Morris Winchevsky was born as Leopold Benzion Novokhovitch in Jonava, Russian Empire (present-day Lithuania) in 1856. He was a Jewish socialist leader, author, and editor.
After studying in a kheder and in a Russian secular school, he moved to Königsberg, East Prussia in 1877, where he began to publish articles, novels and poems in socialist Hebrew newspapers. He was expelled from the German Empire for his socialist activism, and moved to London, where he founded Der Poylisher Yidl (The Little Polish Jew), one of the first Yiddish daily socialist newspapers, and the Arbeter Fraynd, the first Yiddish-language anarchist newspaper.
He immigrated to the United States in 1894, and he co-founded the New York City-based daily Forverts in 1897, together with Abraham Cahan and Louis Miller. Originally a member of the Socialist Labor Party of America, he was expelled, together with Cahan and Miller, for their implication in the Forverts. Winchevsky was later selected as the representative of the Jewish Socialist Federation to the American Jewish Congress when the AJC met to select its delegates to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. He was subsequently associated with the Communist Party USA and its Yiddish daily Morgen Freiheit, and made a trip to the USSR in 1924-1925, from which he came back enthusiastic about the socialist state. He was also a member of the Proletarian Poets, a circle of working-class socialist jewish poets formed with Morris Rosenfeld, David Edelstadt, and Joseph Bovshover.
He was later considered as the grand-father of socialist jewish literature in the Soviet Union, and a United Jewish People's Order-run school in Toronto was named after him.