The Halo of Education in Abraham Cahan’s “The Imported Bridegroom” and The Rise of David Levinsky

While there is little question that learning plays a major role in Jewish American experience, the ongoing fascination with Jewish achievement has taken critical focus away from the full complexity of their encounters with education. The work of Jewish Daily Forward editor Abraham Cahan (1860–1951) offers one generative starting point from which to build a more rounded perspective of Jewish Americans’ engagement with learning. In Two of Cahan’s most well-known works, “The Imported Bridegroom” (1898) and The Rise of David Levinsky (1917), the protagonists are less interested in actually studying texts or earning degrees than they are in pursuing an ethereal notion of higher learning. Education is imagined as a way to transcend the emptiness of life driven by ambition and the accumulation of wealth. While underscoring Jewish American veneration of higher education, these texts portray the difficulty of finding spiritual sanctuary within an American culture of competition and self-fashioning. Moreover, Cahan’s writing challenges simplified perceptions of education as a springboard to Jewish success.