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.

The Shapshilevich family left Tsarist Russia when Morris was a small child, living first in Brazil before emigrating to the United States in 1914.

[2] He was "highly regarded'[8] as an effective teacher and was awarded annual pay raises seven times during his career at City College.

[4] Schappes served nearly 14 months in state prison, where he learned Hebrew, attended Sabbath, and studied Jewish history.

In 1952, Professor Lewis Balamuth testified before the Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security as follows: Mr. Morris: Would you tell us the circumstances of your joining the Communist Party?

"[3][6] 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,[12] Jewish Currents aligned with a dissident liberal faction of the CPUSA headed by John Gates.

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

By 1958, Ms. Jochnowitz said, the Jewish Life staff had become anguished by the Soviet Union's abrupt discarding of Stalin and the only sort of Communism they had known.

[1] In 1983, Schappes submitted an oral history of his life to Columbia University in New York City, material which was transcribed into 66 pages.