He later joined the US Army in 1941 and was stationed in the Aleutian Islands in Alaska, along with novelist Dashiell Hammett, where together they wrote and published a newspaper for US troops, The Adakian.

[2] Colodny was a historian and professor, who earned his doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley in 1950, with his Masters Thesis on the Spanish Civil War.

[3] Colodny was a member of the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigades (VALB) and served on their historical preservation committee, as well as contributing articles to their publication.

Colodny was one of the original twenty-nine sponsors of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, along with many other notable American intellectuals and writers.

Isidor was a Jewish immigrant originally from Belarus, but often claimed to have been born in Vermont (where he grew up) on various papers.