Michael Meeropol

A "Citizen Professor," in the words of a local newsweekly, Michael Meeropol has combined the career of a college professor with the role of a public intellectual. From the day his high school history teacher lent him a copy of Robert Graves's Count Belisarius, Meeropol has had a passion for reading historical novels. Howard Fast's Freedom Road was his early introduction to post-Civil War Reconstruction and a healthy inoculation against the then-dominant Confederate historiography soon to be overturned by the work of John Hope Franklin, Eric Foner and others.

In 1971, he read E.L. Doctorow's The Book of Daniel. This was historical fiction that hit very close to home. As the older son of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Meeropol was confronted by an imaginative fictionalization of his family in the persons of Paul and Rochelle Isaacson and their son Daniel and daughter Susan. His interest in how fiction illuminates "the truth" about historical events and figures has brought him into dialogue with E.L. Doctorow and other writers. He has recently participated in an interdisciplinary colloquium on Doctorow's work, delivering lectures on Ragtime and The Book of Daniel.

He has studied and argued "the truth" about the Rosenberg-Sobell case and its role in Cold War America for the past 35 years. Meeropol edited The Rosenberg Letters (the complete prison correspondence of his parents). He co-wrote We Are Your Sons, The Legacy of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg (2nd Edition, 1986) with his brother Robert. In 1994, he participated in preparing lawyers for a mock re-trial of his parents at the American Bar Association's annual convention. In 1995, he attended the CIA's VENONA conference. In 2003, he participated in his daughter Ivy's documentary about his parents, Heir to an Execution.

Meeropol is the author of Surrender, How the Clinton Administration Completed the Reagan Revolution. For the past three years, he has been a regular commentator on economic and political issues on the Albany, NY NPR station, WAMC-FM. He believes that it is important to understand economics so as not to be misled by economists.

He received a bachelor's degree from Swarthmore College, bachelor's and master's degrees from King's College, Cambridge University, and a doctorate from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He has taught at Western New England College in Springfield, Massachusetts, since 1970, where he currently serves as Chair of the Department of Economics. He and his wife Ann have two children and one grandchild (with another due in September). They divide their time between homes in western Massachusetts and Cape Cod.

Bibliography:

Surrender, How the Clinton Administration Completed the Reagan Revolution (1998)

The Rosenberg Letters, A Complete Edition of the Prison Correspondence of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg (1994)

We Are Your Sons, The Legacy of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg (1975)

Links:

Lecture on E.L. Doctorow's 'Book of Daniel'
Lecture on E.L. Doctorow's 'Ragtime'
Commentaries from NPR affiliate WAMC