" A Romance of New York": Abraham Cahan's Encounters with Non-Jewish Immigrants

• In Event: Jews and their Ethnic Neighbors in 20th Century New York:Images and Attitudes

Abstract

Ayelet Brinn explores the early English-language journalism career of renowned Jewish Daily Forward editor Abraham Cahan. Through a study of Cahan’s articles in American Anglophone newspapers and his later reminiscences, Brinn elucidates Cahan’s appreciations of immigrant life in New York outside the Jewish sphere. She shows how Cahan’s writings shaped the vision of various ethnic groups held first by countless English-reading readers and colleagues and ultimately informed his Yiddish subscribers’ understanding of the non-Jewish people among whom they lived in the Jewish quarter.

Author

• Ayelet Brinn, Fordham University