Remembering the Rosenbergs
My mom was eight months pregnant with me when she, my dad, and tens of thousands of others around the world held vigils in June 1953 calling on President Eisenhower to grant clemency to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who had been convicted in 1951 of passing information about the atomic bomb to the Soviets. Eisenhower declined, saying their crime “could very well result in the death of many, many thousands of innocent civilians.” The Rosenbergs were executed on June 19, 1953.
Under the pretext of rooting out “communists,” the post-World War II Red Scare targeted dissent, especially by the radical leadership of the labor movement and the Black liberation movement. The political elite sought to manufacture consent for its Cold War against the Soviet Union, the war in Korea (the Rosenberg trial judge, Irving Kaufman, blamed the Rosenbergs for the Korean War), and spiraling war budgets and corporate profits. Many people here and around the world spoke up and spoke out against the hysteria, but many more enthusiastically or reluctantly participated in the witch hunt or were cowed into submissive silence.
The Rosenberg trial was especially egregious because the five defendants in the case — the Rosenbergs, David and Ruth Greenglass, and Morton Sobell — were Jewish and, although others have since been convicted of violating national security, the Rosenbergs were the only ones put to death.
Antisemitism surges during critical periods such as the Red Scare. The antisemitic trope that equates Jews with communism, and the antisemitic trope that views Jews as aliens, merged to create a powerful fog of hatred and fear. The Soviet Union tested its first atom bomb in 1949. In a 1950 survey, the American Jewish Committee asked “What do you think of the atom bomb stories appearing in the newspapers?” Many of the answers were blatantly antisemitic:
“Jews should not be permitted to work in atom laboratories.”
“Every Jew is a Communist. Just go to Union Square and you will see that everyone has a hooked nose. Hitler didn’t finish the job.”
“Don’t kid me, you know as well as I do who’s helping the Reds. It’s those goddamn Jews.”
“Do you read the papers? What are their names? It isn’t Giuseppe, Kelly, or O’Flaherty! Shoot the bastards!”
“I blame the Jewish influence in the Communist movement. They disregard the interests of this country and they operate in behalf of the Soviet Union and for Palestine.”
“Every time you pick up a newspaper and read of spying, and Communists, all you see is Jewish names.”
“The Communist movement is dominated by Jews. At least 65% of the Communists in the United States are of Jewish nationality. I am not anti-Semitic, but you cannot overlook that fact.”
In that environment, describing the Rosenbergs as communists working for a foreign power hit both tropes and was good theater.
Among those who participated in spreading the anticommunist hysteria were major Jewish organizations, including the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Congress, the Jewish War Veterans of the United States, the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, the National Community Relations Advisory Council, and the Jewish Labor Committee. They argued that the charge of antisemitism raised by the Rosenberg defense movement was “Communist trickery,” that the Rosenbergs should be executed, and that good Jews are anticommunist patriots. In a February 28, 1952 memorandum, the American Jewish Committee made it clear:
We have a directive to dissociate Jews and Communism in the American mind…Jewish organizations should be warned that the FBI has been making careful note of pro-Communist meetings and that these pro-Rosenberg meetings will surely go into the record…The Jewish community owes nothing to the Rosenbergs and must not be put into a position wherein the general public assumes that the Jewish community is on the side of the Rosenbergs…
Apparently, only certain Jews were worth protecting. This is still the case: Jonathan Greenblatt of the Anti-Defamation League called on New York Gov. Kathy Hochul to send the National Guard into Columbia University this past spring to attack peaceful anti-Gaza war protesters, including peaceful Jewish protesters.
Now comes the revelation that the U.S. government knew shortly after she was arrested that Ethel Rosenberg was innocent. Their sons, Robert and Michael Meeropol, wrote:
A newly declassified NSA memorandum dated August 22, 1950 — ten days after our mother’s arrest — confirms that the U.S. government knew Ethel Rosenberg was not a spy long before her trial and execution. Authored by then-chief analyst of the NSA Meredith Gardner, the memo reveals that he concluded from reviewing Soviet Intelligence that Ethel Rosenberg was not a spy…. After [Ethel’s] arrest the National Security Agency’s chief analyst, Meredith Gardner, wrote that Ethel, “knew about her husband’s work, but that due to ill health she did not engage in the work herself.”
The Meeropol brothers are calling on President Biden and Attorney General Garland to exonerate Ethel Rosenberg.
The charge for which the Rosenbergs were killed — conspiracy to give the Soviets the secret to the atomic bomb — was ludicrous. The Manhattan Project cost $2 billion and employed thousands of engineers, mechanics, chemists, physicists, etc., from 1939 to 1945. Dr. Harold Urey, one of the scientists on the project, testified to Congress in 1946 that “detailed data on the atomic bomb would require 80 or 90 volumes of close print which only a scientist or engineer would be able to read.” Whatever information Julius Rosenberg conspired to give the Soviets, he didn’t give them the secret of the atomic bomb. In other words, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were killed for a crime they did not commit.