June 4: M.U.S.

Morris U. Schappes, who edited and guided Jewish Currents magazine for more than four decades, died on this date in 2004 at the age of 97. Schappes was a popular lecturer in the English department at City College throughout the 1930s until New York State’s Rapp-Coudert Committee, seeking to root out Communist Party members among teachers in public education, called him to testify in 1941. Convicted of perjuring himself before the committee, Schappes spent thirteen months in prison. Forty years later (“but not too late,” he wrote), the City University formally apologized to him and other victims of the witch-hunt. As editor of Jewish Currents (the mothership of JEWDAYO), Schappes guided the publication through its transition from Communist origins to independence and kept it alive as a reader-supported institution. He also became a self-taught historian who wrote, among other books, A Documentary History of the Jews in the United States, 1654-1875, and The Jews in the United States: A Pictorial History, 1654 to the Present, as well as editing two collections of writings by Emma Lazarus. Many of Schappes’ articles, including his 1982 remembrance of his days in prison, can be read at the Sid Resnick Archive at the Jewish Currents website (scroll down to “S” for Schappes).

“We look back (for experience and wisdom); we look around us (for clarity and analysis); we look forward — forward, past Reagan and Haig, past the new right, old old right, the all-right . . . to a vision of what humankind can make of a world — of peace, of brotherhood and sisterhood, of amity and community of peoples, of the good life. Together, only together, can we go forward.” —Morris U. Schappes