Of the many literary and intellectual groups that fueled the emergence of Jewish literature in America, none was as well situated to take advantage of the country's opportunities as the cohort centered in New York City during World War II. While social conditions alone can never inspire a renaissance, the quality of Jewish culture – and even the language in which it was produced – always depended on the Jews' relations to the surrounding polity. The radical intellectual community dominated by Abraham Cahan between 1897-1917 had drawn tremendous energy from the concentrated mass of Yiddish readers and theatergoers, but the urgent needs of immigrant audiences riveted the writers' attention on crises of security and material subsistence. Subsequent groups of Yiddish poets and writers,like the Yunge (Young) and Inzikhistn (Introspectivists), managed to distance themselves somewhat from the social and national claims of their immigrant society, yet their reliance on a Yiddish readership put them essentially at odds with English America even as their work responded to its atmosphere. During the 1920s, when American nativism spurred a fear of immigrants and tried to set limits on the advancement of those who had already entered the country, Jewish enthusiasts of the Russian Revolution tried to introduce its egalitarian ethos into America, but their dependence on directives from the Soviet Union limited ever more of their autonomy of mind and spirit the longer they stayed under its ideological influence.