Prime Minister Menachem Begin had done to Iraq’s in 1981. Irately, Kazin protested in a letter that our willingness to countenance war in Korea was out of character in “a paper founded a century ago on the blood and toil of peaceful laboring people who believed in harmony with people like themselves.”

In response, we printed the Forward‘s editorial of June 27, 1950, the morrow of the attack by Communist North Korea on the South. According to the editorial, this act of aggression clearly showed “the swindle and hypocrisy of the so-called ‘Peace Campaign’ which Moscow’s agents have been promoting throughout the world,” and concluded that if the Kremlin did not retreat, a new world war would become inevitable. In other words, at least some “peaceful laboring people” once understood that the world was not made up entirely of “people like themselves.”

But by far the most contentious issues to arise during my tenure have been those involving the course of events in the Middle East. What do the Forward‘s traditions demand of its editors in commenting on those events?

The first argument erupted in the summer of 1990, less than three months after we had begun publication, and was sparked by our coverage of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. My phone was ringing when I walked into the office one day at 7:30 A.M. My caller, Motl Zelmanowicz, a director of the Forward Association, was audibly enraged. He had begun the day by going to the newsstand and picking up the English-language Forward, only to discover on the editorial page an article by—he was so choked up he could barely utter the name—Ariel Sharon.

Attempting to calm him, I explained that in March 1989 I had gone with General Sharon for a picnic in the Samarian hills. We had come to an outcropping from which my host had gestured off into the hazy distance. “The next sound you hear out of the Middle East,” he said, “is going to come from Iraq.” The prediction had made an enormous impression on me, the more so because I had learned over the years that Sharon had an uncanny ability to forecast events.

My caller was, to say the least, unconvinced. “If this were an Italian newspaper,” he keened, “would you have published an article by Mussolini?” Despite myself, I felt a surge of sympathy—though I also knew, and tried to tell him, that no one on the planet comprehended better than Ariel Sharon the order of battle in the war then erupting. Nor was the “line” Sharon took on these developments a departure for us. A week earlier, we had published an editorial arguing that if war was to come—as it must—the best course for President Bush would be to go to Congress and get a proper declaration.

Among ourselves, it is true, we had debated whether it was wise for the editor of the Forward to be calling for war without so much as a how-do-you-do, particularly at a moment when its inevitability was by no means obvious to other newspaper editors in the country. Still, even the most dovish among us saw the need to deal with Saddam by military force. And so as the Bush administration carried on its diplomatic dance that summer, I dug out an editorial probably written by Cahan and published the day after the Munich agreement in 1938 between Britain’s Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and Adolf Hitler.

What struck me was not simply the clarity with which Cahan grasped the situation, but also the unbridled derisiveness of his tone. He visualized Hitler rolling in laughter, telling his clique in Berlin, “I, Hitler, now appear as the defender of the holy principle of the self-determination of peoples.” I quoted Cahan’s words in an editorial of my own about the grotesque spectacle then taking place as Secretary of State James Baker prepared to meet with Tariq Aziz, the Foreign Minister of Iraq.

Another occasion on which I sought the wisdom of Cahan on matters Middle Eastern was when the Israeli settler Baruch Goldstein murdered Arabs praying at the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron. All of us at the Forward were revolted by the act, and our editorial said so. But I felt it was important that these killings not be used to deny the right of Jews to be in Hebron at all. So I looked up what the Forward had had to say about another outrage in Hebron many decades earlier. In 1929, the Jewish community of that city had been driven out in the course of Arab riots in which more than 60 religious Jews, including women and children, were murdered. What I found was that the paper not only stood behind the Jews of Hebron, and lauded the courage of yeshiva students who fought back, but angrily questioned the point of having a British Mandatory authority at all in Palestine if it was not willing or able to protect the Jewish populace. This was a more remarkable stand than it may seem today—in 1929, the Left was quite solidly behind the Arabs.

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In fact, every time I have dipped into the files of the Forward, I have found editorials on Zionism and Israel rippling with verve and strength and hewing to what, in the contemporary context, can only be called a hard line. By that I do not mean a line necessarily sympathetic to the Right in Israeli politics; not surprisingly, the paper had little use for the Revisionist groups, the followers of Jabotinsky, in pre-state Palestine or in Israel itself after the establishment of the state in 1948. On this point, my interview with the board in 1987 had confirmed the paper’s sentiments accurately enough. But I have been unable to find any hint of wavering in the face of Israel’s enemies. Last September, during the Arab rioting over the opening of a tourist tunnel in Jerusalem, we ran a full page of editorials from the time of the liberation of Jerusalem in the Six-Day War of 1967; they dripped with scorn for the United Nations, for Britain’s Labor party, and for the Soviet-led international Left in general (“the noble comrades, with their crippled concepts”).

Of course, by 1967 Cahan had been dead for over fifteen years. But it was clear that the paper was following the trajectory he had sketched. Indeed, I believe it is no coincidence that the fervency of Cahan’s support for Jewish statehood grew in tandem with the liveliness of his anti-Communism. He never lost sight of where, after the obvious case of the Nazis, the real enemies of the Jews were likely to be found, and of what it would require to counter them. An appreciation for what he must have been thinking crystallized for me last year, when I sat down to write a review of Lone Wolf, a new biography, by the Israeli author Shmuel Katz, of—again—Vladimir Jabotinsky.

Before writing the review, I sent for a translation of the editorial the Forward had published when Jabotinsky died in New York on August 6, 1940. Mindful of my early interview, I was expecting a few paragraphs of dismissal. What I got, instead, was an extraordinarily admiring eulogy. “The death of Vladimir Jabotinsky at this grim time for the Jewish people is, in the true sense of the word, a national catastrophe,” the editorial began. It proceeded to laud him as a person, a writer, and an orator; when he spoke, the paper asserted, “even the deaf could hear.” But the sentence that struck me with particular force was the one predicting that Jabotinsky would be missed “not only now, in the middle of the storm, but also later, when the storm is over and the time comes to heal the wounds and rebuild Jewish life on new foundations in a new time.”

I quoted this editorial in my piece on Katz’s book, a piece that reflected my own abiding respect for its subject. Among the letters provoked by the review was one from a retired newspaperman named Harry Lopatin, who said he had been a young reporter on the Forward at the time of Jabotinsky’s death. It seems that Cahan had tried to get his editors to cover the funeral, but to a man they had refused on grounds of political antipathy. “Send the youngster,” Cahan finally commanded; and so Lopatin had drawn the assignment.

I scheduled Lopatin’s letter for publication and, because I had enjoyed it so much, invited him to join us at a staff lunch. That morning, as I wandered by the office of my colleague Jonathan Rosen, I was horrified to spot on his desk a new book by the astronomer Carl Sagan (who has since died). “What’s that doing here?” I snapped, and before Rosen could answer I burst out, “He’s a Communist!” Rosen said that he had already assigned a reporter to interview Sagan. “He damned well better make it clear that we comprehend that Sagan’s a Communist,” I snorted. “But he isn’t a Communist,” my colleague reasonably protested. I harrumphed back that he might as well have been, given the campaign he had waged against the Strategic Defense Initiative when President Reagan was facing down the Soviet Union. Then I stomped away.

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Lopatin came in for lunch an hour or so later, and regaled the staff with stories of the old days. At one point, he was asked whether he had liked Abe Cahan. “Hell, no,” he said. “I hated him.” I perked up. “Cahan was a right-wing bastard,” Lopatin continued. “We all hated him.” Things went on in this vein until someone asked Lopatin what he remembered most about his editor. He thought for a moment. What he remembered most, he finally said, was that Cahan would sit in his office with the door open, and when he heard the name of someone he disliked, he would come barreling out, shake his fist in the air, and bellow, “He’s a Communist! He’s a Communist!”

As Lopatin related this story, I felt a kind of calm come over me. Not that I fancy myself Abraham Cahan’s clone. But the longer I am around the less I share the concern that the Forward being produced today in English would be an affront to the editor who led the paper to greatness. It could easily be argued that the tradition at the Forward is to take one step rightward with each crisis that comes upon the Jewish people, though I would not want to push the point too far. Yes, times change, and so do circumstances. But my own view is that while times may change, Abraham Cahan would have perfectly well understood the contours of the struggles we are in today, and have responded in the spirit in which we carry on.

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¹ In addition to editing and writing for the Forward, the indefatigable Cahan composed a five-volume autobiography in Yiddish and a number of remarkable works of English fiction, including The Rise of David Levinsky (1917). He was also prolific in Russian.

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