Writing in 1935, one of the leaders of the Marxist Bund movement in interwar Poland, Henryk Erlich, attacked the Forverts (Jewish Daily Forward) and especially its longtime editor, Abraham Cahan. Erlich claimed that, “Apart from the New York Forverts, no other newspaper in the whole international press is so right-wing, unprincipled, petty-bourgeois, and conservative,” and all that was due to the “malevolence of one person”—Abraham Cahan (250–51). That year, former Forverts columnist and Bundist-cum-communist, Moyshe Olgin, who edited the Morgn-Frayhayt (Morning Freedom), published a pamphlet titled, “Ab. Cahan: Who Is He? Whom Does He Represent?” As Gennady Estraikh notes in his comprehensive study, despite the deep Bundist-communist schism, “both sides often had quite similar views on Cahan” (251).

In this encyclopedic book, Estraikh sets out to offer an analysis of the ideological vicissitudes and transformations of the world's most successful Yiddish newspaper, its writers and readers, and of Cahan, who led the Forverts from 1903 until his death in 1951. Estraikh considers that period as the “Russian years” of the paper (2), when “Events in the ‘old country’ remained one of the central topics, and often the central topic, covered by the Forverts” (5). The quotes above represent merely one example of the antagonism that various circles within the usually-contentious Jewish Left expressed toward the Forverts and Cahan at different junctures. The book chapters follow key events, debates, and ideological changes in relation to World War I, the two revolutions of 1917, the paper's shifting attitudes toward Bolshevism and Zionism, the dispute over the role of Yiddish at the Workmen's Circle's schools, the positions of some of Forverts's foreign correspondents (Raphael Abramovitch) and its Berlin bureau, the challenges of the Great Depression and Stalinism, and finally the lasting effects of the Holocaust and the beginning of what Estraikh calls “a policy of catering to the observant” (273).

Any short review would do injustice to the scope of Estraikh's undertaking, and his meticulously researched analysis of the Jewish Left's internal and external struggles. The book is bursting with interesting stories and insights, such as Estraikh's comment that Cahan believed, “Yiddish had an expiration date” (98), and his attitude toward Yiddish was “neo-maskilic” (116). Yet despite Cahan's “dictatorial style of editorship” (10), he exhibited patience to opposing views from people he respected, such as Abramovitch (who viewed Cahan's Marxism as “a caricature of the theory,” 135) and Bentsiyen Hoffman (Tsivion). In cases of profound political disagreement, however, Cahan was unwavering: his clash with veteran Bund leader and the Forverts's business manager, Borekh Charney Vladeck, became “so poisonous that Cahan did not even attend Vladeck's funeral” in 1938 (12).

Nonetheless, the book has a few shortcomings. It is unclear why Estraikh dedicates more pages to Yiddish writer Sholem Asch's visit to the Soviet Union (1928)—as important as it was—than to the Birobidzhan project, Moscow's failed attempt to build a Soviet Jewish nation in Russia's Far East. It is also unclear why Estraikh's wide-ranging bibliography omits seminal works about the Forverts and Cahan by Irving Howe, Moses Rischin, and Isaiah Trunk (the latter wrote specifically about the 1931 controversy over Yiddish at Workmen's Circle's schools). More importantly, throughout the book, Estraikh refers to Cahan's “idiosyncratic outlook, or Forvertism, which combined commitment to both socialism and Jewishness” (40), and quotes historian Melech Epstein, who wrote that Cahan was not “hampered by doctrinal restrictions” (115). Still, Estraikh does not engage with the findings of historians who argued that Cahan and the Forverts were often just paying lip service to socialism while leading “de facto conservative Politics” (Ehud Manor, Forward—The Jewish Daily Forward (Forverts) Newspaper: Immigrants, Socialism and Jewish Politics in New York, 1890–1917, 2009, 106) and being “nominally socialist” (Maxine Schwartz Seller, “The Uprising of the Twenty Thousand: Sex, Class and Ethnicity in the Shirtwaist Makers’ Strike of 1909,” in Dirk Hoerder, ed., Struggle a Hard Battle: Essays on Working-Class Immigrants, 1986, 268). A more critical approach would have examined the gap between rhetoric and deeds, and cases where the Forverts adopted actual conservative positions, whether explicitly or implicitly.

Those criticisms notwithstanding, Estraikh's study makes an unquestionably significant contribution to several fields. Not only is this book vital to students of Yiddish culture and Jewish history, it is also highly beneficial to future scholarship about Soviet history, the American Left, communism, and US-Soviet relations. The extent and depth of the information about numerous socialist and communist intellectuals and activists will surely inform studies in the above fields.