To the Other Shore

This is the story of a small but influential group of Jewish intellectuals who emigrated to the US from the Russian Empire between 1881 and the early 1920s - the era of mass immigration . This group abandoned their Jewish identity, absorbed the radical political ideas circulating in 19th-century Russia and took these theories with them to America. When they became leaders in the labour movement in the United States and wrote for the Yiddish, Russian and English-language radical press, the generally retained the secularized Russian cultural identity they had adopted in their homeland, together with their committment to socialist theories. This group of Jewish intellectuals included: Abraham Cahan, long-time editor of The Jewish Daily Forward and one of the most influential Jews in America during the first half of the 20th century; Morris Hillquit, a founding figure of the American socialist movement; Michael Zametkin and his wife, Adella Kean, both journalists and labour activitists in the early decades of the 20th century; and Chaim Zhitlovsky, one of the most important Yiddish writers in modern times. These individuals were part of the generation of Jewish intellectuals that preceded the better-known New York Intellectuals of the late-1920s and 1930s - the group chronicled in Irving Howe's World Of Our Fathers .