Morris Schappes

Morris Schappes died age 97 on June 3, 2004, in New York City.

Schappes garnered professional recognition for his work as a historian; in 1993 he received the Torchbearer Award of the American Jewish Historical Society.

Schappes' papers reside in two collections, one held by the Tamiment Library of New York University in New York City and the other by the American Jewish Historical Society. In 1983, Schappes submitted an oral history of his life to Columbia University in New York City, material which was transcribed into 66 pages.

In 1981, City University apologized to Schappes and still-living professors for firing them four decades earlier.

In 1972, he accepted a position as adjunct professor of history at Queens College.

In 1957, Schappes began teaching at the School of Jewish Knowledge through 1969.

In the aftermath of Nikita Khrushchev's February 1956 "Secret Speech" and the violent repression of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 in the fall of that year, Jewish Currents aligned with a dissident liberal faction of the CPUSA headed by John Gates. The magazine ultimately decided to leave the Communist Party orbit altogether to pursue an independent existence.

In 1953, as part of fallout from a purge of books in USIA overseas libraries, The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, chaired by Senator Joseph McCarthy, subpoenaed Schappes to appear before it in April 1953 to defend his own books.

In 1952, Professor Lewis Balamuth testified before the Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security as follows:

In 1948, Schappes began teaching at the Jefferson School of Social Science through 1957.

In November 1946, he became a member of the editorial board of Jewish Life (later known as Jewish Currents), an English-language magazine associated with the Communist Party USA dealing with Jewish issues and targeted to a Jewish readership. He served as editor of this publication for the next four decades, ending in 2000. He wrote "The Editor's Diary."

In 1942, Henry Foner composed "The Ballad of Morris Schappes."

In 1941, Schappes was one of 40 educators fired in conjunction with an investigation by the Joint Legislative Committee to Investigate the Educational System of the State of New York, commonly known as the Rapp-Coudert Committee, a body which attempted to identify and remove members of the Communist Party USA from the public education system of New York state.

On April 23, 1936, a new head of the English Department at City College wrote to Schappes announcing that his position at City College was to be regarded as temporary, and that he was therefore summarily dismissed from the staff. Students at City College erupted at what they perceived to be a politically motivated personnel decision, with 1500 students signing a petition calling for Schappes' reinstatement and protest meetings held by the American Student Union and former students of Schappes.

In 1930, Schappes married Sonya Laffer, who died in 1992.

In 1928, he accepted a position as a lecturer in the English Department of City College. He was "highly regarded' as an effective teacher and was awarded annual pay raises seven times during his career at City College. He was regarded as a scholar by his peers and frequently contributed reviews and commentary to the popular and academic press, including such magazines as Saturday Review, the New York Post, The Nation, Poetry, and American Literature.

In the latter 1920s, Schappes taught at the New York Workers School.

Morris U. Schappes was born Moishe ben Haim Shapshilevich in Kamianets-Podilskyi, Ukraine, then part of the Russian empire. The Shapshilevich family left Tsarist Russia when Morris was a small child, living first in Brazil before emigrating to the United States in 1914. The family name was truncated to "Schappes" by Brazilian immigration authorities and Moishe's mother later Americanized his name to "Morris" upon the family's arrival in North America. His middle initial, "U," referred to nothing, but was inserted by Schappes as a collegiate journalist to add zest to his byline. He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from City College of New York and a Master's degree from Columbia University.

Morris U. Schappes (pronounced SHAP-pess, born Moishe Shapshilevich; May 3, 1907 – June 3, 2004) was an American educator, writer, radical political activist, historian, and magazine editor, best remembered for a 1941 perjury conviction obtained in association with testimony before the Rapp-Coudert Committee (investigating Communism in education in New York) and as long-time editor of the radical magazine Jewish Currents.