To the other shore

by Steven Cassedy

To the Other Shore tells the story of a small but influential group of Jewish intellectuals who immigrated to the United States from the Russian Empire between 1881 and the early 1920s - the era of "mass immigration." This pioneer group of Jewish intellectuals, many of whom were raised in Orthodox homes, abandoned their Jewish identity, absorbed the radical political theories circulating in nineteenth-century Russia, and brought those theories with them to America. When they became leaders in the labor movement in the United States and wrote for the Yiddish-, Russian-, and English-language radical press, they generally retained the secularized Russian cultural identity they had adopted in their homeland, together with their commitment to socialist theories. This group included Abraham Cahan, longtime editor of The Jewish Daily Forward and one of the most influential Jews in America during the first half of this century; Morris Hillquit, a founding figure of the American socialist movem