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

He graduated with a B.A. from City College of New York (CCNY) in 1928, returned to teach there September 1928, and began graduate work at Columbia University. In 1930, he graduated Columbia with an M.A. and married Sonya Laffer (1909-1992). Sonya Laffer had graduated from Hunter College High School in 1925 and went on to Hunter College, graduating with a B.A. in 1929. In 1932 she earned a degree in teaching English as a second language from CCNY. She worked as a teacher, and in the 1940s was a manager of the Jefferson School of Social Science bookshop.

In 1934 Morris Schappes officially joined the Communist Party. Schappes explained his entry into the party as follows: “I joined the Communist Party in 1934 because I wished more effectively to resist the march of fascism and work for a new reorganization of our social economy in an American form of Socialism,” 2 and “One of the features that attracted me to the Communist Party was the development of Soviet Jewish culture. Also, I supported the Soviet peace policy of collective security, which would have prevented World War II.” 3 He was also influenced by the Depression and his in-laws’ politics.

Schappes helped found the Anti-Fascist Association of staff and faculty at CCNY in 1935. The following year Schappes, along with a dozen other CCNY faculty, were dismissed by the administration for their activism, but following large student protests and trade union pressure, they were reinstated. Then in 1941 Schappes and about 40 other CCNY instructors were investigated by the Rapp-Coudert Committee. His turned into one of the most publicized of the cases. Though he admitted to his Communist Party membership, when asked to name colleagues affiliated with the party, he said there were only four, all of whom were not on the faculty by that time. There was evidence to the contrary, so he was indicted on charges of perjury, incarcerated in December 1943 and released on parole in December 1944. Not until 1981 would the Board of Trustees of CUNY formally apologize to him for his unfair dismissal and treatment.

By the time he was in prison in 1943, Schappes’s academic interests had shifted away from American literature, where they had once been centered, and tilted more in the direction of American Jewish history, politics and culture. He had distanced himself from his Jewish and Yiddish background in his early years in the U.S., when trying to assimilate as a child and adolescent, but his shift back to Jewish culture began in the mid-1930s. Schappes explained, “Not only Marxism but the impact of Hitler’s anti-Semitism overcame my alienation from the culture of my people and family.” 4 While in prison December 1943 through December 1944, he read works on American Jewish history and taught himself Hebrew. After his year in prison, Schappes worked as an editor, writer and educator.

Beginning from its inception in 1946, Schappes was on the editorial board of the Communist-Party-sponsored magazine, Jewish Life . In 1958, in tandem with growing disillusionment with Soviet Communism in Schappes’s circles and with Schappes’s entry into the position of Editor-in-Chief, the magazine shifted away from Communist politics, transformed into a more broadly leftist, politically independent publication, and was renamed Jewish Currents . Schappes served as Editor-in-Chief until 2000.

Schappes taught Jewish Studies at the Jefferson School of Social Science from 1948 through 1957 and at the School of Jewish Knowledge 1958-1969. When in 1972 he was offered a full professorship in the Queens College History Department, he thought it “more important to continue editing Jewish Currents than to be one of 50,000 history professors in the United States.” 5 He did, however, take on the position of Adjunct Professor of History at Queens College 1972-1976. He was especially active in the American Jewish Historical Society and the American Historical Association. He died on June 3, 2004.

His letters written during incarceration at the Tombs in Manhattan were published as Letters from the Tombs (1941), with a foreword by Richard Wright. He edited and/or authored introductions to Emma Lazarus: Selections from her Poetry and Prose (1944; 5th edition, 1982), The Letters of Emma Lazarus (1949), A Documentary History of the Jews of the United States: 1654-1875 (1950; 1971), and An Epistle to the Hebrews (1987). He wrote The Jews in the United States: A Pictorial History, 1654 to the Present (1958; in 1965, revised and retitled as A Pictorial History of the Jews in the United States ). He contributed columns and articles to Jewish Life, Jewish Currents, Morning Freiheit, The Worker and Challenge .

From the guide to the Morris U. Schappes Papers, 1891-2004 (bulk 1940-1990), (American Jewish Historical Society)