On July 17, 1950, a New York Times five-column headline announced: “U.S. Troops Driven Back Six Miles Under Fierce Blows on Kum Line; South Koreans in a Sharp Rally.” News of the Korean War, only a month old, did not augur well despite Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s pledge of victory in the “shortest possible time.” The Times did not report the arrest that day on the Lower East Side of Julius Rosenberg by FBI agents on charges of conspiracy to commit espionage, although as the Korean War dragged on, it would subsequently carry the news of his trial and sentence.
Julius Rosenberg, a second-generation New York Jew, son of immigrants, graduate of City College of New York, committed Communist, father of two sons and owner of a modest machine shop, was married to Ethel Greenglass, three years his senior. Like Julius, Ethel grew up on the Lower East Side, the daughter of immigrant Jews; like him, she joined the Communist Party during the Great Depression; unlike Julius, she aspired to a career in music, having a beautiful voice. After their marriage in 1939 and the subsequent birth of their sons, Michael and Robert, she worked full-time at home. Her arrest, a month after Julius, followed a subpoena in which she refused to give evidence against him. The FBI prosecuted Ethel to pressure her husband to cooperate, confess and identify others associated with the conspiracy to provide information about the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union.
When the trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg opened in March of 1951 as the Korean War dragged on, it initiated one of the most dramatic conflicts facing American Jews to date, and by the time of their sentencing, reverberated for Jews throughout the world. J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI, dubbed it “the crime of the century,” but perhaps the jury’s chairman conclusion that it was “a strictly Jewish show” is more apt. Although the trial involved prosecution by the state, its conflict pitted different types of Jews against each other. A family drama in more than one sense — Ethel and Julius were convicted largely on the testimony of her youngest brother, David — the trial engaged second-generation Jews in a profound struggle to sort out how they understood what it meant to be an American Jew.
The trial engaged second-generation Jews in a profound struggle to sort out how they understood what it meant to be an American Jew.
It spurred a reckoning for American Jews to choose between those who had made it and those who still struggled on the edge of poverty, between the values of Park Avenue and those of the Lower East Side, between a religious Jewish identity and a secular radical one, between those who were clothed in the power of the state and those who wore only their ideology. These values became epitomized in the different persons involved: the defendants, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg; the Jewish men who testified against them, Harry Gold and David Greenglass; the prosecutors, Irving Saypol, who had made his reputation in the trial of Alger Hiss and would be praised by Time magazine as the nation’s “Number One legal hunter of top Communists,” and his young special assistant, Roy Cohn, whose participation started his meteoric rise as a Communist hunter soon to be helping Republican Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin; the defense counsel, Emmanual Bloch, who came to his task with a solid reputation for defending radicals and a personal commitment to left-wing causes. And then there was the judge, Irving Kaufman, appointed to the federal bench in 1949 by U.S. President Harry Truman. Called the “boy judge” at age 41, Kaufman had enjoyed a meteoric career, first entering Catholic Fordham College at 15 followed by Fordham Law School, from which he was graduated at age 20, too young to take the bar exam. Married with three sons, he lived with his family on Park Avenue and was a member of the Conservative Park Avenue Synagogue, as well as a supporter of the Anti-Defamation League.
Of course, there were non-Jews involved as well. All the jury members were Christian. One of them, James Gibbons, recalled that he “felt like Pontius Pilate washing his hands.” David Greenglass’s counsel, O. John Rogge, was not Jewish, nor was Catholic James B. Kilsheimer III, who served as assistant attorney, the only one to stay with the government’s case through to its conclusion in 1953.
More than the trial itself, the judge’s sentence produced the soul searching by American Jews. After the jury returned a guilty verdict, Judge Kaufman sentenced both Ethel and Julius to death — an extraordinary sentence for conspiracy to commit espionage. (The Rosenbergs’ co-defendant, Morton Sobell, received 30 years.) In his sentencing speech, Kaufman accused the Rosenbergs of “devoting themselves to the Russian ideology of denial of God, denial of the sanctity of the individual and aggression against free men everywhere instead of serving the cause of liberty and freedom.” As Kaufman saw it, their crime was “worse than murder” since the murderer kills only his victim while the Rosenbergs’ betrayal of the United States led to the deaths of many thousands in Korea. He went on to describe their conspiracy as “diabolical,” designed to destroy “a God-fearing nation.” Their death represented a symbolic atonement demanded to signify the loyalty of American Jews to the United States and its ideals.
The execution of the Rosenbergs represented a symbolic atonement demanded to signify the loyalty of American Jews to the United States and its ideals.
The death sentence shocked many Jews and sparked a vigorous campaign by Communists and left-wing Jews as the Rosenbergs appealed. The public campaign launched to save the Rosenbergs deeply disturbed Kaufman, who described it privately as “propaganda that gives me great concern as an American and a Jew.” He denied their appeal for a reduced sentence.
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg saw themselves as martyrs, albeit as “the first victims of American fascism,” as Ethel put it. At the same time, they affirmed their identities as American Jews shaped by their radical commitments, described in Julius’s words, as
Our upbringing, the full meaning of our lives, based on a true amalgamation of our American and Jewish Heritage which to us means freedom, culture and character.
These working-class Jewish values had become dangerous to espouse during McCarthyism’s heyday. Most American Jews hastened to disavow their progressive concerns even as American Jewish organizations rushed to trim their left wing. The campaign for clemency for the Rosenbergs fueled attacks on anti-anti-Communists, those often dismissively dubbed “knee-jerk liberals.” Those individuals most bitter about the Rosenbergs, most withering in their attacks on the National Committee to Secure Justice in the Rosenberg Case as a Communist-front organization, most vehement in their insistence that the Rosenbergs be executed, were anti-Communist Jewish intellectuals.
The limitations of Jewish liberalism appeared most vividly in the response of the two well-known Jewish jurists who were forced to confront the case and its legal implications, Jerome Frank and Felix Frankfurter. Frank refused to overturn the sentence, although he had initially urged Kaufman not to sentence the Rosenbergs to death. Frankfurter, the one Jewish justice on the Supreme Court, found the case “the most disturbing single experience I have had during my term of service on the court.” Yet Frankfurter failed to convince the court to hear the case, nor would he cooperate with William Douglas to stay the execution scheduled for June 19, 1953.
Most American Jews hastened to disavow their progressive concerns; American Jewish organizations rushed to trim their left wing.
The case also divided religious Jews. Reform Jews officially opposed to the death sentence, agonized whether to issue a statement of clemency and eventually tabled the issue at their rabbinical conference. The editors of The Reconstructionist by contrast articulated a carefully worded anti-Communist editorial in favor of clemency. They argued that the sentence was excessive and concluded that “admitting the guilt of the Rosenbergs, it is hard to see wherein their moral culpability exceeded that of others involved in espionage to a degree that would warrant the death sentence.”
In 1988, I published an article, “Reconsidering the Rosenbergs: Symbol and Substance in Second Generation American Jewish Consciousness.” Although publication of the Venona files has now revealed the guilt of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, as well as of David and Ruth Greenglass, among others, my conclusion to the essay still rings true today:
Beneath the Jewish trauma caused by the Rosenberg case lay a measure of guilt and of anger: guilt for their deaths, for the absence of solidarity, for the failure to save the Rosenbergs and for the crime they had committed; anger at the Rosenbergs for taking advantage of America, the one country that had been good for Jews, for being stooges of the Communists, for showing the reality of Jewish second-class citizenship in the United States. The Rosenberg case revealed the ambiguities of Jewish identity and raised anew the disturbing question Jews thought they had answered: What must Jews do to be American?
One Response
I shared your experience. Marching with bereaved Rosenberg supporters from Union Square to East Broadway on the Lower East Side, I was pelted with epithets and curses along with my fellow protesters. Subsequently, my former roommate Sol Stern in conjunction with friend Ron Radosh found evidence of Hulios Rosenberg’s guilt. Although the book that emerged from their research omitted Sol (supplanted by Joyce Milton), Stern continued to debate hardine Rosenberg supporters like the Shneyers. I attended a debate at Town Hall, at which Stern played a recording that indicated a fabrication presented by the Shnyers. At the end of this event, I witnessed Paul, the elder son of the Rosenbergs, approach Woody len and Mil Farrow. Plead for a review of the case that led to his parents death by extraction. Woody Allen who had stated that fascism rather than communism was America’s real enemy muttered some words to the effect that he would consider this suggestion minus a firm commitment.