Philip Jaffe

Philip Jacob Jaffe (March 20, 1895 – December 10, 1980) was a communist American businessman, editor and author. He was born in Ukraine and moved to New York City as a child. He became the owner of a profitable greeting card company. In the 1930s Jaffe became interested in Communism and edited two journals associated with the Communist Party USA. He is known for the 1945 Amerasia affair, in which the FBI found classified documents in the offices of his Amerasia magazine that had been given to him by State Department employee John S. Service. He received a minimal sentence due to OSS/FBI bungling of the investigation, but there were continued reviews of the affair by Congress into the 1950s. He later wrote about the rise and decline of the Communist Party in the USA.

Career

Background

Philip Jaffe was born in Mogileb near Poltava, Russian Empire on March 20, 1895. His father, Morris Jaffe, was a Russian-speaking Jewish lumberjack. Morris moved to the United States in 1904, temporarily leaving his family in Ekaterinoslav, where Philip attended a Jewish school and experienced a pogrom in 1905. His father, who had found work as a plasterer, sent for Philip and his mother to join him on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in New York City. Roughly one third of the copies went to government offices.