Isaac Hourwich

Isaac Aronovich Hourwich (Russian: Исаак Аронович Гурвич; April 26, 1860 – July 9, 1924) was a Jewish-American economist, statistician, lawyer, and political activist.

Hourwich is best remembered as a pioneer in the development of labor statistics for the American mining industry and as a prominent public intellectual among the Yiddish-language community in the United States.

[2] Hourwich then moved to Yaroslavl where in 1887 he passed the examination at the Demidov Law Institute and was admitted to the Russian bar.

[1] During this interlude Hourwich also studied the economy and social relations of the Siberian peasantry and wrote a book on the topic, The Peasant Immigration to Siberia, published in 1888.

[1] Hourwich remained active in the underground revolutionary movement even as a lawyer and was instrumental in establishing radical study circles among Jewish workers.

[3] Hourwich earned his doctorate from Columbia after successfully defending a pioneering dissertation on the economics of the Russian village.

[3] Back in America, Hourwich continued to stand outside the Socialist movement, supporting the Progressive Party ("Bull Moose") ticket of Theodore Roosevelt in the Presidential election of 1912.

[1] He remained active in the socialist movement as well, publishing a Yiddish translation of Das Kapital by Karl Marx in 1919 and publishing fragments of his uncompleted Yiddish autobiography, Memoirs of a Heretic, in the Socialist The Jewish Daily Forward and the anarchist Fraye Arbeter Shtimme (Free Worker's Voice).

[1] Hourwich would visit briefly Soviet Russia in 1922 but he was thoroughly disillusioned by the experience, and he emerged as a critic of the tactics of the Bolshevik Party of V.I.

Hourwich was remembered by his friend, journalist William M. Feigenbaum, as "a man of charm and genuine brilliance" with a tendency to intentionally hold contrarian opinions.