More in ‘Abraham Cahan’

One day in the fall of 2001, not long after a final salute to the portrait of Abraham Cahan in the lobby of the Forward, I entered Borough Hall in Brooklyn to vote in the New York City mayoral primary. Greeted by a very nice poll watcher, I asked for a ballot that would permit me to vote for Herman Badillo. The lady leafed through the voter registration lists, looked up at me and said: “I’m afraid you can’t do that. You’re registered as a Democrat.” “What?” I exclaimed. “Badillo is a Republican?” She turned her palms up and gave me a look of finality. So it was that at the age of 55, after decades of being set down as a right-wing extremist and arch-collaborator of Robert L. Bartley of The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, I actually changed my registration. If I couldn’t vote for Badillo that year, I would be prepared should he ever make another run for high office.

In New York City in May 1942, the Yiddish Scientific Institute—known then and now by the transliterated Yiddish acronym YIVO—announced a memoir contest for members of the aging remnant of the estimated 2.5 million Eastern European Jews who had crossed the Atlantic during what scholars call “The Third Migration”—roughly, 1880 until a nativist Congress slammed, ...

When Jacob Gordin first arrived in America in 1891, he had no intention of writing for the Yiddish stage. The plays by Chekhov and Ibsen that had inspired the playwright in Russia had little in common with the melodramatic and vaudevillian charades that dominated popular productions on the Lower East Side.
Gordin was won over, however, ...