Melech Epstein
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Melech Epstein (1889–1979) was an American journalist and historian. His two most famous books, Jewish labor in U.S.A. and The Jew and communism are considered standard works.
Epstein was born in Ruzhany, Grodno Guberniya, Imperial Russia (now in Belarus). His family was unsure of his exact birth date, but assigned him March 15, 1889, the second day of Purim. During his teenage years he became active in the Jewish territorialist movement. Beginning shortly before the 1905 revolution he was a cadre in the Zionist Socialist Workers Party in Białystok, Łódź, Warsaw, Kiev and Odessa. His activities included writing for party journals, organizing unions and Jewish cultural societies and, in Białystok manning an armed guard of the Jewish neighborhood during a pogrom. He served three intermittent periods in the Czarist prisons. Becoming dissatisfied with the ultimate aims of the territorialists he emigrated to America in 1913. He arrived at Ellis island on December 24, 1913.
In New York, Epstein settled in Brownsville, Brooklyn and became involved in the local Jewish radical scene. In 1915 became labor reporter for a new Yiddish daily The Day. Soon he became labor editor, which was an ideal place to observe the burgeoning Jewish labor and radical movements. After The Day came out in favor of foreign intervention against the Bolsheviks Epstein left the paper and joined the staff of Zeit, a Labor Zionist paper edited by David Pinsky. While working for Zeit he exposed financial improprieties involving Lucy Lang, the Forward and the United Hebrew Trades. As a result, the UHT forced his expulsion from its affiliate, the Yiddish Writers Union, which Epstein had helped to found in 1917. Despairing of mainstream union bureaucracy, he left the Socialist party in 1921, as part of the Workers Council of the United States. When this group merged with the communists to form the Workers Party of America Epstein was offered a place as labor editor on the communists' new Yiddish daily, Morgen Freiheit.
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