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Maurice Isserman (born 1951) is an American historian who is Professor of History at Hamilton College. He has written about the Communist Party USA during the Popular Front period of the 1930s and 1940s, as well as the emergence of the New Left and the 1960s. He co-authored a biography with Dorothy Ray Healey and authored a biography of Michael Harrington, both of whom were co-founders of Democratic Socialists of America. 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. In 2008, he began writing about mountaineering.
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 and the American Civil Liberties Union, as well as a founding member of the National Lawyers Guild (1937). Abraham was a defense lawyer in the first Smith Act trial of Communist Party leaders in 1949 during which he was cited for contempt and then imprisoned afterwards and disbarred.
Isserman's parents had divorced in 1959, and his mother remarried Walter Snow, a local newspaper reporter who had been a Communist in the 1930s, a minor figure on the literary left (John Reed Club member, and the editor of The Anvil, a Midwestern radical literary magazine). They lived in the small town of Coventry, Connecticut. Maurice Isserman graduated from Coventry High School in 1968.
After his father's death in 1963, Maurice became close to his uncle Abraham, who took him to one of his first demonstrations, the 1967 March on the Pentagon.
After a couple of years, PRYM disbanded, and Isserman returned to Reed to finish his undergraduate degree. He wrote a senior thesis on the history of radical American writers in the 1930s and worked on another underground newspaper, The Portland Scribe.Maurice Isserman, "1968 and All That: Radicals, Hippies and SDS at Reed," Reed Magazine, Winter 2007, pp. 26–30. He graduated with a BA in history in 1973 and stayed on another year, working evenings as a proofreader for The Oregonian and days (unpaid) for The Portland Scribe.
In August 1974, Isserman began graduate work in history at the University of Rochester, working closely with Eugene Genovese and Christopher Lasch. He received his MA in American history in 1976 and his PhD in 1979. His dissertation was a history of American communism during the Second World War,Maurice Isserman, "The 1956 Generation: An Alternative Approach to the History of American Communism," Radical America, Vol. 14, No. 2, March–April 1980, pp. 43–51. which became his first published book, Which Side Were You On? in 1982.
During this period, a debate broke out over the character of American communism, and Isserman's book was one of several criticized by Theodore Draper's two-part attack on the "new history of American Communism" in The New York Review of Books. As the debate heated up, Isserman criticized books by Draper's protégé, Harvey Klehr.Maurice Isserman, "Communist Caricature," In These Times, April 4–10, 1984, pp. 18–22 (review of Klehr's The Heyday of American Communism).Maurice Isserman, "Notes from Underground," The Nation, June 12, 1995, pp. 846–856. (review of Klehr's The Secret World of American Communism). Isserman returned to the theme with a chapter on the history of the CPUSA's "destalinization crisis" in his second book on the emergence of the New Left, If I Had a Hammer in 1987, and in his co-authored work with Healey, Dorothy Healey Remembers, in 1990 (reissued in paperback as California Red).
Isserman secured a tenure-track position at Hamilton College in 1990 as the James L. Ferguson Professor of History. After the debate over American communism, Isserman shifted his focus to the history of conflicts between left and right during the 1960s in his book with Michael Kazin, America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s, now in its third edition. He wrote a prize-winning biography of America's best known socialist of his time, Michael Harrington, leader of the Democratic Socialists of America.
In 1997, Isserman received a Fulbright grant to teach American Political History in Moscow State University in Russia.
Beginning in 2008, Isserman has written several books and articles about mountaineering in the HimalayasAl Alvarez, "Getting High on the Himalayas," The New York Review of Books, July 2, 2009, pp. 27-29. and in the United States. He has also written a history of Hamilton College for its bicentennial in 2012.
Isserman has participated in an exchange at the University of Sussex in fall 1985, a Mellon fellowship at Harvard University, 1992–1993, a Fulbright Distinguished Professorship at Moscow State University in 1997, and an exchange at Pembroke College, Oxford University in 2001.
In an article published October 23, 2023, in The Nation, Isserman explained in detail why he had resigned from the Democratic Socialists of America after 41 years as a member to protest that organization's response to the October 7 attacks in Israel by Hamas.
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