Morris U. Schappes (1907-2004) was a scholar, editor and activist who was fired by the City College of New York after being investigated as a Communist Party member, and who spent over a year in prison (1943-1944) for perjury after refusing to name other Party members when testifying before an investigating committee of the New York State Legislature. He was a founder and long-time editor of the progressive, secular magazine Jewish Currents; a popular lecturer; and the author of articles, reviews, radio broadcasts, books and monographs, many of them on U.S. Jewish history.

Born Moishe Shapshilevich in Kamenetz-Podolsk, Ukraine, Schappes spent his earliest years in Brazil and then moved with his parents to New York City in 1914. Bureaucrats reduced the family name to Schappes and his mother Americanized his name as Morris. He added the middle "U" later as part of his byline as a sportswriter on the newspaper of City College of New York (CCNY), where he graduated in 1928 and subsequently joined the faculty as an English lecturer. (He had previously attended Townsend Harris Hall High School.) He also attended Columbia University as a graduate student, earning a master's degree in 1930. In that same year, he began his sixty-two year marriage to Sonya Laffer, who died in 1992.

A longtime fixture in the world of American Communism, Schappes gained widespread attention in 1941 when he was fired, along with 40 others, from the faculty of CCNY for Communist Party membership or involvement. The school had first attempted to dismiss him in 1936 for his political activities but he was retained as the result of a student protest. Later he served 13 1/2 months (1943-1944) in prison for perjury after refusing to name other Party members before New York's Joint Legislative Committee on the State Education System (known as the Rapp-Coudert Committee). After his release from prison, Schappes worked briefly in a war production factory in Queens and, in 1946, joined with other Party activists to found the magazine Jewish Life, which became an unofficial Party organ. He supplemented his income by freelance lecturing and writing.

As a scholar, Schappes first achieved some prominence for his work on the poetry and letters of Emma Lazarus, and he published a number of books and monographs between 1944 and 1987. Having developed a strong interest in Jewish history while serving in prison, he subsequently published two broad historical studies: A Documentary History of the Jews in the United States, 1654-1877 (1950) and The Jews in the United States: A Pictorial History, 1654 to the Present (1958).

In the early 1950s, Schappes experienced another brush with government committees when the State Department began a purge of books from the shelves of overseas libraries operated by the United States Information Agency. The U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, chaired by Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, held hearings to support McCarthy's demand that 30,000 "Communist books" be removed, including Schappes' A Documentary History of the Jews…. In April of 1953, Schappes was subpoenaed and appeared before the committee to defend his books and to attack McCarthyism.

After Nikita Krushchev's 1956 speech denouncing the misdeeds of Stalin, the subscription base of Jewish Life began slipping away and the magazine's staff joined many of the rank-and-filers in their disillusion with the Communism they had known. The result was the founding of Jewish Currents, with Morris Schappes as its editor; the journal, independent of Party discipline and financing, would become an intellectual home for an increasingly diverse base of (mostly) secular Jewish leftists.

Schappes dedicated more than four decades to Jewish Currents, and to shaping the views of its enthusiastic and loyal readership. In his "Editor's Diary" column, he reported on books, plays, films and events in the progressive Jewish movement and engaged in a number of noteworthy controversies, including a historical defense of American Jewish responses to the Holocaust; commentaries about solidarity and tensions between U.S. Jews and African-Americans; and his concerns about antisemitism in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice. Schappes played an active role in the day-to-day management of Jewish Currents until 2000.

Throughout his working life, he was a sought-after lecturer and commentator on Jewish affairs and wrote many articles, essays and letters to the editor in a variety of newspapers, magazines and journals. In 1981, the faculty senate of City College formally apologized for firing him and his colleagues.

Morris Schappes died in New York City on June 3, 2004. He was 97 years old.

Sources:

Douglas, Martin, "Morris Schappes, Marxist and Jewish Scholar, Dies at 97", New York Times (June 9, 2004).

Forward Staff, "Leftist Magazine Editor Morris U. Schappes, 97, Dies", Forward, http://www.jewishcurrents.org/schappes.htm , July 17, 2008.

"Morris U. Schappes, 1907-2004," Jewish Currents, July 2004.