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Masliansky was born in Slutzk, province of Minsk, Belarus, and was the son of Chaim and Rebecca (Papok) Masliansky. He was mute until the age of five, but by the time he was seven he had become locally famous for his intellectual abilities and his tendency to orate. His father, a teacher of Hebrew and a businessman of moderate means, was an orthodox Jew untouched by contemporary currents of modernism.
At the age of twelve young Masliansky left home to study at the yeshiva in Mir, and two years later went to Paritz, where he studied with the distinguished rabbi Yechiel Michael Wolfson.
Following the death of his father, he helped support his mother and a younger brother by becoming a teacher in the Jewish schools of Pinsk and nearby Karlin. He soon tired of teaching, however, and for about five years engaged in farming. Masliansky apparently resumed his teaching career, but after the pogroms of 1881 he also became active as a public speaker in the nascent Zionist movement, whose goal was to secure a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine. In 1887 he moved to Yekaterinoslav, where, in addition to teaching, he frequently preached in synagogues on the sabbath and other holidays. When he spoke in Odessa in 1891, his success was so great that, with the encouragement of local Zionist leaders, he gave up teaching and became a professional propagandist for the movement. He spent the next three years as a wandering preacher in Russia and Poland; for his Zionist activities he was deported from Odessa and Minsk and was once arrested in Lodz. Ordered to leave Russia in 1894, Masliansky migrated to England, stopping along the way at the major cities of Western Europe to speak to groups of newly arrived Russian-Jewish immigrants. He then joined the mainstream of the Russian-Jewish emigration and in 1895 settled in New York City. He brought with him a reputation as the finest Yiddish orator of his time. On the occasion of his first address, in the Great Synagogue on the Lower East Side, the entrance to the building was so crowded that he had to be handed up the stairs by the police. Masliansky adjusted quickly to his new home, trimming his beard from its Russian fullness to the more Americanized spade shape. In 1898 he began weekly lectures at the Educational Alliance, which had been established in 1889 by prominent German Jews to facilitate the Americanization of Eastern European immigrants. Masliansky became an interpreter of Americanism to the new immigrants, but he was equally concerned with implanting Jewish loyalties in their children. Masliansky wrote with equal ease in Hebrew and in Yiddish, and while still in Russia had contributed several articles to Hebrew periodicals. His paper Die Yiddishe Velt was of substantial literary merit, and Masliansky gave it a pronounced Zionist orientation. But it also emphasized its sponsors' aims to Americanize the immigrants and enlist them in anti-Tammany reform politics in a way that the Lower East Side readers found condescending. Disappointed at the paper's poor reception, the sponsors withdrew their support in 1904, and the Jewish World ceased publication the next year, with Masliansky losing all his personal funds. He remained a frequent contributor to Yiddish and Hebrew periodicals and newspapers, one of his most important contributions being his travel diary of a journey to Palestine in 1921 which appeared in the Yiddish Morgen Journal. Three volumes of his speeches were published in Yiddish in 1909. His memoirs appeared in Yiddish (1924) and in Hebrew (1929) as part of a three-volume edition of his speeches, travel diary, and reminiscences. Masliansky died at the age of eighty-six at his home in Brooklyn and was buried in Mount Carmel Cemetery, Queens, New York City.
In 1902, with the financial backing of Louis Marshall and other prominent German Jews in New York, he became the founder, president, and co-editor of a daily Jewish newspaper, Die Yiddishe Velt (The Jewish World), published in both Yiddish and English. Active in communal organizations, Masliansky was vice-president from 1900 to 1910 of the Federation of American Zionists, president from 1915 to 1920 of the New York division of the Jewish Consumptive Relief Society of Denver, and director from 1925 until his death of the Israel Matz Foundation, engaged primarily in the support of Hebrew writers. He also took an active part in Jewish educational affairs, both in New York and in Brooklyn, where after 1929 he was head of the yeshiva of Borough Park. Though he did not play a leading role in the political movement of Zionism, he became on the Lower East Side of New York a legendary figure as a folk preacher of Jewish nationalism. In 1956, on the centennial of his birth, a prize for excellence in preaching was established in his honor at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America.
He preached a deep commitment to both Jewish tradition and Zion. His speeches were emotional rather than analytic, studded with images drawn from the whole range of biblical and rabbinic literature, and often delivered in the rhythmic singsong of Eastern European Jewish preachers. He nevertheless emphasized the relationship of the individual to his community rather than to a personal God, and in so doing provided a bridge between earlier religious pieties and the more rational and secular interests of American Jews.
On March 3, 1875, he married Henrietta Rubenstein, by whom he had six children: Hyman, Phillip, Bertha, Fanny, Anna, and Beatrice.
