Abraham "Abe" Cahan (Yiddish: אַבֿרהם קאַהאַן; July 7, 1860 – August 31, 1951) was a Lithuanian-born Jewish American socialist newspaper editor, novelist, and politician.

[3] Abraham Cahan was born July 7, 1860, in Paberžė in Lithuania (at the time in Vilnius Governorate, Russian Empire), into an Orthodox, Litvak family.

He, however, was attracted by secular knowledge and clandestinely studied Russian, ultimately demanding that his parents allow him to enter the Teachers Institute of Vilnius from which he graduated in 1881.

[10] After the Emperor Alexander II of Russia was assassinated by a member of the Narodnaya Volya in March 1881, all revolutionary sympathizers became suspect to the Russian police.

[16] Cahan’s education in Russian and English and his literary and journalistic abilities allowed him to excel as a socialist, and toward the end of his career he was considered a leading figure of the radical Jewish left.

[17] In keeping with his socialist politics, Cahan believed that immigrants needed to combine formal learning with informal studies about local life and community customs to achieve not only an education but also integration into American society.

'Worker's Newspaper')[10] Cahan edited the Arbeiter Zeitung from 1891 to 1895, and followed that position with an editorship at the paper Di Tsukunft (Yiddish: די צוקונפֿט, lit.

[22] In his years working at the Forward, Cahan transformed the self-identified socialist newspaper from an obscure paper with only 6000 readers to the forefront of Yiddish journalism.