Finding the Jewish Shakespeare by Kaplan Beth;

Author:Kaplan, Beth;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
Published: 2021-10-02T00:00:00+00:00

Jacob Gordin circa 1906.

And so the next round began. Gordin denounced Cahan from the stage as a man of poor education and even poorer taste. Louis Miller again wrote an article in defense of the play, but this one Cahan refused to print, ordaining that the Forward didn’t print discussion about theater reviews even when written by one of the paper’s founders. Miller’s article found a place in Gordin’s own Drama World.

Published there too was Gordin’s furious denunciation of his rival, exposing their most profound disagreement: how to teach their landslayt good socialist principles. Each man was trying, in his own paternalistic way, to lead his perplexed Jewish flock. But Cahan saw Gordin as a bombastic, overrated, nostalgic self-promoter. Gordin saw Cahan’s attempts to ease his readers into the American way as a hypocritical sellout of everything he should stand for as a Russian, a Jew, and a socialist. Gordin fumed,

I cannot reach any accord with him because he is my principle detractor, because whatever I build, he tears down, because whatever I’ve been doing all my life, he negates. We are working for the sake of the selfsame people. But I want to lead them forward, and he drags them backward through the Forward. I say to them, a man must be upright and defend his principles unequivocally; he teaches them to be politicians. I say, a revolutionary should not be two-faced. . . . He says, you have to keep the circulation in mind. I say, you have to lift the masses up to your level. He says, you have to stoop down to the level of the masses, cater to them, and accommodate yourself to their basest instincts.

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