His father Jacob (Jack) Isserman, born in Antwerp, came with his family to the US at age four in 1906; he was a machinist who worked at the Pratt and Whitney aircraft factory in East Hartford, Connecticut.

Abraham was a defense lawyer in the first Smith Act trial of Communist Party leaders in 1949 during which he was cited for contempt and then imprisoned afterwards and disbarred.

[4] In the fall of 1968, Isserman enrolled in Reed College in Portland, Oregon, where he joined the campus chapter of Students for a Democratic Society and took part in antiwar protests and other New Left activism.

In the spring of 1970, following the US invasion of Cambodia and the Kent State University strike, he dropped out of Reed College and joined the Portland Revolutionary Youth Movement (PRYM) collective.

He wrote a senior thesis on the history of radical American writers in the 1930s and worked on another underground newspaper, The Portland Scribe.

[5] He graduated with a BA in history in 1973 and stayed on another year, working evenings as a proofreader for The Oregonian and days (unpaid) for The Portland Scribe.

After the debate over American communism, Isserman shifted his focus to the history of conflicts between left and right during the 1960s in his book with Michael Kazin, America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s, now in its third edition.

[11] In 1997, Isserman received a Fulbright grant to teach American Political History in Moscow State University in Russia.