Olgin, Moissaye J.

OLGIN, MOISSAYE J. (1878–1939). Yiddish writer and journalist and editor of several Yiddish socialist publications in Russia and the United States, Moissaye J. Olgin served as editor of the Yiddish Communist daily newspaper in New York, Freiheit, later Morgen Freiheit, from its founding in April 1922. Olgin (family name Moishe Yankl Novomeisky) was born in a small town near Kiev, Ukraine. In 1900 he became a student at Kiev University and was expelled after two years for revolutionary activity. Later, in Vilna (now Vilnius), he became an activist in the Bund, the underground Jewish social-democratic party in Russia. During the 1905 revolution he wrote all the public statements issued by the Bundist leadership and was dubbed the Bund’s “golden pen.” Following the failure of the revolution he devoted much time to Yiddish education for workers and prepared two Yiddish grammar texts. Beginning in 1910 he studied German literature at Heidelberg University. He arrived in New York in 1915 and became a contributor to the Jewish Daily Forward and other Yiddish socialist periodicals. Olgin also studied at Columbia University. His doctoral thesis was issued in book form in 1918 under the title The Soul of the Russian Revolution. He spurned offers to accept a teaching appointment at a few American universities, preferring to work with the Yiddish socialist movement.

After the Bolshevik Revolution (November 1917) Olgin became the leader of the pro-Communist faction in the Jewish Federation of the Socialist Party and in 1921 brought it into the Communist Party. Under Olgin’s editorship, the Freiheit attracted some of the most popular Yiddish writers and poets of the period.

Though Olgin shared the Stalinist viewpoint of the American Communists, he was quick to take advantage of the Party’s turn to its Popular Front position in the mid-1930s, when a less rigid sectarian outlook was promoted. In this period Olgin proposed united-front action within the Jewish community against anti-Semitism and fascism and to seek the cooperation of Zionists and even bourgeois spokesmen in this effort. He also expressed appreciation for American democracy in an essay entitled “I Love America,” which irritated Party hard-liners.

In his last years Olgin became more involved with Yiddish cultural problems. At the World Yiddish Cultural Congress held in Paris in 1937 he delivered the main report, in which he developed a program for the Yiddish secular and progressive cultural movement.

Olgin was also a noted translator in several languages and was among the first translators of Lenin’s works into English. He translated a number of important fictional works of European and American writers into Yiddish. During the 1920s and 1930s Olgin was an authoritative and much-beloved figure in the Yiddish Left. The procession at his funeral in Manhattan on 27 November 1939 attracted more than 100,000.

Buhle, Paul. “Jews and American Communism: The Cultural Question.” Radical History Review 23 (spring 1980).

Moissaye J. Olgin Archive (1878-1939). Writings and Works About. Marxists Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/archive/olgin/index.htm