Uncategorized
Daniel Ellsberg, Pentagon Papers leaker whom ‘everyone assumed’ was Jewish, dies at 92
(JTA) — Daniel Ellsberg, the military analyst whose leak of the classified “Pentagon Papers” exposed American deceit about the Vietnam War, led to a landmark Supreme Court on press freedoms and inspired a White House backlash that cascaded into the Watergate scandal, died Friday at age 92.
Ellsberg had announced in March that he had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
Although raised by parents of Ashkenazi descent and attacked as a Jewish traitor by President Richard Nixon, Ellsberg was raised and practiced as a Christian Scientist.
“I think everyone assumed he was Jewish, and Nixon certainly did,” said filmmaker Rick Goldsmith, in an interview with J. The Jewish News of Northern California, about his 2010 documentary, “The Most Dangerous Man In America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers.”
Ellsberg, who was born in Chicago in 1931 to Jewish parents with a passion for Christian Science, “shifted from avowed hawk to antiwar activist in part due to the influence of his girlfriend (and later, wife) Patricia, the daughter of Jewish toy magnate Louis Marx,” according to the California Jewish newspaper.
The Harvard-educated ex-Marine was one of three dozen Rand Corporation analysts who helped prepare a report expressing official government doubts about a war that would claim the lives of some 58,000 American and countless Vietnamese soldiers and civilians. Hoping to hasten the end of the war, he eventually leaked thousands of pages to The New York Times, which began publishing excerpts in 1971.
The Nixon White House challenged their publication on national security grounds, leading to a Supreme Court decision that June that favored the Times and the Washington Post and allowed their publication of the documents to continue.
An enraged Nixon set up a secretive unit, known as the Plumbers, to ruin Ellsberg’s reputation and plug other leaks. “I don’t care how you do it,” Nixon told his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, according to a White House recording made in June 1971. “You can’t let the Jew steal that stuff and get away with it. You understand? People don’t trust these Eastern establishment people. [Ellsberg is] Harvard. He’s a Jew. You know, and he’s an arrogant intellectual.” Ellsberg was also one of several people that Nixon was alleged to have called “Jew boy” on explosive recordings that captured headlines in 1974.
The Plumbers’ burglary of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office was followed by a series of break-ins at the Democratic National Committee offices at the Watergate complex in Washington. The revelations about the burglaries and the White House’s role in trying to cover them up led to Nixon’s resignation in 1974.
Facing theft, conspiracy and espionage charges, Ellsberg fully expected to go to jail. But a U.S. district judge declared a mistrial in 1973, citing governmental misconduct.
Stanley Sheinbaum, the liberal Jewish activist who died in 2016, raised nearly $1 million for the successful defense of Ellsberg.
In 2008, Ellsberg told a journalist that his parents considered the family Jewish, “but not in religion.”
“I was a Jew and I am a Jew,” he said. “By [Nixon’s] definition, I’m 100 percent a Jew, as I would be under Hitler’s.”
Ellsberg’s leak was one of the factors that turned public opinion against the war in Vietnam, and he remained an advocate for whistleblowers throughout his life. Earlier this week, in an interview with Politico that turned out to be his last, Ellsberg urged other whistleblowers to remain vigilant despite his and their skepticism that their efforts would effect change.
“[W]hen everything is at stake, can it be worth even a small chance of having a small effect?” said Ellsberg. “And the answer is: Of course. Of course, it can be worth that. You can even say it’s obligatory.”
—
The post Daniel Ellsberg, Pentagon Papers leaker whom ‘everyone assumed’ was Jewish, dies at 92 appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
The Trump administration’s latest affront to Jewish history
President Donald Trump’s administration either does not understand or does not care about the point of the International Criminal Court.
In announcing that the United States would try to “dismantle” the ICC, Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently wrote in The Wall Street Journal that “the ICC and its allies seek a standing world tribunal with near-unlimited reach, empowered to override the courts and constitutions of the U.S. and other sovereign states — and to prosecute and arrest our citizens.”
As examples of the court’s potential overreach, he cited the possibility of it taking action in response to activist pleas to prosecute Trump administration officials for deporting people to a notoriously inhumane El Salvador prison — regardless of their country of origin — and calls to treat the administration’s airstrike campaign against alleged drug smuggling boats as a crime against humanity.
The ICC is an imperfect institution. But to argue against its necessity is an affront to Jewish history, which has taught us, over and over again, that a country sometimes needs to be held to international account over its treatment of disempowered minority groups.
Because while the ICC is the self-described court of last resort, meant in large part to complement national courts, it exists at least in part because there are times that national courts — like nation states more generally — do not consider everyone within their borders to be worthy of their protection, and when words like “sovereignty” are used to bludgeon individual human rights and dignity.
The proof of the court’s importance lies in how deeply tied its origin story is to the crimes of the Holocaust, even though the ICC itself was only formally established in the 1990s.
Aryeh Neier, whose family fled Nazi Germany when he was a small child, was instrumental in the creation of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia — the development of which was an important stop on the way to the creation of the ICC. Ben Ferencz, top prosecutor against the Einsatzgruppen at Nuremberg, was a prominent advocate both for the creation of the court and for the adoption of the Rome Statute, the treaty that established the court and the court’s jurisdiction over four core crimes: genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression. (The U.S. has never ratified that treaty.)
Theodor Meron, who was born in Poland in 1930 and survived the Holocaust before becoming an Israeli diplomat, spent decades as a judge both for the ICTY and for a similar special tribunal for Rwanda. He was part of the delegation that led to the ICC’s establishment in the 1990s, and in 2024, he recommended that the ICC consider issuing warrants for the arrest of both Israeli and Hamas leaders for war crimes and crimes against humanity as a result of the Oct. 7 attack and the subsequent Gaza war.
It’s not coincidental that all these men were Jewish, and aware from firsthand experience of the dangers of unchecked national power.
Ben Ferencz deliberately drew a connection between the two in 2011, when he delivered the closing prosecution speech at the first trial ever heard by the ICC at its home in the Hague. “The case we present is a plea of humanity to law,” he said — the same statement he used in his opening statement at the Einsatzgruppen trial.
In a Prospect UK interview in 2024, Meron said he has always been driven by the desire to bring ours closer to being “a world with no holocausts.”
Neier, for his part, has criticized the ICC for its ineffectiveness, despite being one of its leading proponents. But writing in The New York Review of Books over the weekend, Neier — who suggested that Rubio’s announcement may be motivated by the coming Israeli elections — pointed out the court’s continued significance.
“The trial in the International Criminal Court of former President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines is scheduled to get underway this fall. While in power, Duterte presided over the summary executions of many thousands of Filipinos, most of them poor people, because they were suspected of using contraband drugs,” he wrote. “It is a shame to see the United States try to destroy the ICC — the only global institution with a mandate to address such horrors — merely because those subject to its jurisdiction may be Americans or their friends.”
There are those who see the ICC itself as an affront to Jewish history, including prominent Jews who have condemned the ICC over its outstanding warrant out for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s arrest. They, too, point to Jewish history to make their case: Netanyahu’s office called the warrant a”modern Dreyfus trial,” and Israeli President Isaac Herzog said that “the outrageous decision at the ICC has turned universal justice into a universal laughing stock.” Meanwhile, attorney Alan Dershowitz posted, “The ICC has never indicted Assad. Of course not because he’s neither Israeli nor Jewish.”
Their common argument: that the ICC has become yet another venue for international antisemitism.
But Neier, Ferencz and Meron’s arguments in favor of the court are more persuasive. They didn’t just think the court was important; they saw international law as so necessary that they dedicated their lives to trying to make it matter, in part through the ICC. Meron said he was working for “a universe in which injustice and violence and mistreatment of people on ethnic and religious grounds is less likely.” That vision is only a threat to sovereignty when sovereignty is interested in injustice.
This does not mean that the U.S. government needs to agree with every ICC decision. Nor does it mean that every individual associated with the ICC is above censure. (Karim Khan, the chief prosecutor of the ICC, was accused of sexual misconduct and is now facing a vote as to whether he will keep his role; Ken Roth, former head of Human Rights Watch, noted that the accusations — and the fact that the ICC Executive Bureau found Khan’s denials lacking credibility — seriously challenge Khan’s ability to do his job.)
What it does mean is this: The ICC does not exist to be friendly — or, for that matter, to be unfriendly — to any country. Nor does it exist to undermine sovereignty, or to treat sovereignty as sacrosanct. To only think of the court in terms of protecting or violating sovereignty is to overlook its real purpose: to protect our shared humanity, and bring justice to people who are no less worthy of dignity or justice than Netanyahu, Rubio or Trump.
The post The Trump administration’s latest affront to Jewish history appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
75 artifacts tell the fitful, inspiring, unfinished story of Jews in America
In May 1818, Mordecai Manuel Noah, a prominent Jew of his time and a member of the Madison administration, delivered a discourse on Jewish history on the occasion of a synagogue consecration. One man read Noah’s words with interest, and took pen to paper to say so.
“Your sect by its sufferings has furnished a remarkable proof of the universal spirit of religious intolerance,” the correspondent noted, in elegant cursive. “Our laws have applied the only antidote to this vice, protecting our religious, as they do our civil, rights by putting them all on equal footing. But more remains to be done, for although we are free by the law, we are not so in practice.”
The letter’s author was Thomas Jefferson. 200 years later, there’s still work to do.
The Jefferson letter is one of 75 objects on view at All We Have Standing Between Us: 250 Years of Jews and American Democracy, the American Jewish Historical Society’s new exhibit at the Center for Jewish History. Arranged in chronological order, from the outbreak of the Revolution to the tiki torches of Charlottesville, the survey takes stock of the at times harmonious but very often discordant, relationship between American Jews and the country, and among themselves.
“One of the throughlines is that for 250 years, American Jews have certainly not been a monolithic community in terms of how they’ve approached key issues,” said Gavriel Rosenfeld, president for the Center for Jewish History.
To that end, visitors can see Shearith Israel’s hazzan Gershom Mendes Seixas’ patriot prayer for the Continental Congress and, a vitrine or two away, a sampler from the loyalist Hendricks family of Psalm 78, whose words were associated with a pro-monarchist sentiment.
Most Jews lived in the Union at the outbreak of the Civil War, but currency with Judah Benjamin’s face, from the Confederate Secretary’s own collection, is proof of just how embedded Southern Jews were in their communities. A telegram nearby, denouncing General Grant’s wartime expulsion order for the Jews of Kentucky, shows how tenuous Jewish belonging was.
The story was never only one of brother against brother. Moving into the 20th Century, with wall text addressing the Gilded Age, we see how American Jews confronted the revival of the Klan and the “Cross of Gold” populism of William Jennings Bryan with the influx of Jews from Eastern Europe. (An explanation of Woodrow Wilson’s veto of a literacy test for immigrants is displayed, as is a scroll inviting well-heeled Jews to a Purim benefit for new arrivals.)
The Anti-Defamation League, a copy of whose founding charter is on display, was formed after the conviction of Leo Frank. But by the 1950s, with the Red Scare gathering storm clouds, the ADL Bulletin dismissed the claim that the Rosenberg trial was animated by antisemitism.
“This is the latest propaganda tactic with which the Communist Party hopes to bludgeon the Jewish community to its support,” Oliver Pilat wrote in March 1952.
Fissures in the community continued with the Civil Rights Movement.
That Jews played an outsized role in the push for Black equality — attested to by Ben Shahn’s lithographs of James Chaney and Northern Jews Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner — is contextualized with the objections of their Southern coreligionists, who feared the blowback of their neighbors.
Betty Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique, and Midge Decter savaged it in Commentary. The so-called culture wars that dominate our discourse today are nothing new.
Among the more recent acquisitions are former U.S. Representative Steve Israel’s handwritten notes on a Sept. 13, 2001 FEMA briefing, marking the start of a new American reality. But one is struck by how much remains the same.
A signed photo of Nita Lowey shaking hands with Barack Obama — a Jewish congresswoman and a Black president— was unthinkable in the days of Jefferson and Noah, but their dynamic was not dissimilar from those two men. The intolerance Jefferson wrote about has not abated, only shifted its focus. A Time report on the Unite the Right Rally tells the tale.
The exhibit stops short of the pandemic, Oct. 7 and the emerging rifts among American Jews and their neighbors. That history is still in progress.
“Longer than there’s been a country, there have been Jews,” said Gemma Birnbaum, executive director of the AJHS. At first it was only 23 off the boat to New Amsterdam, she said, but the Jewish story has always been a part of the American one.
Birnbaum and Rosenfeld want visitors to recognize continuities in the unfinished American Revolution, both the progress and the work that remains. Sometimes, this means reassuring visitors. One thing they’re asked a lot: “Does it ever get better?”
“What is better?” Birnbaum asks. “There are times when things are really difficult, and there are times when things feel a little less difficult. And if you can take inspiration from that — to me, I find it grounding.”
The American Jewish Historical Society’s exhibit All We Have Standing Between Us: 250 Years of Jews and American Democracy is on view at the Center for Jewish History through Dec. 31, 2026.
The post 75 artifacts tell the fitful, inspiring, unfinished story of Jews in America appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Diary of a Jewish ghetto refugee, written in a pigsty
אין דער װעלט פֿון ייִדיש איז בערל כּהנס נאָמען גוט באַקאַנט צוליב זײַנע היסטאָרישע און ביבליאָגראַפֿישע שטודיעס, צװישן זײ — דער צוגאָב־באַנד צו דעם „לעקסיקאָן פֿון דער נײַער ייִדישער ליטעראַטור“ און „ייִדישע שטעט, שטעטלעך און דאָרפֿישע ייִשובים אין ליטע ביז 1918“.
אָבער זײַן ערשט בוך איז געװען דער חורבן־טאָגבוך „אַ ייִד אין װאַלד“, װאָס איז אַרױס אין ניו־יאָרק אין 1955. דאָ דערצײלט כּהן װעגן צען חדשים אונטער דער דײַטשישער אָקופּאַציע פֿון ליטע צװישן אָקטאָבער 1943 און אױגוסט 1944. די דאָזיקע צײַט האָט ער, אין אײנעם מיט זיבן אַנדערע פּליטים פֿונעם קאָװנער געטאָ, פֿאַרבראַכט אין אַ באַהעלטעניש טיף אין ליטװישע װעלדער.
איצט, העכער װי 70 יאָר נאָך דער פּובליקאַציע פֿון דעם ייִדישן טאָגבוך, איז עס סוף־כּל־סוף אַרױס אױף ענגליש מיטן טיטל, „אַ ייִד אין וואַלד: זײַטלעך פֿון אַ טאָגבוך“.
פֿאַר דער מלחמה איז כּהן געװען אַן אַקטיװער לינקער ציוניסט און האָט געשריבן פֿאַר קאָװנער ייִדישע צײַטונגען. װען די דײַטשן האָבן פֿאַרכאַפּט די שטאָט, האָט ער זיך געפֿונען אינעם געטאָ אין דער ייִדישער פֿאָרשטאָט סלאַבאָדקע.
„אין דער צװײטער העלפֿט פֿון 1943 זײַנען די אילוזיעס פֿון די פֿאַרשפּאָרטע ייִדן אין סלאַבאָדקער געטאָ אַריבערצולעבן היטלערן געװאָרן אַלץ שװאַכער.“ אַזױ הײבט כּהן אָן די דערצײלונג װעגן זײַן ראַטעװען זיך פֿונעם חורבן.
כּהן, זײַן פֿרױ ראַיע און איר שװעסטער נחמה זײַנען אַנטלאָפֿן פֿונעם געטאָ מיט דער הילף פֿון אַ ליטװישן פּױער טאַדעוש. ער האָט זײ פֿאַרבאַהאַלטן אינעם חזיר־שטאַל בײַ זײַן שטוב אין אַ װײַטן דערפֿל אין מיטן װאַלד.
אין זײַנע נאָטיצן האָט כּהן פֿאַרפֿיקסירט פּרטים פֿון זײער טאָג־טעגלעכן לעבן מיט אַלע דאגות, אַנגסטן און האָפֿענונגען. ער האָט אױך געפּרוּװט צו באַזיניקן דאָס, װאָס עס קומט פֿאָר מיט זײ און מיט אַנדערע ייִדן, כאָטש קײן פֿאַרלאָזלעכע ידיעות פֿון דער ברײטערער װעלט האָט ער ניט געקענט קריגן.
פֿאַרװאָס האָט אַן עלטערער ליטװינער באַשלאָסן צו ראַטעװען ייִדן? טאַדעוש האָט דערקלערט: „איך טו עס ניט דערפֿאַר, װאָס איך װיל פֿאַרדינען געלט. איך בין שױן אַלט – און דאָס געלט אין דער ערד װעל איך סײַ װי ניט מיטנעמען. איך װיל אָבער, אַז ס׳זאָל ניט פֿאַרגאָסן װערן נאָך אומשולדיק בלוט. װאָלט איך געקענט װאָלט איך געראַטעװעט נאָך ייִדן, קען איך עס ניט, װעל איך באַשיצן די, װעמען איך האָב יאָ געראַטעװעט.“
אינעם טאָגבוך ווײַזט כּהן אַרויס אַ סך דרך־ארץ פֿאַר טאַדעוש און זײַן פֿרױ באַרבאַראַ, װאָס שטעלן אײַן זײער לעבן פֿאַר פֿרעמדע מענטשן. ער פֿרעגט זיך: „װיפֿל ייִדן װאָלטן געווען פֿעיִק אַזױנס צו טאָן?“
יעדע מינוט קען װערן די לעצטע פֿאַר די ייִדישע פּליטים אינעם שטאַל. אָבער כּהן איז געװױר אױך פֿונעם שװערן מצבֿ פֿון די ליטװינער: „פֿון דײַטשן װילן זײ פּטור װערן, אָבער דעם רוס װילן זײ אױך ניט האָבן.“
די גרעסטע סכּנה פֿאַר ייִדישע פּליטים קומט טאַקע ניט פֿון די דײַטשן, װאָס באַװײַזן זיך זעלטן אין יענע טיף־באַגראָבענע מקומות, נאָר פֿון די שכנישע פּױערים און פֿון די ליטװישע פּאַרטיזאַנער, װאָס הרגענען ייִדן.
אָבער די מיאוסטע פּאַרשױנען אינעם בוך זײַנען ניט קײן דײַטשן און ניט קײן ליטװינער, נאָר צװײ מיטגלידער פֿון זײער גרופּע — דער „אַמאָליקער פּריץ“ און זײַן פֿרױ. פֿאַר דער מלחמה האָט דער דאָזיקער ייִד געפֿירט געשעפֿטן אין דער געגנט און איצט האַלט ער, אַז די אָרטיקע פּױערים זײַנען אים מחויבֿ צו העלפֿן.
זײַן אַני־מאמין איז געװען „כּל־זמן מע לעבט, דאַרף מען מאַכן געשעפֿטן.“ און ער האָט טאַקע געװאָלט באַקומען רװח אַפֿילו פֿון די פּליטים אינעם אײגענעם שטאַל.
אָבער װאָרעם זײ האָבן ניט געהאַט מיט װאָס צו באַצאָלן, האָט זיך דער פּריץ ניט געטײלט מיט זײ מיטן עסן, װאָס ער האָט געקױפֿט בײַ די פּױערים: „די אַמאָליקע ייִדישע פּריצים עסן פֿאַר אונזערע אױגן פֿלײש און אַלדאָס גוטס – און מיר זיצן און חלומען װעגן אַ שטיקל טרוקן ברױט“, פֿאַרשרײַבט כּהן אינעם טאָגבוך.
אַפֿילו אין יענע ביטערע באַדינגונגען האָט כּהן אָפּגעהיט אַן אײגנאַרטיקן חוש פֿון הומאָר. דאָס קומט פֿאָר למשל אין זײַנע שילדערונגען פֿון די באַציִונגען צװישן ייִדן און דעם חזיר: „אונדזער אײנציקער ׳ניט־ייִדישער׳ שכן אין שײַער איז – דער חזיריוק. אַזױ װי מע קען דאָך ניט פֿיר און צװאַנציק שעה אין מעת־לעת טראַכטן װעגן טױט – קוקט מען גאָר אָפֿט אױפֿן קלײנעם חזיר. די עקלדיקסטע באַשעפֿעניש פֿאַר אַ ייִד […] װאַקסט ברוך־השם פֿון טאָג [צו טאָג].“
מאַקס ראָזענפֿעלדס ענגלישע איבערזעצונג פֿונעם טאָגבוך איז גאַנץ פּינקטלעך און פֿליסיק, אָבער זי גיט ניט איבער דעם אײגנאַרטיקן טעם פֿון כּהנס פּראָזע.
אָט איז אַ משל: אײן טאָג אַנטלױפֿט דער חזיר פֿונעם שטאַל און ייִדן מוזן זיך יאָגן נאָך אים כּדי צו ברענגען אים צוריק. כּהן באַשרײַבט דאָס בזה הלשון: „מיר פֿירן דעם דבֿר־אחר צו זײַן מקום־מקלט“. אָבער אױף ענגליש קלינגט דאָס פּשוט: „we are taking him back to the barn“. דאָ איז ניטאָ קײן שפּור פֿון כּהנס איראָניע, װאָס שטאַמט פֿון זײַן שפּיל מיט לשון־קדוש.
דער חורבן־היסטאָריקער יצחק ארד האָט אָפּגעשאַצט, אַז בערך 25,000 ייִדן זײַנען אַנטלאָפֿן פֿון די געטאָס אין װעלדער בעתן חורבן. אַרום 15,000 פֿון זײ האָבן זיך צוגעשטאַנען צו די סאָװעטישע פּאַרטיזאַנער, בעת 10,000 האָבן געפּרוּװט איבערלעבן אין קלײנע גרופּקעס, אָפֿט מאָל מיט דער הילף פֿון ניט־ייִדישע פּױערים.
די גענױע צאָל פֿון די, װאָס האָבן זיך געראַטעװעט אונטער אַזעלכע ביטערע און געפֿערלרכע באַדינגונגען, װעט מען קײן מאָל ניט װיסן, זאָגט ארד. װאָס איז יאָ זיכער, איז אַז זײער צאָל איז געװען אַ סך קלענער אײדער די צאָל פֿון די, װעמען עס האָט זיך אײַגעגעבן צו אַנטלױפֿן פֿון די געטאָס.
כּהנס טאָגבוך איז ניט נאָר אַ ביז גאָר װיכטיקער היסטאָרישער מקור װעגן דער דאָזיקער דערפֿאַרונג, אָבער אױך אַ מערקװירדיקער מענטשלעכער דאָקומענט און אַ פֿאַרכאַפּנדיקע לעקטור דערצו.
The post Diary of a Jewish ghetto refugee, written in a pigsty appeared first on The Forward.
