Maurice Isserman

Maurice Isserman
Maurice Isserman, March 2008
Born	(1951-03-12) March 12, 1951 (age 66) Hartford, Connecticut
Occupation	Professor, historian

Maurice Isserman (born March 12, 1951), formerly William R. Kenan and the James L. Ferguson chairs, long-time Professor of History at Hamilton College and an important contributor to the "new history of American communism," which reinterpreted the role of the Communist Party USA during the Popular Front period of the 1930s and 1940s. His books have also traced the emergence of the New Left and the decade of the 1960s. He co-authored a biography of Dorothy Ray Healey and wrote an award-winning biography of American socialist leader Michael Harrington.

Recently, he refocused his work on the history of mountaineering in the Himalayas and the United States. He has contributed editorials and book reviews to The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Newsday, the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, and The American Alpine Review.

Isserman was born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1951, into a family that would have significant influence on his political and intellectual future. His mother, born Flora Huffman, was the daughter and sister of Quaker ministers and graduated from a Quaker college. She was a social worker for Connecticut. His father, Jacob (Jack) Isserman, was born in Antwerp and came with his family to the US in 1906 at 4, and he was later naturalized as a US citizen. He was a machinist who worked at the Pratt and Whitney aircraft factory in East Hartford, Connecticut.

The Issermans were Jewish; Maurice’s uncle, Ferdinand Isserman, was a prominent rabbi in St. Louis, Missouri. Another uncle, lawyer Abraham J. Isserman, was member of the International Juridical Association (1931), founding member of the National Lawyers Guild (1937), and member of the American Civil Liberties Union: he was also one of the lawyers in the first Smith Act trial in 1949, during which he was cited for contempt and then imprisoned afterwards and disbarred. He also argued for the plaintiff in Dennis v. United States.