Joseph Freeman (1897–1965) was an American writer and magazine editor. He is best remembered as an editor of New Masses, a literary and artistic magazine closely associated with the Communist Party USA, and as a founding editor of the magazine Partisan Review.

Joseph Freeman was born October 7, 1897, in the village of Piratin, part of the Poltava Governorate in Ukraine, which was then part of the Russian Empire. Freeman's parents, Stella and Isaac Freeman, were of ethnic Jewish extraction, forced to live in the Pale of Settlement by the anti-semitic laws of the Tsarist regime. At the behest of his grandfather, Freeman spoke Yiddish as a small boy. His parents worked as shopkeepers.

In his memoirs, Freeman recalled a traumatic boyhood incident which had followed shortly after a pogrom of the Jewish population of a neighboring town:

Less than a week later a bearded peasant came into my mother's store drunk. He asked for tobacco in a voice that frightened me, and my mother handed him a package.

"I'm not going to pay you," he said. "You filthy Jews get too much money."

"Then you can't have the tobacco."

The peasant took a clasp knife from his pocket. He opened the long blade and brandished it at my mother.

"I'll kill you," he growled.