Zukunft

ZUKUNFT. At a time when the prestige of a Yiddish publication stood in indirect proportion to the frequency of its publication, the Yiddish-speaking leftist intelligentsia in New York felt the need for a highbrow monthly. Di Zukunft (The Future) first appeared in January 1892 in response to this need. It was founded by Philip Krantz, Abraham Cahan, Morris Hillquit, and Louis Miller, the same group that had founded the weekly Arbeter Zeitung (Workers’ Paper) two years earlier. Except for a hiatus of five years, from 1897 to 1902, it has been published until its twenty-first century demise. since. In 1992, the journal celebrated its hundredth anniversary at the New York Young Men’s Hebrew Association.

Di Zukunft began with a challenging and complicated set of goals. A socialist publication from the outset, it was designed to be an organ of political propaganda. Its editors hoped to put out a journal comparable to the “thick journals” published for the tiny, elite group of intellectuals in nineteenth-century Russia. They looked enviously, too, at such highbrow English-language magazines as the Atlantic and dreamed of creating something similar in Yiddish. Unfortunately, their readership lacked the secular education that distinguished members of the Russian intelligentsia and middle-class American readers of the Atlantic, so Di Zukunft of necessity became a vehicle for the edification of the immigrant Jewish community in America.

In the beginning the articles were divided into three categories: socialism, general “science” (or scholarship), and literature. The aim was to give contributors a forum for the exposition of their latest theoretical musings, while giving readers exposure to the basic facts of modern science and the latest writings of some of the world’s finest (and many less known) Yiddish writers. Popularization was the key concept, as the editors soon recognized. Until Di Zukunft had succeeded in creating for itself an educated readership, it would be forced to target a level of cultivation far beneath that of the men and women who wrote for it.

Di Zukunft was not a dazzling success in its first decades, and though it is difficult to measure the extent to which it furthered its goal of raising the Jewish masses out of ignorance and into a modern, secular, and politically progressive view of the world, it is fairly safe to say that its impact on the lives of common working people was not enormous. There is no doubt that the quality of its articles was uneven at best. And yet the journal could boast a number of truly extraordinary figures among its contributors, and its pages contain treasures that few researchers have turned up. Di Zukunft was and remains fascinating above all for the picture it gives us of the development of the intellectual vanguard in the Jewish immigrant community.

One of its most noteworthy and most frequent contributors in its early years was Louis Boudin, labor lawyer and author of the widely respected book The Theoretical System of Karl Marx (1907). In addition to many articles on socialist theory and current political trends, he contributed some of the earliest examples of Marxist literary criticism ever published in the United States in any language. Leo Deutsch, the Russified Jewish intellectual who was widely known among Jewish revolutionaries on both sides of the Atlantic for his ordeals during sixteen years of imprisonment in Siberia, published numerous articles on his own experiences and on the heroes and heroines of the Russian Jewish revolutionary movement. Abraham Cahan wrote on a wide range of topics, from literary theory to biology. Morris Winchevsky offered political history and theory, in addition to poetry, stories, and translations. Chaim Zhitlovsky treated readers to the various stages in his intellectual journey through the problems of radicalism and Jewish identity.

Writing in 1912 about the history of Di Zukunft, Morris Winchevsky characterized the political orientation of the monthly in its first twenty years by saying that it had started out presenting a viewpoint that combined Marxism, Blanquism, and traditions taken from the conspiratorial Narodnaia volia (Popular Will) movement in Russia, but that this amalgam of ideologies had gradually given way to the more or less unified worldview of “contemporary Marxism.” The goal for the future, he said, was to abandon the doctrinaire assimilationist ideology of the previous era in Jewish socialism and actively take account of the Jewishness of the journal’s contributors and the working masses they were trying to serve.

This goal appears to have been met, though in a way that Winchevsky might not have predicted. In 1913, Abraham Liessin took over the editorship and occupied that position for twenty-five years, longer than any predecessor or successor. By one estimate, within a single year he boosted the readership from a modest two or three thousand to an impressive twenty thousand. He attracted a consistently higher caliber of writer than in the past. Above all, he moved the journal away from the antireligious sentiments that characterized its earlier decades to a ready acceptance of Jewish concerns. It was during the 1920s that Di Zukunft gained recognition among Jews around the world, especially on matters relating to the Bund. It also widened the considerably narrower political focus of earlier years.

Liessin’s impressive circulation figures did not survive the Depression, and over the years the journal was passed from owner to owner (including for many years the Jewish Daily Forward), generally operating at a loss. Until recent decades, with a circulation of some three thousand, Di Zukunft was published three or four times a year by CYCO (Tsentrale yidishe kultur organizatsye) and the Congress for Jewish Culture. It expired in the first years of the twenty-first century.

Boaz, Khaim. “Der khoydesh-zshurnal ‘Tsukunft’” (The monthly journal Zukunft). Di Tsukunft 73, nos. 3–4 (March–April 1968).

Shtarkman, Moyshe. “Bashayners fun der ‘Tsukunft’” (Luminaries of Di Zukunft). Di Tsukunft 73, nos. 3–4 (March–April 1968).

Yeshurin, Yefim. “Zibetsik yor ‘Tsukunft’ (1892–1962) (Biblyografishe statistik)” (Seventy years of Zukunft [1892–1962] [Bibliographical statistics]). Di Tsukunft 67, nos. 11–12 (November–December 1962).