Louis Harap

Louis Harap (September 16, 1904-May 12, 1998) was an American writer and editor.

Harap in 1953

Biography

Harap attended Harvard University, where he was a friend of Delmore Schwartz.^[1] He received his doctorate from Harvard in 1932 and then worked as the librarian at Harvard's Library of Philosophy and Psychology until 1939.^[2] Harap was active in left-wing politics, organizing a group of Communist faculty members at Harvard with William T. Parry in 1937.^[3]

He was a contributor to Science and Society and the Daily Worker.^[4] Harap became the managing editor of the left-wing monthly The Jewish Survey in 1941.^[5] He later became managing editor of Jewish Life from 1948 to 1957.^[6] Harap was one of the first members of the National Committee to Secure Justice in the Rosenberg Case in 1952.^[7] In 1953, Harap testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee, denouncing HUAC as anti-Semitic and arguing that Jews were treated better in the Soviet Union than in the United States.^[8] Harap died in 1998, in Rutland, Vermont.^[9]

Bibliography

• Social Roots of the Arts (New York: International Publishers Company, 1949)
• The Image of the Jew in American Literature: From Early Republic to Mass Immigration (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1974)
• Dramatic Encounters: The Jewish Presence in Twentieth-Century American Drama, Poetry, and Humor and the Black-Jewish Literary Relationship (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987)