Morris Rosenfeld
Morris Rosenfeld (born Moshe Yankev Chmielowski; December 28, 1862 – June 22, 1923) was a Yiddish poet known as one of the “sweat shop” poets for writing about immigrant life in New York’s garment industry. He was born in Stare Boksze, in Russian Poland. After the cholera epidemic around 1870, his family added Alter to his name; he later changed his last name to Rosenfeld when he moved to the United States. He studied in Boksha, Suwałki, and Warsaw, and worked as a tailor in New York and London, and as a diamond cutter in Amsterdam before settling in New York in 1886 and joining Jewish newspapers.
In the 1890s he wrote song parodies for a New York publisher and published Der Ashmedai (1904). He edited and published several Jewish periodicals, including the New Yorker Morgenblatt (1905) and Jewish Annals. He participated in Zionist activities, attending the Fourth Zionist Congress in London in 1900 and giving readings at Harvard, Chicago, and Wellesley. His major works include Di Gloke (The Bell, 1888), Di Blumenkette (The Chain of Flowers, 1890), and Dos Lieder-Bukh (Songs from the Ghetto, 1897); Gezamelte Lieder (Collected Poems) appeared in 1904. He died in New York City in 1923.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 18:55 (CET).