To the Other Shore (Princeton Legacy Library (361)). This item is unavailable.To the Other Shore (Princeton Legacy Library (361))

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".

"Cassedy breaks new ground in this comprehensive study of Russian Jewish intellectual emigrés to America from 1880 to 1920. With clear-eyed wisdom, To the Other Shore explores a host of topics, from the influence of nineteenth-century Russian literary criticism to the turn-of-the-century Yiddish press, from Abe Cahan's working-class fiction to Adella Kean Zametkin's daily columns in Der Tog."--Jewish Book World