Michael Meeropol

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Michael Meeropol (born 1943) 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 and three years later, they were executed for conspiracy to commit espionage.

During the trial and after the executions, Michael and his younger brother Robert lived first with their maternal grandmother, Tessie Greenglass (until November 1950), then in a children's shelter, The Hebrew Children's Home, in the Bronx during the trial (until June 1951), then with their paternal grandmother, Sophie Rosenberg in upper Manhattan (until June 1952) and from June 1952 until the December after their parents' execution (June 19, 1953) with family friends, Ben and Sonia Bach in Toms River, New Jersey. The situation there became untenable after the school superintendant "turned the boys away as non-residents" [1]

The brothers were eventually adopted by the lyricist, librettist and musician Abel Meeropol, writing under the pen name of Lewis Allan, and his wife Anne, whose first children were stillborn. Taking their last name, they grew up happily and anonymously first in Manhattan and then (after 1961) in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York. [2]

Michael later attended Swarthmore College, before going on to graduate work at King's College, Cambridge University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he received his PhD in Economics in 1973. He would eventually become a moderately prominent economist. In 1998 he authored SURRENDER: How the Clinton Administration Completed the Reagan Revolution. (University of Michigan Press, paperback edition, 2000) Many of his articles have involved advocacy of liberal to left-wing economic policies, including his opposition (in 2005) to the Bush administration's efforts to partially privatize Social Security. Since September of 2006 he has been a monthly commentator on WAMC radio (the NPR affiliate in Albany, NY). He and his brother have written about and been involved in documentaries about Julius and Ethel, and Michael edited a complete edition of his parents' prison correspondence in 1994 (THE ROSENBERG LETTERS). Though currently not speaking in public about his parents' case as much as his brother, he remains a strong advocate for his parents as evidenced in the comments he makes in his daughter Ivy's documentary, Heir to an Execution, which was featured at the Sundance Film Festival in January of 2004 and shown extensively on HBO that June.

At present, Michael Meeropol is an economics professor and Chair of the department at Western New England College, a small private college in Springfield, Massachusetts. He is married to Ann and they are the parents of Ivy and Greg, grandchildren of Julius and Ethel.

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