Yael: They’re executed in the electric chair.
Schwab: On a Friday night in July.
The first on a Friday night in July, the first two or three Jewish cemeteries that are approached refused to take them.
Schwab: Wow.
Yael: From Unpacked, this is Jewish History Nerds, the podcast where we nerd out on awesome stories in Jewish history. I’m Yael Steiner.
Schwab: I’m Jonathan Schwab, I’m really excited for this week’s episode and for what we have in store. I know you’re very excited to get into it,
Yael: I’m very excited, but I have to say I’m a little nervous. This is a really hot topic, and I think, which is insane because it’s something that happened over 70 years ago, but I feel like it still inflames a lot of tempers. And I also am nervous because I think I’m going to present it in a way that historically the Jewish community may not have chosen to present it. So I’m already anticipating angry comments. But I do think it’s really, really fascinating and a totally different angle than any other that I’ve heard about this story in the past. So I’ll just go ahead and share.
Schwab: Interesting. Yeah, without, what are we talking about?
Yael: We’re gonna be talking about Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were American-born Jews who were convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage in 1950. They were arrested in 1950, convicted in 1951, and executed in the electric chair in 1953.
Schwab: That’s like, I would say that’s like my familiarity with this. I’m very curious to get to what different take you’re gonna present on this.
Yael: If you, I actually am curious, could you give me like 30 seconds on things you’ve heard about the Rosenbergs in your life?
Schwab: I think I would say, the espionage specifically was related, Ito like the Soviet Union, right? it was Cold War spying, which spying is always the type of thing that gets, and treason is the type of thing that gets people upset, but that was a particularly important moment where this is, you are convicted of espionage for the United States.
Yael: Yeah, they… Yes.
Schwab: worst enemy in the world.
Yael: I want you to hold on to that word treason. And if I don’t come back to it, please remind me before we sign off because I said espionage. I said espionage. You said treason. But a lot of people say treason. So I want to hold on to that and why it’s such a powerful word and why it lingers.
Yes, they were known colloquially and in the press as the atomic spies. They were portrayed as having given information to the Soviet Union that led to the hastening of the Soviet Union being able to develop an atomic bomb.
Schwab: Which is like pretty consequential stuff.
Yael: Yes, just to give you a sense of the chronology, the Soviet Union first detonated an atomic bomb in a test scenario in 1949. The Korean War began in 1950 and Julius and Ethel were arrested in 1950. So those, the start of the Korean War and the detonation of the atomic bomb by the Soviet Union were the main builders of hysteria leading up to the arrest of first Julius and then a few weeks later Ethel.
Neither of them were scientists. Julius was an engineer, but he did, at least during World War II, work in a machinist shop. During World War II, he worked in some sort of operational position, civilian engineer position, but his civilian engineer position had nothing to do with atomic weapons.
Schwab: So they were not high-level nuclear scientists. They weren’t on the Manhattan Project.
Yael: No, no, The person in their life who was most closely tied to atomic research and quote the way you say it on the Manhattan Project was Ethel’s brother, David Greenglass, who was a low level non-scientist employee at Los Alamos.
Yael: in New Mexico where the main testing of the atomic bomb was done by the United States, the Manhattan Project as you say, but again super low super low level.
Schwab: Yeah. So, so low level that he was not, yeah. And we have shockingly referenced this movie a number of times, but he’s not even portrayed by anybody in Oppenheimer. And there are so many parts in Oppenheimer.
Yael: Nobody in Oppenheimer knew who this guy was. Let’s just start there. oSo he was a low level employee. He had no clearance.
Also, he certainly did not have any higher education. He did not go to college. He did not go to graduate school. He was not a scientist. I think this is a good time to stop and say that we’re not here or I’m certainly not here to relitigate the Rosenberg case to say whether or not they were innocent or guilty though we will definitely talk about different factions of people who believed both things.
Schwab: Hmm.
Yael: And I’m not here to pass judgment on anyone who believes one way or the other. I will tell you what the current consensus is now, which is not necessarily the consensus that existed in the 1950s. Whether or not it would have made a difference is unclear. But I’m just going out there now. I’m not a Rosenberg truther. I’m not saying that the government got it right or the government got it wrong or the crusade to clear their names was right or wrong. I’m just going to feed you a lot of what happened, particularly in the aftermath of the trial because for any of you listening to this podcast or watching it on video, you clearly have the technological prowess to be able to learn about the nuts and bolts of the Rosenberg case online from multiple sources. That’s all out there. This is an extremely, well-known incident in American history.
If you’re familiar with the Billy Joel song, We Didn’t Start the Fire, which lists off certain things in American history, the Rosenbergs are referenced. I want to spend most of our time talking about the aftermath of the conviction, aftermath of the execution, and how the Jewish community reacted to this very famous happening.
Schwab: Yeah. And because I think you said this at the beginning, but just to reiterate, they were Jewish and like it was an important part of the story of like this is a Jewish married couple with an extremely stereotypical Jewish last name.
Yael: Yes. Exactly. So there are a few things I want to before we talk about the Jewish community reaction, I want to talk about Ethel and Julius and their background and the Jewish content of their background, because in case it you know, you made it clear, you know, obviously the Cold War, Soviet Union, America’s greatest enemy, and they were, you know, hated for their communism.
And a portion of communism that is constantly stressed in American life is its godlessness. Or, you know, the fact that it is opposed to organized religion in any way. Obviously, America has a very conflicted sense of self when it comes to its religiosity. But by and large, we are told as American citizens, Godliness is next to patriotism, basically.
Schwab: I like that, yeah.
Yael: So Julius and Ethel, who were actually both members of the Communist Party at certain times in their lives, were communists, which is really an economic designation. But were they godless is the question I want to start with. They both were born on the Lower East Side of New York. Ethel was actually three years older than Julius. She was born in 1915 to Tessie and Barnett Greenglass. Tessy and Barnett were immigrants from the part of Galicia that sort of changed hands every once in a while. They are immigrants from that part of the world. Eastern Europe, European Ashkenazi immigrants.
Schwab: Eastern European Jews who immigrated to the Lower East Side. She probably grew up speaking Yiddish, I’m guessing. Yeah.
Yael: Her mother only spoke Yiddish, actually. She grew up in a hovel of a tenement on Sheriff Street in the Lower East Side, abject poverty. Julius was born in 1918 to Harry and Sophie Rosenberg, possibly the most stereotypical Lower East Side Jewish names that you could have at that time. And they both went to Seward Park High School on the Lower East Side, they did not meet there. They met much later when Julius was a student at City College.
In terms of religious observance, most of the sources talk about Julius’s family being more religiously observant than Ethel’s, Julius’s family much more obviously religious. He learned in a Talmud Torah. Apparently there was a time where either he or his father thought that he might become a rabbi.
Schwab: Classic
Yael: Both, very bright. Ethel in particular, extraordinarily bright. Ethel actually was somewhat of an opera singer and she really desperately wanted to go to college, but that was not in the cards, certainly for economic reasons, but it also doesn’t seem like her parents would have been in favor of it, even if it were economically viable. The consensus is that Ethel’s home life was not good. That Tessie Greenglass, her mother, is portrayed as a horrible person in multiple sources. Really, at the very least, a mother who favored her sons significantly over her daughter. And that David Greenglass, who becomes a pivotal part of the story and one of the main witnesses against Julius and Ethel in their trial, David Greenglass, who was the youngest, the baby, known in the household as Dovi, was very much her favorite.
Schwab: Mm-hmm.
Yael: So Julius graduates from Seward Park and he goes on to study engineering at City College. At City College, he becomes involved with the young communists, which was very fashionable at that time in the 30s. That’s in the 30s.
Schwab: And timeline wise he’s in college right before World War II.
Yael: Correct. And that’s around the time of the Spanish Civil War, which was very much a galvanizing event for young communists in the United States. It’s important to note these are people who grew up in the desperate straits of the Great Depression and really saw horrible, horrible poverty as young people. And it is not insane to think that they might want to agitate for a different economic system.
Schwab: Yeah, also grew up in conditions where they and most people they know are working in labor and there there is no recourse for any right. Like there’s plenty of very oppressive labor practices. And the idea of unionizing and, like having fair wages or safe working conditions is often tied up in like a larger communist project.
Yael: So you got there before I did, which is while Julius is in City College, Ethel goes to work as a secretary. She’s a good typist, which comes into play also later in her life for better or worse, probably worse.
Schwab: For our younger listeners, a secretary before the age of AI chatbots, people used to have to write things down or type them up using machines.
Yael: Yeah. And Ethel was working as a secretary in a business. And the workers in her company went on strike and during the strike
Ethel becomes one of the most active members of the group that is protesting the employment conditions. And she even lies down in the street to stop the entry by people who were trying to break the strike. So Ethel clearly feels emotionally tied to this movement, whether you want to say it’s labor socialism, communism, trade unionism, whatever it is, she’s clearly a leftist and clearly ideologically a leftist and not just, you know, a limousine leftist standing on the side of things. She got down on the pavement to stop this strike from being broken. Julius and Ethel meet at a party meeting slash party for the cause where Ethel was part of the entertainment.
Schwab: You say party, not communist party, but not, party party. Okay.
Yael: They met at a party party. Ethel was supposed to sing and she got a little nervous and a young man came over to her even three years younger than her and calmed her nerves and apparently that was the fireworks moment for them and they were together ever after, until both being executed on the same day in 1953.
They were together two and a half years and then they got married, I think, Julius turned 21. They had one son named Michael in 1943 and one son named Robert in 1947. Julius was working in a civilian engineering position on behalf of the US Army. Ethel, once Michael is born, stops working outside the home. And she was by all accounts very dedicated to being a good mother, very ahead of her time and progressive. She had a subscription to Parents Magazine, which she continued while she was in jail. And the prospect of her ever being reunited with her children again was minimal, but she continued to read Parents Magazine because it was important to her.
Michael was a difficult child and when traditional interventions were not working in the late 1940s, she brought him to see a social worker through Jewish family services. and Ethel herself saw a psychiatrist in the late 1940s as well. And she was, according to the psychiatrist, which I’m not sure how they got the psychiatrist to talk about this or if it was appropriate or illegal, that Ethel really wanted to be the kind of mother that Tessie never was.
Schwab: Mm-hmm. And her kids are young then when they’re arrested. Their kids are born, like in the early 40s, so their kids are like seven or eight years old, something like, yeah.
Yael: Kids are very little. Seven and three, when they’re arrested. And yeah, when they’re executed, 10 and six. And we don’t talk about the fact that this was a very regular Jewish Lower East Side family with two little boys. We talk about the Rosenbergs writ large, the quote unquote atomic spies.
Schwab: Right, like the idea of them as these like villainous figures, I think because that is a representation of them or even as very controversial figures, but I had not previously thought of them as parents to young children. Like that is a very different human perspective.
Yael: I wanna very quickly gloss over what happens at the trial and their conviction, just so that then, we can talk about how the Jewish community reacted and how Judaism played a part in the reaction to this trial.
Schwab: Yeah.
Yael: A spy named Klaus Fuchs is arrested. He was, I think, a major spy for the Soviet Union. He was a scientist, I believe, and he names someone named Harry Gold. Harry Gold names someone named David Greenglass. David Greenglass is Ethel’s younger brother, Dovey.
Schwab: Mm-hmm.
Yael: And David Greenglass ultimately names Julius. It’s important to note that David Greenglass does not name Ethel. David Greenglass had been working at Los Alamos. He had provided a very rudimentary sketch of some sort of lens to the Soviets via Harry Gold. And, he was arrested. He, when he named Julius, Julius was arrested. And then three weeks later, Ethel was arrested. And it is fairly clear to everyone, regardless of what you think about Ethel’s level of involvement, that Ethel was arrested, held and then ultimately executed as a lever to try to get Julius to name names or confess. Even if you take every piece of evidence against Ethel, some of which we now known to have been perjured at face value, there is nothing that she did that would warrant execution.
Schwab: Wow. Okay.
Yael: Maybe a jail sentence, maybe a long one, maybe a short one. Basically, the extent to Ethel’s involvement, if you take everything at face value, is that she knew what Julius was doing and that she typed a set of notes once. But the Jewish prosecutor who had an assistant named Roy Cohn,
Schwab: Hmm.
Yael: Who you may have heard of, who later became Senator McCarthy’s right-hand man and was a big player in the Red Scare in the 1950s United States. Ethel was called in to testify at the grand jury in connection with the investigations into David. David’s wife Ruth traveled to Los Alamos and brought back information, actually physically couriered it, and Julius. So in connection with the investigation into David, Ruth and Julius, Ethel is brought into the grand jury to testify a few times and either the second or third time that she’s brought into the grand jury, she is arrested and she never goes home after that. She had hired a babysitter to watch her two sons. That babysitter stayed overnight.
Schwab: And that’s it then for a while.
Yael: The next day that babysitter deposited the children with Grandma Tessie. And for the rest of their lives, they visited their parents in Sing Sing multiple times, but they were never reunited with their parents for more than a few hours ever again for the rest of their lives.
Schwab: And that big picture, just like, so I’m understanding, is there an idea that this is, these are like essential parts of how to build a nuclear bomb or they were passing along like, here’s how to make this one part.
Yael: It is portrayed as being essential. In fact, President Eisenhower, when he declines to grant clemency in the case and to put off the execution, he says that Julius and Ethel could have been responsible for killing millions and millions of people, that they were that critical to the development of the atomic bomb by the Russians. That is clearly not the case.
Spoiler, I’m gonna just say this now so we don’t lose it. Cables that were declassified in the 1990s make it very clear, and this is the general consensus now, and even their children admit to it, that Julius was a spy. Ethel was not.
Whether or not she may have typed these notes is probably false. David Greenglass in 2001 admitted that he perjured that testimony. But even if Ethel knew what Julius was doing in its entirety and may have been supportive of it, that was certainly the extent of her involvement. Her sons are still advocating for the rehabilitation of her image, they no longer advocate the same way for their father. They don’t think that what he did warranted execution. But they do acknowledge that if these Venona cables, which were declassified in the 90s, are accurate, that Julius Rosenberg was a spy codename liberal.
MIDBREAK
Yael: These Venona cables that I just mentioned being declassified in the 1990s, the government had them prior to the start of the trial against Julius and Ethel, who by the way, there was a third defendant in their trial named Mort Sobell, who was an old friend from City College of Julius’. Mort Sobell was also convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage, and he, I believe, served 30 years in jail.
So the only people executed are the Rosenbergs. Actually, to this day, Ethel is the only woman ever executed by the United States for espionage.
Schwab: Wow. Wow.
Yael: So these cables, again, we take them 100% at face value. The government had them and they had already been decrypted, but they could not be shared or made part of the trial because we did not want the Soviets to know that we had decrypted them.
Schwab: Mm-hmm.
Yael: Julius was not at the top of the scheme by any means. We believe that he first presented himself as a possible asset to the Russians. I think in 42 or 43, one of the shops he was working in as a civilian engineer had some kind of piece of equipment that enabled you to know when to shoot an anti-aircraft missile from the ground. Julius, who was pro-communist, presented it to the Russians and that he then became an asset of some kind, but again, low-level asset. And then it is believed Julius recruited Greenglass when Greenglass was stationed at Los Alamos and Ruth.
It is clear, Julius was a Soviet spy recruited in the early 40s passing along some information. Not passing along anything atomic. David Greenglass does pass along this very rudimentary drawing of a lens that they say was critical to the Russians developing the atomic bomb. But again, David Greenglass also was only sentenced to prison and he didn’t even serve the entirety of his sentence. I think he served nine years. David testifies against Julius and Ethel, saying that Ethel typed up the notes, which is not something he said when he initially named names.
Schwab: Yeah. And this is all in an attempt to lessen his own sentence because he, because it’s not like he’s also a spy and he was also caught and or was caught first.
Yael: Yeah, So this is an attempt to save himself, but also really to save his wife. When he acknowledges in 2001 that he did perjure himself, he says very clearly, I chose my wife over my sister. He said something like, I don’t sleep with my sister. I sleep with my wife.
Schwab: Wow. No one asked.
Yael: But that his wife is the mother of his children. Julius and Ethel who were given multiple chances to either have their sentences commuted to prison terms rather than execution if they would turn on one another or turn on somebody else and they don’t do it.
Yael: And the fact that they have these two little.
Schwab: Yeah. And, are they right? I don’t know, the principle that Julius and Ethel stand on is we’re not going to name anybody else. And like, we’ll go to the electric chair rather than give the name of the next handler up in the chain.
Yael: And they love each other and they love their children. The jailhouse letters published between them are fascinating. They are so literary. These are clearly very smart, very well-read people. They are effusive in their affection for each other and their affection for their children. And ultimately, they choose not to name any names. Julius chooses not to say that Ethel wasn’t involved and save Ethel. And Ethel declines to say that she wasn’t involved and named Julius. And they leave these two little boys as orphans.
Schwab: Why? if they love each other so much, why wouldn’t Julius say like my wife didn’t have anything to do with this like that? Seems strange. Yeah.
Yael: That is the big question that everyone talks about and I don’t think we have an answer. Ethel does say I think in one of her letters, that if she were to confirm Julius’s guilt, proclaiming her own innocence, even if that meant she would get a jail term. She says that when I’m released from jail, my children will be older and all they will think is that I killed their father. So I think she doesn’t see a way out that works for her family either way.
Schwab: Yeah. So they both, in the trial, both plead innocence? Both, like what?
Yael: They take the fifth and they both plead complete innocence.
Now there’s so much here and this is also part of the reason why I was nervous is that like I could talk about this for three hours and I want to get to the Jewish part. So as I mentioned the prosecutor was a Jew, the judge was a Jew.
Schwab: Yeah.
Yael: Their defense attorneys were Jewish. It should be noted that they didn’t have the best defense attorneys there. They had two separate attorneys, Manny Block and Manny Block’s father. One of them had most of his experience in negotiating the sales of bakeries. Like these were not experienced criminal defense attorneys.
Yael: The population of New York at that time was 25-30% Jewish and there was not a single Jew on the jury.
Schwab: Do we know what, like is that like both lawyers from both sides were like, we can’t have any Jews on the jury.
Yael: Unclear. The jury foreman is quoted as saying he was glad it was a Jewish show. Which in and of itself is interesting that he calls it a show because in a lot of ways it was, but I think he felt as a Gentile that he could get comfortable convicting them without feeling like he was committing an antisemitic act because the judge and prosecutor were both Jewish.
Schwab: I feel like just out of just like pausing on that for a second, the the notion of Jewish defense attorney, Jewish defendants, Jewish defense attorney, Jewish prosecutor, Jewish judge, all sort of like performing this question of what what is the place of Jewish Americans for an audience of non-Jews is like a very striking image.
Yael: So they are convicted. There was one holdout. They ended up having to sequester the jury overnight. And apparently the one holdout was later quoted in an article in Esquire, I believe in the 70s, saying that the reason he held out was because he couldn’t stop thinking of the two little boys.
And then he was informed that it was not his job as a juror to think of the sentence. It was only his job to think of the crime. And so he said, once I took the sentence out of my mind that I was maybe killing the parents of these two little boys, I was able to convict.
That being said, Judge Kaufman almost immediately, instead of going through the normal sentencing phase, imposes a death sentence.
They appeal to Eisenhower, they appeal to the Supreme Court. There are dissenting opinions. There are concurring opinions. They exhaust all of their legal resources and legal recourse available to them and ultimately are executed in the electric chair. One after the other, Julius first, then Ethel on a Friday night at 8 p.m. in July 1953.
Schwab: On a Friday night, okay. Mm-hmm.
Yael: One of the last ditch efforts to push off their execution to possibly find more time to get clemency was the execution was scheduled for 11 p.m. on Friday night and Manny Block and his team basically said you can’t execute them on the Sabbath.
Yael: The chaplain at Sing Sing at this time was a man named Rabbi Koslowe. Apparently Rabbi Koslowe called some of the more eminent Jewish halachic authorities to find out whether or not execution on Shabbat was a problem, which I think is a fascinating question. And he talks about having made those calls. And apparently the result of those calls was that execution on Shabbat, it doesn’t matter one way or the other.
Schwab: Hmm. Yeah.
Yael: Rabbi Koslowe visited with each of them many times, but he was with each of them immediately prior to their executions. And in his own words says that he tried to convince them to one to turn on the other or to, you know, for Julius to exculpate Ethel to think of their sons and they refused.
Schwab: Mm-hmm. Yeah. I was going to ask more broadly, are, how many people are being executed for espionage around this time?
Yael: I don’t know, unfortunately. But they are the biggies.
Schwab: Right, like they’re, yeah. I, It’s just like the only other people that I have that are ever referenced as being executed are San,
Yael: Sacco and, Sacco and Vanzetti.
Schwab: Okay. I was close. Yeah. Yeah.
Yael: And they are brought up many times by the committee to save the Rosenbergs. Apparently the committee says we let you get it wrong with Sacco and Vanzetti and we’re not going to let you get it wrong here. The committee obviously was not successful.
The committee was spearheaded by Manny Block, the defense attorney, but it was a huge movement. Many, many leftists from all over the country were involved. There were protests all over the country. There was a march in Washington, Sophie Rosenberg, Julius’s mother was at the front of it. They brought the boys. The boys are ultimately adopted by a couple named Abel and Ann Meeropol, Jewish couple. So the boys now go by Meeropol. Michael Meeropoll talks about he was told by Manny or someone in Manny’s sphere exactly what to write down in his own handwriting on a letter. And the little boy walks up to the White House security guard and hands this letter to security guard, Dear President Eisenhower, please don’t kill my parents. Sincerely, Michael Rosenberg. So there is a huge movement to save these people or at the very least get their sentence changed to a prison sentence.
And here’s where the
Schwab: Yeah, like, well, let’s talk about the Jewish thing. Like, how, I don’t know, is this, do we assume, like, some of this is antisemitism? So, like, this is, wrapped up in, the complicated place of Jews in America and…
Yael: I want to talk about the Jewish community. So I just want to say one thing before we get into this, because this is really the gist, but I don’t want to forget to say this. The jailhouse letters between Julius and Ethel have a tremendous amount of Jewish content, not halachic, not observant, but like you can tell these are very normal Lower East Side Jews. And this goes back to Rabbi Koslowe. Rabbi Koslowe held services in the jail. They were both regular attendees at those services.
Schwab: Mm-hmm.
Yael: They found them very comforting. Ethel in particular enjoyed the singing. At some time they were joint men and women’s services, so it allowed them to be together. But they both remark in their letters to each other that they find the rabbi to be a smart, kind man and they enjoy his sermons and his services. They find them interesting.
They wish each other a good Passover. They talk about a Chanukah that they remember with their boys, where they remember their boys being really excited to put on a kippah, which is not something everyone who lights Chanukah candles does, by the way, and saying the blessings together.
They weren’t anti-religion in any way.
Okay, how does the Jewish community respond to this? The institutional Jewish community does its best to side with the government and say these are bad people and to distance themselves from them as Jews. This goes so far as the someone very high up, pinnacle of leadership at the American Jewish Committee writes a book called The Rosenberg Case Fact and Fiction, to make sure you guys know the American Jewish Committee is on board with saying these people are spies.
Schwab: Mm-hmm. They do not have, like to talk about a phrase that unfortunately is still very relevant today. Like they do not have dual loyalties. They are they are, like faithful to America.
Yael: So the committee for the Rosenbergs, committee on the side of the Rosenbergs, tries to inject the specter of antisemitism into the case, tries to stress that there were no Jews on the jury. How is this possible?
Yael: And they try to cast this as the American Dreyfus affair. And the AJC and the ADL and the Jewish war veterans and some other people all say, we want to tell you this is not antisemitic. We are proclaiming once and for all this trial was not antisemitic.
Schwab: Which I just want to say, I mean, I don’t, I don’t know whether it is or isn’t, but like again, also something that is very relevant in, 2026 is like Jews telling other people, this, this is not antisemitic.
Yael: You are hitting the nail on the head. Same exact situation. Feinberg, the guy from AJC, says the only Jewish organizations who are taking up the cause of the Rosenbergs are the leftists, godless communists, no respectable Jewish organization. He writes somewhere, Judaism and communism are utterly incompatible. He wants to make clear.
Schwab: Again, just like the representation of the trial as like Jewish prosecutor, Jewish defense attorney, Jewish judge, all performing for the jury of non-Jews, everybody getting up there and saying like, this is or isn’t, you know, what’s going on here. And American public non-Jews should decide.
Yael: And we won’t get into this, but again, there are people, not for antisemitic reasons, but there are plenty of people who say the trial was rigged and a show trial in other ways. But there is some evidence that Judge Kaufman, a Jew, a, I believe Park Avenue Synagogue Jew, very, you know, the cream, the crea- right, the cream of the crop of the elegant, old money Jewish New York.
Schwab: Hmm, so not the Lower East Side.
Yael: There is evidence that he sort of rigged the trial, that he was shown the decrypted Venona cables and that he knew Julius was a spy. He, adds what the word treason, when he gives his instructions to the jury, he provides a summary of the defense case and the prosecution case. He spends almost zero time on the defense case and instead completely reiterates the prosecution’s case.
And uses the word treason multiple times, even though treason is not the charge. Treason is a charge of aiding the enemy.
Russia, the Soviet Union is our ally during World War II. espionage is still a crime, but if they provided aid, they provided aid to an ally.
Schwab: And they were teammates during World War II against… Yeah. …against a much greater threat, and a very great threat to Jews specifically.
Yael: So again, they weren’t accused of treason. Treason is a totally different thing. And usually espionage that isn’t treason, that’s aid to an ally, is not punished by execution. But Judge Kaufman used the word treason multiple times in his summary. And I think Judge Kaufman is very representative of how most Jews, anyone to the right of the far left was feeling at that time, which was that things are maybe just starting to get a teeny bit more comfortable here for us. We can demonstrate that we’re Team America by sacrificing these two no-goodniks. Like, at the end of the day, they’re not faultless. Look at these people, they’re willing to die and leave their children orphans.
Schwab: Right.
Yael: They’re not helping themselves in any way. So again, Saul Feinberg was really like the leader with the pitchfork who wanted to show, I guess, as the head of the American Jewish community. Like, America, we’re with you. Get these godless commies out of here. They are not representative of American Jews. These organizations that I mentioned, the ADL, American Jewish Congress, American Jewish Committee, Jewish War Veterans, maybe some others, they put out guidance to synagogues and Jewish organizations saying, don’t help the Rosenbergs. Do not rent out your space or allow speakers who are going to advocate for them.
Through the National Library of Israel, I found a scan of a Jewish newspaper from Chicago where the president of a synagogue allowed space to be rented for an event that I think was a fundraiser for the Rosenberg Defense, there was a trust, also a fundraiser for a trust fund for the children.
Schwab: Mm-hmm.
Yael: And the board of directors forced the president to resign. They rescinded the invitation to the speaker. Ultimately, the president was allowed to return. I think he apologized, but it was, you know, the AJC had intervened and said, you guys can’t have this speaker at your synagogue but it happened in a lot of places. The AJC also sent rogue agents into these meetings to find out what the progressive Jews were doing. Like I went to this meeting of progressive Jews in the Bronx and this is what they said. And they were doing this in multiple areas of the country.
So I don’t know if Saul Feinberg was really worried about the antisemitism that would happen If people didn’t believe that the Jewish community was against communism, but he was very active in his anti Rosenberg stance. His book, Rosenberg Case Factor Fiction, was actually advertised in a white nationalist or Klan magazine. And he, after the fact, claims that he had him and the publisher had no knowledge of it. The State Department ordered 3,000 copies of Feinberg’s book by the way.
Schwab: Mm-hmm.
Yael: And he wrote that the case may be over, the evil that they did is endless.
Yael: They’re executed in the electric chair.
Schwab: On a Friday night in July.
The first on a Friday night in July, the first two or three Jewish cemeteries that are approached refused to take them.
Schwab: Wow.
Yael: And they are ultimately buried in Wellwood Cemetery in Babylon, Long Island.
Yael: As I was preparing for this podcast, this is Jewish History Nerds and I wanted to focus on the Jewish element of it.
Schwab: Which I assume this is the case is in the 70 years since this has happened is tempered.
Yael: We don’t talk about them as Jewish martyrs. And when we learn about them, or at least for me in Jewish day school, and we learn about the Red Scare, we don’t dwell on the fact that they’re Jewish. I mean, it might be noted, but we don’t talk about this as being an episode of oppression of Jews. Because I think, as you said, people want no part of this. We would just rather not talk about it. There were three rabbis who I think tried to see Eisenhower or wrote to Eisenhower, who were advocates for the Rosenbergs. Again, not necessarily that they were innocent, but that they shouldn’t be executed.
Schwab: Just like clemency, just so like, know, hey, they did something wrong, but maybe let’s not put them to death.
Yael: Yeah, and the rest of institutional Jewry kind of casts these three people as, you know, lefty menaces. Abraham Kronbach, who was a reform rabbi in Cincinnati, who was the leader of this group, officiated the funeral. The Jewish Daily Forward, for instance, which was always a left leaning Jewish institution.
Schwab: Radical leftists, yeah.
Yael: Also, to the extent it took a stance on this, advocated for jail sentence rather than execution. They thought the sentence of execution was too extreme. And then I guess you also have the people who say maybe the conviction wasn’t antisemitism, but the sentence was antisemitism.
Again, the sentence was handed down by a Jewish judge with institutional ties. That being said, Judge Kaufman also had seen the Venona cables, which nobody else had seen. This is going back to the beginning, but I just want to point it out. In the cables, David, his wife Ruth, and Julius all had code names, and Ethel did not.
Schwab: Mm-hmm. Which is like, so she’s not a, yeah, she’s not a player in this story.
Yael: If she were a spy, she would have a code name because all of the other spies have code names. And again, I really not here to relitigate this, but those are all sort of things that have come out lately and have led to the Meerpol children trying to get, her name rehabilitated, they focus less on Julius’s name now,
Schwab: Yeah, like that’s what’s so strange that is like knowing, okay, if we know that the facts of the case that Ethel was innocent, why didn’t she say that?
Yael: There’s one letter where Julius writes that he’s kvelling from something that Ethel did, which I thought was, they write about each other in really romantic, really romantic terms. There’s also, you know, there’s some allusion to, like their physical relationship also in the letters and how, you know, they were able to see each other occasionally for that reason.
They talk about how their children would survive without them. Their wills left the children to Manny Block, their defense attorney as a guardian. I don’t think that they intended that the children would live with Manny, but maybe that he would arrange for their caretaking.
But Manny ultimately dies suddenly, which is why they are shuttled from place to place within the Jewish institutional social service system. So these boys are not abandoned per se by the institutional Jewish community, but there’s nobody coming out and saying these boys are innocent victims in all of this. In fact,
Schwab: But also no one coming out and saying like they need to be completely cast out and like we can’t have anything to do with that.
Yael: And nobody, it seems to me, is saying our Jewish values tell us to behave one way or another way, because I think the community is so split.
Schwab: Mm.
Yael: And if I can make one sweeping generalization, it’s that Jews in the 1950s in the United States by and large are living the best life that Jews had lived in history up until that point. Schwab: Mm-hmm.
And especially probably are keenly aware of that given that it’s like a decade since, yeah, yeah.
Yael: Right, because it was such a stark contrast to how they were living 15 years earlier. And they didn’t want to mess with that.
Yael: This was certainly the beginning of the golden age of American Jewry. To the extent that you had federal judges, federal judges making these decisions who were Jews.
Yeah.
Yael: Roy Cohn, the, you know, the prosecutor Irving Seypol was a Jew. Roy Cohn was a Jew. And then Roy Cohn goes on to spearhead an entire, I don’t want to call it legislative because there wasn’t really anything legislative about it, but like this entire legislative agenda, agenda of the Senate for years and years. So they didn’t know what to do. They weren’t sure. Like, do we, do we speak out for these people or do we, we let them take the
Schwab: Right. And just like, is this a threat? Yeah. Right. It’s interesting. Just like, yeah, like is what is yeah, what is
Yael: fall for the rest of us because all of a sudden we’re in a place where not every they’re not trying to kill all of us. They’re only trying to kill two of us. And
Schwab: Interesting. like, but just like, imagine this question of like one, do we feel, do we as Jews feel secure enough as Americans, that we can express concern or do we feel insecure enough that we need to very quickly assert, you know, our opposition, you know, and it, and it sounds like this is, that’s right. That question is, like unresolved. Right. Like just, you know,
Yael: I don’t think we ever feel secure.
There was a tremendous amount of antisemitism in the Soviet Union. So these people that the Rosenbergs were accused of abetting were killing thousands and thousands of Jews in the 1950s. So…
Schwab: Mm-hmm.
Yael: Well, and that’s what was also very complicated about being a communist, particularly a communist Jew in the United States in the late 30s, early 40s, because Stalin started as an ally of Hitler and then became an ally of the United States. So, Saul Feinberg and institutional Judaism in the United States had that on their side as well. How could this be antisemitism when it’s about prosecuting people who are helping Stalin, when Stalin is killing thousands of Jews?
Schwab: Was never an ally of the Jews, yet.
Schwab: Right. Look at who they’re. Yeah.
Yael: I think I might have mentioned this, but just in case, even the ACLU won’t get involved, and that’s how you know that people aren’t being persecuted for their religion. I don’t know how I would have reacted if I had been there, I don’t know if I would have been in a position where I wouldn’t have been able to make up my minds, but I have had a tremendous amount of sympathy for those two little boys. Again, not a reason to convict or not convict a criminal, but there is a human cost to every proceeding and it is very sad.
Like what the little boys went through is really heartbreaking.
Schwab: Thanks for listening to Jewish History Nerds brought to you by Unpacked, an OpenDor Media brand.
Yael: If you like this show, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and please give us a rating and review.
Schwab: Check out unpacked.media for everything unpacked related and subscribe to our other podcasts and our YouTube channel. Most importantly, be in touch. Write to us at nerds@unpacked.media. This episode was hosted by me, Jonathan Schwab.
Yael: and by me, Yael Steiner. Our education lead is Dr. Henry Abramson. Our editors are Rob Pera and Ari Schlacht. We’re produced by Jenny Falcon and Rivky Stern. Thanks for listening. See you next week.