July 21, 2011 | 6:14 pm

From Pike to Greenberg to Koufax - Great Jewish Sports Heroes

Posted by Jonathan Kirsch

Jews and Baseball: Sandy Koufax on the mound.

One of my fondest childhood memories are the baseball games that my grandfather and I watched on the public diamond in La Cienega Park. The players were Jews, and so were the fans.  Perhaps that’s why I still think of baseball as a sport with a special resonance for Jews. After all, even if we don’t remember the first Jewish professional ballplayer — his name was Lipman Pike — who in the NBA or the NFL can stir the Jewish soul like Hank Greenberg or Sandy Koufax?

Something of the same point is made in “Jews and Baseball” by Burton A. Boxerman and Benita W. Boxerman (McFarland, $45.00 per volume) (www.mcfarlandpub.com, 800-253-2187), a handsome hardcover series in two volumes, both of which are full of history and memory, and both of which are richly and appropriately ornamented with stats, color commentary, and lots of evocative photographs.  Volume 1 is subtitled “Entering the American Mainstream, 1871-1948” and, as if to emphasize the pivotal role that Greenberg played in the national sport, Volume 2 is subtitled “The Post-Greenberg Years, 1949-2008.”

Martin Abramowitz, who contributes a foreword to Volume 1, argues that baseball was nothing less than a machine for turning greenhorns into Americans, and my own grandfather – who arrived in Brooklyn from Bobruisk via Palestine, Cairo and Gallipoli — was an example of precisely that phenomenon.

“The Jews who paid to watch, or who hovered around radios, bars, and sports pages as fans of the game, were absorbing America, being absorbed by America, and contributing to America,” writes Abramowitz. “It’s no surprise that Solomon Schechter, the long-time chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary and the leader of Conservative Judaism, told his students that if they wanted to be successful as rabbis, they needed to understand baseball!”

The Boxermans remind us that the total number of Jewish major leaguers has been no more than roughly 160, and they represent less than one percent of all major league players since 1871.  By contrast, the Jewish community has represented between two and three percent of the American population. But these athletes — and the far more numerous Jewish owners, managers, coaches, executives, union leaders, sportswriters, broadcasters, statisticians,  and umpires — represent something unique and important about the Jewish experience in America.

“Jews gave to baseball not only the great love for the game,” they conclude, “but also a number of good and a few great players, the World Series, innovative statistics, equal rights for players, and even the music for baseball’s national anthem.”

Koufax and Greenberg are only two of the many of the Jewish players who are featured in these books, but they are deservedly singled out as superstars.  Greenberg, the authors insist, “was, without a doubt, the greatest Jewish baseball player during the first century of baseball,” and they quote Alan Dershowitz for the proposition that he was “the most important American Jew of the 1930s.” While both Greenberg and Koufax famously refused to play ball on Yom Kippur, but the authors insist that Greenberg took the greater risk when he did so back in the 30s, which is exactly what Dershowitz is referring to.

The Boxermans have achieved something especially noteworthy with “Jews and Baseball.” We’ve all heard the joke about the shortest book in the world — “Great Jewish Sports Heroes.”  Now we know that there’s enough to say about Jews in the great American game to take up two books!

Jonathan Kirsch, author and publishing attorney, is the book editor of The Jewish Journal. He can be reached at books@jewishjournal.com.

July 18, 2011 | 5:46 pm

So Passes the Glory of the World

Posted by Jonathan Kirsch

Long ago, one of the charms of State Street in Santa Barbara was Earthling Books, one of those warm and welcoming bookstores that were the glory of bookselling not so long ago.  But Earthling was choked out of existence when Borders moved into a former bank building not far away, and the same thing happened to Sisterhood Bookstore on Westwood Boulevard in Los Angeles when a Borders store opened directly across the street.

Conspiracy theorists held that Borders searched out neighborhoods where vigorous independents were doing business and sited their new stores with the intent to drawing away their customers and thereby doing away with them.  Patrons of the Earthling and Sisterhood could certainly have been forgiven for suspecting such predatory practices.

Now, however, Borders is the prey and not the predator.  After struggling to save what they could in bankruptcy, the company has given up the fight and announced its plans to close the remaining 399 stores across the country.

No single villain can be singled out for the failure of what was once a leading national bookstore chain.  In a sense, what killed Earthling and Sisterhood also killed Borders — the decline of bricks-and-mortar retailing in general and the collapse of retail outlets for media products in particular.  Just as the record store is now obsolete because it’s easier to buy digital music online, the bookstore is endangered by both the e-book and the online book retailers who sell print, audio and electronic books.

Those of us who still love bookstores are not wholly without places to go, but it is certainly getting harder and harder to find them. For us, no e-book will ever replace the tactile pleasure of a printed book, and no amount of browsing at Amazon.com will ever provide the sense of place and the social connectedness that the Earthling (and Borders, too) offered us. Nor will these pleasures ever come back to us in quite the same way. Indeed, the final agony of Borders seems to prove that we are past the tipping point. Sic transit gloria mundi.

Jonathan Kirsch, author and publishing attorney, is the book editor of The Jewish Journal. He can be reached at books@jewishjournal.com.

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March 20, 2011 | 3:14 pm

“Bloodlands” Revisited - Is the Holocaust Something Unique in History?

Posted by Jonathan Kirsch

The gates of Auschwitz.

After my review of “Bloodlands” by Timothy Snyder ran in The Jewish Journal, I received an email from Ken Waltzer, Director of Jewish Studies at Michigan State University.  Prof. Waltzer has graciously allowed me to share it with our readers.

“I read your uncritical review of Timothy Snyder’s important book ‘Bloodlands,’ and was surprised that you didn’t notice the subtle flattening effect on the Nazi Holocaust from interpreting it in the geographical and interpretive frame Snyder embraces. While Snyder neither denies nor decenters the Holocaust, he does examine it as just one of several genocides, diminishing its distinctiveness – especially its intentional quality and its totalistic quality. He also diminishes the agency of European Jewish neighbors, some of whom joined in the killing or benefited from the proceeds. While never made completely explicit, the subtle impact of the book is to diminish the Nazi Holocaust. It is also the case that Snyder’s book makes little or no mention of Nazi anti-Semitism.  It also misdates the decision for genocide, placing it later than the most persuasive accounts, including those by Christopher Browning. I’m afraid there is more to say. Your readers deserve to know more.”

I am happy to share Prof. Waltzer’s discerning comments here, and they have prompted me to rethink not only my review of “Bloodlands” but also some of our assumptions about the Holocaust.

A constant theme in Holocaust scholarship — and a constant source of tension and anxiety — is what we might call the exceptionalism of Jewish suffering.  Much effort has been made to distinguish the Jewish experience at the hands of Nazi Germany and its collaborators from the experience of others who were also victimized during World War II. The same impulse prompts us to make distinctions between the Holocaust and, for example, the more recent acts of genocide in Cambodia and Rwanda.

I hasten to say that I agree with Prof. Waltzer on two points. First, I am persuaded that the Holocaust is something unique in history, and there are crucial differences — qualitative as well as quantitative — between the Holocaust and other genocides.  Scholars like Prof. Waltzer are duty-bound to remind us of these differences. And, second, I concede that it is important for the rest of us to bear them in mind and speak about them aloud, if only because we are now faced with the burden of convincing some people not merely that the Holocaust is exceptional but that it happened at all.

That’s the slippery slope on which scholars like Timothy Snyder are walking when they reframe the history of World War II in imaginative and provocative ways. But it’s also true that his book stimulating precisely because, as I pointed out in my review, it reminds us that Poland and Russia were the ground zero of the Second World War — something that Americans tend to overlook.

But we need to remind ourselves that there is also a moral danger in making fine distinctions between degrees of suffering when we consider an evil as profound as Nazi Germany.  We need to carefully consider what we are seeking to accomplish in making the point that Jews suffered more — and suffered differently — than the men and women who were tortured and murdered because of their politics, nationality, class, ethnicity, or sexuality. 

That’s a slippery slope, too.

Jonathan Kirsch, author and publishing attorney, is the book editor of The Jewish Journal.  He can be reached at books@jewishjournal.com.

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February 19, 2011 | 11:34 am

The Comic Book After Auschwitz

Posted by Jonathan Kirsch

“After Auschwitz,” goes the provocative aphorism of Theodor Adorno, “to write a poem is barbaric.”

What, then, would Adorno have made of a biography of Anne Frank in the form of a comic book?

Of course, the tools of the graphic novelist were first applied to the Holocaust as far back as 1986, when Art Spiegelman published the first volume of “Maus,” the only comic book to be honored with a Pulitzer Prize. So we should not be surprised that the life story of Anne Frank is now depicted in comic-book format by Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colón in “Anne Frank: The Anne Frank House Authorized Graphic Biography” (Hill and Wang: $16.95), the same team that produced a best-selling comic-book version of the official report on the events of 9/11.  It’s a shocking and even more heartbreaking look at the most deeply familiar figure in the history of hte Holocaust.

The style of illustration in “Anne Frank” reminded me more of the immortal Tintin series than, say, the Archie or Superman comics.  But it’s more accurate to say that Jacobson and Colón have devised a style of their own, sometimes rendering the scenes and dialogue in the conventional panels of a comic book and sometimes in a harsh documentary presentation that calls to mind the lifelike images of the rotoscope.

By way of example, the authors show us a moment in 1928 when Hitler and the other leaders of the Nazi party gathered to gloat over the first of a series of electoral victories that would elevate them to absolute power in Germany five years later.  A bar-maid in the background is rendered in full color, but the Nazi leadership is shown in a monochrome that suggests the moral darkness that they embodied — only their swastika armbands stand out in bright red.

Then, too, “Anne Frank” is not a comic-book version of “The Diary of Anne Frank,” although it certainly draws on the events that Anne Frank described in her own journals. Rather, they also tell the backstory — both in terms of family history and world history — and the aftermath of the more familiar saga.  Indeed, the book celebrates the efforts of her father to preserve her memory and publish her diary after his release from Auschwitz.

Above all, the authors remind us that, as Art Spiegelman has already proven, the cartoon panels and dialogue bubbles do not detract from the seriousness of the story that they tell. Certain scenes in “Anne Frank” — the betrayal and arrest of the Frank family, their journey by cattle car into the lower depths of the Nazi hell, and Anne Frank’s death in Bergen-Belsen even as Allied troops were fighting their way toward the Rhine — are not less than shattering as depicted in comic-book images.

The book is sanctioned by the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, as announced in its subtitle, and there is something faintly official about the narrative.  The final panel shows the visitors who make a kind of pilgrimage to the site of the Frank family’s hiding place. But it’s also true that the authors have refused to blur the details of the horrific story they tell or avert their gaze at the most disturbing moments.  Quite to the contrary, you will see images in “Anne Frank” that are seldom depicted in the visual accounts of the Holocaust.

For precisely that reason, “Anne Frank” is probably too intense for the youngest readers, but it is an ideal starting place for teenagers. Even for those of us who think we know everything there is to know about Anne Frank, it will add a new dimension to our perception of a figure and an episode that may have lost their edge for many readers precisely because Anne Frank was long ago transfigured from a flesh-and-blood human being into an icon.

In that sense, the greatest achievement of Jacobson and Colón is that they have rescued Anne Frank from the lofty perch of a plaster saint and placed her back in the grim and gritty setting in which she lived out the last days of her young life.  The fact that they have done so in a comic book is the greatest irony of all.

Jonathan Kirsch, author and publishing attorney, is the book editor of The Jewish Journal. He can be reached at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

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December 31, 2010 | 12:27 pm

TURNING NUMBERS INTO PEOPLE

Posted by Jonathan Kirsch

I’ve been running a Polish film festival in miniature at my house with a series of war movies by Andrzej Wajda, including “A Generation,” “Kanal,” “Ashes and Diamonds” and “Katyn.”  As a Polish film historian observes on the commentary track, these are movies that only a Polish director could make — and only a Polish audience can fully appreciate — if only because the blood-soaked soil of Poland was, in a real sense, the ground zero of World War II.

That observation came to mind as I read Yale history professor Timothy Snyder’s “Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin” (Basic Books: $29.95), a brilliant, important and highly original look at a swath of territory that includes not only Poland but also Belarus, Ukraine and the Baltic states. As Americans, we may be stirred by heroic memories of Guadalcanal and Normandy, but in terms of sheer brutality and carnage, they cannot be compared to what happened in central and eastern Europe. And, as Snyder insists on pointing out, the tragedy was not limited to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust.

To be sure, the concentration camps and killing fields of the Holocaust were located in what Snyder calls the bloodlands, but he seeks to make a different and larger point.  Between 1933 and 1945, the death toll in the bloodlands reached a total of some 14 million souls.  “Yet not a single one of the fourteen million murdered was a soldier on active duty,” he writes. “Most were women, children and the aged; none were bearing weapons; many had been stripped of their possessions, including their clothes.”

What’s more, Snyder’s ringing “J’Accuse” is not confined to the usual suspects.  “The fourteen million were all victims of a Soviet or Nazi killing policy, often of an interaction between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, but never casualties of the war between them,” he explains. “Stalin’s own record of mass murder was almost as imposing as Hitler’s.  Indeed, in times of peace it was far worse.”

Snyder also calls our attention to some of the myths and misconceptions that have shaped our perception of the Holocaust.  Auschwitz may have been an industrial-scale murder factory, but he argues that “[t]he image is too simple and clean.”  More than half of the fourteen million civilians and prisoners of war who died in the bloodlands were simply starved to death, and many of the other victims were shot, one by one.  “The vast majority of Jews killed in the Holocaust,” Snyder notes, “never saw a concentration camp.” And he forces us to confront the intimacy of death even as he considers the casualties that are measured in the millions.

“No matter which technology was used, the killing was personal,” he writes. “People who starved were observed, often from watchtowers, by those who denied them food.  People who were shot were seen through the sights of rifles at very close range, or held by two men while a third placed a pistol at the base of the skull.  People who were asphyxiated were rounded up, put on trains, and then rushed into the gas chambers.”

For the Jewish reader, “Bloodlands” can be especially challenging as when he asks us to contemplate the special quality of Polish suffering.  “A non-Jewish Pole in Warsaw alive in 1933 had about the same chances of living until 1945 as a Jew in Germany alive in 1933,” he argues. “Nearly as many non-Jewish Poles were murdered during the war as European Jews were gassed at Auschwitz.” 

Snyder’s book of history ends with a moral admonition.  “Each of the living bore a name,” he reminds us in “Bloodlands.” “Each of the dead became a number. Each record of death suggests, but cannot supply, a unique life.” He demands that we recall the humanity of each victim, regardless of religion or nationality, and he refuses to concede even a statistical victory to the murderers: “The Nazi and Soviet regimes turned people into numbers,” he concludes. “It is for us as humanists to turn the number back into people.”

Jonathan Kirsch, author and publishing attorney, is the book editor of The Jewish Journal. He can be reached at books@jewishjournal.com.

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December 10, 2010 | 10:51 am

Poetry That Makes Something Happen

Posted by Jonathan Kirsch

Kim Dower, author of "Air Kissing on Mars"

Kim (Freilich) Dower is a svelte and stylish woman, but she looms large on the literary landscape of Los Angeles. Doing business as “Kim-from-L.A.,” she is among our most admired and beloved book publicists, a ubiquitous and cheery presence at every venue where authors and readers gather.

But Kim is also an accomplished writer in her own right, as we learn from her newly published poetry collection, “Air Kissing on Mars” (Red Hen Press: $18.95).  Her work is exquisitely crafted but the tool marks are invisible on the printed page, and each poem reads like an intimate conversation with the poet herself — bright and lucid, funny and sharp, and always full of life.

The point was made at a recent reading that Kim gave at the Barnes & Noble bookstore in the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica.  As always — and she will not be surprised to hear me say it — Kim was superbly attired and accessorized, but it was only in one of the poems in “Air Kissing on Mars” that I found a clue to the origins of her sense of style.

“My mother,” she writes in a poem titled “Different Mothers,” “did know about soil or earth worms.” And she goes on to observe:

“City mothers, we know about bus routes, restaurants/Broadway, the people on the eighth floor./Mine taught me to accessorize/bring the ideal hostess gift./have my keys in hand/when I enter the building.”

Many of the poems in the collection share the same kind of city smarts, and “Air Kissing on Mars” can be approached as a kind of poetic handbook for contemporary urban life in both New York and Los Angeles. A certain wry sense of humor is always at work — the title of “The Nudists Are Getting Ready to Pack” is a joke in itself —  but the poems are infinite in their variety. Kim is sometimes subtly but undeniably erotic (“they made out on the carousel swan,/kissed til their lips bled”), sometimes openly confessional (“not even my therapist can know/the things I do in my car”), and sometimes unapologetically sentimental as in a superbly bittersweet poem titled “If My Father Were Alive.”

“If my father were alive/heaven would be calm,/the woman in the apartment next door/would still be dressing up, her fuchsia prints/shrieking into the night.”

My single favorite poem in the collection — and something of an outlier in terms of form and style — is “She Showed Me Pictures of Injuries,” a tour de force that pulses with a strange sexuality as the poet describes an unlikely encounter between a guy in a Wisconsin hotel lobby and two roller-derby skaters dubbed Hot Pink Suede and Jazz Night Queen.  To be sure, skating injuries have something to do with what’s going on here, but that’s not all.

“he closes his eyes sees her flying/she tugs at Jazz Night dizzy their short skirts/singing to him he’s cold in Wisconsin he watches them kiss/he met a girl who skates across his face”

The best way to enjoy the poems in “Air Kissing on Mars,” I think, is to gather with friends, open a bottle of wine, pass the book around, and take turns reading them aloud.  Something not unlike that took place at Barnes & Noble — a few of the appreciative folks in the audience were definitely aglow! — and Kim Dower’s poems flew off the page and soared around the room.

“Poetry makes nothing happen” warned Auden, but after closing my copy of “Air Kissing on Mars,” I think he was wrong.

Jonathan Kirsch, author and publishing attorney, is the book editor of The Jewish Journal. He can be reached at books@jewishnournal.com.

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November 14, 2010 | 11:08 am

THE SECRETS AND POWERS OF ISAAC BASHEVIS SINGER

Posted by Jonathan Kirsch

The 50th anniversary edition of Singer's magical masterpiece from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

I fell in love with Isaac Bashevis Singer when an early mentor of mine recommended “The Slave,” and I have been reading — and re-reading — Singer’s novels, stories and memoirs ever since.  Seven years ago, when I sought to introduce his work to a young writer of my acquaintance, I found a copy of “The Slave” that had been inscribed in Singer’s own hand.  I paid a bit less for an autographed copy of one of Singer’s masterpieces than what I would have shelled out for some newly-published flavor-of-the-month best-seller at the local bookstore.

The point, of course, is that the literary stock of Isaac Bashevis Singer has slumped since his death in 1991.  It’s hardly surprising, of course, and it says nothing about the enduring quality and importance of his work. Singer was honored with a Nobel Prize in 1978, but that’s wholly beside the point in our media-frenzied culture in which we are invited to communicate with each other in 140-character bursts and we are always scanning the horizon (or, more precisely, the computer screen) for the next big thing.

So I was delighted to see that Singer’s longtime publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, has re-issued “The Magician of Lublin” ($15.00), one of Singer’s most beguiling and beloved novels, on the 50th anniversary of its first publication.  Set in Warsaw in the late 1870s, the book bears all of his toolmarks as a storyteller — a certain strange magic but also a sure sense of the world as it is, an open-eyed interest in sexual adventure, an all-embracing curiosity about even the most extravagant varieties of human experience and, not coincidentally, the dangers and doom that it can bring, all conveyed with a sly sense of humor and expressed in the deceptively simple phrases and cadences that are Singer’s glory.

“A reckless man! To win a bet, he had once spent a whole night in the cemetery. He could walk a tightrope, skate on a wire, climb walls, open any lock,” writes Singer about Yasha Mazur. “In Lublin they said that if Yasha had chosen crime, no one’s house would be safe.”

Singer himself was a master of literary legerdemain, which is another reason why “The Magician of Lublin” is a good starting point for a new generation of readers. Born in Poland in 1902, he followed his more famous brother, I. J. Singer, to the United States shortly before World War II, and achieved a unique kind of literary success only in the 1960s, when the stories he had composed in Yiddish for the Forward began to show up in English translation in the pages of Esquire and the New Yorker. Thus Singer showed himself to be an alchemist who was able to transmute Yiddish newspaper serials into high literature.

Like “The Magician of Lublin,” his other novels and stories often conjured up recent and distant history, ranging from medieval Poland to post-war Manhattan. But he was always a thoroughly modern writer, and his frankness about matters of sex and the human psyche put him at a distance from the conventions of Yiddish literature.  He was famously willing to entertain the existence of ghosts and dibbuks, as he does in “The Magician of Lublin,” but always with a certain ironic distance that allowed the reader to understand them as phenomenon of the human imagination, no different than dreams and visions, “fancies [that] had burrowed through like mice or hobgoblin” — a fact that always endeared him to the Jungian movement in psychoanalysis.

So when Singer writes that Yasha “had always been a soul-searcher, prone to fantasy,” we might imagine that we are glimpsing the author himself.  “He possessed hidden powers,” continues Singer, “he had more secrets that the blessed Rosh Hashonah pomegranate has seeds.”  All of these powers and secrets are richly displayed in the pages of “The Magician of Lublin,” and I confidently predict that any reader who opens the book in its latest edition will yearn for more of Singer’s remarkable magic.

Jonathan Kirsch, author and publishing attorney, is the book editor of The Jewish Journal. He can be reached at books@jewishjournal.com.

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November 6, 2010 | 5:46 pm

WHY THE ROSENBERGS DIED BEFORE NIGHTFALL

Posted by Jonathan Kirsch

American icons: The Rosenbergs in captivity.

Not long ago, I reviewed in these pages a book titled “The Invisible Harry Gold” by Allen M. Hornblum, the biography of a man who figured crucially in the 1951 trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg on charges that they conspired to provide “the secret of the atomic bomb” to our wartime ally, the Soviet Union.

One reader of my review was someone with an unmatched command of the Rosenberg case — Michael Meeropol, son of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Meeropol was orphaned along with his brother, Robert, when their parents died in the electric chair in 1953.  Meeropol took issue with the Hornblum book — and with some of my comments about the book — in his communications with me, and I hope to share his thoughts with the readers of The Jewish Journal in the near future. 

In the meantime, however, I have been reading another book about the Rosenberg case, one that Michael Meeropol recommended and for which he provides an introduction —  “Exoneration” by Emily Arnow-Alman and David Alman (Green Elms Press: $24.95). The argument and evidence presented by the authors of “Exoneration” are summed up in its subtitle: “The Trial of Julius & Ethel Rosenberg and Morton Sobell — Prosecutorial deceptions, suborned perjuries, anti-Semitism and precedent for today’s unconstitutional trials.”

The Rosenberg case, as I suggested in my review of the Hornblum book, is something much more than a matter of jurisprudence. The Rosenbergs can be described as iconic in the original sense of the word — they were martyrs to a certain political madness that seized the American democracy during the McCarthy era, and their fate is a caution against the excesses of true belief. 

But it is also true that the Rosenberg case can and ought to be regarded as an acid test of the American system of justice.  “Exoneration” argues convincingly that the Rosenbergs did not receive a fair trial, and Julius and Ethel were condemned to death on the basis of perjured testimony, forged documents, and questionable conduct by both the court and the prosecution.

The tone of “Exoneration” is urgent and intimate. The authors were neighbors of the Rosenbergs in Knickerbocker Village in Manhattan, and Emily once met Ethel and her children in a nearby park in 1950. The Almans later knew young Robert and Michael after they had been adopted by the Meeropol family after the death of their parents. But the greatest achievement of the authors is their exhaustive and meticulous documentary research and their mastery of the scandals, contradictions, and ironies that have always haunted the Rosenberg case. The Almans began writing “Exoneration” in 1995, and David completed the book only after Emily’s death in 2004.  Immediately upon its publication in 2010, “Exoneration” became an essential addition to the literature of the Rosenberg case.

The authors point out that the trial of the Rosenbergs and their alleged co-conspirators, with its “all-Jewish cast of defendants” and its Jewish judge and prosecutors, is a poignant spectacle for the Jewish reader.  They cite evidence that Julius may have been “motivated by his belief that…a strengthened Soviet Union would stand in the way of the future emergence of another Holocaust-driven state.” And they suggest that the grotesquely long prison sentence imposed on Jonathan Pollard in 1986 for espionage on behalf of Israel “revealed the persistence of discriminatory justice against Jews.”

Among the most intriguing revelations in “Exoneration” — and there are many of them — is the calling to account of William H. Rehnquist, the long-serving Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.  In 1953, Rehnquist was a clerk to Associate Justice Robert H. Jackson, who was considering the final appeal of the Rosenbergs.  “It is too bad that drawing and quartering has been abolished,” wrote Rehnquist in a memo to Jackson about the fate of the Rosenbergs, whom he regarded as “fitting candidates” for execution. And Richard Nixon is shown to admit that the evidence against Ethel Rosenberg, which prompted President Dwight Eisenhower to deny clemency to the Rosenbergs, turned out to be, in Nixon’s words, “tainted.” “If we had known that at the time,” Nixon later admitted, “he might have taken a different view with regard to her.” The Rosenbergs, in other words, died because “overzealous” investigators and prosecutors were willing to fabricate evidence against them.

The bottom line, according to the Almans, is that the conviction and execution of the Rosenbergs amounted to a grievous, avoidable but irreparable miscarriage of justice. They concede that Julius Rosenberg may have passed information to the Soviet Union during World War II, but the evidence offered to prove that the information included “the secret of the atomic bomb” was questionable or phony. No evidence at all exists against Ethel Rosenberg, who was charged, tried, convicted and sentenced to death for the sole purpose of coercing a confession that would have spared the government the task of proving its case.

To their credit, there is not a single tough question that the Almans do not confront.  “The most profound question of all,” they write, “the question that has haunted students of the case for more than half a century is this: why did Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, a couple in their thirties, the parents of two very young sons, choose to be executed rather than confess?”  The conventional answer is that they chose to martyr themselves for the cause of Communism, but the Almans reject it.  “[T]hey did not defend Communism at their trial,” they write. “They simply said they were innocent.”  In that sense, the Rosenbergs can be seen as martyrs for the Constitution — they died because they would not confess to crimes they did not commit.

“[J]ust as my brother and I can admit our earlier mistake in proclaiming our parents’ total innocence,” writes Robert Meeropol in a passage that is quoted in “Exoneration,” “it is past time for the Executive Branch of the Federal Government to acknowledge that it was wrong to execute two people for a crime they did not commit, and remove from their names all stigma that is associated with the commission of that act.”

The tragic ending of the Rosenberg case is especially bitter for the Jewish reader. The executions were scheduled to take place on a Friday night. To win at least one more day of life for the Rosenbergs after all their appeals had been denied, their attorney, Emanuel Bloch, asked to Judge Irving R. Kaufman to delay the execution until Sabbath ended at nightfall on the following day. But a decision was made by the authorities to advance rather than delay the hour of execution “to show their respect for the Jewish Sabbath.” The Rosenbergs died before sundown on Friday, June 19, 1953.

Jonathan Kirsch, author and publishing attorney, is the book editor of The Jewish Journal. He can be reached at books@jewishjournal.com.

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