Morgen Freiheit

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The New York city-based Morgen Freiheit (Morning Freiheit) was a daily Yiddish language newspaper affiliated with the Communist Party, USA, founded by Moissaye Olgin in 1922. After the end of World War II the paper's editors developed criticisms of the Soviet Union and thereby clashed with the leaders of the Communist Party. Its editor Paul Novick was expelled from the organization. The paper finally folded in 1988.

Institutional history

Establishment

The Freiheit was established in 1922 as a self-described "Communistic fighting newspaper" in the Yiddish language.^[1] Chief among the papers goals included the promotion of the Jewish labor movement, the defense of the Soviet Union, the advancement of proletarian culture, and the defeat of racism in America.^[1]

Development

By 1925, the press run of the Freiheit ran to 22,000 copies per issue, making it the largest of nine daily newspapers in the United States affiliated with the American Communist Party.^[1]

One of the most notable who published in the now defunct The Morgen Freiheit before it ceased publication in the 1980s was Michael Gold who wrote the novel "Jews Without Money", but it was the show case of left socialist artists and writers both Jewish and Non-Jewish, Zionist and Internationalist. The Morning Freiheit/Morgen Freiheit in its time was one of the most prominent Yiddish newspapers published in the United States which made significant political contributions that related to the formation of the International Fur and Leather Workers Union, as well as many of the needle trades unions in the United States including the Amalgamated Clothing Workers union, and perhaps the Congress of Industrial Organizations that later merged with the AFL as the AFL-CIO.

Following Moissaye Olgin's sudden death in November 1939, the Freiheit was headed by Paul Novick (1891–1989), a journalist born in Brest-Litovsk who had first come to America in 1913.^[2] Novick had been associated with the publication from its foundation in 1922 and was active in the ICOR, the American Committee of Jewish Writers, Artists and Scientists, the American Committee for Settlement of Jews in Birobidzhan, and other Communist Party-sponsored mass organizations.^[2]

Writers

People who wrote for or served on the staff of Morgen Freiheit included:

• Melech Epstein
• Mike Gold
• Moissaye Olgin
• William Weiner

Footnotes

1. ^ ^{a b c} Henry Felix Srebrnik, Dreams of Nationhood: American Jewish Communists and the Soviet Birobidzhan Project, 1924-1951. Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2010; pg. 2.
2. ^ ^{a b} Srebrnik, Dreams of Nationhood, pg. 16.