He was born Yisruel Yehoyshye Zinger,[1] the son of Pinchas Mendl Zynger, a rabbi and author of rabbinic commentaries, and Szewa Zylberman.

In 1921, after Abraham Cahan noticed his story Pearls, Singer became a correspondent for the American Yiddish newspaper The Forward.

Eventually, Israel Joshua invited his younger brother, the future Nobel prize winner Isaac Bashevis Singer, to the United States and engineered for him a job with The Forward.

Singer died of a heart attack at age 50 at his home in New York City, at 258 Riverside Drive, on February 10, 1944.

[2] In the introduction to A Treasury of Yiddish Stories, Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg stated that Singer's books are organized "in a way that satisfies the usual Western expectations as to literary structure.