Forward: Immigrants, Socialism and Jewish Politics in New York, 1890–1917 (review)

Ehud Manor sets out to explore the politics and political significance of the Jewish Daily Forward and its editor, Abraham Cahan, between the years 1890 and 1917. He argues that no real historical research has been done on the paper. Rather, he claims, previous scholars have simply embraced an "idealized memory" of a non-political Forward that functioned as both an agent of Americanization and a champion of Yiddish culture, while ignoring "the fact that the JDF [Jewish Daily Forward] was a political force from the beginning" (14). Manor seeks to demonstrate that the Forward, under Cahan's complete control from 1903, exerted considerable political influence in New York and over the Yiddish speaking public, and that the political stance of the United States' most widely read Yiddish daily was not at all what it purported to be.

While Cahan identified himself as a socialist and the Forward was founded as a socialist newspaper, Manor argues that under Cahan the Forward worked together with staunch conservatives to advance the interests of the Republican Party and to promote a conservative political agenda. He stops short of suggesting that the Forward was part of an outright political conspiracy, although he does raise this as a possibility, but he claims that Cahan's interpretation of socialism "as a vague moralistic and pious ideological structure which might, at best, serve as an individual moral compass for some kind of self-righteousness and self-esteem" worked to the advantage of Republican politicians and played into the hands of the "American-Jewish plutocracy," embodied by the patrician American Jewish Committee and particularly by Committee stalwarts Jacob Schiff and Louis Marshall (43, 14).

Manor attempts to make his case by demonstrating that at key moments, the Forward advanced conservative politics either by abstaining from debate or by urging its readers to accept the judgment of wealthy and established communal leaders like Schiff and Marshall. In approximately 100 pages of text, Manor works to show that the Forward failed to support causes "appropriate" to a progressive publication. According to Manor, these include Zionism, unrestricted immigration, tenement reform, attempts to organize American Jewry, and the efforts of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union to improve working conditions in the garment industry. In each of the cases he examines, Manor claims that the Forward revealed itself to be an agent of political conservatism and an underminer of the left. He points, moreover, to Cahan's praise for Jacob Schiff, "one of the leading figures of American conservatism," and his willingness to turn to Louis Marshall for help in avoiding government censorship during World War I as further evidence of the paper's, and of Cahan's, betrayal of the socialist cause (77).

Manor's thesis is certainly intriguing, and there is room to question Cahan's commitment to socialist politics. As historian Tony Michels noted in his book A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York (Harvard University Press, 2005), the Forward under Cahan's stewardship was hardly a Socialist Party organ. Cahan was far more interested in transforming the Forward into a general interest daily than in reflecting strict party doctrine. Under his leadership, the paper not only tolerated a diversity of political opinion, it also adopted a sensationalistic and popular tone that marked it as different from the more radical Yiddish daily, Dos Abend Blat. But while Manor claims that his book reveals the true politics behind the Forward, he seems far more intent on castigating Cahan for failing to adhere to the author's definition of progressive politics. This is particularly true with regard to the sections dealing with Zionism. It hardly seems surprising to learn that the Forward, a non-Zionist newspaper, heaped scorn on Theodor Herzl's "Uganda Plan" in 1903, but Manor, who opens the book by proclaiming himself to be a "devoted left-wing Zionist, or a Socialist-Zionist," interprets the paper's anti-Uganda position as an indication of...