Cahan_commentary_Converting-for-Love
Media
Part of Converting for Love
Commentary
Abraham Cahan, “Converting for Love,” 1902. Commentary by Ayelet Brinn
In March of 1902, journalist and socialist agitator Abraham Cahan returned as editor of the New-York-based socialist Yiddish daily Forverts (Forward) after a five-year hiatus. Cahan had been one of the newspaper’s founders in 1897 and its first editor-in-chief, but had resigned after not receiving full creative control. In the interim, Cahan wrote instead for English-language newspapers like the New York Commercial Advertiser and the New York Sun. Unlike the Forverts, these newspapers were not politically radical, nor did they speak to an audience primarily composed of Eastern European Jewish immigrants. In these publications, Cahan mainly wrote a genre of features called “urban sketches,” describing life in New York’s immigrant neighborhoods to the newspaper’s readers. Urban sketches were a common theme for features in American mainstream newspapers in this period, but were also a classic theme for feuilletons in various countries going back to the second half of the nineteenth century. When he described this phase of his career in retrospect, Cahan switched back and forth between calling these articles “features” and “feuilletons”—highlighting his engagement with American and transnational journalistic trends (Cahan, vol. 4: 276-9).
Read Full
When he returned to the Forverts, one of Cahan’s goals was to transform the paper so that it conformed to the lessons he had learned while working for English-language newspapers. Up to this point, Cahan felt that the Forverts’s content had been dry and its audience relatively small. Cahan wanted to bring both mass appeal and human interest to the paper by including features and feuilletons, articles that were meant to entertain readers as much as inform them. In order to achieve this aim, Cahan translated several of his recent articles for English-language newspapers and adapted them for inclusion in the Forverts. In Cahan’s mind, these articles could serve as a bridge between the English- and Yiddish-language press (Cahan, vol. 4: 276-9).
One of these adapted articles, “Converting for Love,” appeared in the Forverts on March 16, 1902. Cahan discussed non-Jews living on New York’s Lower East Side who converted to Judaism after falling in love with Jewish neighbors or acquaintances. Most of the article focused on the complications these couples faced when attempting to build lives together. In some cases, Cahan highlighted the humor of these complications—focusing, for example, on a Swedish woman’s attempts to learn the details of Jewish rituals. In other cases, Cahan focused on how the authenticity of these converts was continually questioned by their new families—making it difficult for them to ever feel fully accepted. Cahan had previously published an English-language version of this article anonymously in The Sun on July 21, 1901 under the title “Converts Made by Cupid.” In order to update the article, and to make the text fit with its new setting, Cahan made several changes, including adding a summary of a recent local news story about a Greek immigrant who converted to Judaism in order to marry the daughter of a prominent scholar.
Therefore both the article itself and the context in which it was produced speak to the permeable, complicated boundaries surrounding American Jewish immigrant communities at the turn of the twentieth century. By focusing on stories in which Jews and non-Jews met and fell in love, Cahan evoked the multi-ethnic neighborhoods in which many Jews lived when they first arrived in America. Intermarriage rates between Jews and non-Jews were quite low in this period, though some Jewish communal leaders were still afraid that these numbers might increase at any moment. Cahan therefore picked up on a theme that would have interested readers of both Yiddish and English-language newspapers, whether because they identified with the subjects of the article or because they were curious about lives different from their own. At the same time, the fact that Cahan adapted this article from his own English-language writing demonstrates the intertwined development of American Yiddish and English newspapers, and the ways in which journalists like Cahan attempted to bring these spheres into closer conversation.
Further Reading:
- Abraham Cahan, Bleter fun mayn leben (New York: Forverts Association, 1926-31) 4: 276-9.
- Abraham Cahan, Grandma Never Lived in America: The New Journalism of Abraham Cahan, ed. Moses Rischin (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985).
- Jessica Kirzane, “Ambivalent Attitudes Toward Intermarriage in the Forverts, 1905-1920,” Journal of Jewish Identities 8, no. 1 (2015): 23-47.
- Keren R. McGinity, Still Jewish: A History of Women and Intermarriage in America (New York: New York University Press, 2009).