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Seventy-five years old yesterday, Abraham Cahan, famous Jewish editor, novelist and Socialist, viewed the possibilities of a European war in the near future as very slight and predicted that anti-Semitism in Europe will decrease as economic conditions improve.
He was reached by the Jewish Daily Bulletin for an interview at a nearby seashore resort where he was spending the day quietly with Mrs. Cahan. If it hadn’t been Sunday, he would have celebrated the ### working at his editor’s desk in the Jewish Daily Forward Building.
As he interpreted European events, Mr. Cahan regarded war as unlikely because the dictators who rule Europe realize that war would be disastrous to their own power. “No dictator,” he said, “can afford a war today.”
SAYS BIAS WILL WANE
Discussing the question of anti-Semitism, he expressed the opinion that in every country except Germany where anti-Jewish sentiment exists, it is a result of economic depression and he predicted that when conditions improve anti-Semitism will wane.
In Germany, he continued, the anti-Jewish policy tends to be more political in character. “It is due,” he said, “to the pressure which the allies exercised on Germany after the war, forcing the country to inflation.”
He gave as a second cause of Hitlerism the propaganda of the German Communists in which, he said, they agitated against democracy and thereby paved the way for Hitler.
‘HITLER BUSINESS UNREAL’
“This Hitler business has never seemed real to me,” Mr. Cahan declared. “It is too much like a nightmare. I always loved Germany and considered her in the forefront of the highest culture and progress.”
But Mr. Cahan was optimistic about Palestine. He declared that the development of the Jewish homeland is “wonderful” and lauded the cultural contributions which refugee German Jews are making in Palestine.
Mr. Cahan recalled the day in 1897 when he first became editor of the Forward. “We had a lot of fanatics,” he said, “who were well-meaning but didn’t understand what a newspaper was. I saw things wouldn’t work out, so I retired from the post.”
WAS POLICE REPORTER
For five years he worked under Lincoln Steffens as police reporter for the Commercial-Advertiser. Then, in 1902, the Forward asked him to come back. He did—on the condition that he would have a free hand with the paper’s editorial policy.
From a circulation of 6,500, Mr. Cahan built it up to 200,000, mainly ### featuring reader-interest material. “I used American methods of putting out a newspaper,” he said. “We went out after human interest stuff. We expanded our news staff. We started a sports page.” He recalled with a chuckle the furor that Socialists raised at the introduction of sports into the paper.
Mr. Cahan was born near Wilno, then part of Russia, in 1860. He came to the United States a poor immigrant and spent a great part of his life in New York’s Jewish East Side. He became one of the ##nders of the first Socialist society in America. He was the first ### make a Yiddish Socialist speech ### he founded the first Jewish ###ion in the country.
If you’ve got something to sell, an ##ellent way of selling it is through columns of the Jewish Daily Bul##n. Call AShland 4-3093 for rates.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
