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 7 years old, his parents were arrested and 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 of 1950), then in a children's shelter The Hebrew Children's Home in the Bronx during the trial, (until June of 1951), then with their paternal grandmother, Sophie Rosenberg in upper Manhattan (until June of 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. After three months Tessie decided she was unable to care for them and the boys were sent to the Hebrew Children Home. After several months, Sophie Rosenberg, their paternal grandmother, removed them from the children's home and decided to care for the boys herself. During their stay with Sophie, the boys began to visit their parents in Sing Sing prison having their first visit in August of 1951. After one year with Sophie, the boys were sent to New Jersey to live with the Bach family, friends of the Rosenbergs. They were eventually adopted by lyricist, librettist, musician Abel Meeropol, writing under the pen name of Lewis Allan, and his wife Anne, and took their last name. [See Robert and Michael Meeropol: WE ARE YOUR SONS, the Legacy of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, first edition: Houghton Mifflin, 1975, second updated and expanded edition, U. of Illinois Press, 1986]

Michael would eventually attend Swarthmore College, and then do graduate work at King's College, Cambridge University and the University of Wisconsin at Madison where he received his Ph D 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 most recently his opposition to the Bush administration's efforts to privatize Social Security. 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, grandparents of Julian.