Philip Jacob Jaffe (March 20, 1895 – December 10, 1980) was a communist American businessman, editor and author.

Morris moved to the United States in 1904, temporarily leaving his family in Ekaterinoslav, where Philip attended a Jewish school and experienced a pogrom in 1905.

His father, who had found work as a plasterer, sent for Philip and his mother to join him in the Lower East Side of New York City.

[2] Jaffe attended Townsend Harris Hall, a very selective three-year secondary school, graduating in 1913.

[2] Jaffe studied electrical engineering at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute for a year, then in 1914 transferred to City College of New York.

"[5] According to Jaffe, from its first publication dated September 7, 1933, the magazine consisted mainly of "rewrites of material (we) received on rice paper from the Chinese Communist Party underground in Shanghai.

[7] Jaffe collaborated with his friend Frederick Vanderbilt Field[b] to set up the journal Amerasia in 1937 as a more moderate and less openly Communist successor to China Today.

They found a small group of Westerners interested in the Chinese Communist movement including Edgar Snow and his wife Helen (Peggy), Owen Lattimore and Karl August Wittfogel.

[12] There they met Agnes Smedley and Peggy Snow, and talked with the Communist party leaders Mao Zedong, Zhu De and Zhou Enlai.

In turn Indochina, Indonesia, Malaya and India would seek and gain independence from the European colonial powers.

[1] In 1945 an official noticed a long and almost verbatim quote in Amerasia from a secret Office of Strategic Services (OSS) report.

[16] The voluminous FBI reports on the surveillance include data from wiretaps, hidden microphones and physical observations.

[19] On April 20, 1945, John S. Service of the State Department gave Jaffe a document at the Statler Hotel in Washington, D.C.

The FBI report of their hidden microphone recording of this meeting said, "Service ... apparently gave Jaffe a document which dealt with matters the [Nationalist] Chinese had furnished to the United States government in confidence.

"[18] Service later said he thought Jaffe was just a journalist, and let him have some memos he had written while in China about the Kuomintang forces and the Communists.

[20] On June 6, 1945, FBI agents arrested Jaffe, his co-editor Kate Louise Mitchell, the journalist Mark Gayn, John Service and Emmanuel Sigurd Larsen of the State Department, and Andrew Roth of the Office of Naval Intelligence, and seized the Amerasia papers, including many government documents.

[24] Senator Joseph McCarthy revived interest in the case as part of his campaign against Communists in the State Department.

[21] Republican Senators including Bourke B. Hickenlooper claimed that the Administration had been covering up the Amerasia case, and the documents contained important secret information.

In 1950, when asked in a congressional hearing whether he had traveled to China and had known Owen Lattimore and other figures, Jaffe claimed his privilege under the Fifth Amendment and was cited for contempt.

[30] On September 26, 1954, the day before a grand jury investigating Field was due to adjourn after finding nothing significant, Walter Winchell claimed on the radio that Jaffe had made "a sensational statement to the FBI."

[31] Although the Amerasia case remained controversial in the academic world and in politics, Jaffe gradually faded from public attention.

[2] Jaffe wrote a book, The Rise and Fall of American Communism (1975), in which he drew on his access through Browder to the party's internal discussions and memos.

[2] Jaffe wrote in it, "As I 'look back on us', I recognize that many still romanticize the radicalism of the thirties without acknowledging its absurdities, illusions and self-deceptions.

[2] Jaffe assembled a large collection of material about communism, civil rights, pacifist movements, labor, and the Third World.