Michael Meeropol - Biography

Michael Meeropol (born Michael Rosenberg in 1943) is a retired professor of economics. He is the older son of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. Born in New York City, as Michael Rosenberg, Meeropol spent his early childhood living in New York and attending local school there. His father Julius, an electrical engineer, was a member of the Communist Party. His mother Ethel (née Greenglass), a union organizer, was also active in the Communist Party. When Michael was seven years old, his parents were arrested. In 1953, they were convicted and executed for conspiracy to commit espionage and passing secrets to the Soviet Union.

Early years

During the trial, Michael and his younger brother Robert lived first with their maternal grandmother, Tessie Greenglass (until November 1950). She placed them in a children's shelter, the Hebrew Children's Home, in the Bronx during the trial (until June 1951). Their paternal grandmother, Sophie Rosenberg, had them live with her in upper Manhattan (until June 1952). Next they were taken care of by family friends, Ben and Sonia Bach in Toms River, New Jersey, from June 1952 until the December after their parents' executions (June 19, 1953). The school superintendent "turned the boys away as non-residents".

Later family life and education

The brothers were eventually adopted by the lyricist, librettist and musician Abel Meeropol and his wife Anne, whose first children had been stillborn. Taking their last name, Michael and Robert grew up anonymously first in Manhattan and then (after 1961) in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York.

Michael graduated from Swarthmore College, before going on to graduate work at King's College, Cambridge University. He did his doctorate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he received his PhD in Economics in 1973.

Career

Meeropol eventually became a moderately prominent economist, teaching at Western New England College. In 1998 he authored SURRENDER: How the Clinton Administration Completed the Reagan Revolution. Many of his articles have advocated liberal to left-wing economic policies, including, in 2005, his opposition in to the Bush administration's efforts to partially privatize Social Security. Since September 2006 he has been a monthly commentator on the Albany NPR-affiliate WAMC radio.

He and his brother Robert have written about their parents as well as participating in documentaries about them. Together they wrote We Are Your Sons (1975). Robert Meeropol separately edited a complete edition of his parents' prison correspondence, The Rosenberg Letters (1994). Though currently not speaking in public about his parents' case as much as his brother, he remains a strong advocate for his parents. His daughter Ivy Meeropol used his comments in her documentary, Heir to an Execution, which was featured at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2004 and shown extensively on HBO that June.

Michael Meeropol recently retired as Professor of Economics and chair of the department at Western New England College, a small private college in Springfield, Massachusetts.

Marriage and family

Meeropol is married to Ann Karus Meeropol. They have two children, Ivy and Greg, and two grand-children.

Currently he is in the second of two years as visiting Professor of Economics and Interdisciplinary Studies at John Jay College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York.

Current position on parents' executions

In 2008, after the Rosenberg co-defendant Morton Sobell admitted that he and Julius Rosenberg had engaged in espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union during World War II, Michael and Robert Meeropol agreed that their father was a Soviet spy. But, they reiterated the failures of the government prosecution: "[W]hatever atomic bomb information their father passed to the Russians was, at best, superfluous; the case was riddled with prosecutorial and judicial misconduct; their mother was convicted on flimsy evidence to place leverage on her husband; and neither deserved the death penalty." A month later, the brothers published an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times reminding readers that the Sobell confession reveals nothing about the issue of the theft of the atom bomb secret. They noted that the witness Ruth Greenglass' recently released Grand Jury testimony said nothing about Ethel Rosenberg's alleged typing activities, for which the government convicted her, thus reinforcing the view that their mother was totally innocent.

External links

• "Michael and Robert Meeropol", Biographies of Key Figures in the Trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, University of Missouri-Kansas City
• Michael Meeropol at WNEC
• Robert Meeropol, An Execution in the Family, First Chapters, New York Times, September 21, 2003
• Bootie Cosgrove-Mather, "Sundance: Heir To An Execution, Granddaughter Of Julius And Ethel Rosenberg Revisits Their Legacy", CBS News, 20 January 2004