The trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg is one of the most well-known espionage trials in all of American history.

The fate of their co-conspirator Morton Sobel is less well-known, but it is the subject of this week's Tikva podcast. I'm

your host, Jonathan Silver. In the June 2019 monthly essay in Mosaic, the death of Morton

Sobel and the end of the Rosenberg affair, David Evaneer, digs into the details of Sobel's

life before and after the fall of the Rosenberg ring.

As he looks back on this period in American history,

Avenir also illuminates what Sobel's life can teach us about the Jews who attach themselves

to the communist movement.

As one of Mr. Evanier's mosaic respondents Harvey Clare makes clear,

although Jews made up a disproportionate share of the

Communist Party in America, perhaps as much as 40% in 1939, the party itself never held more than

100,000 members. So, in an American Jewish population of several million, a tiny percentage were

communists. And he goes on to remind us,

there were also among Jews a greater number of fierce enemies of communism than is sometimes credited.

In the socialist garment unions, the Zionist enclaves, and of course in the religious world,

Jews who understood that communism was a pernicious doctrine waged a continuous

war against its influence. For most of the Jewish community, Claire writes, the highly visible

presence of so many Jews in the Communist Party, amplified by the location of so many of them in New York,

the cultural and intellectual center of American life was a constant

source of tension and embarrassment. In today's conversation with Mr. Evaneer, we discussed

the source of that tension and that embarrassment, and one of the most significant figures, Ethel

and Julius Rosenberg's co-conspirator, Morton Sobel. If you enjoy this conversation, you can subscribe to the

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