ABSTRACT
When Abraham Cahan, influential editor of the New York Yiddish daily Forverts, toured Palestine in 1925 and the Soviet Union in 1927, he was engaging in an activity that had become common among people of his sort. International travel had become an important mark of middle-class status and urbane sophistication, as well as of intellectual cultivation. Palestine and the Soviet Union thus embodied the basic conflicting aspirations of modern Jewish politics, which often centred on arguments over where the Jews' true home lay. Cahan began life deeply embedded in the Yiddish and Hebrew world of Eastern European Jewry, but in his youth he developed a fervent identification with the Russian language and with Russian culture. Cahan's return from the Soviet Union also provided the occasion for a banquet, attended by some 1,000 members of the Forward Association, the Socialist Party and the trade unions.
