Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.
In the history of the American Left, Jews have been disproportionately represented—disproportionately, that is, relative to their share of the American population. At the extremes, they have also been active participants in what has sentimentally been called the "romance" of American Communism, including by committing espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union against the United States itself.
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were model American Communists. Joining the party in their teens, they loyally adhered to the beliefs and dogmas of their surrogate religion and faithfully carried out the directives issued by the totalitarian Stalinist regime in Moscow to its American followers. Julius, who graduated from the City College of New York, joined the Army Signal Corps. In 1942 he was recruited by Soviet intelligence, to which he provided thousands of pages of secret documents on American technical projects. No less importantly, he recruited other spies, mostly Jews, who transmitted similar information. Among them was his wife Ethel's brother, David Greenglass, who worked as a machinist on the American atomic-weapons program known as the Manhattan Project.
The Manhattan Project was riddled with Soviet spies. When one of the most important of them, Klaus Fuchs, was uncovered in 1950, the Rosenberg ring likewise began to unravel. Julius and Ethel were indicted for espionage, tried in 1951 (by a Jewish prosecutor, in front of a Jewish judge, with a New York jury that included no Jews), convicted, and sentenced to death. The execution, carried out in 1953, elicited worldwide outrage. The pair went to their deaths refusing to admit guilt or to implicate others, and celebrated by many as victims of official American malevolence and cold-war "hysteria."
At the conference in Washington, the gray-haired participants included virtually all of today's leading scholars of the case and experts in the history of Soviet espionage, American Communism and anti-Communism, and the American Left: Ronald Radosh, John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, Richard Gid Powers, and many more. They spoke as insiders: the Rosenbergs were referred to by their first names, and full knowledge of their deeds and misdeeds was assumed.
It was the 1983 publication of The Rosenberg File by Ronald Radosh and Joyce Milton that severely dented the then-accepted narrative among leftists and many liberals of the couple's innocence. At the conference, Radosh recounted the vicious campaign against him by Rosenberg loyalists and revisionist historians dedicated to preserving the pair's reputation as blameless martyrs to a great cause. Although a number of such loyalists were invited to the Washington conference, none attended.
But another June event, the "58th Annual Memorial Meeting for Ethel and Julius Rosenberg," made up for the lack. Held at New York University and sponsored by the National Committee to Reopen the Rosenberg Case, that meeting featured, among others, Robert Meeropol, one of Ethel and Julius's two sons. Fifty years ago, such a gathering would have been held in Madison Square Garden. Today, thanks to the declassification of American and Soviet documents, the fact of the Rosenbergs' espionage, he as leader and recruiter, she as facilitator, is no longer in question except by a handful of true believers, and the wind has gone out of efforts to "reopen" the legal case against them.
Which has not impeded efforts to exonerate the couple politically and morally, as Radosh pointed out in Washington. Instead, it has only prompted a switch in emphasis.
Supporters of the Rosenbergs had always admitted their membership in the Communist party—touting this, however, as evidence not of their guilt but of their virtue: at a time when the "capitalist" nations had been doing nothing to oppose Hitler, the Rosenbergs were staunch anti-fascists as well as upholders of the higher ideals of equality and social justice embodied in the Communist revolution and the Soviet experiment. When pressed, supporters would concede that some, like Greenglass, may have been guilty of espionage, but not Julius and Ethel. Now, this pillar of the argument having been knocked out from under them, they have fallen back on the insistence that what the Rosenbergs did was good, just, and necessary, performed by two citizens of the world in support of a wartime ally. The real villain of the piece was not the Rosenbergs; it was the U.S. government.
As participants at the Washington conference repeatedly stipulated, however, the misdeeds of the U.S. government are not in question. Witnesses for the prosecution were indeed pressured, perjury was suborned, and Ethel Rosenberg was given the death penalty on less than fully conclusive evidence in an effort to coerce a confession from her husband. But to transform the fact of American misconduct into the focal point of the entire narrative is to engage in the same sort of subterfuge that the Rosenbergs' defenders perfected in the 1950s with such striking success among liberals and intellectuals, turning on its head the widespread and well-founded alarm over internal subversion and discrediting the cause of anti-Communism itself.
At the conference, Harvey Klehr detailed the way in which many of today's high-school history textbooks perpetuate this same ideological campaign, passing off the issue of Soviet espionage as a trivial matter, much less significant than government abuses and the manipulations of public opinion practiced by the American Right. As if to illustrate Klehr's point, the historian David Garrow, conceding at the conference that scholars like Radosh have proved their case, proceeded to accuse the "winners" of exaggerating the influence of ongoing defenses of the Rosenbergs like the meeting at NYU. The leading revisionist Ellen Schrecker similarly referred to the issue of Soviet espionage as a lamentable "fixation" of the Right: a "scab" at which the likes of Radosh and Klehr obsessively pick, refusing to allow it to heal.
But who is really picking at this scab? That the Rosenberg case continues to be a fetish of the American Left—Exhibit A in its indictment of American evil—is blazingly apparent not just in the textbooks cited by Klehr, which are reprehensible enough, but in such popular works of middlebrow entertainment as Tony Kushner's Angels in America (one of the "angels" in that play being Ethel Rosenberg). Echoes live on, moreover, in the push to dismiss today's legitimate fears of domestic terrorism and Islamist extremism as contemporary equivalents of alleged cold-war hysteria, in this case ginned up by the administration of George W. Bush and the "vast right-wing conspiracy" to justify domestic repression and forestall world peace.
The Rosenbergs' devotion to the Communist party, to Moscow, and to Stalinist doctrine was total and absolute. Do analogous forms of devotion still exist? At the conference, it was left to Alexander Vassiliev, a former KGB officer who copied and smuggled out Soviet documents showing the Rosenbergs' guilt, to ask obliquely whether such a spy network might be created in America today—and to wonder whether so politically incorrect a thought could even be openly voiced.
This brings us back to the political and moral choices of American Jews. To the degree that Jews have sympathized with radical revolutionary movements aimed at remaking whole societies and peoples, most of which have ended by creating variants of hell on earth, is not a more scrupulous Jewish accounting of ends and means long overdue?
And there is a specific obligation as well. As compared with the phenomenon of Nazism, still vividly present in modern consciousness, the vast, blood-soaked, and no less openly anti-Semitic tyranny that was Soviet Communism has been largely erased from mind. When it comes to individuals like the Rosenbergs, whose service to that tyranny involved high crimes against their fellow American citizens, technical guilt may now be grudgingly acknowledged but, for the most part, moral guilt is not. To the contrary, the alleged nobility of their motives is held to trump the all too evident evil of their actions. To the extent that American Jews sympathize with such perversions of morality, they owe themselves, and their fellow Americans, a reckoning.
Alex Joffe is a research scholar with the Institute for Jewish and Community Research.
COMMENTS
Bill Pearlman on June 29, 2011 08:25 am:
My father got drafted for Korea. So did a lot of other guys from his neighborhood in Brooklyn. A Jewish neighborhood. Not all of whom made it back. Would North Korea had attacked if they hadn't been backed by a nuclear Russia. Maybe, maybe not. All I know is that my father always said that if he could dig the Rosenbergs up and kill them again he would do it.
fred davis on June 29, 2011 10:54 am:
and Jonathan Pollard and the Govt of Israel owe American Jewry and and "their fellow Americans, a reckoning" as well!
Hershl on June 29, 2011 11:21 am:
While the children of the communists described here may have finally come to face the slavish conduct of their parents regarding the USSR, they often today repeat the same thing in their lock-step hatred of Israel, Zionism, and the future of the Jewish people.
It is no accident that these lovers of justice are, as usual, on the wrong side of history, defending the enemies of Israel and the Jewish people.
Rachel Golem on June 29, 2011 12:31 pm:
They made the world a better place, for that great humanitarian, Josef Stalin.
SW on June 29, 2011 12:43 pm:
Joffe writes, "The Rosenbergs' devotion to the Communist party, to Moscow, and to Stalinist doctrine was total and absolute."
Given this statement, I would like to know how they were in any sense theologically Jewish? Or, for that matter, culturally?
The earliest 20th century Jewish thinkers in Europe in the 10s and 20s actually thought often, long and hard about liberation of society from government.
That the "capitalist" nations of the West did not restrain Hitler, the theme sold by Soviet Socialists -- nor Stalin, whose murderous numbers far surpass the Nazis -- was not and is not reason to be socialist.
At best the Rosenbergs were not fully Jewish, not theologically Jewish and not particularly interested in freedom. Rather they were converts -- to the secular gods of socialism. So it seems to me.
Geoff on June 29, 2011 03:18 pm:
It is shocking and historically inaccurate to say that the Soviet regime was as anti-Semitic as the Nazi regime. Afer all, the Red Army liberated Auschwitz and Maidanek and,to the best of my knowledge, they did not slaughter the remaining Jews they found there in 1945.
David Alman on July 1, 2011 04:00 pm:
Lest your readers believe that there is unanimity among the non-Communist and anti-Communist Jewish community in support of the conduct of the Department of Justice in the Rosenberg-Sobell case, I call your attention to the February 2011 issue of Zman, an Ultra-Orthodox Jewish publication. After considerable research by the Zman staff, a 69-page report was published that differs widely from Alex Joffe's views. The report "challenges 60 years worth of assumptions" regarding the case. Unlike Joffe's dismissal of the government's perjuries and deceits, the Zman report takes seriously the lawlessness practiced by the government in the case.
I was greatly surprised that Mr Joffe accepted as a "fact" that Jews were predominatly associated with Communism and espionage. He seems unaware that the documented anti-Semitism of J. Edgar Hoover, the then Director of the FBI, led his agency to focus on Jews and dissent, which deliberately created an impression that Joffe accepts without question and inadvertently propagates. He would do well to ponder an important fact: in his 48 years as the nation's prime spy-hunter, Hoover never provided the Justice Department with so much as one prosecutable Anglo-Saxon suspected of spying for the Soviet Union. With one exception, every susepct he provided was Jewish. The exception was an African-American.
Mr Joffe should confront some unhappy facts about the role of anti-Semitism in American life. The Pollard case has no precedent for a life sentence for spying for Israel. None of the non-Jewish billionaire thieves of the past 3 years was given a sentence anywhere near Madoff's 150 years sentence. None of the non-Jewish persons previously convicted of the crimes for which Sholom Rubashkin was convicted recieved 27-years sentences.
Two decades after Hoover died, a dozen spies for the Soviet Union were discovered, some of whom were charged with having caused the deaths of American agents abroad. None was a Jew. None was executed.
I respect Mr Joffe's scholarship, but it is incomplete.
David Alman
friscosan on July 1, 2011 05:22 pm:
It has been said that those who deny the existence of God have a God, a man-made one like government, to regard as their messiah. This is the classic mistake made by humans throughout the ages. The Jews of Germany made this mistake in the 1930's. And, the folly continues full force this day.
DON on July 8, 2011 06:29 am:
THE ROSENBERGS WERE THREATENED AND THEIR FAMILIES, BEFORE THE ROSENBERGS DIED THEY GAVE A RELIGIOUS ITEM TO THEIR CHILDREN. IT WAS ABOUT BEING JEWISH NOT SPIES.
Joe Owens on July 12, 2011 03:37 am:
Julius Rosenberg wanted to be a Rabbi, before he sold his soul to the communist conspiracy!
David Alman on July 12, 2011 01:30 pm:
There is more to the Rosenberg-Sobell case than Julius Rosenberg, as Joe Owens surely knows. There were two parties: the defendants and the government.
The government created an unusual spectacle in the Federal Courthouse in New York City on March 1951 by prosecuting an all-Jewish cast of defendants charged with conspiring to commit espionage against the United States on behalf of the Soviet Union. In his 48 years as Director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, the nation's chief spy-hunter, discovered only one non-Jewish Soviet spy, and that exception was an African-American, who was not sentenced to death.
Perhaps the explanation for the spectacle was in a statement to the press by national law enforcement officials nine months after the trial, in which they said that persons of "pure Anglo-Saxon stock" were less likely to be disloyal than others (see NY Times 12/26/51). Here is another clue: According to one of Hoover's biographers, when Hoover began his career at the Department of Justice, he sent for 12 copies of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (the 'Bible' of international anti-Semitim) one for himself, the others for his colleagues (see Ackerman, Kenneth D.,Young J. Edgar, Carrol & Graf, NY, 2007, p. 342). Here's another clue, from J. Edgar Hoover himself: in Masters of Deceit, a 1958 book by Hoover, he devoted an entire chapter to complaining about Communists among Jews (page 270), a complaint he never made against any other ethnic group.
Twenty years after Hoover's death, a dozen American spies for the Soviet Union were discovered in the FBI itself, the CIA and the armed forces. All were found guilty. None were Jewish. None were critics of the government. None received death sentences.
I have a suggestion: examine the sentences given to the Rosenbergs, Jonathan Pollard, Bernard Madoff and Sholom Rubashkin, against the sentences given to non-Jews for the same crimes. Why the ethnic-driven great disparity in sentences?
David Alman
Joe Owens on July 12, 2011 05:34 pm:
Strangely enough I’ve just ordered Hoover’s Masters of Deceit.
Not sure Hoover would have dabbled in the Protocols of Zion?
“Why the ethnic-driven great disparity in sentences?” Obviously, the Rosenbergs were the fall guys. But it takes nothing away from what they did. I don’t believe there was a policy then (and now) of official anti - Semitism in the sentencing of Jewish Traitors.
David (if I may), can you give some details of the crimes and sentences of the 20 no - Jew spies.
Thanks
Joe Owens
David Alman on July 12, 2011 10:00 pm:
In response to Joe Owens:
The dozen non-Jewish Cold War spies for the Soviet Union included agents in the FBI (Earl Pitts , Robert Hannsen ); in CIA (Aldrich Ames, Harold J. Nicholson); in the armed forces (Army Lt. Colonel William H. Whalen, Air Force Sgt. Herbert W. Boeckhaupt,Army Intelligence officer Richard Craig Smith, Chief Warrant Officer John Anthony Walker, Yeoman 3rd Class Michael Walker, Navy Lt. Commander Arthur Walker,Senior Chief Radioman Jerry Whitworth; Sgt. David S. Boone, Marine Sgt. Clayton Lonetree). They were arrested between 1966 and 2001, and their sentences ranged from 15 years to life. The 15 year sentence was given to W.H. Whalen, who was specifically charged with atomic espionage. For more details, you can get the FBI’s Report to the American People, 1993-1998, Chapter 2, p. 7-9; FBI press release on espionage 02/20/01; joint FBI-CIA press release 02/18/96; a number of biographies of several of these spies are available in public libraries and at bookstores.
There are 2 issues that that should concern us. The first is whether the FBI was searching for Soviet spies or only for Jewish Soviet spies. Certainly, the Germans and Japanese were well motivated to spy on our atomic development program (the Germans had an active one of their own) and yet the FBI did not turn up even one atomic spy on behalf of Germany or Japan. The statement I cited in my last comment, in which our national law enforcement officials stated they doubted they’d find many disloyal people among the nation’s “pure Anglo-Saxon stock” isn’t one bit reassuring. The second issue is this: out of a minimum of 14 spies for the Soviet Union, the only ones to be sentenced to death were a Jewish couple. Doesn't sound right to me, no matter how you try to rationalize it. And to find the same ethnic-driven disparities in sentences today isn't reassuring either. In fact, it's alarming.
Dave Alman