arts & entertainment
An Iconic Newspaperman
In a new book, Seth Lipsky tells the story of Abraham Cahan,
a pivotal figure in journalism and Jewish American history.
I
Suzanne Chessler
Contributing Writer
He was something of a star, but I am
much more interested in making stars out
of the people who work for me. The stars
in my day were not the editors; they were
the writers and in one or two cases senior
editors.
S
eth Lipsky lived among the his-
toric homes of Indian Village in
the 1970s but has lived in the
contemporary world of news for most of
his life.
During the Michigan years, Lipsky
worked in the Detroit bureau of the Wall
Street Journal. Various reporting, editorial
and ownership positions — before and
since — have included employment with
Time magazine, the New York Post and the
New York Sun.
Lipsky, a minority owner of the Detroit
Jewish News, will visit the area to intro-
duce his new book about legendary editor
Abraham Cahan, founder of the Jewish
Daily Forward, the Yiddish publication
started in 1897 and now known as the
Forward. Cahan also penned the acclaimed
1917 novel, The Rise of David Levinsky.
Lipsky's book, The Rise of Abraham
Cahan (Nextbook/Schocken), will be his
subject for two appearances at the Jewish
Book Fair: at 2 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 10, at
the Jewish Community Center in West
Bloomfield; and 1 p.m. Monday, Nov. 11,
at the JCC in Oak Park. His talks are spon-
sored by the Detroit Jewish News.
Lipsky, who proposed the English edi-
tion of the Forward and worked at the
paper for 10 years, has included two sec-
tions of photos in the book. They relate to
Cahan's historic connections as he covered
and confronted issues important to Jewish
immigrants settling into America.
"The Yiddish Forward led its readers not
away from Judaism but toward assimila-
tion:' Lipsky explains in a phone conversa-
tion from New York.
"The English paper was launched in
1990 just as a national Jewish population
survey discovered that the Jewish commu-
nity had a demographic crisis.
"People have said that the Forward has
begun to lead its readers back toward a
Jewish life. It's an cinspirator' in interests of
matters Jewish, and I think Jewish news-
papers can play a role in keeping young
people connected to Judaism:'
Here, Lipsky, 67, whose college
years included a stint as editor of the
Harvard Crimson, anticipates his local
presentations:
JN: What do you like about Abraham
Cahan's story?
SL: I like the relevance of the story to
Seth Lipsky
today and the lesson that one can adjust
one's position to conform to the facts. I
like the example he set as editor and his
trajectory of discovering that, after his
long battle, religion was at the core of his
struggle.
JN: What influenced you to write this
book?
SL: As the founder of the English lan-
guage paper that we call the Forward, [I
realized] that Cahan, 40 years after he
died, was a huge presence there. People
talked about him and wondered how he
might have handled editorials.
I began to wonder about Cahan, and
when I sold my interest in the paper, I
began working on this book.
JN: How does your book differ from
other books on the same subject?
SL: There are some very good but
more academic and specialized books
about Abraham Cahan. This is a book
for the general reader, and it is part of
the Encounter Series on great Jewish
lives that's published by Nextbook in
conjunction with Random House and the
Schocken imprint.
JN: What did you learn about the dra-
matic impact of the Forward and Cahan
as you worked on the book?
SL: One of the remarkable things I
learned was just how anti-communist The
Forward was. We think of it rightly as a
great pro-labor, progressive institution in
many ways, but it figured out before the
other papers just what an evil enterprise
the Soviets' Communist system was.
Abraham Cahan made a famous trip to
Europe in the mid-1920s and debriefed the
Forward's correspondents. He came back
and said what the Communists had set up
in Russia was worse than anything under
the czars.
Coming from someone like Cahan, that
was a very strong statement, and it colored
the coverage of the Soviet Union for the
rest of his days.
A free trade union movement, with
unions responsive to their members and
not a political party or government, is
the movement that really resulted in the
downfall of the Soviet Union. A lot of the
events in the downfall of the Soviet Union
happened after Cahan died, which was
in 1951. This book sets the stage for that
story.
JN: How did the Forward change with its
English-language edition?
SL: The Forward, between the assimi-
lation it encouraged and the murder of
European Jewry, was left with a dwindling
readership. In 1983, it announced it would
retreat to weekly publication from daily.
That is the point at which I approached
the Forward with a proposal to create a
new paper under the flag of the old paper
in the English language.
We started out as a weekly, but it has
been my hope it will be restored to daily
publication in English. That is happen-
ing now with the online platform, which
makes daily publication radically less
expensive from a production point of view
than a printed paper. I think it will end up
as a daily paper on the Web.
JN: How would you compare your edit-
ing style to Cahan's?
SL: Cahan was a great editor, political
leader and intellect in his own right. I'm a
newspaperman and much more conserva-
tive than he was.
IN: What would you like readers to
remember about the famous journalists
you recall in connection with Cahan and
also show in pictures?
SL: There's a picture of Lincoln Steffens,
who became the editor of the New York
Commercial Advertiser and was a famous
muckraking journalist. Cahan founded the
Forward but quit [for a time], protesting
attempts of the Socialist Party to control
the publication, and went to work for the
Commercial Advertiser.
There's a picture of William Dean
Howells, who was a great literary figure
in America at the time and took Abraham
Cahan under his wing.
And there's a picture of H.L. Mencken, a
famous correspondent for the Evening Sun
in Baltimore but also an anti-Semite who
had a great friendship with Cahan; they
collaborated on a monograph about the
Yiddish language, and it's a mystery why
they liked each other so much.
JN: What are your current projects?
SL: I wrote an annotated guide to the
Constitution for the general-interest
reader, and I'm writing two sequels to that,
one on the constitutional dollar and one
on broad themes in the Constitution. I'm
working on a book about Vietnam. I edit
the New York Sun website, and I write a
column for the New York Post.
JN: How do you envision the future of
Jewish newspapers and newspapers in
general?
SL: It's logical that we'll reach a tipping
point where the online publications are
more practical and popular than the print-
ed papers, but papers are proving pretty
durable. Most of the larger companies
bring in far more revenues through their
printed products than online products, but
it's starting to shift. ❑
Seth Lipsky will speak at 2 p.m.
Sunday at the Jewish Community
Center in West Bloomfield and at
1 p.m. Monday, Nov.11, at the JCC
in Oak Park. No admission charge.
www.jccdet.org .
JN
November 7 • 2013
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