Shlomo Jack Enkin Lewis is a Yiddish translator and student of Judaic Studies.

Leon Zolotkof (1866-1938), born in Vilna, Lithuania, was a poet, writer, and lawyer, In Vilna, he received his Jewish education and afterward attended a Russian senior high school. From late 1883 until the autumn of 1885, he lived in Paris where he was an early auditor at the Sorbonne and at the same time was engaged in a variety of trades, for a time as well working in a publishing house. In those years, he began to write poetry in Russian and Hebrew. He debuted in print with “A Letter from Paris,” in which he described the sad condition of Jewish immigrants in Paris and the work of Alliance Israélite, for the Russian monthly Evreiskoe obozrenie (Jewish review) in St. Petersburg (March 1884)—in which he also published under such pen names as L. Zolotkovich and Ben-Zev. At the beginning of 1886, he returned to Russia, worked for a time on the editorial board of Hayom (Today) in St. Petersburg (writing under the pen name “Zaken gadol” or big elder), and then late that year again left Russia and headed for London, where he purchased the small publishing house from which he produced Der arbayter fraynd (The workers’ friend), became a friend of B. Feygenboym who enlisted him in the Jewish labor movement, and together with Feygenboym wrote Di sotsyalistishe hagode shel peysekh (The socialist Passover Hagada) (London: Berner Street Club, 1888). That same year he emigrated to the United States and settled in Chicago. He was at first active in the Jewish socialist movement and was well-known as a political speaker and lecturer. After graduating from university with a doctoral degree, he practiced as a lawyer and also assumed the post of prosecutor, simultaneously turning his attention to writing, and with his friend and fellow townsman Perets Vyernik, he began to publish various periodicals in Hebrew and Yiddish. He was one of the pioneers in the Yiddish (mainly, conservative) press in America. In 1911 he moved to New York, was active in the Labor Zionist party, later moved over to general Zionism, and was one of the founders of the organ Knights of Zion in Chicago in 1898.

Benjamin Feigenbaum (1860–1932), born in Warsaw, Poland, was a Jewish socialist, newspaper editor, translator, and satirist. Feigenbaum was an associate editor of the Yiddish language The Forward, its predecessor Di Arbeter Tsaytung, and the literary monthly Di Tsukunft, co-founder of the Workmen's Circle, and a pioneer of the Socialist Party of America. Born to a prominent Ḥassidic family in Warsaw, he studied in Yeshivah, but became a free-thinker. According to colleague Israel Joshua Singer, Feigenbaum's "conversion" to secularism happened when his teacher, the Gerer rebbe, discovered that Feigenbaum was not wearing tsitsit, a ritual garb. The rebbe beat him as a punishment. As a young socialist in 1887, Feigenbaum considered starting a socialist Yiddish newspaper. To his delight, he discovered the newly created London-based Arbeter Fraynd. He contacted them immediately. Feigenbaum moved to London towards the end of 1888 to join their editorial board. During Yom Kippur in 1888, Feigenbaum hosted the first public Yom Kippur Ball. In 1889 at another Yom Kippur Ball, Feigenbaum famously declared "If there is a God and if he is Almighty as the clergy claims he is, I give him just two minutes' time to kill me on the spot, so that he may prove his existence!". After two minutes he declared "See! There is no God!". He then announced a location for the workers to eat instead of fasting, as traditionally done during Yom Kippur. In 1891, Feigenbaum immigrated to New York to work on New York's first Yiddish-language socialist newspaper, Di Arbeter Tsaytung (The Workman's Paper). He co-founded the Workmen's Circle, serving as its first general secretary. In New York, Feigenbaum developed a relationship with Bolesław Miklaszewski, a representative of the London affiliate of the Polish Socialist Party (PPS), named the Union of Polish Socialists Abroad (ZZSP). After vetting Feigenbaum's circles to ensure they did not have "a gravitational pull" to Russia, ZZSP announced the creation of a "Jewish Socialist Post from America to Poland" in 1896 to publish and disseminate Yiddish socialist literature.