Morris U. Schappes, 1907-2004

Morris Urman Schappes, self-taught historian of American Jewry, author, teacher and editor of Jewish Currents across four decades, is also known as a victim of hearings conducted in 1941 by the Rapp-Coudert Committee, a New York legislative committee investigating Communist activities in the state educational system.

Morris Schappes was born Moise ben Haim Shapshilevich on May 3, 1907. Prior to Schappes’s birth, his father, Hyman, a wood turner and carpenter, and his mother, Ida Urman, had emigrated from the Ukraine to Argentina, Chile and Brazil. Once pregnant with Morris, however, his mother returned to the Ukraine in order to give birth with the help of family in Kamenets−Podol’skiy. They returned shortly thereafter to Brazil, and Brazilian officials changed their last name to Schappes. In July 1914, intending to move back to the Ukraine, the family first stopped in New York to visit relatives. With the outbreak of WWI, however, they remained permanently in New York, residing on East 10th Street. A clerk at Schappes’s first elementary school Americanized and recorded his name as Morris. His parents changed their last name to Schapiro, but Morris kept Schappes. As a college student he added the initial “U” to his name to stand for his mother’s maiden name, Urman, or alternately Ulysses, but Urman is what formally stuck. 1

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