Michael Meeropol (born Michael Rosenberg on March 10, 1943) is an American retired professor of economics. He is the older son of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, convicted communist spies. 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, and his mother Ethel (née Greenglass), a union organizer, were members of the Communist Party USA. When Michael was seven years old, his parents were apprehended. In 1951, they were convicted and sentenced to death for conspiracy to commit espionage related to the passing of atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. After two years, during which they both maintained their innocence, and a worldwide campaign for executive clemency raged, they were executed in June 1953.
Early years
During the trial, Michael and his younger brother Robert lived first with their maternal grandmother, Tessie Greenglass, until November 1950, when she placed them in the Hebrew Children's Home in the Bronx. In June 1951, they moved in with their paternal grandmother, Sophie Rosenberg, in upper Manhattan until June 1952, at which time they were taken in by family friends, Ben and Sonia Bach, in Toms River, New Jersey, from June 1952 until the December after their parents' executions on June 19, 1953. The Toms River school superintendent "turned the boys away as non-residents".<ref>{ { cite magazine |url=http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,913052-1,00.html |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20121022175508/http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,913052-1,00.html |url-status=dead |archive-date=October 22, 2012 |first=R.Z. |last=Sheppard |series=Books |title=Generation on trial? review of We Are Your Sons' |magazine=Time Magazine |date=May 5, 1975}}</ref>
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 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. In 1973, he received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Career
Meeropol eventually became an economist, teaching at Western New England College (now Western New England University), a small private college in Springfield, Massachusetts. 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 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 participated in documentaries about them. Together they wrote We Are Your Sons (1975). A second edition was published in 1986 (University of Illinois Press) with three new chapters, including a rebuttal to the book, The Rosenberg File. Meeropol said that even though the authors got it "right" about the (partial) guilt of Julius Rosenberg, Michael Meeropol said they were "right" like a stopped clock is right twice a day.
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 interviewed both brothers about the Rosenberg trial and his childhood for her 2004 film Heir to an Execution, and included new comments from Michael in her 2019 documentary on Roy Cohn. In the latter, we see the younger Michael Meeropol debating Roy Cohn in 1981, as well as re-visiting Sing Sing in September 2018.
Meeropol retired as professor of economics and chair of the department at Western New England University in December 2008. He worked for four years at John Jay College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York teaching economics and interdisciplinary studies. He taught his last class at John Jay in May 2014.
In 2013, he co-authored a textbook, Principles Of Macroeconomics: Activist vs. austerity policies.In June of 2022 he openly called for non-violent nuisance protest at the homes of NRA board members because they enable mass murderers. The exact quote as reported by FOX is:
