Plunkett Lake Press

Born in Fredrikstad, Norway, in 1948, Finn Aaserud obtained the equivalent of a PhD in physics at the University of Oslo in 1975. By then his interest had changed from physics proper to the history of modern physics. The possibilities of formal education in the history of science in Norway being limited, Aaserud received a grant from the Norwegian government to obtain a PhD in this field at Johns Hopkins University. His thesis ultimately developed into the book Redirecting Science: Niels Bohr, Philanthropy and the Rise of Nuclear Physics first published by Cambridge University Press in 1990.

Aaserud spent time writing his thesis at the Niels Bohr Archive (NBA) in Copenhagen, and after he received his PhD in 1984, he was hired by NBA to help prepare Niels Bohr's 100th anniversary exhibit in 1985 at Copenhagen city hall. By the time the exhibit opened, Aaserud had moved to New York to become the first Associate Historian at the Center for History of Physics of the American Institute of Physics (AIP). He successfully applied for grants to conduct a documentation, interview, and research project on American physicists’ involvement in science policy, with particular emphasis on the Jason group of elite academic physicists established in 1959 to advise the Pentagon.

In 1989 Aaserud moved to Copenhagen to become Director of NBA, which he led until his retirement in 2017. As NBA director, Aaserud became General Editor of the Niels Bohr Collected Works. He was solely responsible for volumes 11 and 12, respectively on Niels Bohr’s political involvements and his miscellaneous non-scientific writings. The entire project was completed in 2008. During his long tenure at NBA Aaserud instigated new activities and expanded earlier ones: new archival collections were obtained; selected collections were digitized; oral history interviews were conducted; a series of history of science seminars with talks by prominent researchers was organized; books and articles by NBA staff and by numerous international visiting researchers were published.

Aaserud was widowed in 2014 and remarried in 2018. He has two adult children.

Henry H. Adams

Born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Henry Hitch Adams (1917-2002) received his BA from the University of Michigan in 1939 and his MA and PhD from Columbia University in 1940 and 1942. He served in the US Navy in the Pacific during World War II on the destroyer escort USS Owen, and retired from the Naval Reserve in 1977 as a Captain.

Adams taught at Cornell University from 1945 until 1951 and then joined the US Naval Academy where he was Assistant, Associate, and full Professor from 1951 until 1968. While at the Naval Academy, he became a noted military historian, a member of the International Order of Military Historians. Among his many books on World War II are biographies of Harry Hopkins and Fleet Admiral William Leahy. He co-authored the textbook Sea Power: A Naval History.

In 1968, Adams became chairman of the English department of Illinois State University. In 1973, Adams retired from teaching and with his wife, started a travel agency and began two decades of world travel. In 1978, he helped establish the Academy of Senior Professionals at Eckerd College in St Petersburg, Florida.

Sholom Aleichem

Sholom Aleichem (1859-1916), a central figure in modern Yiddish literature, was born Sholom Rabinowitz in Voronko, Russia. Often called the “Jewish Mark Twain,” he published more than 40 volumes of work.

His merchant father’s business failed when Sholom was still a child, impoverishing the family. In the 1860s, Sholom attended a traditional cheder. Later, he attended the Russian district school in Pereyaslav, but wrote that the literature of the Haskala, the Jewish Enlightenment movement, was the main source of his education. At 15, he wrote a novel inspired by his reading of Robinson Crusoe and adopted the popular Hebrew/Yiddish greeting meaning “How do you do,” or “Peace be with you” as his pseudonym.

After graduating from high school in 1876, he spent three years tutoring Olga (Golde) Loyev, a girl from a wealthy family. They married, against parental wishes in 1883, and had six children.

Sholom Aleichem was influenced by Haskala author Mendele Mocher Seforim, a founding father of modern Yiddish and modern Hebrew literature. Initially, Aleichem shunned Yiddish until he realized that his work in Hebrew and Russian would be understood only by the intellectual elite. In 1883, he switched to Yiddish. Characters from his short-lived Hebrew period were overshadowed by Tevye the Dairyman, luftmentch Menachem Mendl, and the chatty population of Kasrilevke.

After 1905, when major pogroms spread across Russia, Aleichem settled his family in Geneva, Switzerland and pursued a strenuous international schedule of lectures to supplement his writing income. The family moved to the lower east side of Manhattan in 1914. When he died two years later, his funeral attracted 150,000 mourners, then one of the largest crowds in New York City’s history.

Henri Alleg

Henri Alleg (1921-2013), born Harry Salem to Jewish parents from Russia and Poland, studied literature at the Sorbonne, became a French-Algerian journalist and a member of the Communist Party. He started writing under the name Alleg for the Alger Républicain, a daily newspaper sympathetic to Algerian nationalism, and became its editor-in-chief in 1951. In June 1957, he was arrested on suspicion of undermining the power of the French state, and underwent torture for one month in El-Biar, a suburb of Algiers, at the hands of the French Army. Alleg’s account of his interrogation was smuggled out of prison and published in 1958 by Editions de Minuit as La Question, and that same year in English as The Question. Alleg gained international recognition for his stance against torture in the context of the Algerian War. The French government banned La Question after 60,000 copies had been sold. In 1960, a military court which barred the public and the press from the trial condemned Alleg to 10 years of hard labor in France, but he escaped from prison in 1961 and took refuge in Czechoslovakia.

After the 1962 Evian Accords, Alleg returned to France and then to Algeria. He helped rebuild the Alger Républicain but was declared persona non grata after the 1965 military coup by Houari Boumédienne. Alleg moved back to France where he worked as a journalist for L’Humanité until 1980 and wrote several books, including a three-volume history of the Algerian War of Independence and Algerian Memoirs published in 2005. He died at age 91.

Yigal Allon

Born Yigal Paicovitch in Kfar Tavor in the Galilee, Yigal Allon (1918-1980) graduated from the Kadoorie Agricultural High School in 1937 and later studied at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, and at St Antony’s College, Oxford. His father had immigrated to Palestine in 1890 from Grodno (Lithuania, today Belarus) and his mother’s family had lived in Safed for generations.

Allon was a founder of Kibbutz Ginosar and commanded a field unit of the Haganah during the 1936-1939 Arab revolt. In 1941 he was one of the founding members of the Palmach, of which he became commander-in-chief in 1945. Allon led several major operations on all three fronts during Israel’s 1948 War of Independence.

After the end of his military career in 1950, Allon entered politics in a left-of-center party. He served in Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, from 1955 until his death. Allon was Minister of Labour (1961-67), Deputy Prime Minister (1967–69) and Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Education and Culture in Golda Meir’s government (1969-74). He was Minister of Foreign Affairs in Yitzhak Rabin’s government (1974-77).

Luis W. Alvarez

Born in San Francisco, Luis W. Alvarez (1911-1988) became an experimental physicist after receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1936 under Arthur Compton. He joined Ernest Lawrence’s Radiation Laboratory at UC-Berkeley in 1936. There, he devised experiments to observe K-electron capture in radioactive nuclei, used the cyclotron to produce tritium and measure its lifetime, and measured the magnetic moment of the neutron. He taught physics at UC-Berkeley where he became Emeritus Professor of Physics.

While working at MIT’s Radiation Laboratory in 1940-43, Alvarez developed what is now the ground-controlled approach (GCA) system for aircraft. He also worked at the Metallurgical Laboratory of the University of Chicago in 1943-44, and at Los Alamos on the Manhattan project in 1944-45. Alvarez won the Nobel prize in 1968 for his work developing liquid hydrogen bubble chambers that allowed scientists to take millions of photographs of particle interactions, to develop complex computer systems to measure and analyze these interactions, and to discover entire families of new particles.

Alvarez was involved in a project to “X-ray” Egyptian pyramids to search for unknown chambers. With his son, geologist Walter Alvarez, he developed the Alvarez hypothesis, which proposes that an asteroid impact caused the extinction of the dinosaurs.

Henry Harley “Hap” Arnold

Born in Gladwyne, Pennsylvania, Henry Harley “Hap” Arnold (1886-1950) graduated in the class of 1907 from the US Military Academy at West Point. He served in the 29th Infantry in the Philippines and at Governors Island, NY until April 1911 when he was assigned to the Signal Corps in Dayton, Ohio for instruction, including by the Wright Brothers on their biplane which had first flown in 1903. Arnold became one of the fist military aviators in June 1911 and taught other flyers at the Signal Corps aviation school.

In 1912 Arnold went to Fort Riley, Kansas, as an aerial observer of Field Artillery firing. He then worked in the Office of the Chief Signal Officer in Washington. As a captain, he was later assigned to the new flying school in San Diego. In 1917 Arnold organized an air service in Panama, which he commanded until May 1917. As the US entered World War I, he was called back to Washington, promoted to major and then to full colonel in 1917, in charge of Information Service in the Aviation Division of the Signal Corps. Arnold became assistant executive officer and in 1918 assistant director of the newly formed Office of Military Aeronautics. He went to France in November 1918 at war’s end on an inspection tour of aviation activities. In 1919 he became supervisor of the Air Service at Coronado, California, and air officer of the 9th Corps Area at the Presidio in San Francisco.

In 1920 Arnold went back to captain’s grade, but soon was promoted to major, where he remained until 1931. In 1922-24 he was commanding officer of Rockwell Field, California. He graduated from the Army Industrial College in 1925 and became chief of the Information Division in the Office of the Chief of the Air Corps. He went next to Fort Riley, Kansas, where he commanded Air Corps troops at Marshall Field until 1928. In June 1929 he completed the Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth and was assigned as commanding officer of the air depot at Fairfield, Ohio.

Arnold was promoted to lieutenant colonel in 1931 as commanding officer of March Field, California. In 1934 he organized and led a flight of 10 Martin B-10 bombers in a round-trip record flight from Washington, DC to Fairbanks, Alaska, for which he received his second Mackay Trophy. In 1935 Arnold was jumped two grades to brigadier general and put in command of the 1st Wing of General Headquarters Air Force at March Field. He was gaining a reputation as a bomber man, having encouraged development of the B-17 Flying Fortress and B-24 Liberator four-engine planes, and the precision training of crew members. In January 1936 he became assistant to the chief of the Air Corps in Washington and on September 29, 1938 was promoted to major general and appointed chief of the Air Corps.

His title became chief of the Army Air Forces on June 30, 1941, and that December he got a third star. When the War Department General Staff was organized in March 1942 Arnold became commanding general of Army Air Forces, directing during World War II global US air activities against Germany and Japan, growing the US air arm from 22,000 officers and men to 2,500,000 and from 3,900 planes to 75,000. He was a member of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff and of the Combined Chiefs of Staff with the British. In March 1943 he received his fourth star. He suffered a heart attack in 1945, attributed by his doctors to overwork. He retired in 1946, after earning multiple US and foreign decorations including three Distinguished Service crosses, the Distinguished Flying Cross, and decorations from Morocco, Brazil, Yugoslavia, Peru, Mexico, France and Great Britain. In 1949, Congress changed the designation of Arnold’s final rank to five-star general of the Air Force, the first such commission ever granted.

Lucie Aubrac

Born Lucie Bernard in France’s Burgundy region into a family of winegrowers, Lucie Aubrac (1912-2007) earned her agrégation and became a high school history teacher. In 1939 she married Raymond Samuel, the son of Jewish shopkeepers and a civil engineer. Both joined the résistance in 1940 adopting the name Aubrac. Lucie delivered packages, printed clandestine news sheets and designed and executed escape plans while continuing to teach in a lycée. When pregnant with their first child, Lucie several times rescued her husband, imprisoned by the Lyon Gestapo headed by the notorious Klaus Barbie. The couple and their son were secretly flown to Britain in 1944 where Lucie gave birth to a daughter days later.

After World War II, Lucie worked for Algeria’s independence, spoke frequently about her wartime experiences and was made Grand officier de la Légion d'honneur, France’s highest honor. Two movies, Lucie Aubrac by Claude Berri and Boulevard of Swallows by Josée Yanne, are based in part on Lucie Aubrac’s life. Jean-Pierre Melville’s Army of Shadows is another movie about the French résistance.

Virginia Axline

Virginia Mae Axline (1911–1988) was born in Fort Wayne Indiana and grew up in Columbus, Ohio. After teaching elementary school for several years, she became a graduate student at Ohio State University where she began collaborating with Carl Rogers.

In 1945, Rogers opened the University of Chicago Counseling Center and Axline served as one of his research associates, developing her own approach to child counseling, grounded in the person-centered principles Rogers set forth for working with adults. Axline’s approach came to be known as Nondirective Play Therapy and later, Child-Centered Play Therapy. In 1947, Axline published Play Therapy in which she explained her groundbreaking theory of child psychotherapy. In 1950, Axline completed her Doctor of Education degree at Columbia University Teachers College, where she would teach for several years before returning to Ohio.

In 1964, Axline published Dibs: In Search of Self, which became popular among professionals and parents alike. While the story of a young boy breaking out of his self-imposed silence gained recognition, Axline slipped into a quieter life for herself. She continued both her teaching career at Ohio State University and her private practice, but declined opportunities to be in the spotlight. Virginia Axline was buried next to her mother, father, and older sister.

Odile Ayral-Clause

Odile Ayral-Clause grew up in Le Havre, France, and moved to the United States when she married an American. She subsequently received a Ph.D. in French literature from the University of Colorado, Boulder, and went on to teach French language and literature at California Polytechnic State University. She is the author of Camille Claudel: A Life, also available in French, and of various articles on Camille Claudel. She contributed an essay to the French catalogue raisonné on Claudel and another to the catalogue of the 2005 exhibition “Claudel and Rodin” that took place in Quebec and Detroit. Her related CBC interview was warmly received. She lives in San Luis Obispo, California.

Aïda Aznavour-Garvarentz

Née en 1923 à Salonique, en Grèce, Aïda Aznavour-Garvarentz émigra à Paris en 1924 avec ses parents où ils vécurent dans la pauvreté au quartier Latin. Son père, musicien arménien dont le succès se limitait à la communauté arménienne, travaillait dans des restaurants, et sa mère cousait dans leur minuscule logement pour aider à nourrir la famille. Son frère, Charles Aznavour (1924-2018), né à Paris, devint l’un des chanteurs français les plus célèbres du 20ème siècle. Aïda et Charles furent élèves à l’École des enfants du spectacle, aujourd’hui le Collège Rognoni, rue du Cardinal-Lemoine.

Pendant l’occupation nazie, en liaison avec le groupe de résistance Missak Manouchian, la famille d’Aïda abrita dans leur appartement parisien des Arméniens, des Juifs et d’autres individus recherchés par les Allemands. En 2017, Aïda et Charles reçurent en Israël du Président Reuven Rivlin le prix Raoul Wallenberg pour leurs activités pendant la Seconde guerre mondiale.

Aïda se lança dans une carrière de chanteuse à la fin des années 50 mais y renonça après avoir épousé en 1965 Georges Garvarentz (1932-1993), fils du célèbre poète et musicien arménien, Kevork Garvarentz, auteur de l’hymne national d’Arménie. Georges composa la musique pour de nombreuses chansons de Charles Aznavour, parmi lesquelles Prends garde à toi (1956), Et pourtant (1962), Paris au mois d’août (1966), et pour des films à commencer par Un taxi pour Tobrouk en 1960.

Leo Baeck

Born in what is now Leszno, Poland, Leo Baeck (1873-1956), the son of a rabbi, studied at the conservative Jewish Theological Seminary in Breslau and at the more liberal Lehranstalt für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin. He received a Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of Berlin in 1895. In 1897, he became a rabbi in Oppeln (now Opole, Poland) where he made his mark as an intellectual and a modern theologian with his Das Wesen des Judentums (The Essence of Judaism) published in 1905 in response to Adolf von Harnack’s Das Wesen des Christentums (The Essence of Christianity). The book is a passionate argument for the enduring relevance of Judaism. Displaying courage, foresight and independence of thought, Baeck was one of only two rabbis in the Union of German Rabbis (Allgemeiner Deutscher Rabbinerverband) who refused to condemn Theodor Herzl and the First Zionist Congress (Basel, 1897). He served as a rabbi in Düsseldorf from 1907 until 1912 when he was called to Berlin to become a rabbi at the large Fasanenstraße synagogue and a lecturer at the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums.

During World War I, Baeck was a chaplain in the German Army. In 1918 he returned to Berlin to work at the Prussian Culture Ministry as an expert in Hebrew. In addition to his position as a rabbi and his lecturing at the Hochschule, Baeck also became President of the Union of German Rabbis in 1922. He was elected President of the German B’nai B’rith Order in 1924 when he also joined the Central-Verein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens, and the Jewish Agency for Palestine.

In 1933, Baeck was elected president of the Reichsvertretung der deutschen Juden, an umbrella organization of German-Jewish groups founded to advance the interests of German Jewry in the face of Nazi persecution. In spite of several offers of emigration, he refused to leave Germany, even after Jewish businesses and synagogues, including his Fasanenstraße congregation, were burned and looted in November 1938. In 1943, Leo Baeck, along with his family members, was sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp where he continued to teach, holding lectures on philosophy and religion. He also managed to begin a manuscript that would become Dieses Volk – Jüdische Existenz (This People Israel: The Meaning of Jewish Existence), an interpretation of Jewish history.

After the Russians liberated Theresienstadt in May 1945 — none of his four sisters survived —, Leo Baeck made his way to England and spent much of his time traveling, lecturing, writing and helping found several organizations to assist the remnants of European Jewry. In 1955, a group of émigré German-Jewish intellectuals met in Jerusalem to found an Institute to preserve the history of the German-Jewish culture. They named the Institute in Baeck’s honor and appointed him its first President. Baeck died the following year in London.

Leonard Baker

Leonard S. Baker (1931-1984) was an American writer who won the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for Biography for his Days of Sorrow and Pain: Leo Baeck and the Berlin Jews. His other published works include The Johnson Eclipse: A President's Vice Presidency, Back to Back: The Duel Between FDR and the Supreme Court, John Marshall: A Life in Law, Brandeis and Frankfurter: A Dual Biography, Brahmin in Revolt, Roosevelt and Pearl Harbor, and The Guaranteed Society.

A 1952 graduate of the University of Pittsburgh's School of Arts and Sciences, Baker was a reporter for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat from 1955 to 1956 and for Newsday from 1956 to 1965. He was married to Liva Baker, and they had two children.

Liva Baker

Born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, Florence Olivia Baker (1930-2007), known as Liva, received her B.A. in English from Smith College in 1953 and a M.A. degree in Journalism from Columbia University in 1955. After a brief stint with Newsday, Baker moved to Washington DC, where and joined National Geographic magazine, which she left in 1965.

Her first book, a children’s book about world religions, was published in 1967. Baker’s biography of Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter appeared in 1969, followed by a book about the legacy women's colleges in the United States, I'm Radcliffe! Fly Me!: The Seven Sisters and the Failure of Women’s Education in 1976. Her other books on US legal history include Miranda: Crime, Law and Politics (1983), The Justice From Beacon Hill: The Life and Times of Oliver Wendell Holmes (1991) and The Second Battle of New Orleans: The Hundred-Year Struggle to Integrate the Schools (1996). Liva Baker was married to Leonard S. Baker, and they had two children.

Michael Balfour

Born in Oxford, England, Michael Leonard Graham Balfour (1908-1995) attended Rugby School and graduated from Balliol College, Oxford, with a First Class degree in history. He then taught at Oxford and worked at Chatham House as secretary to a study group on Nationalism. He first visited Germany in 1930, where he became a close friend of Helmuth James von Moltke, executed by the Nazis in January 1945, and von Moltke's widow, Freya, who provided material for his 1972 book Helmuth von Moltke: A Leader Against Hitler.

During the World War II, Balfour worked at the Ministry of Information and the Political Intelligence Department of the Foreign Office. In 1944 he joined the Psychological Warfare Division of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force and after the war he became Director of Public Relations and Information Services, Control Commission, in the British Zone of Allied-occupied Germany. His 1979 book Propaganda in War, 1939-45 is based on his experiences. He also wrote The Kaiser and his Times in 1964.

He returned to the UK in 1947 and served as Chief Information Officer at the Board of Trade until 1964. He was then Professor of European History at the University of East Anglia from 1966 until 1974.

George W. Ball

Born in Des Moines, Iowa, George Wildman Ball (1909-1994) graduated in 1930 from Northwestern University where he majored in English, founded a literary magazine, and earned a law degree in 1933. Ball worked in the Farm Credit Bureau and the Treasury Department in Washington but returned to Chicago in 1935 to join a tax law firm, where Adlai Stevenson was a partner. Stevenson helped Ball join the Lend-Lease Administration as a lawyer in 1942. Ball then headed the US Strategic Bombing Survey in London in 1944-45, where he met Jean Monnet who would become the driving force for European integration.

As a founding partner of Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Ball, a law firm which represented European institutions, Ball pushed for Britain to join the Common Market. When Governor Stevenson of Illinois ran for President in 1952, Ball joined his campaign as chief of volunteers. In 1960, Ball backed John F. Kennedy who made him Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs and in November 1961, Under Secretary of State, a position he kept in the Johnson Administration and in which he argued forcefully against US involvement in Vietnam and mediated crises in Cyprus, Pakistan and the Congo. Ball was a member of President Kennedy's inner circle during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.

He resigned in 1966 to join the investment banking firm of Lehman Brothers Kuhn Loeb in New York, from which he retired in 1982 as senior managing director. While in the private sector, Ball advised several Presidents, including when the Pueblo was captured by North Korea in January 1968. In May 1968, President Johnson named Ball US delegate to the United Nations, a position he resigned after three months.

Bernard Baruch

Born in Camden, South Carolina to a Jewish family, Bernard Mannes Baruch (1870-1965) moved in 1881 with his family to New York City where he attended local schools and graduated from the City College of New York in 1889. He became a broker and then a partner in A.A. Housman & Co. Baruch bought a seat on the New York Stock Exchange and amassed a fortune before the age of 30 by speculation in the sugar market. With John D. Rockefeller, Jr. and others he founded the Intercontinental Rubber Company of New York, which dominated the guayule rubber market in the US. By 1903 Baruch, dubbed “The Lone Wolf of Wall Street” because he refused to join any financial house, had his own brokerage firm. By 1910, he had become one of Wall Street’s best-known financiers.

In 1916, Baruch left Wall Street to advise President Woodrow Wilson on national defense. He served on the Advisory Commission to the Council of National Defense and, in January 1918, became chairman of the new War Industries Board which successfully managed economic mobilization during World War I. He received the Army Distinguished Service Medal for his work for the war effort. In 1919, Wilson asked Baruch to be on his staff at the Paris Peace Conference, where he opposed what he saw as unrealistically high reparations imposed on Germany.

In the interwar years, Baruch was a strong advocate of US preparedness and of a more powerful War Industries Board, should war happen again. He remained a prominent government adviser during this time, anticipated a Wall Street crash as early as 1927, selling stocks short periodically in 1927 and 1928, and supported Franklin D. Roosevelt’s domestic and foreign policies after his election.

All through World War II, Baruch was a close advisor to FDR on the role of industry in war supply, was credited with greatly shortening the production time for tanks and aircraft and was appointed troubleshooter on several issues, including the supply of rubber to the armed forces. In 1944, Baruch commissioned a committee of physicians to help establish the specialty of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation and provided over a million dollars of funding to many medical schools to further this cause. Baruch’s father had been a surgeon and was the first teacher of physical medicine at Columbia.

In 1946, Truman appointed him as the US representative to the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission (UNAEC), but his “Baruch Plan” for international control of atomic energy was rejected by the Soviet Union.

Rachel Yanait Ben-Zvi

Born Golda Lishansky in a Hasidic family in the shtetl of Malin, near Kiev, Ukraine, Rachel Yanait Ben-Zvi (1886-1979) represented Malin at the 7th Zionist Congress in Basel (1905). She was among the founders of the socialist Zionist party Poale Zion in Russia before emigrating in 1908 to Palestine, where she worked for Labor Zionism, was a leader among the Jewish workers of the Second Aliyah (1904-1914) and helped organize the Jewish Watchmen, Hashomer, in 1909. To prepare herself to promote agricultural settlement in Eretz Israel, she studied agricultural engineering at the University of Nancy, France (1911-1914). In 1918, she married Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, a fellow Poale Zion and Hashomer activist who became Israel’s second President (1952-1963).

In 1928, she founded “The Educational Farm” to provide agricultural education for women in Jerusalem. She remained a labor activist, was active in the Haganah and organized the clandestine immigration of Jews through Syria and Lebanon.

After 1948, Rachel Yanait Ben-Zvi was active in the absorption of immigrants from Arab countries. As Israel’s first lady, she opened the president’s residence to people from all backgrounds in Israeli society, wrote about education and defense. Her autobiography Coming Home (in Hebrew, Anu olim) was published in 1961. In 1978, she was awarded the Israel Prize for her special contribution to society and the State of Israel.

William Bentinck-Smith

Born in Boston, William Bentinck-Smith (1914-1993) graduated from Milton Academy in 1932, from Harvard College in 1937 and from the Columbia School of Journalism with a master’s degree in 1938. He was a reporter for The Boston Globe for two years and served in the Navy in the Pacific during World War II, rising to the rank of lieutenant commander and earning the Bronze Star for courage.

From 1946 until 1954, Bentinck-Smith was editor of the Harvard Alumni Bulletin, now the Harvard Magazine, winning for the Bulletin the Robert Sibley award for best alumni publication in the United States.

Bentinck-Smith worked at Harvard in various administrative positions under presidents James Bryant Conant, Nathan Pusey (as his administrative assistant from 1954 until 1971) and Derek Bok for over 40 years. He was author or editor of numerous books on Harvard’s history including The Harvard Book, an anthology about Harvard College and its history, and Building A Great Library: The Coolidge Years at Harvard. He received the Harvard Medal in 1987 for exceptional contributions to the University.

Bentinck-Smith was active in the Massachusetts Historical Society, served on the boards of the New England Historic Genealogical Society and of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts and was a member of the American Antiquarian Society and of the Boston Society of Printers.

Richard B. Bernstein

Born in Flushing, New York in 1956, Richard B. Bernstein is a scholar of American constitutional history and a biographer of founders of the American Republic and of its constitutional system. Educated in the New York City public schools, he graduated from Stuyvesant High School in 1973, received his BA from Amherst College in 1977 where his mentor was Henry Steele Commager, and earned his J.D. degree from the Harvard Law School in 1980. After three years practicing law in New York City, Bernstein returned to academia in 1983, pursuing graduate study in history at New York University. From 1991 through 2014, he was an adjunct professor of law at New York Law School, rising to the rank of Distinguished Adjunct Professor of Law. He also was director of online operations at Heights Books, Inc., in Brooklyn, New York, until the used books store closed in 2011. In 2011, he became an adjunct professor of political science at the City College of New York’s Colin Powell School for Civic and Global Leadership. He is now a full-time lecturer in law and political science at CCNY.

Bernstein’s books include Are We to Be a Nation? The Making of the Constitution (1987), Amending America (1993), Thomas Jefferson (2003), considered the best modern short biography of Jefferson, The Founding Fathers: A Very Short Introduction (2015), and The Education of John Adams (2020). He is working on three books to be published by Oxford University Press, Alexander Hamilton: The Energetic Founder, Hamilton: A Very Short Introduction, and Jefferson: A Very Short Introduction. Future books include two more Oxford projects, The Man Who Gave Up Power: A Life of George Washington and John Jay: The Diplomatic Founder.

Niels Blaedel

Niels Blaedel (1917-2011) was a Danish journalist, author, publisher and nature lover. He started work as a journalist at Jydske Tidende in 1938. In 1946, he joined the Berlingske Tidende, the oldest and largest Danish newspaper. He later became science editor at Politiken, today part of the largest news media group in Denmark. Blaedel was Editor in Chief of Naturens Verden (1957-1963 and 1970-2001), Denmark’s largest and most important natural science monthly journal. He edited the 7-volume color series The Birds in the Nordic Countries between 1957 and 1963. In 1959, he founded the publishing house Rhodos International which he led until 1999.

Besides Harmony and Unity: The Life of Niels Bohr (in Danish, Harmoni og enhed: Niels Bohr – en biografi), Blaedel wrote five books about birds and animals. He studied in the US in 1950 on a Smithsonian scholarship and received Denmark’s most prestigious awards: for journalism, the Cavling-prisen in 1954; for science writing, the EEC Science Writers Award in 1978; for science educators, the H C Ørsted Medaljen i sølv in 1988; and the Hendriksen Medaljen for the production of high quality books.

Sandra Blakeslee

Sandra Blakeslee was born in Flushing, New York in 1943, graduated from UC-Berkeley in 1965 and joined the Peace Corps in Sarawak (Borneo). After returning to the US she worked for the New York Times, first as a news assistant and then as staff reporter on the science desk. She continued to work for the paper for the next 45 years on staff, then on contract until she retired from daily journalism. As a third generation science writer (her grandfather and father were Associated Press science editors), she has observed first- and second-hand most major scientific advances of the 20th and (so far) 21st centuries.

Blakeslee has co-authored ten books, including four with Judith Wallerstein, Second Chances, The Good Marriage, The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce and What About the Kids. She is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and was a journalism fellow at the Templeton Foundation and at the Santa Fe Institute. She is co-founder and co-director of the Santa Fe Science Writing Workshop.

Kurt Blaukopf

Born in Czernowitz (Austria-Hungary, now Ukraine), Kurt Blaukopf (1914-1999) moved with his family to Vienna where he studied law and political science. After the Anschluss in 1938, Blaukopf left Austria to work in Paris, and in 1940 he moved to Jerusalem. Blaukopf never completed his studies. He was a freelance musicologist and music critic starting in 1947.

From 1962 until his retirement in 1984, he lectured at the Academy of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna where he became an honorary professor in 1974 and Austria’s first and only full professor of music sociology in 1977. In 1994 Blaukopf received an honorary doctorate from the University of Vienna. He initiated the founding of the MEDIACULT Institute (International Research Institute for Media, Communication and Cultural Development) and was its director until 1985. Blaukopf was also a member of the Executive Council of UNESCO from 1972 to 1976. His books include Musical Life in a Changing Society, published in 1982 and expanded in 1996, which provides a comprehensive overview of his conception of music sociology and Gustav Mahler.

Léon Blum

Né à Paris de parents juifs, Léon Blum (1872-1950) fit ses études aux lycées Charlemagne et Henry-IV. A l’âge de 17 ans, il publie ses premiers poèmes dans une revue créée avec André Gide, obtient le second prix du concours général de philosophie et le baccalauréat. En 1890, il est reçu 23ème sur 25 à l’École normale supérieure où il rencontre le futur bibliothécaire Lucien Herr, se désintéresse des cours et, ayant échoué aux examens de licence de première année, est exclu de l’école en 1891. Il poursuit ensuite des études de Lettres à l’université de Paris, mais commence aussi des études de droit, obtenant sa licence en droit en 1894. Blum est nommé au Conseil d’État en 1895 et y fera carrière pendant près de 25 ans, interrompus seulement par ses fonctions de chef de cabinet (1914-1916) du ministre socialiste des Travaux publics Marcel Sembat. Parallèlement, il consacre l’essentiel de son activité à l’écriture, avec des critiques de livres et pièces de théâtre. Il participe à la revue Le Banquet, où il côtoie Marcel Proust et où il publie ses premières chroniques. À partir de juillet 1892, il collabore durant près de neuf années à La Revue blanche, où ses chroniques établissent sa réputation dans le milieu littéraire parisien.

À l’occasion de l’affaire Dreyfus Léon Blum se lance en politique, après que Lucien Herr l’ait convaincu de l’injuste condamnation d’Alfred Dreyfus. Son devoir de réserve en tant que Conseiller d’État limite son activité : il donne des conseils juridiques aux avocats de Dreyfus et de Zola. Son engagement provoque sa rupture avec Maurice Barrès et sa rencontre en 1897 avec Jean Jaurès, qui devient son ami et avec qui il participe à la fondation de L’Humanité en 1904, où il tient la rubrique littéraire. En 1905, il adhère à la Section française de l’Internationale ouvrière (SFIO) au moment de sa création, mais dès l’été 1905, il quitte L’Humanité, devenu le journal du parti, et ne milite plus guère. Ses activités littéraires reprennent le dessus sur ses activités politiques.

Lorsque Blum est élu pour la première fois député de la Seine (1919-1928), il démissionne du Conseil d’État. Il devient ensuite secrétaire, puis président du groupe parlementaire socialiste et député de l’Aude (1929-1940, circonscription de Narbonne). Une vague d’antisémitisme de grande ampleur se manifeste avant l’arrivée de Blum au pouvoir en 1936. Charles Maurras appelle au meurtre de Blum et le décrit dans L’Action française du 9 avril 1935 comme « un monstre de la République démocratique... Détritus humain à traiter comme tel... un homme à fusiller, mais dans le dos. » Le 13 février 1936, Léon Blum est agressé boulevard Saint-Germain par des membres de l’Action française et des Camelots du roi qui, l’ayant reconnu dans une voiture, tentent de le lyncher. Alors âgé de 64 ans et gisant sur la chaussée, saignant abondamment, blessé au visage et à la nuque, il reçoit encore des coups de pied. Transporté à l’Hôtel-Dieu, il est soigné pour une rupture de la veine temporale.

Après les accords du Front populaire et la victoire aux élections législatives d’avril/mai 1936, le premier gouvernement à dominante socialiste de la IIIème République est formé en juin 1936 avec Blum à sa tête comme président du Conseil. Le bilan du Front populaire est mitigé, mais comprend un nombre important d’avancées, en particulier dans le domaine social : congés payés, semaine de 40 heures, établissement des conventions collectives, prolongement de la scolarité à 14 ans, relance des dépenses d’armement.

Pendant l’occupation, Blum est emprisonné par le régime de Vichy, traduit en justice lors d’une parodie de procès à Riom en 1942, puis déporté à Buchenwald. Libéré en 1945, il devient président du Gouvernement provisoire de la République française et prépare aux institutions de la IVème République, négociant l’annulation des dettes de guerre de la France auprès des États-Unis (accords Blum-Byrnes de mai 1946).

Charles Bohlen

Born in Clayton, New York, Charles “Chip” Eustis Bohlen (1904-1974) was educated at St. Paul’s school in Concord, New Hampshire and at Harvard. After joining the Foreign Service in 1929, he studied Russian in Paris under a newly instituted State Department program designed to train Russian speakers. He served two formative tours in Moscow in the 1930s. Assigned next to Japan, he was interned for six months in Tokyo after Pearl Harbor. Returning to Washington in the summer of 1942, he would again be immersed in Soviet affairs for the better part of the next ten years. In October 1943, he interpreted for Cordell Hull at the Moscow Foreign Ministers conference, a trial run for interpreting for Roosevelt at the Big Three conferences at Teheran (November 1943) and Yalta (January 1945). Bohlen worked closely with FDR’s adviser Harry Hopkins in the White House, and after FDR’s death, interpreted for Truman at the Potsdam conference (August 1945).

Under Truman (1945-1952), Bohlen worked as a special assistant for three Secretaries of State: James Byrnes, George Marshall (whom he revered) and Dean Acheson, becoming Counselor, the fourth ranking position in the State Department, in 1947. His was involved in all the major events and crises of the early Cold War including the Marshall plan, the Berlin blockade and the formation of NATO.

In 1953, President Eisenhower named Bohlen Ambassador to the Soviet Union. His confirmation turned out to be highly contentious because of Bohlen’s association with Yalta, but Eisenhower stuck by him. In Moscow, Bohlen was a keen and acute observer of post-Stalin developments in the Soviet Union, but his difficult relationship with Secretary of State John Foster Dulles kept him sidelined from any meaningful policy role and he felt underutilized.

In 1957, Dulles maneuvered him out of Moscow and sent him off to virtual exile as Ambassador to the Philippines. In 1959, Dulles’s successor Christian Herter brought Bohlen back to the State Department as a special adviser on Soviet affairs, a role he retained for a time after the election of John F. Kennedy who named Bohlen Ambassador to France in 1962, a position he filled with distinction at a time of difficult relations between de Gaulle and the United States. He served briefly as Deputy Under Secretary for Political Affairs in the State Department.

Bohlen was considered, on a par with George Kennan, as the top Soviet specialist of his generation: when he retired in 1969, he had more years of direct experience dealing with Soviet officials than anyone else in the US government (he once calculated that he had spent over 2000 hours sitting across a table from Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov). Bohlen’s memoir Witness to History was published in 1973 with extensive help from Robert Phelps. He died of cancer the following year.

Ruth Bondy

Born in Prague, Ruth Bondy (1923-2017) joined the Zionist youth group Noar Zioni Chaluzi, and planned to make Aliyah, but was sent to Theresienstadt Ghetto in 1942, where she worked growing vegetables for the SS command, and participated in the extensive educational activities of the ghetto.

In 1943, she was sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau’s Czech family camp and in July 1944, roughly one month after the Czech family camp’s liquidation, Bondy was transferred to Hamburg as a worker clearing debris from allied bombardments. A short time later she was sent to Bergen-Belsen, where she was liberated, weighing 35 kilograms. Following a miraculous recovery from typhus, Bondy returned to Prague, where she joined a unit of Jews determined to fight for Israel’s independence, arriving in Haifa on December 31, 1948.

Once in Israel, she learned Hebrew and began working as a Hebrew teacher and as a reporter for Omer, a newspaper for new immigrants. In 1953 she became a columnist for Dvar Hashavua, the respected weekly magazine of the daily newspaper Davar. Bondy wrote over twenty books, including four biographies, the first of which, The Emissary: A Life of Enzo Sereni appeared in 1973 and won the Yizhak Sadeh Prize in 1974. It was followed by a profile of Jacob Edelstein, the chairman of the Theresienstadt Council of Elders. Bondy intended this biography to change the negative attitude of Israelis towards Holocaust victims. Bondy translated more than 50 books of Czech literature into Hebrew, including Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Soldier Schweik, works of Karl Čapek, Milan Kundera, Bohomil Hrabal and many others. She also translated Kamarad, one of the children’s newspapers in the Theresienstadt Ghetto.

In 1981 Bondy became a member of Sovlanut, a non-partisan movement for tolerance and the prevention of violence, but distanced herself from the group in frustration in 1995, after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. Bondy, who won the Sokolov prize for journalism, the Tchernichovsky prize for translation and the Prime Minister's prize for Hebrew literature, continues in her nineties to write nonfiction and to translate works from the Czech into Hebrew. (photo: Moshe Shai)

Thomas Neville Bonner

Thomas Neville Bonner (1923-2003), a widely known medical historian, earned a Ph.D. from Northwestern University and held bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Rochester. Distinguished Professor Emeritus and President Emeritus of Wayne State University, Bonner wrote five books on the history of medicine and education, including Medicine in Chicago (1957), To the Ends of the Earth (1992), Becoming a Physician: Medical Education in Great Britain, France, Germany and the United States, 1750-1945 (1996) and Iconoclast: Abraham Flexner and a Life in Learning (2002), and two textbooks. He received two Guggenheim Fellowships and was a Rockefeller Foundation Resident at Bellagio, Italy.

He was vice president and provost at the University of Cincinnati (1967-71) and president of the University of New Hampshire (1971-74), of Union College (1974–78), and of Wayne State University (1978-82). He retired from the Wayne State faculty in 1997. Bonner received major, multi-year grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Institutes of Health, and has been awarded three honorary degrees.

Omar Bradley

Born and raised in Missouri, Omar N. Bradley (1893-1981) worked as a boilermaker before entering the US Military Academy at West Point, graduating in 1915 alongside Dwight D. Eisenhower. During World War I, Bradley guarded copper mines in Montana. After the war, Bradley taught at West Point and served in other roles before taking a position at the War Department under General George Marshall who noticed him. In 1941, Bradley became commander of the US Army Infantry School.

After the US entered World War II, Bradley oversaw the transformation of the 82nd Infantry Division into the first American airborne division. He received his first front-line command in Operation Torch in North Africa, serving under General George S. Patton. After Patton was reassigned, Bradley commanded II Corps in the Tunisia Campaign and the Allied invasion of Sicily. He commanded the First US Army during the Invasion of Normandy, which landed at Utah and Omaha beaches. After the breakout from Normandy, he took command of the Twelfth US Army Group, which ultimately comprised 43 divisions and 1.3 million men, the largest body of American soldiers ever to serve under a single field commander: Bradley, the senior commander of American ground forces, linked up with Marshal Koniev of the Soviet Union on the banks of the Elbe River on April 25, 1945, sealing the defeat of Nazi forces. He was known as the “G.I.’s General” because of his concern for the ordinary soldier.

After the war, Bradley headed the Veterans Administration. He became Chief of Staff of the US Army in 1948 and the first Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1949. In 1950, Bradley was promoted to the rank of General of the Army, becoming the last of only nine people to be promoted to five-star rank in the US Armed Forces. Bradley was the senior military commander at the start of the Korean War, supported President Truman’s wartime policy of containment and was instrumental in persuading Truman to dismiss General Douglas MacArthur in 1951 after MacArthur resisted administration attempts to scale back the war’s strategic objectives.

Bradley left active duty in 1953 (though remaining on “active retirement” for the next 27 years as a five-star Army general), then continued to serve in public and business roles, including at the Bulova Watch Company, until his death.

Jean-Denis Bredin

Jean-Denis Bredin (1929-2021) was a French attorney, law professor, and author. He was born Jean-Denis Hirsch to an Alsatian Jewish father and a Catholic mother. His parents divorced when he was small and he was raised as a Catholic. After obtaining degrees in law and humanities from University of Paris-Sorbonne, Bredin was admitted to the Paris Bar in 1950. In 1965, he co-founded Bredin Prat, today one of France’s most prestigious law firms. Bredin was a law professor in Rennes, in Lille and in Paris where he taught from 1969 until 1993. He served on various commissions tasked with reforming France’s universities (1968), broadcast media (1981) and film industry (1982). In 1974, Bredin began publishing fiction (Un Coupable, L’Absence) and non-fiction (L’affaire, Bernard Lazare, Joseph Caillaux, Sieyès). His literary work was so prolific and distinguished that in 1989 he was elected to the Académie Française, occupying Chair 3, formerly held by Marguerite Yourcenar.

Richard Breitman

Born in 1947 in Hartford, Connecticut, Richard Breitman credits his West Hartford public high school history teacher Robert Derosier with bringing European history to life for him. Breitman graduated from Yale and earned his M.A. and Ph.D. at Harvard. His first book, German Socialism and Weimar Democracy which explored the tensions between socialist goals and democratic convictions in the Social Democratic Party of Germany during the Weimar Republic, appeared in 1981.

Breitman read a 1983 article by historian Walter Laqueur about an anonymous German industrialist who in 1942 brought to the West information about Hitler’s planned use of gas chambers and crematoria to destroy European Jewry. Breitman proved that the industrialist was Eduard Schulte, a prominent but secretly anti-Nazi CEO of a large mining firm who traveled frequently between Germany and Switzerland. Breitman and Laqueur then wrote Breaking the Silence: the German Who Exposed the Final Solution.

In 1994, Breitman asked the National Security Agency to declassify its holdings of World War II intercepts and decodes of radio messages. As a result, the NSA Historical Cryptographic Collection, amounting to some 1.3 million pages, was turned over to the US National Archives. In this mass, Breitman found a small file of British decodes of German police radio messages, still unavailable in the United Kingdom, that revealed important information about the first stage of the Holocaust. Prodded by Parliament, the British government followed with its own, larger, declassification of German decodes. Breitman mined both British and American archives for his 1998 book Official Secrets: What the Nazis Planned, What the British and Americans Knew.

Breitman then served as director of historical research for a small US government body set up to oversee implementation of a 1998 declassification law regarding Nazi war crimes. This organization helped to declassify more than eight million pages of US government records, and a team of four historians used them to write a 2005 book on US Intelligence and the Nazis.

Among Breitman’s 13 books are the prize-winning The Architect of Genocide: Himmler and the Final Solution, stressing Himmler’s central planning of the Holocaust, and FDR and the Jews, co-authored with Allan J. Lichtman, which argued that Roosevelt’s policies toward European Jewry fluctuated substantially over time according to circumstances, political calculations, and constraints.

Breitman joined American University’s history department as assistant professor in 1976 and retired as distinguished professor emeritus in 2015. For 25 years, he served as editor of the journal Holocaust and Genocide Studies. In 1999 he received an honorary doctorate from Hebrew Union College, and in 2018 a Distinguished Achievement Award from the Holocaust Educational Foundation.

Andrew Brown

Born in London in 1950, Andrew Brown graduated from Bristol University with a psychology degree before entering the Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine. After junior hospital jobs in London, he specialized in radiation oncology. He also spent two years as Medical Director of the National Radiological Protection Board, and later as consultant oncologist at St Thomas Hospital, London. He emigrated to the US in 1990 and spent many years in practice in New Hampshire, before finishing his clinical career in the Department of Radiation Oncology at Duke University.

His professional experience treating patients with X-rays led to a fascination with the history of physics and the nuclear age. His first book, The Neutron and the Bomb: A Biography of Sir James Chadwick, was followed by two other biographies of remarkable, if lesser known, figures who made substantial contributions to the modern world. J D Bernal: the Sage of Science explores the passionate and pioneering genius, whose work in the field of X-ray crystallography opened the way to contemporary structural biology. The third biography is Keeper of the Nuclear Conscience about the life and work of Joseph Rotblat, the physicist and 1995 Nobel peace laureate.

In addition to medical papers, Brown has also published articles and chapters on radiation risks and nuclear history. He is currently working on a book about A V Hill, the muscle physiologist who shared the 1922 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, before emerging as a leading anti-fascist and defense expert in the years leading up to World War II.

Robert V. Bruce

Born in Malden, Massachusetts, Robert Vance Bruce (1923-2008) served in the Army during World War II. He studied at MIT in 1943, graduated from the University of New Hampshire with a B.S. in mechanical engineering in 1945 and received a M.A. in history in 1947 and a PhD in 1953, both from Boston University. He was a Guggenheim fellow in 1957-1958 and a Henry E. Huntington fellow in 1966.

Bruce taught at the University of Bridgeport, Lawrence Academy at Groton, and the University of Wisconsin before returning to Boston University where he taught history as an instructor (1955-1958), Assistant Professor (1958-1960), Associate Professor (1960-1966), Professor (1966-1984) and Emeritus Professor (1984-1991). He specialized in the American Civil War, and won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for History for his book The Launching of Modern American Science, 1846–1876. His other books are Lincoln and the Tools of War, 1877: Year of Violence, and Bell: Alexander Graham Bell and the Conquest of Solitude, which was a finalist for the 1974 National Book Award in biography.

Michael Burns

Born in New York in 1947, Michael Burns grew up in Los Angeles, where he worked in the motion picture and television industry for nearly twenty years. He graduated from UCLA and received a PhD in Modern European History from Yale University in 1981. He is Professor Emeritus at Mount Holyoke College and has taught at Yale and the École des Hautes Études.

Besides France and the Dreyfus Affair: A Documentary History, his publications include Rural Society and French Politics: Boulangism and the Dreyfus Affair; a revision of Geoffrey Barraclough’s Main Trends in History; and Dreyfus: A Family Affair from the French Revolution to the Holocaust, which was awarded the Prix Bernard Lecache of the International League against Racism and Antisemitism. Recipient of Rockefeller, Fulbright, and Tocqueville fellowships, he has been advisory editor for the Blackwell series New Perspectives on the Past and for France and the Americas: Culture, Politics, and History. He is a former fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

William Burrows

Born in Philadelphia in 1937, William E. Burrows became enraptured with flying as a youngster by looking up and seeing the airliners coming and going from LaGuardia and Idlewild (later John F. Kennedy International) airports in his neighborhood in Forest Hills, New York. While his classmates at Forest Hills High School participated in sports and other extracurricular activities, Burrows built and flew balsawood and paper airplanes in vacant lots near his apartment and at 17, unbeknownst to his mother, spent his allowance briefly taking flying lessons in a canvas and wood Piper Cub near LaGuardia. He got a congressional appointment to the first class at the US Air Force Academy but flunked the physical because he couldn’t climb a rope to the ceiling in the gym at Mitchel Air Force Base on Long Island.

He took a BA and an MA in Political Science at Columbia in 1960 and 1962, decided on a career in journalism, and joined The New York Times as a clerk on the Foreign Desk on October 15, 1962, one week before the Cuban Missile Crisis. Burrows was eventually put on the commercial aviation beat. He has also reported for The Richmond Times-Dispatch, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, has published 14 non-fiction books including Richthofen: A True Story of the Red Baron and This New Ocean: The Story of the First Space Age, won several awards, and taught journalism at New York University for 35 years; he created NYU’s graduate Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program, and is the NYU Journalism Department’s only professor emeritus.

Hendrik B.G. Casimir

Born in The Hague, Hendrik Brugt Gerhard Casimir (1909-2000), a Dutch physicist best known for his research on the two-fluid model of superconductors (1934) and the Casimir effect (1948), studied theoretical physics at the University of Leiden under Paul Ehrenfest, where he received his PhD in 1931 for work on the quantum mechanics of a rigid spinning body and the group theory of the rotations of molecules. During that time he also spent time in Copenhagen with Niels Bohr.

After receiving his PhD he worked as an assistant to Wolfgang Pauli at ETH Zürich. In 1938, he became professor of physics at Leiden University. In 1942, during World War II, Casimir moved to the Philips Natuurkundig Laboratorium (or Physics Laboratory, NatLab) in Eindhoven where he remained an active scientist until becoming co-director of the NatLab in 1946 and a member of Philips's board of directors in 1956. Casimir retired from Philips in 1972.

Although Casimir spent much of his professional life in industry, his contributions to science from 1931 to 1950 include: pure mathematics, Lie groups (1931); hyperfine structure, calculation of nuclear quadrupole moments, (1935); low temperature physics, magnetism, thermodynamics of superconductors, paramagnetic relaxation (1935-1942); applications of Onsager's theory of irreversible phenomena (1942-1950). Casimir helped found the European Physical Society of which he became president (1972-1975). In 1979 he was one of the key speakers at CERN's 25th anniversary celebrations. In 1946 Casimir became a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.

While at Philips NatLab in 1948, Casimir, collaborating with Dirk Polder, predicted the quantum mechanical attraction between conducting plates now known as the Casimir effect, which is important in Micro Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS). He was awarded six honorary doctor degrees by universities outside the Netherlands and received numerous awards and prizes, including the IRI Medal from the Industrial Research Institute in 1976. He was a Foreign Associate of the National Academy of Engineering.

David C. Cassidy

Born in Richmond, Virginia, David C. Cassidy grew up in Detroit and New Jersey. He received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in physics at Rutgers University and his doctorate in a joint Purdue University (physics) and University of Wisconsin-Madison (history of science) program. After a year as a post-doctoral fellow in history of science at UC-Berkeley, he lived for six years in Germany, first as a Humboldt Fellow in history of science at the University of Stuttgart, then as an assistant professor in the chair for history of science at the University of Regensburg.

Cassidy returned to the US as associate editor of The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, then located in Princeton and Boston. He joined the faculty of Hofstra University in 1990. In 1992 he published the award-winning biography Uncertainty: The Life and Science of Werner Heisenberg. He published J. Robert Oppenheimer and the American Century in 2004. Cassidy is also the author of Einstein and Our World, Understanding Physics, and A Short History of Physics in the American Century. Recently he began writing science history plays, the first of which premiered in New York in 2014; it will be published in his new book Farm Hall and the German Atomic Project of WWII: A Dramatic History.

Cassidy is the recipient of the Pfizer Award of the History of Science Society, the Science Writing Award of the American Institute of Physics, the Abraham Pais Prize of the American Physical Society, and an honorary doctorate of science awarded by Purdue University.

Jack Chen

Jack Chen (1908-1995) was born in Trinidad. His father, Eugene Chen, was a Chinese solicitor and his mother was French creole. In 1911, the family moved to London soon after the Manchu Dynasty was overthrown by Sun Yat-sen who founded the Chinese Republic. Encouraged by Sun Yat-sen, Eugene returned to China to help build the new nation, leaving his family in London so his children could complete their education. In 1927, after his mother died, Jack Chen moved to Wuhan, China where he briefly worked as his father’s secretary at the Foreign Affairs Ministry and as a cartoonist for Wuhan’s People’s Tribune. After the fall of the Wuhan government, the Chen family left for Moscow where Jack started his art education at Moscow’s Polygraphic Institute in 1928. In 1937-38, Chen took his and the work of other young Chinese artists on a world tour, organizing the first exhibition of Chinese cartoons and woodcuts in Moscow, London, New York, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Paris, Amsterdam and other cities, introducing modern Chinese art for the first time to the Western world.

From 1950 on, Chen worked in China as a journalist, editor and artist, contributing regularly to People’s China, Peking Review, and Cartoon. Under Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution started in 1966, after a kangaroo court of Red Guards sentenced him to hard labor Chen worked with peasant farmers in the countryside, an experience he recounted in his book A Year In Upper Felicity: Life in a Chinese Village During the Cultural Revolution.

In 1971 he came to the United States and lectured widely about Chinese affairs, including at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and UC Berkeley. He wrote for several publications including The New York Times and Esquire. In 1972-73, Chen worked as a consultant to the New York State Department of Education, helping develop study programs on modern China. In 1973-77, he worked at Cornell University, lecturing, researching, and writing. In 1978-82, he worked at the Chinese Culture Center of San Francisco and organized the exhibition Chinese of America, the research for which became the basis for his book The Chinese of America. Chen’s other books are The Chinese Theatre, Folk Arts of New China, New Earth and Inside the Cultural Revolution.

Herbert Childs

Born in Iron Mountain, Michigan, and educated at Macalester College, Herbert Childs (1904-1971) became a magazine editor and freelance writer while still in his early twenties. Hoping to write the life of a famous character in Patagonia, he took his bride to that remote land on a yearlong honeymoon that resulted in his first book, El Jimmy. A captain in the infantry during World War II, he served in occupied Japan. His novel, Way of a Gaucho, was made into a motion picture. In researching An American Genius, Herbert Childs steeped himself in Ernest O. Lawrence’s correspondence and other papers and has had over eight hundred interviews with people in all walks of life who knew the physicist.

Peter Collier and David Horowitz

Born in Hollywood, California, Peter Collier (1939-2019) grew up in Burbank and earned a BA in English in 1961 and a MA in 1963 from UC Berkeley. He was a civil rights activist in the South in 1964 before returning to UC Berkeley to teach freshman English from 1964-69 and again as a Visiting Writer from 1977-81. He also taught at UC Santa Cruz and at Miles College in Birmingham, Alabama. In 1966 he became an editor at radical leftist Ramparts magazine where David Horowitz also worked. Becoming disillusioned with the New Left when it ignored Communist atrocities in Southeast Asia, both began a political transition away from the Left which turned them into “second thoughters” (their own terms).

Among Collier’s books are The Kennedys: An American Drama, a #1 New York Times bestseller co-authored with David Horowitz as were The Roosevelts: An American Saga, The Fords: an American Epic and The Rockefellers: An American Dynasty. Collier was the founding editor of conservative Encounter Books in San Francisco and held that position from 1998 until he resigned in 2005 when he became Vice President of Programs at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. Collier’s other books are Medal of Honor: Portraits of Valor Beyond the Call of Duty, Political Woman: The Big Little Life of Jeane Kirkpatrick and the young adult book, Choosing Courage: Inspiring Stories of What It Means to Be a Hero published in collaboration with the Congressional Medal of Honor Foundation. His final work, the novel Things in Glocca Morra, appeared in 2021.

Born in 1939 in Queens, New York, David Horowitz received a BA in English from Columbia University in 1959 and a MA in English literature from UC Berkeley. During the mid 1960s, he worked in London for the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, identifying as a Marxist intellectual. In 1968, he returned to northern California where he became co-editor of the magazine Ramparts. In the early 1970s, Horowitz developed a close friendship with the founder of the Black Panther Party and helped the Panthers raise money for, and run a school for poor children in Oakland.

In 1985, Horowitz and Collier published “Lefties for Reagan” (later retitled “Goodbye to All That”) in The Washington Post Magazine to explain their change of views and decision to vote for a second term for Republican President Ronald Reagan. In 1998 Horowitz and Collier founded the David Horowitz Freedom Center. In the early 2000s, Horowitz concentrated on issues of academic freedom, attempting to protect conservative viewpoints on college campuses. Horowitz opposes illegal immigration, gun control, and Islam. Besides those written with Peter Collier, his books include From Yalta to Vietnam: American Foreign Policy in the Cold War, Isaac Deutscher: The Man and His Work, The Politics of Bad Faith: The Radical Assault on America’s Future and the memoir Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey.

J. Lawton Collins

Born in New Orleans in a large Irish Catholic family, Joseph Lawton Collins (1896-1987) spent 1912-13 at Louisiana State University, entered the US Military Academy at West Point and graduated 35th in his class of 139 in 1917, shortly before his 21st birthday. He served as platoon and company commander with the 22nd Infantry Regiment. Promoted to captain in 1918, he commanded the 3rd Battalion, 22nd Infantry Regiment and then the 3rd Battalion, 18th Infantry Regiment in France in 1919. He was assistant chief of staff, as a G-3 officer with the American Forces in Germany from 1920 to 1921.

Collins was a chemistry instructor at West Point from 1921 to 1925. He completed the company officer course at the US Army Infantry School at Fort Benning in 1926, and the advanced course at the US Army Field Artillery School at Fort Sill in 1927. He was an instructor in weapons and tactics at Fort Benning from 1927 to 1931 and, promoted to major in 1932, was executive officer of the 23rd Brigade in Manila, and assistant chief of staff, as a G-2 officer, with the Philippine Division from 1933 to 1934.

Collins graduated from the US Army Industrial College in 1937, and from the US Army War College in 1938 where he stayed as an instructor from 1938 to 1940. Promoted to lieutenant colonel in 1940, to colonel in 1941 as chief of staff of VII Corps, and to general rank in 1942, Collins was chief of staff of the Hawaiian Department from 1941 to 1942 and commanded the 25th Infantry Division on Oahu and in operations against the Japanese on Guadalcanal between 1942 and 1943 and on New Georgia in 1943. Transferred to the European Theater of Operations, Collins commanded the VII Corps in the Allied invasion of Normandy, in the battles of the Hürtgen Forest and of the Bulge and until the end of World War II in Europe in May 1945.

After the war, Collins was chief of staff of Army Ground Forces until December 1945, director of information of the US Army from 1946 to 1947, Vice Chief of Staff of the US Army from 1947 to 1949 and Army Chief of Staff from 1949 to 1953 throughout the Korean War. He was the US representative to NATO from 1953 to 1954 and special US representative in Vietnam with ambassadorial rank from 1954 to 1955. He retired from active service in 1956, after almost 40 years of military service. In 1957 he became vice chairman of the board of Pfizer International subsidiaries. His books are his autobiography, Lightning Joe, and War in Peacetime: The History And Lessons of Korea.

Arthur Holly Compton

Arthur Holly Compton (1892-1962), a Nobel Prize winning physicist and educator, was born in Wooster, Ohio where his father, Elias Compton, was a Presbyterian minister, professor, and dean at the College of Wooster.

Compton began his higher education at the College of Wooster and completed his PhD in physics at Princeton University in 1916. In 1920, after several university and industry appointments, he became head of the physics department at Washington University in St Louis. His research into the scattering of X-rays by electrons led to the discovery of what is now known as the “Compton Effect” (the wavelength of an X-ray increases, and its energy decreases, after scattering by an electron) for which he won the 1927 Nobel Prize in Physics, the first conclusive experimental evidence that light consists of particles, or photons. From 1923 until 1945, Compton was a Professor of Physics at the University of Chicago where he continued to conduct seminal research on X-rays and cosmic rays.

During World War II (1942-1945), Compton was Director of the Metallurgical Project at the University of Chicago, overseeing the demonstration of the first controlled nuclear chain reaction by Enrico Fermi. This work spearheaded the initiation of the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb. Compton led teams of physicists, chemists and engineers charged to produce the large quantities of plutonium needed for that project, on which he worked closely with Ernest Lawrence, James B. Conant and J. Robert Oppenheimer.

In 1945, Compton returned to St Louis as Chancellor of Washington University. In 1953 he resigned that position and assumed the role of Professor of the Natural Philosophy at Washington University where he lectured and wrote about science and society. He lived in St Louis with his wife, Betty Charity McCloskey (m. 1916), until his death. He had two sons, Arthur Alan and John Joseph, and four grandchildren.

Ruth Schwartz Cowan

Born in 1941 in Brooklyn, New York, Ruth Schwartz Cowan attended the public schools there, graduating from Midwood High School. Subsequently, she earned a BA in zoology from Barnard College, an MA in history from the University of California at Berkeley, and a PhD in the history of science from Johns Hopkins University.

Specializing in the history of science, technology and medicine, Cowan taught in the history department at SUNY Stony Brook from 1967 to 2002, becoming a Professor in 1984; she also served as Director of Women’s Studies (1985-1990) and Chair of the Honors College (1997-2002). In 2002 she became Janice and Julian Bers Professor of the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania, where she also served as department chair from 2003-2008, and 2011-2012. Since 2012 she has been Professor Emerita at the University of Pennsylvania.

Cowan’s books include More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave, which won the Dexter Prize from the Society for the History of Technology in 1984, Heredity and Hope: The Case for Genetic Screening and A Social History of American Technology. Cowan has been awarded the Leonardo daVinci Prize for lifetime achievement from the Society for the History of Technology in 1997 and the John Desmond Bernal Prize for her contributions to the field of Science and Technology Studies in 2008. Cowan was President of the Society for the History of Technology (1992-1994) and was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2014.

Robert Crassweller

Born and raised in Minnesota, Robert D. Crassweller (1915-2004) graduated from Carleton College Phi Beta Kappa with Special Honors in History and from Harvard Law School in 1941. He practiced law in Duluth before joining the State Department’s Division of World Trade Intelligence in Washington, DC in 1943. He returned to Duluth after the war, resuming his private practice of law. From 1951 to 1953, he participated in a mining venture in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic.

In 1954, he became counsel for Pan American World Airways in New York City; he remained at Pan Am until 1966. From 1967 to 1969 he was a Visiting Fellow on the Council on Foreign Relations in New York City, and testified as an expert witness before the Committee on Foreign Affairs of the House of Representatives in Washington. In 1970-1971, he was a Visiting Professor at Sarah Lawrence College and at Brooklyn College. He later worked for International Telephone and Telegraph, where he became General Counsel for ITT-Latin America.

Over 16 years, Crassweller reviewed some 700 books for Foreign Affairs, the magazine of the Council on Foreign Relations; he also reviewed for the New York Times book section. He wrote three books on Latin America: Trujillo: The Life and Times of a Caribbean Dictator (1966), The Caribbean Community: Changing Societies and U.S. Policy (1972) and Perón and the Enigmas of Argentina (1987).

John Cullen

A native of New Orleans, John Cullen received a bachelor’s degree from Loyola University and a master’s degree from University of Virginia, both in English. He earned a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Texas. A year of full-time university teaching after graduate school gave him the urge to travel, and he lived in Paris, Rome, Vienna, and Madrid among other places.

Cullen has translated more than fifteen books from the French, Italian, German, and Spanish, including Susanna Tamaro’s Follow Your Heart from the Italian, Christa Wolf’s Medea from the German, and Henning Boetius’s The Phoenix from the German. His translations of Margaret Mazzantini’s Don’t Move from the Italian and of Yasmina Khadra’s The Swallows of Kabul from the French were short-listed for The International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Cullen is also the co-author with Alexandra Villard de Borchgrave of Villard: The Life and Times of an American Titan.

Roger Daniels

Roger Daniels, Charles Phelps Taft Professor Emeritus of the University of Cincinnati, has written widely about immigration, race and ethnicity in American history with a special emphasis on Japanese Americans. He has also been active in public affairs, most prominently as a member of the history committee which helped plan the immigration museum on Ellis Island and as historical consultant to the Presidential Commission on the Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians. His most recent publications are The Japanese American Cases and his two-volume biography, Franklin D. Roosevelt: Road to the New Deal, 1882-1939 and Franklin D. Roosevelt: The War Years, 1939-1945.

Daniels earned his Ph.D. at UCLA in 1961, after serving in the merchant marine during WW II, in the Army during the Korean War, and briefly as a journalist. He taught at Wisconsin State University, Platteville, UCLA, the University of Wyoming, and SUNY, Fredonia before coming to the University of Cincinnati as professor and head of the History Department in 1976. In 1994 he was named Charles Phelps Taft Professor of History, and took emeritus status in 2002. He had Fulbright and other visiting professorships at four European and two Canadian Universities and has lectured widely in North America, Europe, and Asia. (photo: Merrill Images)

Lucy S. Dawidowicz

Born in New York City to recent immigrants from Poland, Lucy (Schildkret) Dawidowicz (1915-1990) attended Hunter College High School and the Sholem Aleichem Mitlshul, a secular Yiddishist supplementary school, and studied English literature at Hunter College. In 1938, she set off for Vilna, Poland to conduct research at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. She fled Vilna only days before the Germans invaded Poland. In 1940, Max Weinreich, a founder of the YIVO who had also escaped from Europe, invited Dawidowicz to rejoin YIVO in New York.

At the end of World War II, Dawidowicz spent eighteen months on the staff of the Joint Distribution Committee in Germany helping Jewish survivors in DP camps. In 1948 she married Szymon Dawidowicz, a political refugee from Poland, and began working for the American Jewish Committee. In 1969, she became a professor at Yeshiva University. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Dawidowicz wrote books and articles about Eastern European Jewry, the Holocaust and Jews in America.

Inge Deutschkron

Inge Deutschkron (1922-2022) grew up in Berlin and was brought up as an atheist. Her parents were members of the Social Democratic Party. In 1939, Inge had to leave high school because she was Jewish, and her father Martin escaped to England. In 1941, Inge was sent to work as a forced laborer at a parachute silk factory. Through the Jewish Community, she contacted Otto Weidt who employed blind and deaf Jews to produce brooms and brushes and protected them. Weidt gave Inge an office job, despite the strict ban on Jews working in an office. In January 1943, Inge and her mother Ella went into hiding in several places with the help of friends and acquaintances, and stayed in Potsdam until the end of the war. In 1946 they joined Martin in England where Inge studied foreign languages and worked in the Socialist International Office.

In 1955, Inge started working as a freelance journalist in Bonn and became the Germany correspondent for the Israeli daily newspaper Maariv in 1960. From 1972 until 1987, she worked for Maariv in Israel. In 2001, she returned to Berlin where she now lives.

Carl Djerassi

Carl Djerassi (1923-2015), scientist and author, was born in Vienna in 1923 to a Bulgarian father and Viennese mother, both Jewish. He fled Nazism and arrived in the U.S. in 1939, received his PhD. in chemistry from the University of Wisconsin at 22 and moved to Mexico City with the then small pharmaceutical company, Syntex. His team synthesized cortisone from a local yam and, in 1951, the steroid oral contraceptive, norethindrone, the template on which most oral contraceptives are based. He continued to work in industry while becoming a chemistry professor, first at Wayne University (now Wayne State), then at Stanford University. After his third marriage, to Stanford English professor Diane Middlebrook, he closed his laboratories and embarked on a writing career. He divides his time between San Francisco, London, and Vienna. At 90, he has published more than 1,200 scientific papers, four autobiographies (including The Pill, Pygmy Chimps, and Degas' Horse), five novels, two nonfiction books, 11 plays, two collections of poetry, three collections of essays and short stories, and one art book. He is the founder of the Djerassi Resident Artists Program near Woodside, California. He has received 32 honorary doctorates and is the winner of the 1992 Priestley Medal, the highest American award in chemistry; he received the National Medal of Science in 1973 and the National Medal of Technology in 1991. (photo: Karen Ostertag)

Alfred Döblin

Alfred Döblin (1878-1957) was an assimilated and ambivalent Prussian Jew, a psychiatrist, critic, essayist, mystic, and novelist. His works are considered classics of German modernism and include The Three Leaps of Wang Lun (1915), Wallenstein (1920) and Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929). When he fled Germany for Paris in 1933, he was one of the country's best-known authors and a serious contender for the Nobel Prize. His refugee trajectory, documented in Destiny’s Journey (1949), led through Marseilles, Lisbon and New York to the colony of European exile intellectuals in Hollywood. His entourage included his wife and children as well as the woman who was his long-time lover. In 1941, after a long period of religious searching, he converted to Catholicism. In a review of Destiny’s Journey, critic John Simon wrote: “Döblin was not at peace with any religion, philosophy, political theory, literary school or style. Though a Jew, he early on rejected many aspects of Judaism. Though a socialist, he had no use for Marx and militancy. Though a Westerner, Eastern mysticism played a substantial role in his thought.” Alfred Döblin returned to Germany in 1945 at the war's end. He could not adjust to life there and, with his wife, resettled in Paris in the early 1950s. (photo: S. Fischer Verlag GmbH)

Lois Dubin

Born in Montreal, Quebec, Canada in 1952, Lois C. Dubin is a scholar of modern Jewish history and thought and Professor Emerita of Religion at Smith College, Northampton, MA. She earned a B.A. from McGill University and a M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University.

Dubin taught at Hebrew College and Yale University before serving on the Smith faculty from 1989 to 2023 in the Religion Department and the Jewish Studies Program. Her courses spanned Jewish history and religion, including Hebrew; world religions; food, ritual and other aspects of lived religions; and women’s history and religious politics. She held visiting research appointments at Harvard, University of Michigan, EHESS (École des hautes études en sciences sociales) in Paris, and University of Pennsylvania, and has lectured in North America, Europe, Israel, and South Africa.

Dubin has published widely on Jews and Judaism in early modern Europe, focusing on themes of citizenship, commerce and culture, religious adaptation, and civil marriage and divorce. Besides the award-winning book The Port Jews of Habsburg Trieste: Absolutist Politics and Enlightenment Culture, she has edited issues of the journal Jewish History: “Port Jews of the Atlantic”; and “From History to Memory: The Scholarly Legacy of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi,” which includes her article “Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, the Royal Alliance, and Jewish Political Theory.” Her chapter “Port Jews Revisited: Commerce and Culture in the Age of European Expansion,” appeared in The Cambridge History of Judaism VII: 1500-1815 (ed. Jonathan Karp and Adam Sutcliffe). She brings Europe and Canada together in her essay “Montreal and Canada through a Wider Lens: Confessions of a Canadian-American European Jewish Historian,” in No Better Place?: Canada, Its Jews, and the Idea of Home (ed. David S. Koffman).

Dubin also writes on contemporary feminist ritual, theology, and spirituality. She has addressed spiritual responses to miscarriage and pregnancy loss, and most recently to COVID. Her essay “Prayer in a Time of Pandemic: Loneliness, Liturgy, and Virtual Community,” is forthcoming in Emet le-Ya’akov: Facing the Truths of History: Essays in Honor of Jacob J. Schacter (ed. Zev Eleff and Shaul Seidler-Feller). Her current book project is Rachele’s Pursuits: Love, Law, and Liberty in Revolutionary Europe.

François Duchêne

Born in London to a French-speaking Swiss father and a French mother, Louis-François Duchêne (1927-2005) attended Colet Court and St Paul’s schools (1940-44) and graduated from the London School of Economics in 1947. During national service, he was sent to Austria as a lieutenant in intelligence. His first job was as lead writer for the Manchester Guardian (1949-52). After reading his articles on the economic and political challenges of a continent ruined by World War II, Jean Monnet invited the 25-year-old Duchêne to join him in Luxembourg to plan the new Europe at the high authority of the European Coal and Steel Community. Duchêne went to Paris in 1955 with Monnet who was preparing the next stage of the EU, working until 1958 as a correspondent for the Economist and adviser to Monnet’s core team. In 1958, Duchêne became director of Monnet’s private office at the Action Committee for the United States of Europe. In 1959 he suffered a nervous breakdown and spent several months in a Swiss sanatorium.

In 1963, Duchêne moved to Brighton, where he went back to work for the Economist. He was a Ford Foundation fellow (1967-69), director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies (1969-74) and professor and director of the newly formed Centre for European Research at Sussex University (1974-84). Duchêne is the author of The Case of the Helmeted Airman: A Study of W.H. Auden’s Poetry (1972) and Jean Monnet: The First Statesman of Interdependence (1994) and edited several other books.

Francis Duncan

Francis Duncan (1922-2016) was born in Oak Park, Illinois. A naval World War II veteran, he graduated from Ohio Wesleyan University with a BA in History and earned his MA and PhD (1954) in History from the University of Chicago. After working as an analyst for the Air Force Office of Intelligence, Duncan moved to the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) in 1957 and was a historian for the AEC and its successor agency, the Department of Energy, from 1962 until 1987. He co-authored with Richard G. Hewlett, Atomic Shield, 1947-1952, Volume II of a History of the United States Atomic Energy Commission, which won the David D. Lloyd Prize from the Harry S. Truman Institute. The volume covers the J. Robert Oppenheimer controversy and many technical and political issues facing the AEC including the debate about the development of thermonuclear devices and the effect of the Korean War on nuclear policy. By 1974, Hewlett and Duncan had also published Nuclear Navy, 1946-1962, a study of the naval nuclear propulsion program. Duncan also published numerous articles in the Naval Institute Proceedings, encyclopedias and professional journals.

Duncan first met Admiral Rickover in 1969 after completing his work on the AEC history, and was assigned to the Admiral’s office in 1974. Until his retirement in 1987, Duncan worked closely with the Admiral and his staff, visiting laboratories, touring shipyards, and attending sea trials of nuclear-powered attack and missile submarines, cruisers, and aircraft carriers. He also assisted with research for Rickover’s monograph, “How the Battleship Maine was Destroyed.” In 1990, Duncan published an overview of Rickover’s nuclear propulsion program in Rickover and the Nuclear Navy: The Discipline of Technology, which won the Theodore and Franklin D. Roosevelt Naval History Prize in 1991.

Duncan’s nearly twenty years involvement with Admiral Rickover and the nuclear naval program allowed him unprecedented access to Rickover’s colleagues, friends, family and the Admiral’s thoughts and personal papers, resulting in the biography Rickover: The Struggle for Excellence, originally published in 2001.

Carol Easton

Carol Easton was born in San Francisco and raised in Los Angeles, where she majored in Theatre Arts at UCLA. She spent the 60s and 70s raising three children, the 80s in London, the early 90s in New York, and now lives in Venice, California. Her play, Champagne Sec, was published by Samuel French. She has published short fiction, and novelisations of films, and was a major contributor to The Music Makers (edited by George Simon) and The People’s Almanac (edited by Irving Wallace). Her published biographies are Straight Ahead: The Story of Stan Kenton, The Search for Sam Goldwyn, Jacqueline du Pré: A Biography and No Intermissions: the Life of Agnes de Mille, which was designated one of the New York Times’ Notable Books of 1996. (photo: Bob Romero)

Abba Eban

Abba Eban (1915-2002) was born to Lithuanian Jews in Cape Town, South Africa and named Aubrey Solomon. His father died when he was seven month old and his mother Alida Sacks moved to Britain where she remarried. In 1938, Eban graduated with honors from Queens’ College, Cambridge and began teaching Arabic, Persian and Hebrew literature at the university. During World War II, Eban worked in Cairo as a translator and censor for the British army. There he met Shoshana (Suzy) Ambache, the daughter of a Jewish businessman from Palestine, whom he married. The couple settled in Palestine where Eban worked for the British until he joined the Jewish Agency for Palestine.

At 33, he became Israel’s first permanent representative at the UN and then Israel’s ambassador to the US. He served as a Labor member of the Knesset, and as Israel’s deputy prime minister and foreign minister. A prolific lecturer and author, he wrote several books, including My people: the story of the Jews, My country: the story of modern Israel, Heritage: civilization and the Jews, Abba Eban: An Autobiography and The new diplomacy: international affairs in the modern age.

Suzy Eban

Suzy Eban (1921-2011), born Shoshana Ambache in a Zionist family in Ismailia, Egypt and raised in Cairo, grew up speaking Hebrew, attended French schools and graduated from the American University of Cairo. Her father, whose family had emigrated to Palestine from Russia, worked for the Suez Canal Company. Her grandparents settled in Motza, near Jerusalem. In 1945, Suzy married Aubrey (later Abba) Eban, then a British army officer stationed in Egypt, who later became Israel’s first ambassador to the UN and to the US. Suzy’s husband of 57 years went on to head the Weizmann Institute of Science and to serve as Israel’s minister of education, deputy prime minister and foreign minister. Suzy led the Israel Cancer Association for almost 40 years.

Keith Eiler

Born in Monowi, Nebraska, Keith E. Eiler (1920-2005) attended the University of Nebraska, graduated from the US Military Academy at West Point in 1944 and joined the 80th Infantry Division in General Patton’s 3rd Army in Europe. After he was wounded in the Battle of the Bulge (and received a Purple Heart), Eiler became an engineer for the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project. From 1950 to 1951, Eiler was aide-de-camp to General Wedemeyer who commanded the 6th Army at the Presidio of San Francisco. He served with the 8th Army in Korea in 1952, commanded an engineer combat battalion in Germany, became assistant director of military construction in the Office of the Chief of Engineers, and served in the Office of the Chief of Staff of the Army and the headquarters of the Army Forces Far East in Tokyo. In addition, he was an instructor and assistant professor of mathematics at West Point from 1954 to 1958.

After retiring from the Army in 1965 as a lieutenant colonel, Eiler earned a PhD in the history of American civilization at Harvard in 1974. He was a research Fellow at the Library of Congress (1968-74) and at the Hoover Institute at Stanford University (1983-2003).

Eiler also earned masters’ degrees in civil engineering from Harvard and in international affairs from George Washington University. His book, Mobilizing America: Robert P. Patterson and the War Effort, 1940–1945, received the Hoover Institution’s Uncommon Book Award in 1999.

Amos Elon

Amos Elon (1926-2009) was one of Israel’s leading public intellectuals. Born in Vienna, he emigrated to Palestine with his family in 1933. He studied law, literature, and history at Tel Aviv University, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, and Cambridge.

A secular Jew, he fought in Israel’s War of Independence in 1948 and later became a journalist. He began writing for Ha’aretz in 1954, and subsequently served as the newspaper’s Washington correspondent, European bureau chief, senior editor and columnist.

His eleven books include Founder: A Portrait of the First Rothschild and His Time, The Israelis: Founders and Sons and Herzl. A persistent and prescient voice for negotiation between Arabs and Jews. In 2004, he moved to Tuscany. He wrote frequently for English-language publications including Encounter, The New Republic, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books.

Helen Epstein

Born in Prague in 1947, Helen Epstein grew up in New York City, where she graduated from Hunter College High School in 1965. She studied at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and became a journalist after the Soviet Invasion of Czechoslovakia of 1968 when her personal account was published in the Jerusalem Post. She became a university correspondent for that newspaper while still an undergraduate. Subsequently, she studied at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and began freelancing for diverse publications including the New York Times.

Her profiles of legendary musicians such as Vladimir Horowitz, Leonard Bernstein and Yo-Yo Ma are collected in Music Talks that, like Children of the Holocaust and Where She Came From, has been translated into several other languages. She herself is the translator of Heda Kovály's Under A Cruel Star and Vlasta Schönová's Acting in Terezín. Her biographies of Joseph Papp and Tina Packer grew out of her journalistic work. She has an active speaking career and has lectured at a wide variety of venues in Europe, and North and South America. She blogs for The Arts Fuse, a New England cultural web site.

Howard M. Feinstein

Howard Marvin Feinstein was born at home in the Bronx in 1929. He attended the Bronx High School of Science and Cornell University as a College Scholar studying a wide range of subjects with an emphasis on history. He entered Cornell Medical College, graduated in 1955 and married in 1956. He uncovered his interest in psychiatry, began a year of residency at the New York Hospital Westchester Division and spent two years in the Army under the “Berry Plan” as a Captain in the Medical Corps at Fort Sill, Oklahoma before two stimulating years of residency at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center at Harvard.

After moving back to Ithaca in 1961 to practice psychiatry, Feinstein gradually extended beyond analytically informed psychotherapy, incorporating psychopharmacology and often involving the patient’s family. He noticed that many patients struggled with ambivalence about work choices and was introduced to the James family through discussions with a friend, Cushing Strout, a professor of American intellectual history.

Feinstein began formal graduate studies at Cornell while continuing to practice and raising three sons. In 1967-68, he studied psychobiography with Erik Erikson and read hundreds of James family letters at Harvard’s Houghton collection. In 1976-77, he explored the resources of the British Museum Library as a Visiting Fellow at the Tavistock Clinic. Returning to Ithaca, he completed his Ph.D. in 1977 with a thesis entitled “Fathers and Sons: Work and the Inner World of William James, An Inter-Generational Inquiry” which evolved into Becoming William James, published by Cornell University Press in 1984.

Feinstein was an Adjunct Professor of Psychology at Cornell University for over 15 years and is a Lifetime Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association.

Charles Fenyvesi

Born in Debrecen, Hungary in 1937, Charles Fenyvesi immigrated to the United States after the revolution of 1956 in which he was a student participant. He won a scholarship to Harvard University where he received his B.A. in 1960 and served as assistant to Prof. Clyde Kluckhohn researching medieval history. He went to India as a graduate student at Madras University and received an M.A. in philosophy in 1962.

Returning to the US, he edited various publications including The National Jewish Monthly and served as Washington correspondent for the Tel Aviv daily Ha’aretz before joining The Washington Post as a staff writer contributing a weekly garden column for nineteen years and scores of features and op-ed pieces. Next he worked for US News & World Report, filing a one-page weekly feature, “Washington Whispers,” for a decade. Fenyvesi also freelanced for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Baltimore Sun, and The New Republic.

He is author of six books on subjects ranging from interviews with Europe’s non-reigning kings to essays on trees, from archival research on three little known anti-Nazi conspiracies during World War II to profiles of rescuers of Jews in wartime Hungary. His own family’s history, When the World Was Whole, was published in six countries.

Benjamin B. Ferencz

Born in Csolt, Hungary, Benjamin Berell Ferencz (1920-2023) emigrated to the US with his family as a ten-month-old baby to avoid Romania’s persecution of Hungarian Jews after Romania gained control of his native Transylvania. The family settled in New York City’s Lower East Side. Ferencz studied crime prevention at the City College of New York, and won a scholarship to Harvard Law School. After graduation from Harvard in 1943, he joined the US Army. In 1945, he was assigned to General Patton’s headquarters to collect evidence of Nazi war crimes and was sent to concentration camps liberated by the US Army.

Ferencz was honorably discharged as a Sergeant but was soon recruited in General Telford Taylor’s legal team in the Subsequent Nuremberg Trials as a Colonel. With some 50 researchers, Ferencz scoured Nazi offices and archives in Berlin, collecting overwhelming evidence of Nazi genocide by German doctors, lawyers, judges, generals, industrialists and others who played leading roles in organizing or perpetrating Nazi brutalities. Taylor appointed Ferencz chief prosecutor in the Einsatzgruppen Case, Ferencz’s first case: all of the 22 accused were convicted; 13 received death sentences, of which 4 were eventually carried out.

Ferencz stayed in Germany until 1956, helping set up reparation programs for the victims of persecution by the Nazis, and negotiate the 1952 Reparations Agreement between Israel and West Germany and the first German Restitution Law in 1953. In 1956, Ferencz returned to the US and entered private law practice as a partner of Telford Taylor. In 1970, influenced by the Vietnam War, Ferencz left law practice and started working for the creation of an International Criminal Court that would be the world’s highest instance for crimes against humanity and war crimes. From 1985 until 1996, Ferencz was adjunct professor of international law at Pace University.

Ferencz received the Erasmus Prize in 2009, an honor recognizing contributions to European culture, society, or social science.

Laura Fermi

Born in Rome, Italy, Laura Capon Fermi (1907-1977) was an Italian-American writer, historian and activist who authored over half a dozen books in both English and Italian. Laura’s family were Jewish and her father was a career Italian naval officer. She studied general science at the University of Rome where she met Enrico Fermi, whom she married in 1928.

In Atoms in the Family (1954), Laura Fermi’s best-selling memoir of life with her famous husband, she recounts how in 1938 with their two young children, she and Enrico fled Fascist Italy and its increasingly draconian anti-Jewish laws; how they adjusted to their lives as immigrants in the United States; and how their lives changed again when Enrico was recruited by the US military to work on the first atomic weapons, in a secret location in the New Mexican desert, during World War II. The family settled in Chicago after the War.

After her husband’s death in 1954, Laura attended the first International Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy in 1955, in her role as the historian for the US delegation. Laura then wrote a book about the proceedings, Atoms for the World in 1957.

Also in 1957, Fermi won a Guggenheim Fellowship for her writing. In 1961, she published Mussolini, a biography of the Italian dictator and a book for young readers, The Story of Atomic Energy. Her last book, Illustrious Immigrants, was originally published in 1968. Since 1959, she was at the leading edge of raising awareness of air pollution control in Chicago and nationally. In 1971, she and her colleagues initiated the US’s first ever lobby for stricter gun control both locally and nationally.

In her later years, Laura lived with a lung condition, which limited her ability to walk more than a couple of blocks. She continued to raise awareness about, and promote solutions for significant social issues until the end of her life.

Lisa Fittko

Born Elizabeth Eckstein in an international Jewish family in Uzhhorod then in the Austro-Hungarian empire, later in Czechoslovakia, then the Soviet Union and today in Ukraine, Lisa Fittko (1909-2005) spent most of her childhood in Budapest and Vienna before witnessing the Nazi rise to power in Berlin where her family moved after World War I. She became an anti-fascist, wrote and distributed leaflets protesting torture in Nazi prisons, and worked as an underground resistance fighter in Berlin, Prague (where she met her comrade and future husband Hans Fittko), Zurich, Amsterdam and Paris.

After Germany invaded France, Fittko was sent as an “enemy alien” to the Gurs concentration camp in southwestern France. There, she helped fellow prisoner Hannah Arendt by supplying her with a stolen release document. Fittko reached Marseille and finally the Pyrenees where she escorted refugees into Spain during 1940-1941. The Socialist mayor of Banyuls-sur-Mer asked Fittko to help emigrés cross into Spain. Fittko wanted to reach Portugal to then take a boat to the US, but she remained in Banyuls-sur-Mer to work with Varian Fry’s Emergency Rescue Committee. In 1940, Fry coined her mountainous escape route, an alternative to the shorter, fascist-controlled coastal path from Cerbère (France) to Portbou (Spain), the F-Route (F for Fittko). In the first of her many walks over the Pyrenees, Fittko took German philosopher Walter Benjamin into Spain, reaching Portbou on September 25, 1940. The morning after the Spanish police threatened to turn their small group of emigrés back to occupied France, Benjamin was found dead, apparently of suicide, in the small Portbou hotel where they arrived.

From Cuba where she escaped with her husband Hans, Fittko reached the US. She became internationally known over forty years later through her two widely translated memoirs that describe her actions, Escape Through the Pyrenees, first published in 1985 in West Germany where it won the award for political book of the year, and Solidarity and Treason: Resistance and Exile, 1933-1940. In 1986, the president of West Germany awarded Fittko the Distinguished Medal of Merit, First Class. She died in Chicago at the age of 95.

Rolf Fjelde

Born in Brooklyn, New York into a family of artists, Rolf Fjelde (1926-2002) was an American educator, poet and critic and one of this country’s foremost translators and proponents of the works of Henrik Ibsen. His father, Paul Fjelde, was a noted sculptor. His grandfather was the Norwegian born sculptor, Jacob Fjelde, who had immigrated to Minnesota in 1887. In 1885, at the age of 26, Jacob had met Ibsen, then 47 years old, and created a bust of his famous countryman.

Rolf Fjelde grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut and graduated from Yale University where he was a founding editor of the Yale Poetry Review. After receiving an MFA at Columbia University, he received fellowships to study in Heidelberg and Copenhagen. In 1954 he joined the faculty of Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where he was a Professor of Literature until his retirement in 1997. He was also on the faculty of the Juilliard Drama School from 1973 to 1983.

Fjelde published two volumes of poetry in 1955 and 1962 and first translated Ibsen in 1964, starting a translating career that culminated in Ibsen: The Complete Major Prose Plays in 1978 and Peer Gynt in 1980. In 1991, the King of Norway honored Fjelde for his translations with the medal of the Royal Norwegian Order of St. Olav and in 1993 the American Academy of Arts and Letters presented him with its Award in Literature. In 1978, as the Ibsen Sesquicentennial Symposium celebrating the 150th anniversary of Ibsen’s birth took place at the Pratt Institute, the Ibsen Society of America was started and Fjelde was elected its founding president. He held that office for 15 years and during that time founded Ibsen News and Comment, the journal of the Society which has been published annually since 1980. The Ibsen Society of America and its journal have provided a vital forum for actors, directors, scholars and critics involved with Ibsen. Fjelde has lectured nationally and internationally, often in connection with productions of his translations.

Harold Flender

Harold Flender (1924-1975) was born and raised in the Bronx, New York. He earned a B.A. from City College of the City University of New York and a Master’s Degree from Columbia University. His early writing success came as a comedy writer, often collaborating with Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner and Woody Allen for sketch comedy shows including Sid Caesar's Your Show of Shows and The Jackie Gleason Show. Subsequently he turned to writing for more serious television and film subjects. His televised An Act of Faith, an initial account of Denmark’s heroic act of saving 8,000 Jews from the Nazis, received the Christopher Award. His dramatization of John Brown’s Body won the B’nai B’rith Human Rights Award. Flender won the Best Articles and Short Stories Award for Cuba Libre. Other honors include a National Council of Churches of Christ citation, an Anti-Defamation League grant, a Writers’ Guild Award and a Fulbright scholarship.

In addition to television scripts and documentaries, Flender wrote many educational and industrial films. He taught film writing at Columbia University, New York University, School of Visual Arts, The New School and was a guest lecturer at Centre d'Etudes de Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française, University of Dakar and Syracuse University. He was a member of P.E.N. and the Writers Guild East. In addition to Rescue in Denmark, Flender wrote two non-fiction books, We Were Hooked and The Kids Who Went to Israel. His works of fiction include To Be, Basso and his first published novel, Paris Blues, which was made into a major film. He was a contributor to Intellectual Digest, Saturday Review, Nation, New Leader, L’Express, Variety, Boy’s Life and other periodicals.

Raymond B. Fosdick

Born in Buffalo to a long line of clergymen, Raymond B. Fosdick (1883-1972) admired Woodrow Wilson so much that he transferred from Colgate College to Princeton where he received his M.A. in 1906. As a student, Fosdick visited New York’s Lower East Side where the living conditions of immigrant families so appalled him that after graduation and during his law studies he worked at the Henry Street Settlement, which provided social services to poor families.

After graduating from New York Law School in 1908, Fosdick worked for the City of New York, soon becoming its top investigator. While investigating white slavery, he met John D. Rockefeller, Jr. (JDR Jr.) who was working with a special grand jury investigating the same issue. JDR Jr. hired Fosdick in 1913 to head up a study for the newly created Bureau of Social Hygiene, a Rockefeller philanthropy working to prevent social ills among the urban poor, including prostitution, venereal disease and crime. Fosdick’s study of European law enforcement was published as European Police Systems in 1916. In 1917 Fosdick studied military training for the US Army and Navy and then served as special representative of the War Department in France and as a civilian aide to General Pershing. After World War I Fosdick became Under-Secretary General of the League of Nations, a position he left in 1920 when the United States did not ratify its membership in the organization.

In 1920 Fosdick returned to the Bureau of Social Hygiene and was a close associate of JDR Jr., serving as his attorney and advisor, and in prominent roles in Rockefeller philanthropies. In 1921 Fosdick became board member of the Rockefeller Foundation, the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial, the China Medical Board and the International Health Division. In 1922 he became a member of the General Education Board, and in 1923 a member of the International Education Board. As a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation, Fosdick played a key role in the Foundation’s reorganization in 1928, and in 1936 was named president of the Rockefeller Foundation and of the General Education Board.

With JDR Jr., Fosdick shaped the direction of the Rockefeller Foundation between 1936 and 1948, a period during which the Foundation contributed substantially to the research and control of malaria and yellow fever, to the modernization of China, to the development of the natural sciences, and started its first programs in the humanities and social sciences, and a revolutionary program in agriculture aimed at expanding crop production worldwide.

Fosdick’s contributions to public service and philanthropy were recognized by many awards, including the Distinguished Service Medal for his war work, and the titles of Commander in the French Legion of Honor and Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the author of fourteen books, including The Story of the Rockefeller Foundation and John D. Rockefeller, Jr.: A Portrait.

Peter Fraenkel

Peter Fraenkel was born in 1926 in Breslau (now Wrocław) into a German Jewish family of lawyers. The family succeeded in emigrating only days before the outbreak of World War II. Most countries had by then closed their doors and they found themselves in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia). There followed years of poverty with Fraenkel senior making a meager living as a dry cleaner. “N.R.” did, however, turn out to be better than anticipated. One of the unforeseen outcomes in this racist society was that whites rallied in support of fellow-whites: the colonial government lent Fraenkel funds for his university studies even though he was still classified as “enemy alien”.

After graduation from the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa in 1949, he joined the Central African Broadcasting Service, the first radio station to concentrate mainly on educational programs in African languages. However, as racist white-settlers movements appeared to become dominant, Fraenkel uprooted himself again in 1957 and moved to England where he joined the BBC as a scriptwriter. Later he became Greek Program organizer, Head of East European Services and, finally, Controller of European Services. In retirement he worked on AIDS prevention campaigns.

Fraenkel translated and edited the memoirs of his great-great-grandfather B.L. Monasch, a 19th century publisher/printer of Jewish books of devotion. His own writings include Wayaleshi, about broadcasting in Africa; No Fixed Abode and several radio plays submitted to the BBC under a nom-de-plume to obscure his seniority in that organization.

Felix Frankfurter

Born in Vienna, Austria-Hungary, Felix Frankfurter (1882-1965) was the third of six children of a Jewish merchant who emigrated with his family from Vienna to New York in 1894. He graduated from City College of New York in 1902 and first in his class from Harvard Law School, where he later taught (1914-39). He served as assistant to Henry L. Stimson, US attorney for the Southern District of New York (1906-09) and secretary of war under President Taft (1911-13). Frankfurter’s influence on President Franklin Roosevelt was largely responsible for Stimson’s return as secretary of War in 1940.

Frankfurter was a legal adviser to President Woodrow Wilson at the Paris Peace Conference (1919). Immediately after World War I, he was an active American Zionist and helped found the American Civil Liberties Union (1920). He delivered blistering attacks on the conviction of Sacco and Vanzetti, encouraged by Justice Louis Brandeis under an arrangement that was not revealed until 1982. Brandeis, from his appointment on the Supreme Court in 1916 corresponded frequently with Frankfurter until 1939, when FDR appointed Frankfurter to the Supreme Court, and sent him stipends for legislative research and activities such as the defense of Sacco and Vanzetti.

When FDR became president in 1933, Frankfurter, who had advised FDR when he was governor of New York, advised him on New Deal legislation and other matters. He served on the Supreme Court from 1939 until 1962 when he retired. In July 1963 President John F. Kennedy awarded him the Medal of Freedom. Among his books are The Business of the Supreme Court (with James Landis); Mr. Justice Holmes and the Supreme Court; The Case of Sacco and Vanzetti; and Felix Frankfurter Reminisces.

Erwin Frenkel

Erwin Frenkel was born an only child in the small rural village of Sohren, Germany in 1933. His family fled the Nazis in 1937 and emigrated to the United States, settling in New York City and then in Erie, Pennsylvania. Frenkel graduated from Academy High School in Erie, received his B.A. from Wesleyan University in Connecticut and his M.A. in history from Harvard University in 1956 before coming to study in Israel in 1958 where he settled permanently in 1960. He joined the Jerusalem Post as a temporary diplomatic reporter and was made a permanent staff member in 1961. He served as an editorial writer, news editor, features editor and, with Ari Rath, shared the position of Editor-in-Chief for nearly 15 years. As he recounts in his 1994 book, The Press and Politics in Israel: The Jerusalem Post from 1932 to the Present, Frenkel resigned in 1989 after the newspaper was purchased by Hollinger Inc., a Canadian media company based in Toronto which took the Jerusalem Post’s editorial policy in a different direction. Between 2001 and 2017, Frenkel and his wife Etha ran the Beit Frenkel bed & breakfast in the Galilee.

Otto Robert Frisch

Born in Vienna of Jewish parents, Otto Robert Frisch (1904-1979) studied physics, graduating in 1926, and worked in Berlin, Hamburg and London in the 1920s and 1930s. From 1934 until 1939 he worked in Copenhagen with Niels Bohr. While there, with his aunt Lise Meitner, he helped explain some puzzling behavior which Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann had found when various chemical compounds were bombarded with neutrons. This lead to the discovery of fission and the development of atomic physics, nuclear power and nuclear weapons. In 1939 he went to work in Birmingham, where with his colleague Rudolf Peierls he showed the feasibility of an atomic bomb. From there he went to Los Alamos where he worked on the Manhattan Project, which developed the first nuclear weapons.

On his return to the UK in 1945, Frisch was employed briefly at the then new Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell. After a few years there, he was offered the post of Jacksonian Professor of Natural Philosophy at Cambridge University, a position he retained until his death in 1979. In Cambridge, a fellow of Trinity College, he pursued his research interests in the Cavendish Laboratory and helped develop scientific instrumentation. This led to the formation of LaserScan Limited which designed, developed and manufactured a machine for measuring bubble chamber tracks. He also wrote several books on physics and many articles and papers.

Besides working as a physicist and designer of scientific devices, Frisch was a family man, having married in 1951, with a son and daughter. He had a deep love of classical music and was an avid pianist.

Varian Fry

Born in New York City, Varian Fry (1907-1967) attended the Taft, Hotchkiss and Riverdale Country Day schools and Harvard (in the top 10% of his class) where he co-founded the literary magazine Hound & Horn in 1927 and received his bachelor’s degree in 1931. As a foreign correspondent for The Living Age, Fry saw the Nazis mistreat Jews in Berlin in 1935, which turned him into an ardent anti-Nazi.

Fry went to Marseille in August 1940 for the newly formed Emergency Rescue Committee. There, he and a small group of colleagues helped over 1,500 anti-Nazis and Jews escape until Fry was expelled from France in September 1941 because Vichy and US State Department officials had become angered by his covert activities. Hiram Bingham, the American Vice Consul in Marseille issued thousands of legal and illegal visas, and the Unitarian Service Committee in Lisbon, through which many of Fry’s “clients” traveled before sailing to the US, assisted Fry’s efforts to save refugees — including prominent artists, scientists and intellectuals such as Hannah Arendt, Jean Arp, André Breton, Marc and Bella Chagall, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Lion Feuchtwanger, Jacques Hadamard, Konrad Heiden, Arthur Koestler, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jacques Lipchitz, Bohuslav Martinů, Golo and Heinrich Mann, André Masson, Walter Mehring, Otto Meyerhoff, Max Ophüls, Peter Pringsheim, Jacques Schiffrin, Franz Werfel and Alma Mahler-Werfel.

Back in New York, Fry was strongly critical of US immigration policies, especially regarding Jews: his scathing “The Massacre of Jews in Europe” appeared in The New Republic in December 1942. After the war, Fry worked as a journalist, magazine editor and business writer. He also taught college and was in film production. Shortly before his death, France awarded Fry the Legion of Honor. In 1994 Fry became the first American recognized as a “Righteous among the Nations” by Yad Vashem, Israel’s national Holocaust Memorial.

Elinor Fuchs

Elinor Fuchs is the author or editor of five books, including The Death of Character: Reflections on Theater After Modernism, winner of the George Jean Nathan Award in Dramatic Criticism, Land/Scape/Theater co-edited with Una Chaudhuri, and Making an Exit, a family memoir which has led to many speaking invitations on issues of dementia and aging. She has published numerous scholarly articles in anthologies and journals as well as theater criticism in The Village Voice and American Theatre. Her documentary play, Year One of the Empire: A Play of American War, Politics, and Protest, written with historian Joyce Antler, received its premiere in Los Angeles, winning the Drama-Logue “Best Play” Award, and was produced in New York in 2008. Known for her work on dramatic structure, and on postmodern and postdramatic theater, Professor Fuchs has also won the Choice Outstanding Academic Book Award, the Excellence in Editing and Outstanding Article awards of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education and the Betty Jean Jones Teaching Award of the American Theatre and Drama Society. Professor Fuchs has taught at Harvard, Columbia, Emory, New York University, and the Institut für Theatrewissenschaft of the Free University in Berlin. She has also offered dramaturgical workshops in Europe and the U.K. She has been the recipient of a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship for independent study, a Bunting fellowship, and a fellowship in Age Studies at the Center for 20th Century Study of the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee. She holds a Ph.D. from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and is now Professor Emerita of Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism of the Yale School of Drama, where she taught from 1987 to 2015.

John Kenneth Galbraith

Born on a small farm near Iona Station in Ontario, Canada, John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006) studied animal husbandry at Ontario Agricultural College (now University of Guelph). After receiving his PhD in agricultural economics at UC-Berkeley in 1934, he went to Harvard as an instructor, and became a full professor in 1949 holding the Paul M. Warburg chair in Economics. He retired from teaching in 1975 but remained at Harvard until his death.

Galbraith became a US citizen in 1937, then spent a year as a research fellow at Cambridge University where he embraced Keynes’ new economic theories. After teaching economics at Princeton in 1939, Galbraith headed the price division in the Office of Price Administration in Washington where within two years, he managed to control the prices of virtually all goods and services in the country. Galbraith joined Fortune as a staff writer from 1943 to 1948, taking leave in 1945 to direct the US Strategic Bombing Survey, which concluded that the Allied bombing of Germany had been ineffective.

Galbraith worked on many political campaigns. He helped John F. Kennedy get elected President in 1960. Kennedy appointed him ambassador to India (1961-63). He advised Lyndon B. Johnson early in his administration but the escalating US involvement in Vietnam ended the relationship. In 1967, Galbraith became chairman of Americans for Democratic Action, a leading group opposing the Vietnam war. In 1968, he was a key supporter of Eugene McCarthy, whose candidacy helped drive Johnson from office. In 1972, he worked for George McGovern against Richard Nixon.

Galbraith's major economics books are American Capitalism (1952), The Affluent Society (1959), The New Industrial State (1967) and Economics and the Public Purpose (1973). His autobiography, A Life in Our Times, appeared in 1981.

Alexander and Juliette George

Alexander L. George (1920-2006) was a prolific and influential scholar of international relations and U.S. national security policy. He was a professor of International Relations at Stanford University from 1968 until his retirement in 1990. He received undergraduate and doctoral degrees from the University of Chicago, teaching there and at the American University before working at the Rand Corporation from 1948 to 1968. He is the author of scores of books on topics ranging from the use of force in global politics to decision-making in crises and war, to comparative case-study methodology in political science. He won numerous awards including the 1975 Bancroft Award for his book Deterrence in American Foreign Policy (co-authored with Richard Smoke), a MacArthur Foundation Prize Award (1983-1988), the 1985 Harold D. Laswell Award of the International Society of Political Psychology, the National Academy of Sciences Award for Behavioral Research Relevant to the Prevention of Nuclear War (1997) and the Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science (Sweden, 1998).

Juliette L. George (born in 1922) is a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley and Columbia University, and served during World War II as a propaganda analyst for the OWI in Washington and London. Later in Berlin and Munich, she edited political affairs reports for the Intelligence Branch of the Office of Military Government for Germany (U.S.). She was a senior scholar at the Institute for International Studies at Stanford University from 1984 until her retirement in 1990.

In addition to Woodrow Wilson and Colonel House: A Personality Study, the Georges co-authored numerous follow-up articles on Woodrow Wilson, and together wrote Presidential Personality and Performance (1998), which examines the leadership styles and decision making practices of presidents from Woodrow Wilson to Bill Clinton, and reflects the authors’ interest for over half a century in the impact of personality on the political behavior of our political leaders. The Georges’ work is among the first to bring theories from the field of psychology into the political science arena. Alexander and Juliette George have two children, Lee George and Mary Douglass (John), and two grandchildren, Juliette and Benjamin Douglass.

Josephine Clara Goldmark

Josephine Clara Goldmark (1877-1950) was born in Brooklyn, New York, the youngest of ten children. Her father was a Jewish immigrant who had fled his native Austria-Hungary following a death sentence for his activities during the 1848 revolution. After graduating from Bryn Mawr college in 1898, she went to work for Florence Kelley at the National Consumers League where she investigated aggressively labor conditions and wrote prolifically about her findings. Her research about the effects of industrial work, low wages, and long hours on workers, particularly women and children, had a major effect on US labor law. In 1908, she helped compile a major brief for the US Supreme Court case Muller v. Oregon, popularly known as the “Brandeis Brief” (after her brother-in-law Louis Brandeis, who filed it), which was instrumental in getting the Supreme Court to declare state maximum-hours laws constitutional.

In 1911, Goldmark was part of the investigating committee into New York’s Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. The Russell Sage Foundation published her book Fatigue and Efficiency in 1912, a study of the effects of long hours on workers’ health and job performance. During 1919-23, Goldmark researched the state of US nursing schools with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation. She published her research in Nursing and Nursing Education in the United States (1923), which was influential in modernizing American nursing education. Her biography of Florence Kelley, Impatient Crusader, was published posthumously in 1950.

Her sister, Pauline, was the secretary for the New York City office of the National Consumers League. Her sister, Alice, was married to Louis Brandeis.

Judith Goodstein

Born and raised in Brooklyn, Judith Goodstein graduated from Brooklyn College in 1960, and received a PhD in the history of science in 1969 from the University of Washington for a thesis on the English chemist Sir Humphry Davy. She taught history of science at California State University (Dominguez Hills), UCLA and Caltech. Her books include a history of Caltech, Millikan’s School, and The Volterra Chronicles, a history of Italian mathematicians from the unification of Italy to the outbreak of World War II. In searching for lost treasure in the Caltech Archives, her institutional home for more than forty years as Caltech’s first university archivist, she uncovered one of physicist Richard Feynman’s unpublished freshman lectures, published with David Goodstein as Feynman’s Lost Lecture, and translated into a score of foreign languages. Her most recent book, Einstein’s Italian Mathematicians: Ricci, Levi-Civita, and the Birth of General Relativity, is the first narrative in English on the contributions made by Gregorio Ricci-Curbastro and Tullio Levi-Civita’s tensor calculus to Einstein’s theory. Goodstein is University Archivist Emeritus at Caltech and served as the school’s registrar.

Samuel Goudsmit

Born in The Hague, Netherlands, Samuel Goudsmit (1902-1978) received his PhD in physics in 1927 under Paul Ehrenfest at the University of Leiden where, with his fellow graduate student George Uhlenbeck, he discovered the electron’s spin. Their work led to the discovery of spin in other elementary particles and to fundamental changes in the mathematical structure of quantum mechanics. He joined the faculty at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor from 1927 until 1946, where his research focused on nuclear magnetism and atomic spectra. In 1930 he co-authored The Structure of Line Spectra with Linus Pauling.

In 1941, as World War II loomed, Goudsmit took leave from Michigan to join staff working on radar at the MIT Radiation Laboratory supporting Allied military efforts. Because of his upbringing in the Netherlands, his facility with languages, and his close relationship with many European physicists, Goudsmit was recruited to become Chief of Scientific Intelligence of Alsos in 1944, the War Department’s secret mission that sent a select group of scientists, secret agents and soldiers into Europe just behind the Allied liberation forces. Their assignment was to determine Nazi Germany’s progress in developing an atomic bomb and to secure associated enemy scientists. In the book Alsos, Goudsmit’s historical memoir of that mission published in 1947, he concludes that the Nazis were not close to creating an atomic bomb.

After completing the Alsos mission in 1946, Goudsmit was briefly Professor at Northwestern University and joined the newly formed Brookhaven National Laboratory in 1948, where he was Physics Department Chairman. From 1951 to 1962 he was Managing Editor of the leading physics journal Physical Review. In 1958 he founded Physical Review Letters to provide rapid publication of emerging scientific findings and later became the first Editor‐in‐Chief of the American Physical Society. In 1974, he became Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Nevada in Reno, where he remained until his death.

Goudsmit also made scholarly contributions to Egyptology. The Samuel A. Goudsmit Collection of Egyptian Antiquities is at the University of Michigan's Kelsey Museum of Archaeology in Ann Arbor.

Howard Greenfeld

Howard Greenfeld (1929-2006) grew up in New York City, graduated from Columbia University, and has lived in Rome, Florence, and Camaiore, Italy, and in Paris, France.

He has written twenty books for young adults, and biographies of Marc Chagall, Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Puccini, Caruso, and the art collector Albert C. Barnes. He was also the founder of Orion Press and published English-language translations of such writers as Italo Calvino, Primo Levi, and Jean Piaget.

Andrew Grove

Andrew S. “Andy” Grove (1936-2016) was a Hungarian-born American businessman, engineer, and pioneer in the semiconductor industry. Born András István Gróf into a Jewish family in Budapest, he survived the Holocaust as a child, escaped in 1956 from Communist-controlled Hungary at the age of 20 and moved to the United States where he finished his education, earning a bachelor’s degree from City College in New York in 1960, and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1963, both in chemical engineering.

He was one of the three founders of Intel in 1968 and its CEO from 1987 until 1998: during that time, Intel grew from 19,200 to 64,500 employees and from $4 billion to $197 billion in market capitalization.

In 1997, Grove was named Time magazine’s “Man of the Year” for his key role in the growth in power of microchips and their innovative potential. After he was diagnosed in 2000 with Parkinson’s disease, he became a contributor to several foundations sponsoring research towards a cure.

Frederic V. Grunfeld

Born in Berlin, Frederic Volker Grunfeld (1929-1987) and his family fled the Nazis in 1938 to settle in Queens, New York. After graduating from the University of Chicago in 1949, Grunfeld was a classical music broadcaster for WQXR, wrote book reviews for the New York Times and worked in the record industry in New York City. He moved to Deia, Mallorca in 1961, was cultural correspondent in Europe for The Reporter, and roving editor for Horizon. He also worked for other publications including Connoisseur, Queen magazine and New York. In 1974, he earned a Master of Fine Arts from Columbia University where he studied with Jacques Barzun. Grunfeld’s books include The Art and Times of the Guitar (1970), The Hitler File: A Social History of Germany and the Nazis, 1918-45 (1974), Games of the World (1975), Berlin (1977), Prophets Without Honour (1979), Rodin: A Biography (1987), and Wild Spain (1988). He died in Spain at the age of 58 of a heart attack.

Sebastian Haffner

Sebastian Haffner was born in 1907 as Raimund Pretzel the last of four children. His father was headmaster of a Berlin school and a noted liberal school reformer. Pretzel studied law and received his doctorate in 1934. Although he was not Jewish he abandoned his planned career as a lawyer in public service when the Nazis came to power. Instead he worked as a non-political journalist.

In 1938 he and his pregnant fiancée, who was of Jewish descent and for that reason had been dismissed from her post as university librarian, managed to emigrate to the UK, where they were married. There he started to write a memoir about his youth in Weimar Germany and the rise of the Nazis. The book (Defying Hitler) was abandoned at the outbreak of war and replaced by another (Germany: Jekyll and Hyde) offering an analysis of Germany for the benefit of the allies. This book, published under the pseudonym Sebastian Haffner which he used for the rest of his life, procured his release from internment in the summer of 1940. In 1942 he became a journalist at the Observer and quickly made a reputation as a political thinker.

Haffner returned to Germany in 1954, initially as a correspondent for the Observer. There he became an important commentator on current affairs and a well-known television personality. In the 1960s he started writing historical books, mostly about 20th century German history, including The Ailing Empire: Germany from Bismarck to Hitler. His most important and successful book, The Meaning of Hitler, appeared in 1978. He retired in 1991 and died in 1999 aged 91. (Image of the author from Mein Vater III, 1986 by Sarah Haffner; oil on canvas, 75 x 100 cm, Stadtmuseum, Berlin).

Samuel B. Hand

Born in New York City and raised in Bayside and Woodstock, New York, Samuel B. Hand (1931-2012) received his BA from New York University in 1952, served in the US Army in Korea, and then entered the doctoral program in history at Syracuse University, receiving his PhD in 1960. Hand then taught briefly at Slippery Rock State College in Pennsylvania. From 1961 to 1994 he taught at the University of Vermont, where he achieved legendary status as a scholar and teacher, Chair of the History department and professor emeritus.

Hand originally focused on US political history, publishing the biography of FDR’s adviser and speechwriter Samuel I. Rosenman Counsel and Advise: A Political Biography of Samuel I. Rosenman (1979) and articles on Rosenman and other New Deal figures. His interests shifted to Vermont history, a field in which he became the acknowledged expert, authoring, coauthoring, and editing numerous articles and essays and five books, including The Star that Set: The Vermont Republican Party, 1865–1974 (2003), and with Stephen C. Terry and Anthony Marro Philip Hoff: How Red Turned Blue in the Green Mountains (2011).

Hand helped found the Center for Research on Vermont, serving as its first director. Beloved by his numerous graduate students, Hand was honored by the University of Vermont with the Graduate Faculty Teaching Award in 1994, and the University Scholar Award in 1989. He was vice president and then president of the Vermont Historical Society (1983-1989); the New England Association of Oral History (1983-1985); and the national Oral History Society (1984-1987). He also received the Oral History Society’s Harvey A. Kantor Memorial Award for Significant Work in Oral History in 1986.

Oscar and Lilian Handlin

Oscar Handlin (1915-2011) was born in in Brooklyn, New York to Jewish parents who came to the United States from Russia. A problematic pupil, he entered Brooklyn College at the age of 15, and three years later, Harvard University to pursue graduate studies in history. His PhD thesis supervisor was Arthur Schlesinger Sr. In 1940 Handlin was appointed instructor at the university, spending his entire academic career at Harvard ever after. In the course of many years he served the university in numerous capacities, retiring finally in 1984 having held two of the institution’s most distinguished appointments — that of Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professorship and subsequently Carl M. Loeb University Professorship. Handlin established his scholarly credentials with the publication of his dissertation in 1941, entitled Boston’s Immigrants 1790-1965, asserting the centrality of immigration to the shaping of American society. The Pulitzer prize winning The Uprooted (1951) enlarged the previous book’s conclusions, detailing the hardships experienced by newcomers to a not always welcoming society. A long life dedicated to scholarship and student mentoring enriched the intellectual lives of Harvard college students. At the same time, Handlin was also instrumental in managing several of Harvard’s institutions and affiliates, and was the founder of the Center for the Study of Liberty in America that later became the Charles Warren Center for the Study of American History. Critical of the immigration laws that governed how newcomers were admitted to the United States, Handlin was also instrumental in abolishing the discriminatory national origins quota system — which eventually contributed to the 1965 passage of the new Immigration and Nationality Act. He died in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Lilian Handlin (PhD Hebrew University of Jerusalem, MA Brown University, BA Queens College, City University of New York) was associate professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (1970-77). Her interests focus on the intersection between social history and the history of ideas. She is the author and co-author of several books, including George Bancroft: Intellectual as Democrat (1984) and Abraham Lincoln and the Union (1980). Her most important publication, collaborated with her husband was the four-volume Liberty in America, 1600 to the Present (1986-1994). She was also responsible for the publication of the second edition of her husband's The Distortion of America (1996). Lilian Handlin's articles and reviews have appeared in several academic and popular journals, including the American Scholar, the New England Quarterly, Perspectives in American History. Most recently she has published a number of articles investigating pre modern Myanmar history, as revealed in the substantial remains of its material culture. Between the 9th and 11th century, a powerful kingdom that called itself Arimadana extended its sovereignty over wide areas in southeast Asia, at a time when its monarchs resided in what later generations called Pukkan, located in upper Burma's dry zone.

Lawrence Harmon

Lawrence Harmon writes editorials and a weekly column for the op-ed page of the Boston Globe. Before joining the editorial board of the Boston Globe in 1992, he was editor of the Citizen Group papers and wrote for the old Boston Ledger and Jewish Advocate. He co-authored The Death of an American Jewish Community: A Tragedy of Good Intentions (1992). Harmon writes extensively on urban affairs, education, law enforcement issues, and housing policy. He has a BS from Boston University’s Metropolitan College, and an MA from Simmons College. (drawing: Boston Globe)

Hugh Hawkins

Hugh Dodge Hawkins (1929-2016), the youngest of five children whose father was a dispatcher for the Rock Island Railroad, was born in Topeka, Kansas, graduated from high school in El Reno, Oklahoma, spent a semester at Washburn University in Topeka and switched to DePauw University in Indiana before going to study intellectual history in 1950 at Johns Hopkins University where he received his doctorate in 1954. Drafted into the Army, he spent two years in clerical jobs, mostly in Germany, before taking a job as instructor of history at North Carolina State University. In 1957, he joined Amherst College, where he stayed for 43 years until his retirement in 2000 as Anson D. Morse professor of history and American studies emeritus.

At Amherst, Hawkins held a joint appointment as professor of history and American studies. A civil rights activist, he flew to Selma, Alabama, in the summer of 1965 to participate in protests, and heard the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. speak during a training session in Atlanta. Back at Amherst, he worked to expand diversity and to introduce African-American studies in the curriculum.

His first major book, Pioneer: A History of the Johns Hopkins University, published in 1960 received the American Historical Association’s Moses Coit Taylor Prize for best manuscript in intellectual history. His other books are Between Harvard and America: The Educational Leadership of Charles W. Eliot, Banding Together: The Rise of National Associations in American Higher Education, 1887-1950, and the more personal Railwayman’s Son: A Plains Family Memoir, They Spoke, I Listened: A Life in Quotes, and The Escape of the Faculty Wife and Other Stories.

As a gay professor who started teaching when his sexual orientation could end his career, Hawkins began in 1958 a long-term relationship with Walter Richard, with whom he shared a home in Plainfield, Massachusetts until Richard died in 2012.

Hans Heiberg

Hans Heiberg (1904-1978) was an extraordinarily prolific Norwegian critic, novelist, playwright, translator, theater director and journalist. He is the only Ibsen biographer to have staged his work. Born in Kristiania (now Oslo), Norway, Heiberg worked as a foreign correspondent in Great Britain, France, Japan and China before turning to theater and radio for the rest of his life. In addition to writing his own plays, novels and literary criticism, he translated more than two hundred novels and plays into Norwegian. Heiberg set out to create “a biography of Henrik Ibsen as a human being — a portrait of the man before he became a mask.” His very readable biography, originally published in 1967 by Aschehoug, is the best-selling biography of the playwright in his native country.

Anthony Heilbut

Anthony Heilbut, born in New York City in 1940, the son of German-Jewish refugees, graduated from Queens College and received his Ph.D. in English Literature from Harvard University. He taught at New York University and Hunter College. Since 1976 he has been a full-time writer and record producer. His first book, The Gospel Sound: Good News and Bad Times, appeared in 1971. Other books include Exiled in Paradise: German Refugee Artists and Intellectuals in America from the 1930s to the Present (1983, 1997); Thomas Mann: Eros and Literature (1996, 1997); and The Fan Who Knew Too Much: Aretha Franklin, The Rise of the Soap Opera, Children of the Gospel Church, and Other Meditations (2012). Heilbut’s work has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, The Nation, The New Yorker, The Village Voice, The Daily Beast, The New York Times Book Review and The Los Angeles Times Book Review. As a record producer, Heilbut specializes in black gospel music. He has produced over fifty albums for various labels.

Ernest Heppner

Born in Breslau (now Wrocław, Poland) to matzo factory owner Isidor Heppner and Hilde Heppner, Ernest G. Heppner (1921-2004) fled Germany in February 1939 with his mother to Shanghai, China, while Heppner’s father and sister Else stayed behind and were later murdered in the Holocaust. Heppner’s brother Henry (Heinz) escaped to England with his wife and son. Ernest Heppner joined the Shanghai Volunteer Corps and his mother became a social worker for the Committee for the Assistance of European Jewish Refugees. Heppner married Ilse-Lore (“Illo”) Koratkowski in 1945 in Shanghai and both worked for the US Army Advisory Group in Shanghai and Nanking.

They immigrated to the United States in 1947 and settled in Indiana where Heppner worked for Monroe-Litton Corp. as a systems manager, and for RANAC Computer Corp. as Vice President and General Manager until his retirement in 1986. The author of Shanghai Refuge: A Memoir of the World War II Jewish Ghetto, Heppner received in 1997 the honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters from Indiana University. A documentary, “Victory Heppner”, describing his life has been televised on PBS.

James Hershberg

Born in New York City (Brooklyn) in 1960, Professor Hershberg received an A.B. in American History from Harvard College in 1982, a Master of International Affairs from Columbia University in 1985 and a Ph.D. from Tufts University in 1989. After teaching at Tufts and the California Institute of Technology in 1989-91, he directed the Cold War International History Project (and edited the project’s Bulletin) from 1991-97 before coming to George Washington University, where he is Professor of History and International Affairs. He edits the CWIHP book series co-published by the Stanford University and Wilson Center Presses. He received the 1995 Stuart Bernath Prize from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Policy for James B. Conant: Harvard to Hiroshima and the Making of the Nuclear Age.

Hershberg’s most recent book is Marigold: The Lost Chance for Peace in Vietnam, co-published by Stanford University Press and the Wilson Center Press in 2012. The Washington Post named Marigold, which examines secret diplomacy during the war using long-secret communist sources, as one of the best ten books (and top five non-fiction books) of the year. He has written extensively on the Cuban Missile Crisis, and is currently working on a study of Cuba, Brazil, and the Cold War and Revolution in Latin America.

Chaim Herzog

Chaim Herzog (1918-1997) was born and raised in Ireland. His father, Ireland’s Chief Rabbi, became Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Palestine in 1936 and held that office in Israel until his death in 1959. Chaim Herzog moved to Palestine in 1935 and served in the Haganah during the 1936-39 Arab revolt. After earning his law degree from University College London in 1941, he served as an intelligence officer in the British Army during World War II, then returned to Palestine. He married Aura Ambache, the sister of Suzy Eban, in 1947. After fighting in the War of Independence, he headed Israel’s Southern Command and established Israel’s military intelligence. He retired from the Israel Defense Forces as Major-General in 1962, and then practiced law. After the 1967 Six-Day War, he returned to the military as governor of the West Bank.

In 1972, Herzog co-founded Herzog, Fox & Neeman, now one of Israel’s largest law firms. In 1975-78, Herzog represented Israel at the UN, where he fought the UN “Zionism is Racism” resolution, tearing it up symbolically before the General Assembly. In 1981, Herzog entered the Knesset as a member of Israel’s Alignment, the predecessor to the Labour Party. In 1983, he was elected President of Israel and served for two terms, until 1993, the maximum allowed by law. His son Isaac Herzog has led Israel’s Labour Party and the opposition to Benjamin Netanyahu in the Knesset since 2013.

Godfrey Hodgson

Born in York, England, where his father was headmaster of the grammar school, Godfrey Hodgson (1934-2021) was educated in the classics at Winchester, then at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he got a First in modern history. He earned a Master’s degree at the University of Pennsylvania. Hodgson worked at the Times of London and was sent to Washington as the correspondent of the Observer of London in 1962. After a couple of years in television news, he headed the London Sunday Times’s Insight investigative team. He led the coverage of the 1968 US presidential election and co-authored a book about it, An American Melodrama. Hodgson has written fourteen books in English, most notably America In Our Time, and one in French.

Hodgson has worked as a reporter all over Europe, in India, the Middle East and West Africa, but the main focus of his work has been the United States. He wrote TV documentaries about George Wallace and Ronald Reagan. As a foreign correspondent he wrote about the news of the day, but as a freelance reporter, he mostly focused on race and foreign policy issues.

As a young man, Hodgson had met Martin Luther King, Jr., who later helped him with great generosity. Hodgson was present at all the main confrontations over race in the South and he made a TV documentary about race in New York in the 1970s. He has watched with some discomfort the evolution of American foreign policy from the Kennedy years as the United States became involved in one long-drawn out conflict after another. Many wise Americans helped in his education in this field: one, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, whose biography, The Gentleman From New York, he wrote, became a close personal friend. Hodgson has taught at Harvard, Yale, and other American universities, and lectured frequently in the United States.

Eva Hoffman

Eva Hoffman grew up in Cracow, Poland, where she studied piano at the Cracow School of Music, before emigrating in her teens to Canada and then the United States. After receiving her Ph.D. in English and American literature from Harvard University, she worked as senior editor at the New York Times, serving for a while as one of its main literary critics. She has taught literature and creative writing at various universities, and has written and lectured internationally on issues of exile, memory, Polish-Jewish history, politics and culture. Her books include Lost in Translation, After Such Knowledge and Time, as well as two novels, The Secret, and Appassionata. She has presented radio programs and curated a series on "Writing and Music" at the South Bank Centre in London. She is the recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship and an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Kosciuszko Foundation award for Shtetl, and the Prix Italia for radio. She now lives in London.

Banesh Hoffmann

Banesh Hoffmann (1906-1986) studied at Merton College, Oxford University in his native England and immigrated to the United States where he earned his doctorate at Princeton working with the noted mathematician Oswald Veblen. He became a US citizen in 1940. After serving as a research associate and instructor in theoretical physics and applied mathematics at the University of Rochester, he returned to Princeton, where, at the Institute for Advanced Study, he collaborated with Albert Einstein and Leopold Infeld on a fundamental contribution to the theory of relativity. He subsequently taught at Queens College of the City University of New York, from which he retired as professor emeritus. He spent sabbaticals and visiting professorships at Harvard, Princeton, and at University of London’s King’s College.

Hoffmann was a gifted expositor of science, noted for his ability to explain and popularize the complex theories of modern physics to the general public. The British scientific magazine Discovery wrote about The Strange Story of the Quantum (1947), Hoffmann’s first book: “This book should become one of the great classics of popular but intelligent science writing...” Yale Professor Henry Margenau added: “Of the books attempting an account of the history and contents of modern atomic physics which have come to my attention, this is the best.”

Hoffmann worked in various areas, including relativity, quantum theory, and applications of tensor analysis to electrical engineering. An accomplished amateur pianist, he played on occasion piano-violin duets with fellow amateur musician Einstein. He was a Sherlock Holmes “Baker Street Irregular” and wrote the short story Sherlock, Shakespeare and the Bomb. An early and persistent critic challenging the scientific validity of standardized multiple-choice testing, he served for 25 years as a consultant on tests for the Westinghouse Science Talent Search and published The Tyranny of Testing (1962). His Albert Einstein: Creator and Rebel, written with the collaboration of Helen Dukas, Einstein’s secretary since 1927 until his death in 1955, first appeared in 1972.

Banesh Hoffmann was married to Doris Goodday and had two children, Laurence, a mathematician and financial advisor, and Deborah, an award-winning documentary filmmaker.

Richard Hough

Richard Alexander Hough (1922-1999) was a British author and historian specializing in naval history. As a child, he was obsessed with making model warships and collecting information about navies around the world. In 1941, he joined the Royal Air Force and trained at a flying school near Los Angeles. He flew Hurricanes and Typhoons and was wounded in action. After World War II, Hough worked as a part-time delivery driver for a wine shop, while looking for employment involving books. He finally joined the publishing house Bodley Head, and then Hamish Hamilton, where he eventually headed the children’s book division.

His work as a publisher inspired him to turn to writing himself in 1950, and he went on to write more than ninety books over a long and successful career. Best-known for his works of naval history and his biographies, he also wrote war novels and books for children (under the pseudonym Bruce Carter), all of which sold in huge numbers around the world. His works include The Longest Battle: The War at Sea 1939-45, Naval Battles of the Twentieth Century and best-selling biographies of Earl Mountbatten of Burma and Captain James Cook. Captain Bligh and Mr Christian, his 1972 account of the mutiny on the Bounty, was the basis of the 1984 film The Bounty, starring Anthony Hopkins and Mel Gibson.

Hough is the official historian of the Mountbatten family and a longtime student of Churchill. Winston Churchill figures prominently in nine of his books, including Former Naval Person: Churchill and the Wars at Sea. He won the Daily Express Best Book of the Sea Award in 1972.

Kathryn Hulme

Born in San Francisco, Kathryn Cavarly Hulme (1900-1981) attended the University of California at Berkeley for three years. In 1922 she moved to New York City, where she studied journalism, wrote freelance articles, worked as publicity director for the Ask Mr. Foster Travel Service, married Leonard D. Geldert in 1925 and was divorced in 1928. Hulme spent much time in Europe during the 1930s, and her early books reflect her interest in travel.

Hulme worked as an electric arc welder at the Kaiser shipyards during World War II. After the war, she spent six years in Germany as deputy director of United Nations Relief and Refugee Association (UNRRA) field teams. The Wild Place, which won the 1952 Atlantic non-fiction prize, describes conditions at the Wildflecken refugee camp. While there, Hulme met Marie-Louise Habets, a Belgian nurse and former nun who became Hulme’s lifelong companion and whose experiences were the basis for Hulme’s The Nun’s Story (1956), which became a best-seller.

Hulme’s other books are We Lived As Children (1938) which describes a child’s perspective of San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake, Annie’s Captain (1961), a fictionalized account of her grandparents’ lives, Undiscovered Country (1966), a memoir of her years as a student of mystic G. I. Gurdjieff and her eventual conversion to Catholicism, and Look a Lion in the Eye (1973) about her 1971 safari in East Africa. From 1960 until her death, Hulme lived on the island of Kauai with Marie-Louise Habets.

J.C. Hurewitz

Born in Hartford the youngest of 12 children of an Orthodox rabbi, Jacob Coleman Hurewitz (1914-2008) graduated from Trinity College in 1936 and did graduate work at Columbia University concentrating on the then unusual topic of the Middle East before going to Palestine to study the influence of Americans in that Ottoman-controlled area.

Because of his language skills, Hurewitz then worked successively for the Near East section of the Office of Strategic Services during World War II, at the State Department, as a political adviser on Palestine to the president’s cabinet, and for the United Nations secretariat. He joined Columbia in 1950 where he directed its Middle East Institute from 1970 until his retirement in 1984. In 1972, Hurewitz established the Columbia Seminar on the Middle East, which he continued to chair until he was nearly 90.

Besides The Struggle for Palestine, a revision of his doctoral thesis, Hurewitz’s books include Diplomacy in the Near and Middle East, The Middle East and North Africa in World Politics, Middle East Politics: The Military Dimension and Soviet American Rivalry In The Middle East.

Wilma Iggers

Professor and author Dr. Wilma Iggers was made an honorary citizen of her hometown Horšovský Týn, in 2002 and in 2004, received the Czech State prize “gratias agit” for her activities on behalf of the Czech lands. Her books include Karl Kraus: a Viennese Critic of the Twentieth Century, The Jews of Bohemia and Moravia: A Historical Reader and Women of Prague: Ethnic Diversity and Social Change from the Eighteenth Century to the Present.

Wilma Iggers and her husband of over 66 years Georg Iggers had distinguished careers as American university professors. After their retirement, they pursued research, dividing their time between Buffalo and Göttingen.

Annette Insdorf

Born in Paris, Annette Insdorf grew up in New York, where she received her B.A. from Queens College in 1972. She earned her Ph.D. from Yale University as a Danforth Fellow in 1975. She is a Professor in the Graduate Film Program of Columbia’s School of the Arts, and served as Director of Undergraduate Film Studies for 27 years. She received the 2008 Award for Excellence in Teaching from Columbia’s School of General Studies. From 1990-1995, she was Chair of the Graduate Film Division. She taught film history and criticism at Yale University from 1975-1988. Since 1983, Dr. Insdorf has hosted Manhattan’s 92nd Street Y “Reel Pieces” film series; her guests have included Martin Scorsese, Meryl Streep, Daniel Day-Lewis, Francis Coppola, Helen Mirren, Pedro Almodovar, Hugh Jackman, and Al Pacino. A popular panel moderator, she is responsible for the panels at the annual Telluride Film Festival (where she is also the main translator).

After her book François Truffaut appeared in 1978, she served as Truffaut’s translator. Considered an authority on the French New Wave, she provided voice-over commentary for the DVDs of Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player, Jules and Jim, and The Last Metro, and was interviewed in the 1993 French documentary, François Truffaut: Stolen Portraits. Her other books are Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust, a landmark study which appeared in a revised edition with a preface by Elie Wiesel and received the National Board of Review’s William K. Everson Award in Film History for its updated third edition; Double Lives, Second Chances: The Cinema of Krzysztof Kieślowski; Philip Kaufman published as part of the “Contemporary Film Directors” series, the first book about the director of The Unbearable Lightness of Being and The Right Stuff; Intimations: The Cinema of Wojciech Has; and Cinematic Overtures: How to Read Opening Scenes.

Sheila Isenberg

Born in New York City, Sheila Isenberg grew up in Far Rockaway, Queens, and lives in New York’s Hudson Valley. She attended Brooklyn College and Hunter College’s graduate school. Her work has been as a reporter, press secretary, adjunct professor of English and journalism, and media director at the Woodstock Comedy Festival, a non-profit that raises money for survivors of domestic violence and human trafficking.

Isenberg is the author of Muriel’s War: An American Heiress in the Nazi Resistance, A Hero of Our Own: The Story of Varian Fry and the groundbreaking Women Who Love Men Who Kill. With the late William Kunstler, she is co-author of My Life as a Radical Lawyer. She also wrote a biography of Ron Brown, the commerce secretary under President Bill Clinton, The Life and Times of Ron Brown, A Memoir by His Daughter Tracey L. Brown.

Her books have been reviewed widely and she has appeared in many documentaries and in countless interviews including on NPR, CNN, 20/20, The Today Show, and Good Morning America. She is a member of PEN, the Authors’ Guild, and Women Writing Women’s Lives biographers’ seminar.

George Jellinek

George Jellinek (1919-2010) was from 1968 to 1984 music director of New York City’s classical music radio station WQXR. His nationally syndicated weekly program, “The Vocal Scene,” was broadcast for 36 years. He also produced “First Hearing,” another nationally syndicated program in which a changing panel of vocal music experts reviewed new recordings without knowing who the performers were. His frequent appearance as a panelist on Texaco’s Metropolitan Opera Quiz made his mellifluous, Hungarian-accented voice an ingredient of American cultural life until 2004.

Born in Budapest, he took violin lessons starting at age 5 and later accompanied the traveling Gypsy bands that serenaded diners at his father’s restaurant. Upon hearing his first “Traviata” as a teenager, he became an avid (in his words, “almost insane”) operagoer, attending over a hundred performances a year.

Jellinek left Hungary as a young man in 1939, initially for Havana, Cuba and two years later for the United States. He served as an Army intelligence officer and translator during WWII. Returning to New York after the war, he took an office job but spent so much time hanging out in a music store that he was hired as an employee. From there his career took off. He began writing reviews for Stereo Review and articles for Opera News. Callas: Portrait of a Prima Donna (1960; 1986) was his first book, followed by History Through the Opera Glass (1994; 2000).

Alvin Johnson

Born near Homer, Nebraska, Alvin Saunders Johnson (1874-1971) was an educator, editor, economist, and author. His parents were Danish immigrants. Johnson grew up on the family farm and graduated in 1897 from the University of Nebraska with a major in the classics. In 1902, Johnson earned a Ph.D. in economics from Columbia University. His teaching career included stints at Columbia, Bryn Mawr, Cornell, Stanford, the University of Nebraska, University of Texas, University of Chicago, and The New School. He was editor of the Political Science Quarterly (1902-1906) and The New Republic, from 1917.

In 1922, Johnson was among the founders of The New School for Social Research, became its director, and later, president, a position he held until 1946. Under his leadership, The New School grew into one of the nation’s most important centers of adult education, as well as a leader in the social sciences. While working as associate editor on The Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, Johnson came into close contact with European scholars, and became acutely alert to the threat posed by the rise of Hitler in Nazi Germany. This led Johnson to mount a campaign to rescue scholars whose professional success, livelihoods, and, increasingly, lives, were endangered. In 1933, largely supported by the benefactor Hiram Halle, Johnson finally successful in his efforts, established the University-in-Exile at The New School (later called the Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science); later, during World War II, he also invited exiled French scholars to reestablish the Ecole Libre at The New School.

A prolific writer before and after his retirement, Johnson’s autobiography, Pioneer's Progress, was published in 1952. Johnson died in Nyack, New York.

James Joll

James Bysse Joll (1918-1994) was educated at Winchester, the University of Bordeaux and New College, Oxford, which he left to join the British Army in 1940; as a fluent German speaker, he eventually served in the German and Austrian sections of the Special Operations Executive. He returned to Oxford after World War II, completed his studies, and taught there, as a Fellow and Tutor in Politics from 1947 until 1950 before transferring to St Antony’s College. Joll was a visiting member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 1954 and 1971, a visiting professor at Stanford in 1958 and a visiting lecturer at Harvard in 1962. In 1955 he met the painter and art historian John Golding with whom he formed a long relationship which lasted until Joll’s death.

In 1967 Joll left St Antony’s, Oxford to teach at the London School of Economics, as the Stevenson Professor of International History. His books include Europe Since 1870: an International History, The Origins of the First World War, Three Intellectuals in Politics: Blum, Rathenau, Marinetti, and books on Italian Marxist intellectual Antonio Gramsci and on the history of anarchism and socialism. Joll was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1977. Following his retirement in 1981, he became Emeritus Professor of the University of London.

Ernest Jones

When he died in 1958 at the age of 79, Ernest Jones was one of the leading practitioners of psychoanalysis and one of its foremost champions. Born in Wales, Jones became the sole “foreigner” in the original circle of Freud’s co-workers in the early years of the 20th century and the first native English-speaking psychoanalyst. Until Freud’s death in 1939, he remained one of his closest friends and trusted associates. When the Freud family authorized a biography, they turned to Ernest Jones and he devoted almost the entire final decade of his life to the project. He himself once observed, if he should achieve immortality, it would be not as a pioneer in the science to which he had devoted his life, but as the biographer of Sigmund Freud.

Matthew Josephson

Born in Brooklyn, New York, to Jewish immigrants from Romania and Russia, Matthew Josephson (1899-1978) graduated with an A.B. from Columbia University in 1920 and worked briefly as a reporter for the Newark Ledger. As an expatriate in Paris in the 1920s “to win a year or two of freedom and give all my time to writing,” he was associate editor of Broom: An International Magazine of the Arts (1922–24), befriended leading surrealists like Paul Éluard, André Breton, Louis Aragon and Max Ernst and was an editor at the magazine transition (1928–29). After returning to America, Josephson worked on Wall Street before joining the editorial staff of The New Republic. He contributed regularly to The Nation, The New Yorker, and the Saturday Evening Post.

His first book was a biography of Émile Zola, Zola and His Time: The History of His Martial Career in Letters (1928). Interested in 19th-century French literature, he also wrote the biographies Victor Hugo (1942) and Stendhal (1946). His books about American economic history include The Robber Barons: The Great American Capitalists, 1861–1901 (1934), which chronicles the lives of late 19th century barons of industry like John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie, Edison: A Biography (1959) and The Money Lords: The Great Finance Capitalists, 1925–1950 (1972). Josephson wrote two memoirs, Life Among the Surrealists (1962) and Infidel in the Temple (1967), and with his wife Hannah, a biography of Al Smith. He was elected a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1948.

Peter Stephan Jungk

Peter Stephan Jungk was born in Los Angeles, raised in several European cities, and now lives in Paris where he writes in German. A former screenwriting fellow of the American Film Institute, he is the author of eight books, including Franz Werfel: A Life in Prague, Vienna and Hollywood (1990) and the novels Snowflake Constant, a finalist for the British Foreign Book Award, and The Perfect American, a fictional biography of Walt Disney's last months, made into an opera by Philip Glass that will premiere in 2013.

E.J. Kahn, Jr.

Born in New York City, Ely Jacques Kahn Jr. (1916-1994) attended the Horace Mann School and Harvard University, where he majored in Latin and Greek, receiving his BA in 1937. Harold Ross hired him as a Talk of the Town reporter at The New Yorker in 1937 when he was still a senior at Harvard. Kahn was drafted and served in the US Army from 1941 to 1945. Over 56 years at The New Yorker, his published work includes 60 profiles, 40 Reporter At Large pieces, 60 war pieces (including accounts of his own service), 27 night-club columns, sports pieces (he covered nine Olympic Games for the magazine) and innumerable unsigned Talk of the Town stories — over three million words in total.

Kahn's long career with the magazine resulted in 27 books on subjects such as Coca-Cola, Lesley J. McNair, the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands, Harvard University, the Korean War, John Hay Whitney, Herbert Bayard Swope, David Rockefeller, Frank Sinatra, Dwayne O. Andreas of Archer Daniels Midland, Arthur D. Little, South Africa, and the Postal Inspection Service.

Kahn taught writing at Columbia University from 1974 to 1977. His book The New Yorker and Me is a diary interspersed with memories of his life, the magazine, and its editor William Shawn. His 1987 diary was released as Year of Change: More about the New Yorker and Me.

Robert H. Kargon

Robert Hugh Kargon was born in Brooklyn, educated with a Union Carbide Research Scholarship at Duke University where he received a B.Sc. degree in physics. He earned a Master of Science degree in physics at Yale and a Ph.D. in history of science from Cornell. He received an honorary D.Sc. degree from the University of Westminster (London) in 2008. Kargon taught at the University of Illinois 1964-65 before moving to Johns Hopkins University where he is now Willis K. Shepard Professor of the History of Science.

His first book, Atomism in England from Hariot to Newton (1966), dealt with the Scientific Revolution. Subsequently his historical interests broadened and moved forward in time. His other books include The Maturing of American Science (1974), Science in Victorian Manchester: Enterprise and Expertise (1977), The Rise of Robert Millikan (1982), Invented Edens: Techno-Cities of the 20th Century [with Arthur Molella] (2008), Urban Modernity: Cultural Innovation in the Second Industrial Revolution [with Miriam Levin et al.] (2010), and World’s Fairs on the Eve of War: Science, Technology and Modernity [with Karen Fiss et al.] (2015).

Kargon organized (with Paul Hanle of the Air and Space Museum) the Space Telescope History Project, with NASA’s support, and placed a “combat historian” on the Hubble Space Telescope Project headed by Riccardo Giacconi while the project was developing. Kargon was a contributor to the resulting book The Space Telescope (1989) by Robert Smith that was published before the launch in 1990.

He lives in Baltimore with his wife and near his two adult children.

Theodore von Kármán and Lee Edson

Born in Budapest, Hungary, of Jewish parents, Theodore von Kármán (1881-1963) was recognized as a mathematical prodigy at the age of 6. He won the prestigious Eötvös Prize for best student in mathematics and science in all of Hungary when he graduated from the Minta Gymnasium in Budapest at the age of 16. He graduated from the Palatine Joseph Polytechnic in Budapest in 1902 in mechanical engineering with high honors. After a year of mandatory military service, he received his doctorate under the famous aerodynamicist, Ludwig Prandtl, at the University of Göttingen in 1908 where he remained as an associate professor until 1912, when he became director of the University of Aachen’s newly created Aeronautical Institute.

After spending World War I in the Austro-Hungarian fledgling air corps, where he developed the first ever helicopter, tethered to the ground, that was able to maintain hovering flight, von Kármán returned to Aachen where he led what became one of Europe’s major aerodynamics research centers. After philanthropist Daniel Guggenheim funded a new aeronautical laboratory at Cal Tech in 1926, Robert Millikan offered von Kármán its directorship, which von Kármán accepted in 1930 in part due to the rise of Nazism and antisemitism in Germany. His Cal Tech laboratory, the most prominent in the world of aeronautical sciences, became the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

By the end of his scientific career during which he made major contributions to aviation and space technology, aerodynamics, and improved aircraft performance, von Kármán had published more than 200 papers, advanced scientific collaboration from world leading scientists, developed many unique theories of aeronautical and space science, and played an important role in the creation of supersonic aircraft and ballistic missiles. In 1963, President Kennedy awarded von Kármán the first National Medal of Science.

Born in New York City, Lee Edson (1918-2008) received his B.S. degree in physics and English from the City College of New York and did graduate work in physics at the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute before becoming a science writer. His articles have appeared in Harper’s, Scientific American, Reader’s Digest and the New York Times Magazine and he is the author of several books.

Edson first met Theodore von Kármán in 1956 when he interviewed him for an article the Saturday Evening Post published in 1957. They became friends and during a visit at his Pasadena home, von Kármán asked Edson to help him write his autobiography — von Kármán later said “Lee writes and I read” — which Edson completed in 1967, four years after von Kármán’s death.

Shmuel Katz

Shmuel Katz (1914-2008) was born in Johannesburg, South Africa. At age 15, he enrolled in Witwatersrand University where he heard Ze’ev Jabotinsky speak and became a member of the Zionist Betar movement. He translated Jabotinsky’s The Story of the Jewish Legion from Yiddish to English when he was 16 and dropped out of university to work for Revisionist Zionism. In 1936, he emigrated to the British Mandate of Palestine, where he became part of the Irgun. Jabotinsky dispatched him to London in 1939 to speak, raise funds, and establish the revisionist publication The Jewish Standard which he edited during the Second World War. In 1946, Katz returned to Palestine to rejoin the leadership of the Irgun under Menachem Begin and in 1948, he was elected to the first Knesset as a member of Begin’s Herut Party but left after a single term to work in publishing. His books include Lone Wolf: A Biography of Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky, Battleground: Fact & Fantasy in Palestine, Days of Fire: The Secret Story of the Making of Israel, The Hollow Peace and The Aaronsohn Saga. Katz was a founding member of the Movement For Greater Israel.

George F. Kennan

Born in Milwaukee, George Frost Kennan (1904-2005) entered the Foreign Service after graduating from Princeton in 1925 with a BA in history. He was posted in Geneva as vice consul, and then in Hamburg. Selected to be trained as a linguist in Russian by the Foreign Service, Kennan studied Russian history, politics, culture, and the Russian language at the University of Berlin’s Oriental Institute in 1929. He was then posted in Tallinn, Estonia, Riga, Latvia and other “listening posts” around the Soviet Union, with which the United States had no diplomatic relations until 1933 when Kennan accompanied the first US ambassador, William C. Bullitt, to Moscow. In 1935 he was assigned to Vienna, and he finished the decade with posts in Prague and Berlin.

Interned briefly by the Nazis at the outbreak of World War II, Kennan was released in 1942 and subsequently filled diplomatic posts in Lisbon and Moscow during the war. Kennan's “Long Telegram,” sent from Moscow in February 1946, enunciated the “containment” policy; it was widely read in Washington and brought Kennan much recognition. He returned to the United States, and in 1947 Secretary of State George C. Marshall asked Kennan to create the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, of which he became the first director. He played a key role in drafting what would be known as the “Marshall Plan” for the reconstruction of Europe. Kennan clarified his views on containment in a highly influential article, signed “X,” published in Foreign Affairs in July 1947: in it, Kennan questioned the wisdom of the United States’ attempts to appease the Soviet Union and advocated US counterpressure wherever the Soviets threatened to expand. This view subsequently became the core of US policy toward the Soviet Union.

Kennan became counselor to the State Department in 1949, but resigned in 1950 to join the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. He returned to Moscow in 1952 as US ambassador but came back to the US in 1953 after the Russians declared him persona non grata for remarks he made about Soviet treatment of Western diplomats. In 1956 he became permanent professor of historical studies at the Institute in Princeton, a tenure broken only by a stint as US ambassador to Yugoslavia (1961-63). In the late 1950s Kennan revised his containment views, advocating instead a program of US “disengagement” from areas of conflict with the Soviet Union. He later emphatically denied that containment was relevant to other situations in other parts of the world such as Vietnam.

Kennan won simultaneous Pulitzer Prizes and National Book Awards for Russia Leaves the War (1956) and Memoirs, 1925-1950 (1967). Other autobiographies include Memoirs, 1950-1963 (1972), Sketches from a Life (1989), and At a Century’s Ending: Reflections, 1982-1995 (1996). In addition to numerous honors, including honorary degrees from Oxford, Harvard, Yale and Princeton and the Albert Einstein Peace Prize in 1981, Kennan was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1989.

Bernice Kert

Born in St. Louis to Gus Galansky, a wholesale grocer, and his wife, Mary, a homemaker, Bernice Kert (1923-2005) attended the University of Michigan and won the university’s Avery Hopwood Award for young writers, also awarded to playwright Arthur Miller. After earning her bachelor’s degree in English in 1944, she taught English as a graduate student and sold her first short story, “Look at Me, Lorrie,” in 1946 to a new magazine called Seventeen. Her writing career was put on hold in 1945, after she married Morley Kert, who joined the university’s department of cardiology. They moved to California in 1948, and her husband built a private practice while doing clinical research at UCLA. They had three children and she supported his career as a Beverly Hills cardiologist, sidelining serious writing. At age 40, Kert started writing fiction, eventually selling several short stories and completing three unpublished novels. At age 50, she started researching her first nonfiction book, The Hemingway Women, which appeared in 1983. A Guggenheim fellowship funded the research for Kert’s biography of the woman who married John D. Rockefeller Jr., Abby Aldrich Rockefeller: The Woman in the Family, published in 1993. Kert was a feminist in her time, and it was very important to her to write about women who supported or were married to powerful men.

Ernest J. King and Walter Muir Whitehill

Born in Lorain, Ohio, Ernest Joseph King (1878-1956) attended the US Naval Academy at Annapolis (1897-1901), graduating fourth in his class. He served on the cruiser San Francisco in the Spanish–American War while still at the Naval Academy. After graduation, King was a junior officer on the survey ship Eagle, the battleships Illinois, Alabama and New Hampshire, and the cruiser Cincinnati. His first command was in 1914, on the destroyer Terry. During World War I, King served on the staff of Vice Admiral Henry Mayo, Commander, Atlantic Fleet. After the war, King headed the Naval Postgraduate School, commanded a submarine squadron, and the submarine base at New London. King was qualified in surface ships, submarines, and as a Naval Aviator. Starting in June 1930, he commanded the carrier Lexington for two years. Promoted to rear admiral, he ran the Bureau of Aeronautics (1933-1936). After a period on the Navy’s General Board and as Commander, Atlantic Squadron, King was promoted to admiral in February 1941 and became Commander, Atlantic Fleet. Shortly after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, King was appointed Commander in Chief of the US Fleet (COMINCH). In March 1942, King succeeded Harold Stark as Chief of Naval Operations (CNO), becoming the only admiral to hold this combined command. As COMINCH-CNO, King directed the US Navy’s operations, planning and administration and was a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In December 1944, King became the second admiral, after Admiral Leahy, to be made Fleet Admiral. After retiring from active duty in December 1945, King served as president of the Naval Historical Foundation (1946-1949). His autobiography appeared in 1952.

Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Walter Muir Whitehill (1905-1978) was a writer, historian, medievalist, and Director and Librarian of the Boston Athenaeum (1946-1973). He received his AB and MA degrees from Harvard in 1926 and 1929 and his PhD from the University of London in 1934 for his thesis on the architecture of medieval Spain. Whitehill spent World War II in the Office of Naval Records in Washington. He edited publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts (1946-1978) and was associated with the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard (1951) where he was a lecturer in history (1956-1957).

Egon Erwin Kisch

Prague-born Egon Erwin Kisch (1885-1948) established narrative non-fiction as an art form in Central Europe. The son of a Jewish draper, he became a journalist and part of a circle of writers that included Franz Werfel, Max Brod, Rainer Maria Rilke, Hugo Bergmann and Franz Kafka. Their literary hybrid of Czech, Jewish and German cultures was unique and they were mocked for sitting in cafés where they “werfelt und brodet und kafkat und kischt.”

Kisch attended technical university, dropped out, and studied journalism in Berlin. After returning to Prague, he became police reporter for the German-language paper Bohemia from 1906 to 1913. His muckraking features ran under the headline “Roaming Through Prague” and explored the city’s underworld of bars, dives, gambling dens, prostitutes and murderers. His first major scoop was the story behind the sensational forced suicide of Colonel Alfred Redl, intelligence officer in the Austro-Hungarian army, in 1913. A homosexual, Redl had been blackmailed into spying for Russia. Kisch served in World War I and was wounded in action. He kept a diary, later published as Write It Down Kisch! His military experience further radicalized him and in 1918, Kisch participated as a Red Guard in a failed putsch in Vienna. He returned to Prague journalism and theater, but was drawn to Berlin. In Weimar Germany, his “literature of fact” became part of the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) cultural movement.

In 1924, his collection of pieces Der rasende Reporter (The Raging Reporter) became a bestseller, followed by many other books of reportage from Europe, North Africa, the Soviet Union, China, and the U.S. The Nazis arrested Kisch, a Communist and a Jew, in 1933 and deported him to Czechoslovakia. His books were banned. That year, he wrote Tales from Seven Ghettos, accounts of Jewish communities from the Thirty Years’ War until the 1930s. Kisch was himself a secular Jew whose family claimed descent from Rabbi Loew, the Maharal of Prague. Kisch inspected the attic of Prague’s Old-New Synagogue for traces of the Golem.

In 1934, he sailed to Australia for an anti-war congress, was denied entry, but jumped off the boat, and broke his leg. The “Kisch Affair” became a cause célèbre, raising Australian awareness of Nazism. Kisch wrote it up in Australian Landfall before going to Spain to report on the Spanish Civil War. In 1939, Kisch fled to New York, was detained at Ellis Island and denied residence in the U.S. He and his wife Gisela spent the war in Mexico City where he completed his memoir Sensation Fair as Stefan Zweig was writing The World of Yesterday in Petropolis, Brazil. Unlike Zweig, Kisch lived to see Nazism defeated. In 1946, he returned to his birthplace a hero. He died in Prague in March of 1948.

Ronald Kline

Ronald R. Kline earned a B.S. in Electrical Engineering at Kansas State University and an M.A. and Ph.D. in History of Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the Sue G. and Harry E. Bovay, Jr. Professor in History and Ethics of Engineering at Cornell University, with a joint appointment between the Science and Technology Studies Department in the College of Arts and Sciences and the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering in the College of Engineering. He directs the Bovay Program in the History and Ethics of Engineering in the College of Engineering and teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on the history of science and technology in the Cold War and the history of information technology.

The author of numerous articles on the history of engineering, industrial research, technology in rural life, and information science and technology, as well as engineering ethics, he is past president of the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) and the IEEE Society for the Social Implications of Technology, and former chief editor of IEEE’s Technology & Society Magazine. In 2016, SHOT awarded him its highest honor, the Leonardo da Vinci Medal, for contributions to the history of technology. He is the author of three books, Steinmetz: Engineer and Socialist (1992), Consumers in the Country: Technology and Social Change in Rural America (2000), and The Cybernetics Moment, Or Why We Call Our Age the Information Age (2015), all published by Johns Hopkins University Press.

Richard Kluger

Born in Paterson, NJ in 1934, Richard Kluger grew up in Manhattan, graduated from the Horace Mann School and Princeton University, where he won honors as an English literature major and his principal interest was the undergraduate newspaper, The Daily Princetonian, of which he served as chairman in 1955-56. He withdrew from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, where he had been campus correspondent for The New York Times, to join The Wall Street Journal as a copy editor and in 1957 married the former Phyllis Schlain. After launching and operating a weekly newspaper in Rockland County, NY for two years before selling it, he worked as a reporter for the New York Post and Forbes magazine and then became the literary editor of the New York Herald Tribune and its Book Week review section. When the Tribune went out of business in 1966, Kluger entered the book industry, serving as executive editor of Simon & Schuster, editor-in-chief of Atheneum, and publisher of Charterhouse Books, his own imprint in conjunction with David McKay Co.

As a moonlighting author, Kluger published two novels, When the Bough Breaks and National Anthem, satirizing American social mores. Moved by the social upheavals sweeping across the US in the 1960s, Kluger left book publishing and devoted six years, starting in 1968, to researching and writing Simple Justice (1976), generally regarded as the definitive account of the US Supreme Court’s 1954 landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision outlawing racially segregated public schools. His second nonfiction work was The Paper: The Life and Death of the New York Herald Tribune (1986). Both were National Book Award finalists. Ashes to Ashes, his following book, is a critical history of the cigarette industry and its lethal toll on the public’s health; it won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction in 1997. Kluger went on to write three other works of history, dealing with the relentless expansion of America’s national boundaries, a tragic mid-19th century clash between white settlers and tribal natives in territorial Washington, and the 1735 trial of John Peter Zenger and the origins of press freedom in the New World.

Of his seven novels, the most widely read are Members of the Tribe and The Sheriff of Nottingham, both anchored in historical events. Two of his novels were co-authored with his wife Phyllis, who often assisted him with research for his historical works. The Klugers have lived near San Francisco since 2003.

Anna Klumpke

Anna Elizabeth Klumpke (1856-1942) was an American portrait and genre painter born in San Francisco where her father was a successful and wealthy realtor. Among her siblings were astronomer Dorothea Klumpke-Roberts, violinist Julia Klumpke, and neurologist Augusta Déjerine-Klumpke. Following falls at age three and five, her mother took Anna to Berlin for medical treatments, which were not successful: Anna remained hobbled all her life. While in Europe, her mother ensured that her children received excellent tutoring. When Anna was fifteen, her parents divorced. She and her siblings moved with their mother to Göttingen. When she was seventeen, the family moved to Switzerland where Anna attended boarding school for two years.

Anna studied art at home, and in 1877 moved with her family to Paris, where she later enrolled in the Académie Julian (1883-1884). She copied paintings in the Musée du Luxembourg, including Rosa Bonheur’s Ploughing in the Nivernais. She presented her first work at the Paris Salon in 1884, and won the grand prize for outstanding student that year. After completing her studies, she returned to the United States for a few years and taught in Boston. By 1889, she was back in Paris.

Since childhood, Anna had been fascinated by French woman artist Rosa Bonheur. Intent on painting Bonheur’s portrait, she met Rosa Bonheur in 1889, under the pretext of being the interpreter for a horse dealer. The two women were soon living together at Bonheur’s estate in Thomery near Fontainebleau, and their relationship endured until Bonheur’s death in 1899. Klumpke was named sole heir to Bonheur’s estate and oversaw the sale of Bonheur’s collected works in 1900. She founded the Rosa Bonheur Prize at the Société des Artistes Français and organized the Rosa Bonheur museum at the Fontainebleau palace.

Following Bonheur’s death, Klumpke divided her time between France, Boston, and San Francisco, finally settling in San Francisco in the 1930s. During World War I, she established with her mother a military convalescent hospital at her home in Thomery. In 1940, Klumpke published her autobiography Memoirs of an Artist. She is buried alongside Rosa Bonheur at Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.

G. Wilson Knight

G. Wilson Knight (1897-1985) served as a military courier in World War I in Iraq, India and Persia. After graduating from Oxford University’s St Edmund Hall, he became a distinguished scholar and literary critic, writing on Shakespeare, Byron, Ibsen and Nietzsche. Starting in 1923, he taught English at various schools, and received his first academic post at the University of Toronto’s Trinity College in 1931.

He taught at the Stowe School from 1941 until 1946 and then at Leeds University until his retirement in 1962, first as Reader and starting in 1956 as Professor of English. Eccentric, powerfully original, and an outstanding lecturer, Knight was mainly fascinated by mythical patterns and meanings in literature. His The Wheel of Fire, Interpretations of Shakespearian Tragedy (1930) is one of the most influential books in the field. Knight was also a producer and actor in Shakespearean plays. His staging of Shakespeare was noted for its emphasis on color and symbolism. He also wrote plays for the British stage and television. A believer in spiritualism, Knight was a vice-president of the Spiritualist Association of Great Britain.

Heda Margolius Kovály

Heda Margolius Kovály (1919-2010) was born in Prague. Her youth was cut short by the rise of Hitler and the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1939. In 1941, she and her family were deported to the Lodz Ghetto, then to Auschwitz. She escaped from a death march, made her way back to Prague, and took part in the uprising against the Germans in May 1945. Heda then reunited with her husband, Rudolf Margolius, who had survived Auschwitz and Dachau. After Margolius became Deputy Minister of Foreign Trade in the post-war Communist government, he was arrested and became a victim of Stalinist anti-semitic show trials. The Slansky Trials found Margolius one of eleven Jews guilty of conspiracy. After his execution in 1952, Heda, who never believed that her husband was guilty and spent her life trying to clear his name, and Ivan, her four-year-old son, were shunned by society. Heda was denied work and lodging, forced to live in poverty and to eke out a living surreptitiously editing and translating. She did not tell Ivan the truth about what happened to his father until he was sixteen years old. Her memoir of life under Stalinism, Under A Cruel Star: A Life in Prague 1941-1968, is dedicated to Ivan. She is the author of a novel, Innocence, and the translator of several American authors into Czech. In his book Cultural Amnesia, Clive James named Heda Margolius Kovály one of the "necessary" writers of the twentieth century. In 1968, after Soviet troops invaded Prague, mother and son fled Czechoslovakia. Heda Margolius Kovály settled in Boston, Massachusetts where she worked at the Harvard Law School library and lived with her second husband, Pavel Kovály. In 1996, they returned to Prague where Heda died in 2010.

Arnold Kramish

Born in Denver, Arnold Kramish (1923-2010) graduated from the University of Denver in 1945 and received a master’s degree in physics from Harvard in 1947. Before graduating from college, he worked in the special engineering division of the Manhattan Project at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, Los Alamos, New Mexico and the Philadelphia Navy Yard where in 1944, he was severely burned when an experimental uranium enrichment device exploded near him.

After World War II, Kramish became a nuclear intelligence and policy expert. He served with the Atomic Energy Commission as a liaison to the CIA providing intelligence estimates on Soviet nuclear capabilities until 1951, when he joined the Rand Corporation. Later, Kramish developed an interest in the history of atomic espionage. In the 1970s, he worked as an arms control adviser for the State Department in Paris and served as nuclear arms control and security adviser to UNESCO and the OECD. During the Reagan administration, he directed a White House study that recommended the Strategic Defense Initiative, also known as Star Wars.

He received a Carnegie Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and was a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. He taught courses at UCLA, the London School of Economics and other institutions.

Peter Kurth

Peter Kurth is the author of Anastasia: The Riddle of Anna Anderson, American Cassandra: The Life of Dorothy Thompson, Tsar: The Lost World of Nicholas and Alexandra, and Isadora: A Sensational Life. His work has appeared in Vanity Fair, Condé Nast Traveler, Forbes FYI, The New York Times Book Review, The New York Observer, Cosmopolitan, Harper’s Bazaar and Salon.com. Peter Kurth lives in Vermont.

William L. Langer

Born in South Boston, Massachusetts, the second of three sons of recent German immigrants, William Leonard Langer (1896-1977) attended the Boston Latin School and Harvard University. He taught German at the Worcester Academy while studying international relations at Clark University, and enlisted in the US Army during World War I, serving in a chemical weapons unit in France. After receiving his Ph.D. at Harvard in 1922, Langer taught modern European history at Clark University for four years before becoming an assistant professor at Harvard where he became the first Coolidge Professor of History in 1936, a chair he held until his retirement in 1964. He is remembered for his courses on the history of modern Europe and the Ottoman Empire. He also taught and lectured in history at Columbia, the University of Chicago, Yale and at Tufts University’s Fletcher School. With other scholars, Langer completely revised Karl Ploetz’s Epitome of History during the 1930s. That massive work was published in 1940 under the title An Encyclopedia of World History; its 6th edition appeared in 2001.

During World War II, Langer served in the new Office of Strategic Services (OSS) as deputy chief and later chief of the Research and Analysis Branch. He was Secretary of State James Byrnes’s special assistant for intelligence analysis. After the war, Langer returned to academia, but in 1950 he organized the newly established CIA office of National Estimates and he served on the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board from 1961 until 1977.

President Truman awarded Langer the Medal for Merit in July 1946 in recognition of his wartime service. Langer received the Bancroft Prize in 1954. Langer served as president of the American Historical Association in 1957 and received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement in 1965.

Langer’s books include The Franco-Russian Alliance (1927), European Alliances and Alignments (1931), The Rise of Modern Europe (1934), The Diplomacy of Imperialism (1935), Our Vichy Gamble (1947) and his autobiography In and Out of the Ivory Tower (1977).

Harold Larrabee

Harold Atkins Larrabee (1894-1979) studied philosophy at Columbia, the Union Theological Seminary, and Harvard. He was a student, and later a young colleague, of William James, Josiah Royce, George Santayana, and Hugo Munsterberg. In 1918, he served as Psychological Examiner at Camps Greenleaf and Beauregard in Louisiana, and the US Army General Hospital, Oteen, North Carolina (1918-1919). Larrabee started teaching at Union College in 1925, where he stayed for 35 years, becoming Ichabod Spencer Professor of Philosophy. When he arrived at Union, courses in philosophy in many American institutions were subordinate to offerings in Theology or Mental and Moral Philosophy. Larrabee developed a strong Department noted for its rigorous, systematic, and historical investigation demanding a more elaborate specialization than was considered essential before World War I. Widely recognized by his peers, he held visiting professorships at Columbia University and Colby College; in 1953-1956, he was Director of the Editorial Center of the United States Bibliography, and a member of the Fulbright Screening Committee on Philosophy (1957-1959).

In 1939, he started working at the New England Quarterly, where he was a Senior Editor for 40 years. Larrabee edited Selections from Bergson (1949) and Bentham’s Handbook of Political Fallacies (1952), translated Man: Mind or Matter? (1951), In Quest of New Ethics (1953) and Sensation: The Origin of Life (1960) and wrote What Philosophy Is (1928), Decision at the Chesapeake (1964) and Reliable Knowledge (1945).

Joseph Lash

Joseph P. Lash (1909-1987) was a radical student leader, an Air Force weatherman, a journalist, and a biographer. He was the oldest of five children born to Jewish immigrants from Ukraine who ran a modest neighborhood grocery store and a kosher household on New York's Upper East Side. Small and scrawny, he managed to survive on the tough streets as a member of a gang which adopted him as their “Professor.” His father died in the 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic, and then 9-year-old Lash refused to drop out of school to run the store. He graduated from City College of New York in 1931, and from Columbia University with a Master's degree in philosophy and literature in 1932.

As America sank into Depression, Lash became a leader in the increasingly radical student protest movement, first as an officer of the Socialist youth organization Student League for International Democracy, and from 1936 to 1939 as executive secretary of the American Student Union, a coalition of radical youth groups. Subpoenaed to testify before the predecessor of the House Un-American Activities Committee, Lash and other leaders gathered were joined at New York’s Penn Station by First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt who rode to Washington with them and invited them to lunch at the White House. By the end of the visit she and Lash had formed a lifelong friendship.

From 1940 until 1942, Lash was general secretary of the International Student Service, a progressive student-aid group. He was later a founder, with Mrs. Roosevelt and others, of Americans for Democratic Action and served as an officer for two years. He was also active in liberal Democratic politics. Mr. Lash was drafted during World War II, serving as a sergeant and later second lieutenant in the United States Army Air Force in the Pacific as a weatherman.

In 1950, after two years working as an assistant to the Roosevelts’ son Elliott, Lash joined The New York Post, then known for its liberal editorial positions. He worked for a time as a general assignment reporter and became its United Nations correspondent, a position he held for 10 years. From 1960 until 1966, he was assistant editor of the editorial page.

After Eleanor Roosevelt died in 1962, Lash published Eleanor Roosevelt: A Friend’s Memoir and Franklin Roosevelt, Jr. invited him to write a biography with access to all of Mrs. Roosevelt’s papers. The result was Eleanor and Franklin, which won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 1972, and Eleanor, The Years Alone. Lash published six more books over the next sixteen years, including Roosevelt and Churchill, Helen and Teacher, and Dealers and Dreamers.

Melvyn Leffler

Melvyn P. Leffler received a B.S. from Cornell University in 1966, and a Ph.D. from Ohio State University in 1972. He is the Edward Stettinius Professor of American History at the University of Virginia and Compton Visiting Professor at UVA’s Miller Center. Leffler has written several books on the Cold War and on U.S. relations with Europe, including For the Soul of Mankind which won the George Louis Beer Prize from the American Historical Association, A Preponderance of Power which won the Bancroft, Hoover, and Ferrell Prizes and most recently, Safeguarding Democratic Nationalism: U.S. Foreign Policy and National Security, 1920-2015. In 2010, he and Odd Arne Westad co-edited the three-volume Cambridge History of the Cold War. Along with Jeff Legro and Will Hitchcock, he is co-editor of Shaper Nations: Strategies for a Changing World. He has served as president of the Society for the History of American Foreign Relations, Harmsworth Professor at Oxford University, and Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences at the University of Virginia. He is now writing about the foreign policies of the George W. Bush administration.

Hillel Levine

Hillel Levine, scholar, teacher, public intellectual, and activist, has authored many influential books and articles including In Search of Sugihara, The Death of an American Jewish Community, “Whodunit?!: Intolerance and the Secularization of Law,” Economic Origins of Antisemitism and “Jewish Reactions to Copernicus” and participated in film production.

Studying with Erik Erikson, A.J. Heschel, Elie Wiesel, and Peter Berger, he received rabbinic ordination from the Jewish Theological Seminary and doctorates in Sociology and Jewish History from Harvard. For 40 years he has been devoted to interfaith, civil rights, historical conciliation, and peacemaking activities and undergraduate, graduate, and adult education at Harvard, Yale, and Boston University. He founded the Yale and Boston University Centers for Judaic Studies and currently teaches sociology and religion at BU.

In 1995 he was appointed Life Time Distinguished Visiting Professor at Kyoto’s Logos Theological Seminary and has been a Visiting Professor at Tokyo University several times. He has also taught and held research positions in China, Ethiopia, South Korea, Poland, the Soviet Union, Brazil, Morocco, and Israel and worked with the US State Department on preventing ethnic conflicts in Western Europe, the Balkans, India and the Northeastern Territories of India. In 2001, he founded the International Center for Conciliation training community leaders to prevent and respond to religious and ethnic conflicts. Recently, he has worked with scientists and environmentalists in the Middle East, developing cross border hazard risk mitigation and emergency mobilization. He enjoys the friendship of several generations of accomplished former students.

Dorothy Michelson Livingston

Born in Chicago a year before her father, Albert A. Michelson, received the Nobel Prize in physics (He was the first American to receive that prize), Dorothy Michelson Livingston (1906-1994) recalls that her father was often not at home, but when he was, it was a treat. He would show her how a single hair caused a sensitive scale to stagger under its weight, or describe how a butterfly’s wings refracted light to create its fantastic colors. Her mother Edna, née Stanton, who had a stronger influence on her with her interest in plants, animals, literature and history, took her and her two teen-aged sisters to Europe to widen their cultural horizons. Dorothy was gifted in picking up spoken French and German, but less successful in the written grammar, failing to obtain her boarding school diploma. This did not dampen her intellectual curiosity and she was able to “skim the cream” off almost any subject, as she herself described her ability, while admitting its superficial quality. Her intelligence and charms were considerable. She was active in New York society, hosting dinner parties with guests connected to Broadway theater, the Guggenheim Museum, upcoming writers and architects as well as diplomats from the United Nations. She married four times and had one daughter with each of her first three husbands.

When she decided to write a biography of her father, she was put off when told she had to cite every source of information. She had never written a term paper in high school! She hired a secretary to help her and this time she did not just “skim the cream”. She persisted for over 15 years to see the project through. She took courses in creative writing and physics. Her academically achieving daughters took an indulgent view of her efforts, not believing it would ever come to fruition — but they were wrong: the biography was completed and published by Scribner’s in 1973.

Netanel Lorch

Born in Germany, Netanel Lorch (1925-1997) emigrated to Palestine in 1935. At age 16, Lorch joined the Haganah and, within two years, was in command of the Gadna (Youth Battalion) of the village where he taught school. In 1944, he served in the Jewish Brigade, part of the Allied Forces, in Egypt and Western Europe. After his release in 1946, he was a scriptwriter with the Palestine Broadcasting Service before reenlisting full-time in the Haganah. During the War of Independence, he served as Platoon and later Company Commander in Jerusalem. After the war he was appointed aide-de-camp to General Yigael Yadin, Chief of the General Staff. In 1952 he organized and directed the Historical Section of the Israel Defense Forces. In 1955-58, he was Israel’s consul in Los Angeles before establishing Israel’s consulate in Ceylon, now Sri Lanka. Later Lorch founded and headed the African Division of Israel’s Foreign Ministry, served as Ambassador in Peru and Bolivia (1963-67), headed the Information and the Latin American Divisions at the Ministry before becoming Secretary General of Israel’s Parliament, the Knesset. He received his M.A. in modern history from the Hebrew University summa cum laude in 1951 and 35 years later, his Ph.D. He is the author of over ten books and hundreds of articles.

David Loth
Loth headshot

Born in St. Louis, David Loth (1899-1988) received a BA in journalism from the University of Missouri in 1920 and worked in journalism for 20 years — at the New York World under Herbert Bayard Swope (1920-31), the Sydney (Australia) Daily Guardian (1925), the Majorca (Spain) Sun and Spanish Times (1931-34) and the New York Times (1934-41).

Loth then headed publications for the Office Inter-American Affairs (1941-44), was Managing editor of Press Research (1944), Information director of the Surplus Property Board (1945) before joining Planned Parenthood Federation American Inc. in New York City in 1946, of which he was acting national director in 1950-51. In 1953-54, he was Director of public information for Columbia University’s bicentennial. He lectured in journalism at Finch College (1961-65) and at the University of Colorado (1978-83).

Loth was an Associate Nieman fellow at Harvard in 1957-58 and President of the Rockland Foundation in 1956. He contributed articles to Reader’s Digest, Look, Esquire and other magazines and authored almost 50 books, from The Erotic in Literature to Public Plunder, a history of graft in America, and many biographies, including of Lafayette, Woodrow Wilson, Alexander Hamilton, John Marshall, Philip II of Spain and Gerard Swope, President of General Electric during 1922-40 and 1942-45 (the Swope and Loth families were friends and neighbors in St. Louis, and David Loth knew Gerard Swope during his whole life).

Richard Lourie

Richard Lourie has defined himself as “an American writer whose main subject is Russia.” Besides Sakharov: A Biography, his books include the international best-seller The Autobiography of Joseph Stalin (a novel), Russia Speaks: An Oral History from the Revolution to the Present, and Hunting the Devil, a true-crime account of Russia’s worst serial killer, for the writing of which Lourie spent two years working with the Russian police. He has translated more than thirty books from Russian and Polish, including Andrei Sakharov’s Memoirs, Vladimir Voinovich’s Chonkin, and Czeslaw Milosz’s Visions from San Francisco Bay. Lourie’s articles and reviews have appeared in many publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, the New Republic, and The Nation.

During the Cold War Lourie was very active in the anti-Soviet underground, smuggling manuscripts and other materials into and out of the USSR and Eastern Europe. He was with Lech Wałęsa in the Lenin Shipyards in Gdansk in 1981 and distributed the movie that Solidarity made called Workers ‘80, the only copy not confiscated by the Polish authorities being the one sent to the Pope by diplomatic pouch. The Pope sent Lourie his copy.

But his interests are hardly limited to Russia and the east of Europe. His poetry has been published widely and he was given the Sneath Poetry Award by Robert Lowell. He was a travel and food writer for many years, his work appearing in The New York Times, Gourmet and in his own column — Dish — in Hamptons Country magazine. Lourie also wrote the next to last episode of Miami Vice.

Gerstle Mack

Born in San Francisco, Gerstle Mack (1894-1983) studied architecture at UC-Berkeley before switching to MIT where he earned a bachelor’s degree in 1916. He worked as an architectural draftsman in New York until World War I. After serving in the War in Paris as a Lieutenant in the US Reserve Corps of Engineers, he returned to San Francisco to do architectural work and theater design production. In 1926 he left his architecture work to travel to Spain where he made architectural measurements and produced a book on southern Spanish architecture in 1928. A companion volume for northern Spanish architecture appeared in 1930.

Mack did extensive archival research in France, England and the United States on Paul Cézanne before publishing a highly praised biography of the painter in 1935. He followed this with a biography of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec in 1938, which was equally well received. During World War II, Mack served in the military in England with the Office of Strategic Services. The Land Divided, his history of the Panama Canal, was published in 1944 and his biography of Gustave Courbet appeared in 1951. In 1981, he wrote a book on the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, which he personally survived. Manhattan has been Mack’s home since 1938, but he travelled extensively across the world.

Norman Macrae

Norman Macrae (1923-2010) served in the Royal Air Force as a navigator in 1942-45 and went to Cambridge in 1945 to study economics, leaving his postgraduate studies without earning his Ph.D. when The Economist offered him a temporary job in 1949. He remained at The Economist until his retirement in 1988, as Assistant editor after 1954 and as Deputy editor after 1965. Macrae wrote over three thousand articles, mostly anonymous, and became respected for his often accurate forecasts. He took time off from The Economist to write eight books: in 1984 in The 2025 Report: A Future History of 1975-2025, he predicted “Eventually books, files, television programmes, computer information and telecommunications will merge. We’ll have this portable object which is a television screen with first a typewriter, later a voice activator attached.” His 1962 “Visiting Japan” pieces were the first to note the success of Japan’s postwar economy. In 1988, Macrae was made Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth and was awarded the Order of the Rising Sun with Gold Rays by Japan’s Emperor.

Philip Magnus

Born in London, the son of Laurie Magnus, director of Routledge Publishing, and Dora Marian Spielmann, Sir Philip Montefiore Magnus-Allcroft (1906-1988) was a British biographer. He was part of a notable Jewish family: his paternal grandmother was historian Katie Emmanuel and his maternal grandmother was Emily Sebag-Montefiore. After graduating from Wadham College, Oxford, Magnus worked for the Board of Education. During World War II, he served in the Royal Artillery and the Intelligence Corps, rising to the rank of Major. He married Jewell Allcroft in 1943, and in 1951 added the name of Allcroft to his own.

He wrote several biographies, first of Edmund Burke, and gained national recognition with his biography of Gladstone, which used new material, revived a general interest in the Victorian period and first revealed Gladstone’s rehabilitative work with prostitutes. His other books were on Kitchener, Sir Walter Raleigh and King Edward VII. In later years, Magnus served as a Justice of the Peace, Shropshire County Councillor, chairman of the governors of Attingham College and governor of Ludlow Grammar School. He was a trustee of the National Portrait Gallery (1970-77) and an editor of the Jewish Guardian.

Klaus Mann

Klaus Heinrich Thomas Mann (1906-1949) was a prolific writer, author of seven novels, six plays, four biographies, three autobiographies, many stories, reviews articles and essays. He was an openly gay man, who wrote the first gay novel and first gay autobiography in Germany. He was also an early and vociferous opponent of Nazism, both in Germany and as a political exile in Europe and the United States. The second of six children of Katia Pringsheim and novelist Thomas Mann and the nephew of Heinrich Mann, Klaus began writing as a child and, at 18, began reviewing theater in Berlin. His most famous book Mephisto, the barely disguised story of Erika’s erstwhile husband, theater actor and political opportunist Gustaf Gründgens, was written in 1936 but banned and relatively unknown in Germany until 1981. Mann wrote Kind dieser Zeit, an autobiography of his first 18 years, in Germany in November of 1932. He fled to Paris in March of 1933 and lived there and in Amsterdam before emigrating to the United States in the late 1930s. He wrote the second installment of his autobiography, The Turning Point — in English — between August 1941 and 1942 while a stateless refugee, waiting to become a US citizen in 1943. During World War II, he served with the US Army in Italy; afterward, he worked as a journalist for the military newspaper Stars and Stripes, writing over 90 articles about Germans in postwar-Germany. In May of 1949, he died of a drug overdose in the south of France.

George W. Martin

George Whitney Martin was born and raised in Manhattan. He attended various schools in New York City and New England. Between his junior and senior years at Harvard College, he took a year’s leave to work as a reporter for a newspaper in Lawton, Oklahoma where he realized that he wanted to write books, not be a journalist.

Martin attended law school on the GI Bill following his World War II naval service, practiced law for five years in a small Manhattan firm working on trusts, estates, and small corporations but then quit the law to write full time.

His books are about music (The Opera Companion: A Guide for the Casual Operagoer, Verdi: His Music, Life and Times, Twentieth Century Opera Guide), the law (Causes and Conflicts: The Centennial History of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, 1870-1970), history (The Red Shirt and the Cross of Savoy: The Story of Italy’s Risorgimento, 1748-1871) and biographies (The Damrosch Dynasty: America's First Family of Music, CCB: The Life and Century of Charles C. Burlingham, New York's First Citizen, 1858-1959, which won the Erwin N. Griswold Award from the US Supreme Court Historical Society in 2005 and Madam Secretary Frances Perkins). He has also contributed articles to many professional journals and magazines.

Jan Masaryk

Jan Garrigue Masaryk (1886-1948) was the third of four children in a prominent family in Prague. His father Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk would become the first president of the Czechoslovak Republic; his mother Charlotte was an American intellectual. After an unpromising adolescence and young adulthood, Jan Masaryk became one of the most popular diplomats in London and one of the most admired broadcasters of the Second World War. Untold thousands of Czechs risked their lives to listen to his program Volá Londýn (London Calling), a public and personal diary of 1939-44, as experienced by the Foreign Minister of the Czechoslovak government-in-exile in London. In 1945, Jan Masaryk returned to Prague and became part of the post-war government. He died shortly after the Communist putsch of 1948.

Melita Maschmann

Born in Berlin, Melita Maschmann (1918-2010) attended boarding school in Thuringia. She joined the BDM (Bund Deutscher Mädel, the Girls’ Section of the Hitler Youth) secretly in 1933 against the wishes of her parents who were conservative and nationalist, but not national-socialist. She worked for the Labor Service in East Prussia (1936-37), then as a journalist for the press section of the BDM (1937-41) in Frankfurt-an-der-Oder and in the Wartheland (German-occupied Poland). She was in charge of women’s Labor Service camps in Poland and Germany (1941-43) and responsible for the BDM’s press and propaganda division in Berlin (1943-45). She did war work, including preparation for “Werewolf” (S.S. sabotage) activities (1945) before the US Army captured her in Austria in July 1945 with a clandestine group manufacturing false documents for “comrades”. She was interned in the “Frauenlager 77” (internment camp for women) near Ludwigsburg, and later in Darmstadt until 1948. Denazification authorities considered her a “follower” (“indoctrinated” and too young to be fully responsible); Maschmann finally broke with National Socialism only in the 1950s.

After her release, Maschmann wrote for the Darmstädter Echo and the Frankfurter Rundschau. She travelled to Afghanistan and India in 1962-63 and moved permanently to India shortly thereafter, becoming a follower of Guru Sri Anandamayi Ma. In India, Maschmann lived mainly in her ashrams, and after Sri Anandamayi Ma’s death in 1982, worked in institutions for children. She returned to Darmstadt in 1998 due to Alzheimer’s disease and died in a retirement home. She was never married and had no children.

Account Rendered was first published in 1963 as Fazit: Kein Rechtfertigungsversuch (No attempt at justification), translated into several languages, and republished seven times in Germany where it became a required high school text. Maschmann also wrote fiction (Die Aschenspur, Der Dreizehnte, Das Wort Hiess Liebe) and books about Sri Anandamayi Ma and India (Der Tiger singt Kirtana, Indiras Schwestern, Eine ganz gewöhnliche Heilige).

Alpheus Thomas Mason

Alpheus Thomas Mason (1899-1989), McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence Emeritus at Princeton University, was born in a small farming and fishing village outside Snow Hill, Maryland. He received his BA from Dickinson College in 1920 and his PhD from Princeton University in 1923. After teaching at Trinity College (now Duke University), he joined the Princeton faculty in 1925 and became a full professor in 1936. After his retirement from Princeton in 1968, Professor Mason taught until 1980 at 15 institutions in the United States, Japan and Israel, including Harvard, Dartmouth, Barnard College, Johns Hopkins and the University of Virginia.

One of the country’s foremost judicial biographers, Professor Mason authored 22 books, including four volumes on Associate Justice Louis D. Brandeis, a study of Chief Justice Harlan F. Stone, one on Chief Justice William Howard Taft, and several on critical periods and issues in the history of the Supreme Court. His course in constitutional interpretation was voted several times by Princeton students as one of the school’s toughest courses.

His Brandeis, A Free Man’s Life sold over 50,000 copies and remained on the best-seller list for five months in 1947. His co-authored textbook, American Constitutional Law: Introductory Essays and Selected Cases, was first published in 1954 and remains popular over sixty years later in its 16th edition.

His Harlan Fiske Stone: Pillar of the Law earned the Francis Parkman Prize in history and the Liberty and Justice Award from the American Library Association, which called the book “the most distinguished book of 1956 in history and biography.”

Professor Mason was one of the few political scientists to hold a visiting membership at the Institute for Advanced Study in the 1930’s. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1963 and served as vice president of the American Political Science Association.

Jeffrey Mehlman

Born in New York City in 1944, Jeffrey Mehlman is a literary critic and a historian of ideas. He has taught at Cornell, Yale and Johns Hopkins, and is currently University Professor and Professor of French Literature at Boston University. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard, UC Berkeley, CUNY Graduate Center, Washington University and MIT.

His books include a memoir, Adventures in the French Trade: Fragments Toward a Life; A Structural Study of Autobiography: Proust, Leiris, Sartre, Lévi-Strauss; Legacies of Anti-Semitism in France; Walter Benjamin for Children: An Essay on His Radio Years; Genealogies of the Text: Literature, Psychoanalysis and Politics in Modern France and Émigré New York: French Intellectuals in Wartime Manhattan, 1940-1944.

He has translated works by Laplanche, Derrida, Lacan, Blanchot, Vidal-Naquet, Roudinesco and The Affair: The Case of Alfred Dreyfus by Jean-Denis Bredin. He has held Guggenheim and Fulbright Fellowships and was appointed Officier de l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques by the French government.

Albert Memmi

Albert Memmi (1920-2020) was born in Tunisia, the second of thirteen children of a poor, working-class Arabic-speaking Jewish family. He learned French in his Jewish elementary school and attended Lycée Carnot in Tunis. When the Nazis invaded Tunisia during World War II, he was unable to continue his studies and interned in a labor camp. He moved to Paris in 1945 where he met Germaine Dubach, a Catholic, whom he married in 1946. The couple moved back to Tunis, where two of their three children were born, and where Memmi taught high school philosophy and helped found a publication that would later become Jeune Afrique.

Memmi’s first book, the autobiographical novel The Pillar of Salt, appeared in 1953. After Tunisia became independent in 1956, Memmi — a prominent leftist and Jew — returned to Paris where he has lived ever since. During the Algerian war, he published The Colonizer and the Colonized with a preface by Jean-Paul Sartre, in 1957. Portrait of a Jew and The Liberation of the Jew were published by Gallimard in 1962 and 1966. Memmi became a French citizen in 1973. He taught at Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes and Université de Paris-Nanterre, received the Académie Française’s Grand Prix de la Francophonie and is a Doctor Honoris Causa of the Ben Gurion University of the Negev.

Kurt Mendelssohn

Born in Berlin, Kurt Mendelssohn (1906-1980) received his doctorate in physics from the University of Berlin in 1930, having studied under Max Planck, Walther Nernst, Erwin Schrödinger, and Albert Einstein. As the Nazis took over, he left Germany for Great Britain in March 1933 after F. A. Lindemann invited him to join the Clarendon Laboratory at Oxford University. He remained at Oxford, becoming Emeritus Reader in Physics and Emeritus Professorial Fellow of Wolfson College when he retired in 1973. His work focused on low-temperature and solid state physics, especially the properties of liquid helium, which he had been the first to produce in Britain in 1933. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1951. He received the Royal Society's Hughes Medal in 1967, and the Institute of Physics and Physical Society’s Simon Memorial Prize in 1968.

Robert A. Millikan

Born in Morrison, Illinois, Robert Andrews Millikan (1868-1953) played a major role in the development of physics and science in the United States for more than fifty years. He grew up in Iowa, earned his bachelor’s degree from Oberlin College in 1891 and his doctorate from Columbia University in 1895, and began his academic career at the University of Chicago. During World War I, Millikan was commissioned in the Army Signal Corps as a lieutenant colonel, and served as chairman of the National Research Council’s committees on physics, optical glass, and submarine investigations.

From 1921 to 1945, Millikan led the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) as director of the Norman Bridge Laboratory of Physics and chairman of the Executive Council — essentially as president, though he declined to use that title. Millikan believed that the modern world was basically a scientific invention, that science was the mainspring of the twentieth century, and that America’s future rested on promoting basic science and its applications.

His determination of the charge on the electron by the oil drop method and his verification of Einstein’s photoelectric equations — for which Millikan won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1923, the first awarded to a native-born American — together with his work on the numerical determination of Planck’s constant at the beginning of the 20th century secured Millikan’s place in the scientific community as a rigorous experimentalist aiming for higher and higher precision. In later years, he also studied cosmic rays, a term he coined.

The son of a Congregationalist minister, Millikan spoke and published frequently on the relationship between science and religion. Politically, Millikan was a Midwestern Republican and a fiscal conservative — he was against pro-union New Deal legislation, against federal funding of education and research except for military ends and anything that smacked of big government. Millikan was also widely known as the author, with Henry Gordon Gale, of a series of textbooks that were the mainstay of physics courses in the first half of the twentieth century. Several generations of Americans literally learned their physics from Millikan.

Walter Millis

Born in Atlanta, the son of an Army officer, Walter Millis (1899-1968) graduated from Yale University in 1920 after his studies had been interrupted by World War I, when he joined the Army and became a second lieutenant in the field artillery. He was an editorial writer at the Baltimore News (1920-23) and at the New York Sun and Globe (1923-24) and an editorial and staff writer at the New York Herald Tribune (1924-54). He also contributed many articles for the Saturday Review. He joined the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, established by the Ford Foundation, in 1954.

Millis’ books include Road to War: America 1914-1917, This is Pearl! The United States and Japan — 1941, Why Europe Fights, Viewed Without Alarm: Europe Today, Arms and Men: A Study of American Military History, The Martial Spirit: A Study of Our War with Spain and An End to Arms. He was the editor of The Forrestal Diaries.

Henry Morgenthau III

Born and raised on New York City’s Upper West Side, Henry Morgenthau III (1917-2018) attended Deerfield Academy and graduated from Princeton in 1939. He served in the US Army in Europe during World War II, rising to the rank of Captain, and receiving a Bronze Star.

From 1945, he worked in the television business as an author, producer and manager for large national institutions like NBC, CBS and ABC, and served as President of Gannaway-Morgenthau Productions, Inc. From 1955 until 1977, Morgenthau was a chief producer at WGBH in Boston. He produced several documentaries, including “The Negro and the American Promise” with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and James Baldwin; and “Prospects of Mankind” with Eleanor Roosevelt. His work won him national acclaim, including Emmy, Peabody, UPI, and other awards. He wrote for the Boston Globe, the Providence Journal, and the Brandeis Review, among other publications.

In his 70s, Morgenthau published Mostly Morgenthaus, a history of his family. At 95, he took up poetry as “a celebration of the evening of a long life,” and at 99 his first solo book of poetry, A Sunday in Purgatory, was published. On the eve of Morgenthau’s 100th birthday, Congressman Adam Schiff offered a tribute to his long career.

Frederic Morton

Born Fritz Mandelbaum in Vienna, Frederic Morton (1924-2015) fled to London with his family in 1939 after Hitler’s 1938 Anschluss of Austria and the family settled in New York, where Frederic’s father, who had owned a factory supplying belt buckles to the Austrian army, changed his last name to Morton to join an anti-Semitic union. Morton learned to be a baker in a trade school before earning a bachelor’s degree from City College of New York in 1947 and a master’s degree from the New School for Social Research in 1949; he also attended Columbia University.

Morton always wrote in English. His first novel was The Hound (1947) about a privileged youth in 1939 Vienna, followed by other novels including The Schatten Affair (1965) about a German-born American Jew who returns to Berlin as the publicist for a financier, Snow Gods (1969) about wealthy habitués of a resort in the Swiss Alps, An Unknown Woman (1976) about a brilliant orphan of Jewish immigrants who ascends to intellectual celebrity and financial riches, and The Forever Street (1984), a family saga set in Vienna over three generations until World War II.

His books of non-fiction include The Rothschilds (1962), a National Book Award finalist about the banking family turned into a musical in 1970 which ran for over 500 performances on Broadway; A Nervous Splendor: Vienna, 1888-1889 (1979) about the life of the city — including Freud, Mahler, Klimt, Schnitzler, Bruckner and Herzl — and the murder by Crown Prince Rudolf of his mistress and his suicide at Mayerling, also a National Book Award finalist turned into a musical staged in Budapest and Vienna; Thunder at Twilight: Vienna 1913-14 (1989) about the city as Europe heads toward World War I; and a memoir, Runaway Waltz (2005).

Morton also wrote for many publications, including Esquire, The Atlantic, Playboy, Harper’s, the Hudson Review and The New York Times. He received Austria’s Cross of Honor for Arts and Sciences in 2003.

Bruce Allen Murphy

Born and raised in Abington, Massachusetts, Bruce Allen Murphy graduated summa cum laude from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst in 1973 and received his Ph.D. in Government and Foreign Affairs from the University of Virginia in 1978. He taught Political Science and American History and Politics at Pennsylvania State University, and has been the Fred Morgan Kirby Professor of Civil Rights at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania since 1998.

Murphy’s books are The Brandeis-Frankfurter Connection: The Secret Political Activities of Two Supreme Court Justices, which describes the financial relationship between Justice Louis D. Brandeis and then-Harvard law professor Felix Frankfurter and their promotion of several political reforms; Fortas: The Rise and Ruin of a Supreme Court Justice, about Abe Fortas who resigned from the Supreme Court after his close political ties to President Lyndon B. Johnson and his financial relationship with Louis Wolfson, a potential litigant before the Court, came to light; Wild Bill: The Legend and Life of William O. Douglas, about the longest-serving Supreme Court justice in US history; and Scalia: A Court of One, which argues that Scalia’s Originalism theory and judicial conservatism was informed as much by his highly traditional Catholicism, as by his reading of the Constitution.

Murphy is also co-author of an American Government textbook, Approaching Democracy, and editor of a reader, Portraits of American Politics. Throughout his academic career, he has taught political science, history, and Constitutional law courses.

Robert Murphy

The son of a railroad worker, Robert Daniel Murphy (1894-1978), was born in Milwaukee, attended Marquette University and received a law degree from George Washington University in 1920. He began his career at the US Post Office (1916), moved to be a cipher clerk at the American legation in Bern, Switzerland (1917), was admitted to the US Foreign Service in 1921 and was posted as Vice-Consul in Zurich and Munich, Consul in Seville and Consul in Paris from 1930 to 1936 before becoming chargé d’affaires to the Vichy government.

At President Roosevelt’s request, Murphy investigated conditions in French North Africa in preparation for the November 1942 Allied landings, the first major Allied ground offensive during World War II. He was appointed the President’s personal representative with the rank of Minister to French North Africa. Murphy made contact in Algiers with various French army officers including Giraud and Darlan, and recruited them to support the Allies’ invasion of French North Africa.

With his British counterpart, future Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, Murphy worked to ensure that following the January 1943 Casablanca Conference, Giraud and de Gaulle would unite the French among the Allies. Murphy stayed with Eisenhower’s staff as the principal civilian representative of the President and the State Department with the Allied command in Italy in 1943. In 1948, Murphy was advisor to General Lucius Clay, American military governor in Germany, during the Soviet blockade of Berlin, and the Berlin airlift. He later was American ambassador in Belgium (1949) and in Japan (1952), Deputy Under Secretary, and later Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs.

After Murphy retired from the State Department in 1959, he was an adviser to Presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon. He served on President Ford’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. He was chairman of Corning Glass International and a director of the Corning Glass Works. He received the Distinguished Service Medal and several foreign honors, including the French Croix de Guerre with palm, the Belgian Order of Leopold, the Japanese Order of the Rising Sun, the German Order of Merit and the Spanish Order of Isabella.

Steven Neuse

Born in San Antonio, Texas, Steven Neuse (1941-2017) grew up in New Braunfels, Texas, and received a Ph.D. in political science from University of Texas, Austin in 1976. He taught at University of Texas, El Paso, and at University of Tennessee, Knoxville before joining the faculty at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville in 1981, where he taught until his retirement in 2001. Along with teaching and research, Neuse served as the chair of the department of political science from 1998 to 2001 and the director of public administration from 1981 to 1990. He was president of the Arkansas Political Science Association from 1990 to 1991 and co-founded the Arkansas Public Administration Consortium, which provides training and certificate programs for public managers and volunteer managers.

Sheldon Novick

Born in New York City in 1941, Sheldon Novick graduated from the Bronx High School of Science, Antioch College, and Washington University School of Law in St. Louis. He was editor of Environment Magazine and wrote books and articles on environmental subjects (The Careless Atom had the first public account of the “China Syndrome”) before leaving St. Louis in 1977 to practice law in New York City, Philadelphia and Washington, DC. For six years he was a regional counsel for the US Environmental Protection Agency. In 1987, he moved to Vermont and started a new career as an author and teacher. He continues to teach at Vermont Law School as Adjunct Professor of Law and History.

Honorable Justice: The Life of Oliver Wendell Holmes was the first full biography of Holmes based on unrestricted access to the Holmes papers. Published in 1989, it received the American Bar Association’s Silver Gavel Award, and was short-listed for the National Book Critics Circle Award. After the biography appeared, Novick was invited to prepare the quasi-official Collected Works of Justice Holmes published by the Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise and the University of Chicago Press.

His biography of Holmes’s friend and rival, the novelist Henry James, was published in two volumes, Henry James: The Young Master (1997) and Henry James: The Mature Master (2007).

John Kennedy Ohl

Born in Brackenridge, Pennsylvania to a steelworker and a nurse, John Kennedy Ohl (1942-2011) received a BS in Education from Slippery Rock State College, an MA from Duquesne University, an MS in Library Science from the University of Kentucky and a PhD from the University of Cincinnati where he was assistant professor of history in 1971-72 before teaching at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio (1972-73) and at Mesa Community College in Mesa, Arizona as professor of history for 30 years, from 1976 until his retirement. Ohl's area of interest was the US Army during the period encompassing World Wars I and II. He authored countless articles, essays, book reviews, and three historical biographies, Hugh S. Johnson and the New Deal, Supplying the Troops: General Somervell and American Logistics in World War II, and Minuteman: The Military Career of General Robert S. Beightler.

Paul Ornstein

Paul Ornstein (1924-2017) was born in Hajdúnánás, Hungary and educated at the Franz Josef Rabbinical Seminary in Budapest, where he discovered psychoanalysis. After surviving the Shoah in Hungary, he received his degree in medicine from the University of Heidelberg, then emigrated to the United States and became a leading figure in psychoanalytic self-psychology. Dr. Ornstein is a graduate of the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, an Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis at the University of Cincinnati Medical School, and a Supervising Analyst at the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute. He co-authored Focal Psychotherapy: An Example of Applied Psychoanalysis with Michael and Enid Balint and edited The Search for the Self: selected writings of Heinz Kohut.

Richard J. Overy

Richard Overy is Honorary Research Professor at the University of Exeter, UK, where he taught for sixteen years. From 1980 to 2004 he was lecturer, then professor at King’s College London. Educated at Caius College, Cambridge, he completed his doctorate in 1976, while teaching as an assistant lecturer. He has written extensively on the history of air power, World War II, the German and Soviet dictatorships and modern British history. Among his 33 books are The Air War, 1939-1945 (1980), The Road to War (1989), Why the Allies Won (1995), Russia’s War (1997), The Dictators (2004) which won the Wolfson Prize, and The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945 (2013) which won a Cundill Award for Historical Literature. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and a Member of the European Academy for Sciences and Arts. In 2001 he was awarded the Samuel Eliot Morison Prize by the Society for Military History, and in 2010 the James Doolittle Award for a lifetime’s work on air power. He is currently writing Blood and Ruins: A History of the Second World War, for publication in 2021.

Tina Packer

Tina Packer is Founding Artistic Director of Shakespeare & Company, in Lenox, Massachusetts, an internationally acclaimed theatrical performance, training and education company, where she directed over 50 productions and acted in many more.

As a young English actress, she trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, where she won the Ronson Award for Most Outstanding Performer, was an associate artist with the Royal Shakespeare Company, performed in the West End, and acted with repertory companies in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Leicester, and Coventry.

Her book, Power Plays: Shakespeare’s Lessons in Leadership & Management, was published in 2001. Her children's book Tales from Shakespeare was published in 2004. Along with acting, lecturing, directing, and writing, Tina continues to spearhead the international effort to reconstruct a historically accurate 1587 Rose Playhouse, where Shakespeare’s plays were first performed, in Lenox, Massachusetts.

Yoel Palgi

Born in Cluj, Transylvania, Yoel Palgi (1918-1978) emigrated to Palestine in 1939 where he helped found Kibbutz Maagan. In 1944, with Hanna Szenes he was part of a group that parachuted into Hungary and Yugoslavia in an attempt to save Jews. After the World War II rescue mission, Palgi established and commanded Israel’s first paratrooper unit during the War of Independence. He was one of the founders of El Al, Israel’s national airline, of which he was deputy director from 1949-60. He headed El Al’s airlift of 200,000 Jews from Muslim countries to Israel. Palgi later served as ambassador to Tanzania and as director of construction for Kupat Holim, the Histadrut’s health insurance fund. He is buried in the Military Cemetery for Heroes in Jerusalem along with Hannah Szenes and other fallen members of the 1944 mission.

Joseph E. Persico

Born in Gloversville, New York, Joseph Edward Persico (1930-2014) received a BA in English and Political Science from the New York State College for Teachers (now SUNY-Albany) in 1952 before spending 3 years in the US Navy, where he served as a Lieutenant on a minesweeper and worked at NATO Headquarters in Naples, Italy. He then worked for Governor W. Averell Harriman as a writer and researcher. In 1960, Persico joined the United States Information Agency (USIA) working in Argentina, Brazil, and Washington DC. During 1963-66, he was Executive Assistant to the New York State Health Commissioner and in 1966 became chief speechwriter for New York Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller, remaining Rockefeller’s main speechwriter throughout his Vice Presidency.

In 1977, after Rockefeller’s tenure ended, Persico published My Enemy My Brother: Men and Days of Gettysburg, a nonfiction book about the Civil War. In 1979, he published The Spiderweb, a novel, and Piercing the Reich: The Penetration of Nazi Germany by American Secret Agents During World War II, a nonfiction study, and in 1982, The Imperial Rockefeller, a biography of his former employer, followed by a biography of Edward R. Murrow. In 1995, he co-wrote Colin L. Powell’s autobiography My American Journey. Throughout the 1990s, Persico published Casey: From the OSS to the CIA and Nuremberg: Infamy on Trial, which became a television docudrama, and wrote numerous articles on American history. In 2001, he published Roosevelt’s Secret War: FDR and World War II Espionage and in 2004, Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour: Armistice Day, 1918, World War I and Its Violent Climax. His last book, Roosevelt’s Centurions, appeared in 2013.

Frederik Philips

Born in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, Frederik Jacques Philips (1905-2005) graduated in mechanical engineering from Delft University of Technology in 1929. At the age of 25 he joined N.V. Philips, the Dutch company founded by his uncle Gerard and his father Anton which had grown into the European market leader for lighting and radio. His first job was works engineer in the Philite factory; he was then put in charge of the Eindhoven Machine Factory and subsequently of all machine shops. Later, he led departments developing products outside Philips’s core business (at the time, radio receivers and lamps), including electro-acoustical, welding and lighting products (gas discharge lamps, such as sodium and mercury vapor lamps). In 1936 he became deputy manager and in 1939, manager. Frederik Philips was one of four members of the Board managing the firm during the German occupation. During those difficult years the management of the company in occupied Europe rested on his shoulders. Frederik Philips became vice-chairman of the Presidium and of the Board of Management when both bodies were set up in 1946.

He then headed Philips from 1961 until 1971, one of the company’s most successful periods: Philips employed over 350,000 employees worldwide and was a leading manufacturer of consumer electronics, medical devices and lighting. Philips’ in-house research lab, a novelty when it was established in 1914, invented the electric rotary razor, cassette tape, and together with Sony, the CD and DVD. Throughout his life, Frederik Philips was a major advocate for the development of medical equipment. After transforming the consumer electronics market for decades, Philips did the same in the medical field.

Ahead of his time, Frederik Philips believed in and practiced socially responsible management. He wanted Philips to take care of all parties involved, shareholders, suppliers, employees and customers. From 1929 onwards, Frederik Philips was a committed Protestant member of Moral Re-Armament (MRA) or Oxford Group, an international movement based on religious core values. In business, MRA strived for close cooperation and mutual respect between employers and employees. In 1986, Frederik Philips launched the Caux Round Table (CRT) group of senior European, Japanese and American business executives. The CRT’s Principles for Business was presented to the UN Social Summit in Copenhagen in 1994. It has since become a standard text and has been used as the basis for internal ethical assessments by international companies.

Frederik Philips received numerous awards, including honorary citizenship of Eindhoven and Hasselt (Belgium), honorary doctorates from the universities of Louvain and Taipei and honorary titles in Japan, France, Germany, India and elsewhere. In 1995 Frederik Philips was honored as “Righteous Among the Nations” by Yad Vashem in Israel, for saving the lives of 382 Jewish employees of Philips during World War II. His Autobiography 45 Years with Philips covers the highlights of his personal and professional life.

Forrest C. Pogue

Born in Eddyville, Kentucky, Forrest Carlisle Pogue Jr. (1912-1996) attended Murray State College in Oklahoma, received his master's degree from the University of Kentucky, and a doctorate from Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1939. Pogue worked at Murray State, teaching history from June 1933 to May 1942, was drafted into the Army in 1942 and promoted to sergeant. After basic training, he was reassigned to a historical unit and made responsible for writing a history of the Second United States Army; in 1944 he was sent to England and to Normandy where he interviewed wounded soldiers over a period of eleven months; he was present at the Battle of the Bulge. For his work, he was awarded the Bronze Star Medal and Croix de Guerre. He was discharged in October 1945, and hired as a civilian, with the pay of a colonel.

Pogue was first assigned to write a history of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force from 1945 to 1946. In July he was assigned by Dwight D. Eisenhower to write an official history of the Supreme Command in Europe, for which he interviewed Dwight D. Eisenhower, Omar Bradley, Charles de Gaulle, Alan Brooke and others. Pogue then spent seven years as a military historian, and two years conducting operations research at United States Army Garrison Heidelberg with the Operations Research Office at Johns Hopkins University. He contributed to The Meaning of Yalta among several other books, returning to Murray State in 1954.

In 1956, Pogue was hired by the George C. Marshall Foundation to write the official biography of George C. Marshall in four volumes on which he worked from 1963 to 1987. He became director of the Marshall Foundation in 1956, leaving in 1974 to become director of the Eisenhower Institute for Historical Research. Pogue retired in 1984. He served as a guest lecturer at George Washington University and the United States Army War College, held the Mary Moody Northen chair in Arts and Sciences at Virginia Military Institute in 1972. Pogue was on the Advisory boards for the Office of Naval History, the Naval Historical Office, the United States Army Center of Military History, the Air Force Historical Research Agency, president of the Oral History Association and the American Military Institute and other organizations. The Pogue Library at Murray State is named after him.

Susan Quinn

Susan Quinn grew up in Ohio and graduated from Oberlin College. Her biography, Marie Curie: A Life, won the Prix Littéraire des Lectrices de Elle in France, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times book award, and was shortlisted for the Fawcett Book Prize in England. Marie Curie has been translated into eight languages.

Her previous biography, A Mind of Her Own: The Life of Karen Horney, won the Boston Globe’s Winship Prize. Susan Quinn, the recipient of numerous awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Rockefeller Foundation residency, is also the author of Human Trials: Scientists, Investors and Patients in the Quest for a Cure (2001) and Furious Improvisation: How the WPA and a Cast of Thousands Made High Art Out of Desperate Times (2008). She lives in Brookline, Massachusetts. (photo: Barry Goldstein)

Santha Rama Rau

Santha Rama Rau (1923-2009) was the first widely-read female South Asian writer in the United States. Born in Madras, India, into an elite Indian family — her father, a high-ranking civil servant, became ambassador to Japan and the United States, and her mother was a founder of International Planned Parenthood —, she grew up in India, Great Britain, and South Africa and made the unusual choice of attending college in the United States rather than in England. She became Wellesley College’s first graduate from India. Between 1945 and 1970, she worked as a journalist for publications as varied as the New Yorker and the Reader’s Digest, writing mainly travel stories from Asia, Africa and the former Soviet Union. Many were collected as East of Home (1950), View to the Southeast (1957) and My Russian Journey (1959). Santha Rama Rau also wrote an autobiography, Gifts of Passage (1961), several novels, and adapted the E. M. Forster novel A Passage to India for Broadway and the London stage.

Gus Rancatore

Born in Staten Island, New York, Gus Rancatore came to Boston to finish college, and never did.

Instead, he blundered into the ice cream business, and founded Toscanini’s Ice Cream in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1981. The store is now a local institution with an international clientele. (photo: Michelle McDonald)

Patricia Rife

Patricia Rife-Beavers is Adjunct Faculty Member and Senior Instructional Designer at the University of Maryland University College Graduate School, where she teaches project management, risk probabilities, and managerial communications. Her research on the life and times of Lise Meitner, Albert Einstein and the “dawn of the nuclear age” spans three continents, and her Ph.D. (Union Institute and University, 1983) and post-doctoral archival research was in the Nobel Prize Swedish Academy of Sciences archives and Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden and Churchill College archives at Cambridge University. She also conducted interviews documenting the memories of Holocaust survivors in Norway, Denmark, Israel, Germany and the US.

Rife presented the rare historical photos she collected during her archival research in a popular public lecture entitled “Einstein, Ethics and the Bomb” worldwide. For six years, Rife was a Professor in the University of Hawaii-Manoa’s Senator Matsunaga Institute for Peace, where she developed interdisciplinary courses on biography and conflict resolution.

As the Internet developed, Rife shifted to online education and was a pioneer in online training, starting and managing two businesses, “Grants Plus” and “Writers Express”. She has mentored many women in IT management and science/technical careers, is a volunteer Instructor for the American Red Cross, an ordained Christian minister, and enjoys creative writing.

John Rigden

John S. Rigden received his B.S. from Eastern Nazarene College in Quincy, Massachusetts, his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins and completed a post-doctoral fellowship at Harvard. He has taught at Eastern Nazarene College and Middlebury College.

Rigden has been dedicated to presenting the ideas and events of physics clearly in books, lectures, and editorials for general readers. He is the author of Rabi: Scientist and Citizen, Einstein, 1905: The Standard of Greatness, Physics and the Sound of Music and Hydrogen: The Essential Element, and was editor-in-chief of the Macmillan Encyclopedia of Physics and Building Blocks of Matter: A Supplement to Encyclopedia of Physics. He directed Physics Programs at the American Institute of Physics, was professor of physics at the University of Missouri St Louis, and served as editor of the American Journal of Physics and co-editor of Physics in Perspective.

Rigden was awarded the 2008 Andrew Gemant Award from the American Institute of Physics, the Robert A. Millikan Award from the American Association of Physics Teachers, and an honorary Doctor of Science from Denison University. He is an Honorary Professor of Physics at Washington University in St Louis.

Michael Riordan

Michael Riordan, a physicist and historian of physics and technology, earned his PhD in physics in 1973 from MIT, where he worked as a graduate student and postdoctoral researcher on the team credited with the discovery of quarks. He pursued research in experimental high-energy physics at the University of Rochester and at SLAC in the 1980s, before taking up the history of physics and technology during the 1990s. He taught this history as Adjunct Professor of Physics at University of California-Santa Cruz and Lecturer in the Department of History at Stanford University.

Riordan’s books include The Hunting of the Quark, for which he won the 1988 Science Communication Award of the American Institute of Physics (AIP); with Lillian Hoddeson, Crystal Fire: The Birth of the Information Age, a definitive history of the invention of the transistor which won the inaugural Sally Hacker Prize of the Society for the History of Technology in 1999; with Bruce Anderson, The Solar Home Book: Heating, Cooling and Designing with the Sun; and with David N. Schramm, The Shadows of Creation: Dark Matter and the Structure of the Universe. Riordan was also an editor of The Rise of the Standard Model: Particle Physics in the 1960s and 1970s.

His articles, essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, San Diego Union, Newark Star-Ledger, Seattle Times, American Scientist, Harvard Business Review, New Scientist, Physics Today, Physics World, Science, Scientific American, and Technology Review.

A Fellow of the American Physical Society, Riordan served on its governing council and as the Chair of its Forum on the History of Physics. He led a group of scholars who wrote Tunnel Visions: The Rise and Fall of the Superconducting Super Collider. In connection with research for this book, he was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in 1999. In recognition of his achievements in communicating modern physics and its relationship to the wider culture, Riordan received the Andrew W. Gemant Award in 2002 from AIP.

Harlow Robinson

Harlow Robinson is an author, lecturer and Matthews Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of History at Northeastern University, where he also served as Chair of the Department of Modern Languages and of the Department of History. He received his B.A. in Russian from Yale University, and M.A. and Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures from the University of California, Berkeley. His books include Russians in Hollywood, Hollywood’s Russians, Sergei Prokofiev: A Biography, Selected Letters of Sergei Prokofiev and The Last Impresario: The Life, Times and Legacy of Sol Hurok. His articles, essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, Opera News, Opera Quarterly, Opera, Musical America, San Francisco Chronicle, Stagebill and other publications.

As a lecturer, he has appeared at The Boston Symphony, Lincoln Center, New York Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, Aspen Music Festival, Bard Festival, Carnegie Hall, Rotterdam Philharmonic, Metropolitan Opera Guild, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Guggenheim Museum, Boston Lyric Opera, Los Angeles Music Center Opera, Harvard University, Columbia University and Cornell University, among others. He has contributed radio commentary to NPR, WGBH, WNYC, the Metropolitan Opera Saturday Matinee Broadcasts and Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and television programming for NPR (Soviet Television Tonight). For Lincoln Center, the Boston Symphony, the San Francisco Symphony and Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center he has consulted on special events and festivals.

The recipient of fellowships and grants from the Fulbright Foundation, American Council of Learned Societies, IREX, and the Whiting Foundation, Robinson was named in 2010 an Academy Film Scholar by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for a biography of director Lewis Milestone, which will appear in 2019. He has made more than 25 research trips to the USSR and Russian Federation, beginning in 1970. As an undergraduate at Yale, he sang in the Yale Russian Chorus and organized the group’s tour to the USSR in 1971.

Theodore Ropp

Born into an Amish family in Illinois, Theodore Ropp (1911-2000) graduated from Oberlin College in 1934 with a BA in history and in 1937 from Harvard University with a PhD, also in history. Faculty mentors who shaped his views of and approach to the study of war included Frederick B. Artz at Oberlin and William L. Langer at Harvard. After spending a year teaching at Harvard, Ropp moved to Duke University in 1938 where he taught and wrote until his retirement in 1980.

Ropp’s decision to become a military historian and his approach to studying global conflict were deeply influenced by the world of his youth. Having surely heard the horror stories about life on the Western Front in World War I from Frederick B. Artz, he became a member of the Oberlin Peace Society and served as its President in 1934. Like many of his contemporaries, his optimism about establishing a peaceful treaty-based post-World War I world began to wane. His faith in international agreements was replaced after World War II by the view that only the fear of mutual self-destruction by leaders of the two Cold War superpowers could stave off the future catastrophic use of nuclear weapons.

The publication in 1959 of War in the Modern World, with its broad sociologically and technologically based approach to the subject, increased interest in Ropp’s work among scholars and military professionals. As a result, Ropp trained a generation of graduate students at Duke and was invited to teach at several military academies, including the US Naval War College, US Army War College, US Military Academy, National Military College (Singapore) and Royal Military College (Australia).

Following his retirement in 1980, Ropp remained active at Duke and in the academic life of his former students. As an emeritus professor, he was chosen in 1984 to serve as Duke’s first Ombudsman. In 1987, his Harvard doctoral dissertation, The Development of a Modern Navy: French Naval Policy, 1871-1904, was published by the Naval Institute Press. Ropp died in Durham, North Carolina.

Charles E. Rosenberg

Born in New York City in 1936, Charles Ernest Rosenberg graduated with a B.A. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1956 and received his M.A. and PhD degrees from Columbia University in 1957 and 1961. He taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison from 1961 until 1963 when he joined the University of Pennsylvania’s faculty, becoming a professor in 1968; he chaired the Department of History in 1974-75 and 1979-83, and the Department of History and Sociology of Science in 1991-95. In 2001, he moved to Harvard University where he has been Professor of the History of Science and Ernest E. Monrad Professor in the Social Sciences. He is now emeritus. Rosenberg was acting chairman of Harvard’s history of science department in 2003–2004.

Rosenberg has written widely on the history of medicine and science; his books include Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849, and 1866, The Trial of the Assassin Guiteau: Psychiatry and Law in the Gilded Age, No Other Gods: On Science and American Social Thought, The Care of Strangers: The Rise of America’s Hospital System, Explaining Epidemics and Our Present Complaint: American Medicine, Then and Now.

He received the William H. Welch Medal of the American Association for the History of Medicine (AAHM) and the George Sarton Medal (for lifetime achievement) from the History of Science Society. He has served as president of the AAHM, of the Society for the Social History of Medicine (UK), on the executive board of the Organization of American Historians and on the council of the History of Science Society and of the AAHM. He has been awarded fellowships by the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation.

Samuel I. Rosenman

Born in San Antonio, Texas, the only child of Russian-Ukrainian immigrants to be born in the New World, Samuel Irving Rosenman (1896-1973) attended public schools in New York City, City College, and Columbia University, graduating Phi Beta Kappa in 1915. He graduated again Phi Beta Kappa from Columbia Law School in 1919, having served in the US Army during World War I. While providing volunteer legal aid at the local Tammany Hall clubhouse, he was picked to run for the New York State Legislature where he served for five years as State Representative before being appointed one of two New York State Legislative Bill Drafting Commissioners.

Running for Governor in 1928, FDR called on Rosenman to help him prepare speeches on State issues. Governor Roosevelt then appointed Rosenman his counsel and their close friendship and work association would continue unbroken for 17 years. Rosenman was FDR’s counsel in initiating reforms during his two terms as Governor of New York State and formed the Brain Trust that would bring these programs to the federal Government. At Rosenman’s request, FDR had appointed him to the New York State Court, lamenting that he was thereby “cutting off his right arm.” While serving on the bench, Rosenman nevertheless continued to lead FDR’s speechwriting teams during his four Presidential campaigns, helping draft speeches that shaped the policies of the New Deal — a term Rosenman coined — and prepared the country for war.

Rosenman served on the Executive Committee of the American Jewish Committee, which raised funds for relief and sought national unity as the response to antisemitism at home and abroad.

In 1940, Rosenman’s duties expanded to manage, as FDR’s unofficial counsel, the reorganization of wartime bureaus to promote efficiency, most notably in the areas of military supply and production, government housing, manpower management, and control of inflation. Working two full-time jobs and commuting between New York and Washington DC led to Rosenman’s hospitalization in 1943 and thereafter he had to choose just one career. He resigned from the state court to become the first Counsel to the President, a position specially created for Rosenman whose responsibilities would later include assessing conditions in Europe at war’s end (leading up to the Marshall Plan) and convincing the Allies to agree to the Nuremberg Nazi war trials.

In the midst of crises, FDR could relax with Rosenman who, with his wife Dorothy, were close friends with Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. After FDR’s death, Rosenman continued as White House Counsel to President Truman, transitioning New Deal programs to Truman’s “Fair Deal.” Later he was a New York City lawyer and President of the City Bar Association.

Working with Roosevelt is a memoir of Rosenman’s close association with FDR, detailing the process of crafting speeches and how the President operated. It includes revealing anecdotes and observations, especially with respect to FDR’s four Presidential campaigns. It is quoted frequently in histories of the New Deal and FDR’s war years, and is highly regarded as an uncommonly fair and objective memoir of service during America’s “rendezvous with destiny.”

Frederick Rudolph

Born in Baltimore, Frederick Rudolph (1920-2013) grew up in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, graduated from Wyoming Seminary in 1938, received his BA from William College in 1942 and served as a captain in the US Army (1942-1946). His 1953 PhD thesis at Yale became the book Mark Hopkins and The Log, which looked at Williams College, at colleges and universities in general, and at the social and political history of the 19th century. In 1951 Rudolph joined the History Department of William College where he developed what became the American Studies Program, which he chaired during 1971-1980, created the African-American History Program, and where he became Mark Hopkins Professor of History Emeritus.

Rudolph was a Guggenheim Fellow (1958-1959 and 1962-1963); director, United World College of American West; member, National Academy of Education, Massachusetts Historical Society, American Historical Association, Organization of American Historians, American Association of University Professors; trustee at Hancock Shaker Village and of the Bennington Museum; and founding member of the Berkshire County Historical Society.

His books include The American College and University: A History, Curriculum: A History of the American Undergraduate Course of Study Since 1636, Essays on Education in the Early Republic and Perspectives: A Williams Anthology. Rudolph received the Frederick W. Ness Award from the Association of American Colleges, the Rogerson Cup from Williams College and the Distinguished Service Award from Wyoming Seminary. Williams College awarded him a Bicentennial Medal and one of his several honorary degrees. In recognition of his impact, the class of 1965 established the Frederick Rudolph ‘42 Professorship of American Culture.

Peter Salins

Born in Berlin, Germany in 1938, Peter Daniel Salins immigrated to New York as an infant and spent most of his childhood years in the city’s New Jersey suburbs. He earned degrees in architecture and urban planning from Syracuse University, and after practicing architecture in Cambridge, Massachusetts for some years, returned to Syracuse to earn a doctorate in metropolitan studies in 1969. Salins then embarked on an academic career as professor of urban planning and policy and as an academic administrator.

In 1968, Salins joined the urban planning faculty of Hunter College of the City University of New York, becoming chairman of the department in 1973. In 1997, Salins was appointed Provost and Vice Chancellor of Academic Affairs of the State University of New York System, a position he held until 2006, when he was appointed University Professor of Political Science at Stony Brook University, where he has been administering and teaching in its graduate public policy program.

Salins wrote and edited six books, including Assimilation, American Style, and numerous articles, monographs and opinion pieces. He has appeared frequently on radio and television in discussions of immigration, housing policy and the economic and social future of American cities, with a particular focus on New York City. Assimilation, American Style cuts across all of these policy issues, because the success of New York and most other American metropolitan areas has always depended on the successful integration of immigrants into their economic and social fabric. Salins has been an editor of the Journal of the American Planning Association and of City Journal.

Junius Scales and Richard Nickson

Junius Irving Scales (1920-2002) was born into a wealthy North Carolina family on March 26, 1920. He read omnivorously in his father’s enormous library in the family home, near Greensboro, North Carolina and, later, in the Intimate Bookshop in Chapel Hill, when the family moved to that university town. There he became acquainted with the leaders and thinkers of the Communist movement and decided to commit himself to battling injustice and inequality. He had grown up with deep respect for the Negro servants and staff at his home and never tolerated racial segregation. He befriended the President of Bennett College, the historically Black women’s college in Greensboro and frequented his wife’s salon. He joined the Communist Party on his 19th birthday, March 26, 1939.

Junius served in the United States armed forces during the war. When he returned to university, he found a changed party and a changed society. The Communist Party eventually came under attack from forces within the FBI and the Congress. Junius was on the most wanted list from 1951 until his arrest in 1954 and then was on trial with appeals and retrial and further appeals until 1961. The Supreme Court decided 5-4, upholding the lower court and so he went to prison. He served 15 months of a six-year sentence and was released by President Kennedy in 1962, but never pardoned.

Richard Nickson (1917-2012) became a life-long friend of Junius on the campus of UNC, Chapel Hill. A professor of English Literature at William Paterson in New Jersey, Nickson was president of the Bernard Shaw Society, editor of The Independent Shavian and poet, whose Staves: A Book of Songs has been rendered by composers and singers across the country. He wrote numerous documentaries but was most proud of helping Junius finally tell his story.

William Schack
William Schack (1898-1988) was born in New York City and became a cultural journalist and reviewer of Yiddish theater. He wrote for The New York Times, Commentary Magazine and Midstream. His biography of the American artist Louis M. Eilshemius, And He Sat Among the Ashes, was published in 1939. Art and Argyrol was originally published in 1960. Schack’s papers are at the Archives of American Art.

Bertram Schaffner

Born and raised in Erie, Pennsylvania, Bertram H. Schaffner (1912-2010) began his university studies at Harvard at age 15, transferred to the Honors Program at Swarthmore College, graduating in 1932 and completed his medical education at Johns Hopkins in 1937. Following a residency at New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital and further training at Bellevue Hospital and the New York State Psychiatric Hospital, Schaffner served with the US Army, evaluating the mental fitness of draftees and then with the 10th Armored Division as a neuropsychiatrist (seeing active combat during the Battle of the Bulge). At war’s end, he served at the Nuremberg trials and then with the American Military Government on the denazification process, which lead to the publication of his book Father Land in 1948.

Back in New York City, Schaffner further trained at the William Alanson White Institute with which he remained associated for most of his career as a psychiatrist, teacher and adviser. He promoted mental health initiatives in the Caribbean, serving on the Expert Committee for Mental Health of the United Nations, advising the British, French and Dutch island governments in the West Indies on their mental health programs.

In his 60s Schaffner revealed that he was gay. In his psychiatric practice, he was a leader in the study of the problems of homosexual medical practitioners; he was one of the first doctors to treat AIDS patients, advocating for more humane treatment for them; from the 1980s on, he dedicated much of his professional efforts to helping AIDS patients and their health care providers. In 2001, the Journal of Gay and Lesbian Psychotherapy recognized him as a leader who has made a major impact on the treatment of homosexuals and the work of gay therapists.

Schaffner was a collector of Indian art, an interest spurred by his participation in a 1966 Brooklyn Museum trip to India, where he often returned. Schaffner was a major donor to the Brooklyn Museum and served on its Collections Committee.

Simon Schama

Born in 1945 in London, Simon Schama attended the private Haberdashers’ Aske’s Boys’ School on a scholarship and studied history at Christ’s College, Cambridge, graduating from the University of Cambridge with a Starred First in 1966. He taught history at Christ’s College, Cambridge University (1966-76) and at Oxford University (1976-80) and worked at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris before moving to the US at Harvard University where he was Erasmus Lecturer in the Civilization of the Netherlands (1978), Professor of History, Mellon Professor of Social Sciences and senior associate at the Center for European Studies (1980-93). He moved to Columbia University in 1994 where he is University Professor of History and Art History, specializing in art, Dutch, Jewish and French history. He was an art critic for the New Yorker (1995-98).

Schama’s first book, Patriots and Liberators: Revolution in the Netherlands, 1780-1813, won the Wolfson Literary Prize for History in 1977. His other books include Two Rothschilds and the Land of Israel, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age, The Story of the Jews, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution, A History of Britain and The Power of Art. He has created highly successful TV series for the BBC and for PBS.

Anne Gruner Schlumberger

Anne Gruner Schlumberger (1905-1993), a French philanthropist and patron of the arts and science, was the daughter of Conrad Schlumberger, who with his brother Marcel Schlumberger, founded the oil exploration company Schlumberger Ltd. Conrad and Marcel’s father, Paul Schlumberger, was an Alsatian textile manufacturer.

Anne Gruner Schlumberger’s first husband, Henri George Doll, joined Conrad and Marcel in 1926 and became a leader in the development of oil well logging and a key technical executive of Schlumberger Ltd. Her sisters, Dominique de Ménil and Sylvie Boissonnas, were also married to Schlumberger Ltd. executives.

Anne Gruner Schlumberger supported the arts, literature and science through many sponsorship activities, encouraging creativity in all its forms. She established the Fondation des Treilles and set up the very first children’s only library near Paris in 1965 before establishing over twenty libraries in rural areas of Greece.

Vlasta Schönová

Vlasta Schönová (1919-2001) or Vava was the third of four daughters of Solomon and Magdalena Schön. Following in her mother’s footsteps, she became an actress and began her career just before the Nazis occupied Czechoslovakia. For a while, she was able to continue acting by passing as a non-Jew. After she and her family were deported to Terezín, she performed, directed and wrote plays as a prisoner.

Theater was her passion since childhood, she writes. It invested her life with meaning and kept her alive, even in the Theresienstadt Ghetto where she was one of the only artists who was not eventually transported east for extermination. After liberation by the Soviet Army in 1945, Vava returned to Prague and resumed her career in Czech theater. After the Communist coup of 1948, she fled Czechoslovakia and settled in Israel. There she lived and worked in many different venues as the Israeli actress Nava Shean.

David Schoenbrun

Born in New York City, David Schoenbrun (1915-1988) graduated from City College in 1934 and taught high school French and Spanish before working as a free-lance writer on foreign affairs to later become one of America’s most distinguished and versatile journalists, noted for his radio and television broadcasts, lectures, articles and books. Schoenbrun went to Europe in 1941 with the War Information Office as editor of the Western European desk. After joining the US Army in 1943, he was assigned to General Eisenhower’s headquarters in Algiers in Military Intelligence and went into France in the 1944 Provence landings as a combat correspondent with the First French Army.

In 1947 Edward R. Murrow recruited Schoenbrun to CBS and appointed him chief Paris correspondent for CBS News. He reported the birth of the State of Israel and its war of independence in 1948. In 1961, Schoenbrun became CBS’s chief correspondent in Washington, where he reported on the Kennedy years. In 1964 he left CBS to write books and work in free-lance broadcasting, appearing nightly on Channel 11-TV (NY) and on network talk shows.

His eight books are As France Goes, The Three Lives of Charles de Gaulle, Vietnam: How We Got In; How To Get Out, Triumph in Paris: The Exploits of Benjamin Franklin, America Inside Out, Soldiers of the Night: The Story of the French Resistance and On and Off the Air: An Informal History of CBS News.

Schoenbrun was awarded France’s Palmes Littéraires, Croix de Guerre and Légion d’honneur with rank of Chevalier, the Overseas Press Club Award for Best Radio Reporting from Abroad (1953), Best Television Reporting from Abroad (1955), Best Book for As France Goes (1957), Best Magazine Article of the Year (1959) and the Alfred I. Dupont Award as Best Commentator of the Year (1960).

Claudio Segrè

Born in Palermo, Italy, Claudio G. Segrè (1937-1995) grew up in Los Alamos and in Berkeley. He attended Reed College, received a master’s degree in English from Stanford University, worked as a reporter for UPI and The Wall Street Journal and earned his doctorate in history from the University of California-Berkeley. Segrè, who specialized in Italian fascism, became professor of modern European history at the University of Texas at Austin.

His book, Italo Balbo: A Fascist Life, won the Italian Air Force Historical Association Prize and the Marraro Prize of the Society of Italian Historical Studies. Segrè’s numerous essays, short stories, humor pieces and articles appeared in American, British, Israeli and Italian publications. His memoir, Atoms, Bombs, and Eskimo Kisses: A Memoir of Father and Son, examines what it was like to be the son of physicist Emilio Segrè, who helped develop the atom bomb and won the Nobel prize in 1959.

Emilio Segrè

Born in Tivoli, Italy, Emilio Segrè (1905-1989) enrolled at the University of Rome in engineering but switched to physics, joining Enrico Fermi’s research students, a group known as the “Ragazzi di via Panisperna”, renowned for prolific pioneering work in nuclear physics. Segrè graduated in 1928, the first of Fermi’s students, and with the Rome group, participated in the discovery of slow neutrons. In 1937, as professor at the University of Palermo, he co-discovered technetium, the first artificially synthesized element that does not occur in nature.

In 1938, when Mussolini passed antisemitic laws barring Jews from university positions, Segrè was on a research visit at the University of California (Berkeley); he stayed there temporarily at the Radiation Laboratory, before receiving a permanent appointment. In 1940, Segrè and his colleagues discovered astatine and plutonium-239, subsequently used to make the atom bomb.

Fermi immigrated to the United States shortly after Segrè, and their collaboration continued. During 1943-46, Segrè led the Manhattan Project’s Radioactivity Group at Los Alamos. He was a professor of physics at UC Berkeley from 1946 until 1972. In 1959, he won the Nobel Prize in physics for the discovery of the antiproton, with Owen Chamberlain.

In addition to his scientific papers, Segrè wrote a biography of Fermi, Enrico Fermi: Physicist, his autobiography A Mind Always in Motion and two volumes on the history of physics, From Falling Bodies to Radio Waves and From X-rays to Quarks. His scientific books include Nuclei & Particles, still used today, and E. Fermi Collected Papers. An avid photographer, Segrè recorded events and people in the development of modern physics. He donated his collection of photos to the American Institute of Physics, which named it the Emilio Segrè Visual Archives in his honor.

Anita Shapira

Born in Warsaw, Poland in 1940, Anita Shapira arrived in Palestine in 1947, and grew up in Tel Aviv. She studied history and Jewish history at Tel Aviv University, earning her Ph.D. in 1974 under Professor Daniel Carpi. Her dissertation, “The Struggle for Hebrew Labor, 1929-1939,” indicated her interest in the history of the Labor Zionist movement, which was to be a continuing focus of her research. Shapira became an assistant professor at Tel Aviv University in 1969 and a full professor in 1985. She was dean of its Faculty of Humanities (1990-95), held the Ruben Merenfeld Chair for the Study of Zionism (1995-2009), was head of the Chaim Weizmann Institute for the Study of Zionism and Israel (2000-12), and was a director at the Israel Democracy Institute (2008-13).

Shapira also was a member of the Planning and Budgeting Commission of the Council for Higher Education in Israel (1985-89), chaired the board of Am Oved publishing house (1987-90), was president of the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture (2002–08) and has been a board member of the Zalman Shazar Institute since 1988. She founded the Yitzhak Rabin Center for Israel Studies and was its first director (1996–99). She is academic co-editor of Yale University Press’s biography series “Jewish Lives” and of the Journal of Israeli History, and served on the editorial board of the Jewish Review of Books.

Shapira’s books include a biography of Zionist socialist leader Berl Katznelson, which was so widely acclaimed when it appeared as the first academic biography published in Israel that Shapira became overnight a famous scholar in Israel; Land and Power: The Zionist Resort to Force, 1881-1948 and biographies of Palmach leader Yigal Allon, of the revered writer Yosef Hayyim Brenner, who was murdered by Arab assailants at the age of 40, and of David Ben Gurion; all were also published in English. She also wrote Israel: A History, a comprehensive book on the history of Israel. She won many prizes, including the Israel Prize in 2008. She was elected to the Israeli Academy of Science in 2021.

Zeev Sharef

Born in Czernowitz, Bukovina (Austria-Hungary, now Ukraine), Zeev Sharef (1906-1984) immigrated to Palestine in 1925 and started work as a laborer. He was a member of Poale Zion’s youth movement, and a founder of the “Socialist Youth” movement. During World War II he was a member of the Haganah command, and after the war, became Secretary of the Political Department of the Jewish Agency then led by David Ben Gurion, Chaim Weizmann, Moshe Sharett, Golda Meir and others.

In 1947 Sharef was appointed secretary of the Situation Committee, responsible for preparing the administrative blueprint for the new Jewish state and laying the groundwork and foundations for Israel’s government institutions after the end of the British Mandate in Palestine. He organized the Independence Declaration ceremony at the Tel Aviv Museum on May 14, 1948. After independence, he served as cabinet secretary of Israel’s government until 1957 when he became Commissioner for State Revenue, reorganizing the state’s tax and revenue administration.

Sharef left the civil service in 1961 and was called back in 1964 by Prime Minister Levi Eshkol as an advisor. He was elected to the Knesset (Israel’s Parliament) in 1965 and served as Minister of Trade and Industry (1966-1969), Finance Minister (1968-1969) and Housing Minister (1970-1973). He was not re-elected to the Knesset in 1973 and lost his place in the cabinet in 1974 when Golda Meir resigned as Prime Minister. Sharef retired from political activity in 1974.

R. C. Simmons

Born in Bristol, England in 1937, Richard Clive Simmons received his first degree from the University of Cambridge in 1958 and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1965. He joined the history department of the University of Birmingham in 1964, specializing in American history, became a Professor in 1987, headed the department starting in 1992 and retired in 2002. His awards include: Visiting Fellow, Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, 1993; Bibliographical Society of America Fellowship, 1990; overseas membership of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts for “distinguished contributions to colonial American history and culture”, 1988; Fellow of the Charles Warren Center, Harvard University, 1968-9. He has published widely on eighteenth-century British and American history, including The American Colonies: From Settlement to Independence (1976) and is currently finishing a biography of William Temple Franklin, grandson of Benjamin Franklin.

Bradley F. Smith

Born in Seattle, Bradley F. Smith (1931-2012) joined the US Air Force for four years before studying history at UC-Berkeley, graduating summa cum laude in 1958, and spending a year at the University of Munich on a Fulbright; he also became a Wilson Fellow. He joined Cabrillo Community College in California in 1960 where he would teach for 32 years. He took a leave of absence in 1967-68 to teach at Miles College in Birmingham, Alabama where he was a civil rights activist.

In the 1970s Smith began to write meticulously researched books which would make him a recognized scholar of World War II and intelligence, including A Nazi in the Making (1971), Reaching Judgment at Nuremberg (1977), The Shadow Warriors: OSS and the Origins of the CIA (1983) and Sharing Secrets with Stalin: How the Allies Traded Intelligence 1941-45 (1996). He was particularly skilled at finding useful documents before intelligence-related materials were widely released, especially at Stanford’s Hoover Institute, at the National Archives in Washington DC and in Britain’s National Archives at Kew.

Smith was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in the mid-1990s.

Leo Spitzer

Leo Spitzer is the K. T. Vernon Professor of History Emeritus and Research Professor at Dartmouth College. A 2014 Research Fellow at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies, South Africa, and Fellow at the Center for the Study of Social Difference, Columbia University, he has received numerous awards, including fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Humanities Center, the American Council of Learned Societies, as well as from the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center and the Bogliasco Foundation’s Liguria Center.

A cultural and comparative historian working in the interdisciplinary field of Memory Studies, he employs personal and familial oral histories, testimonial documents, and wide-ranging photographic and artistic resources to write about responses to colonialism and domination, Jewish refugee memory, and traumatic witnessing and its generational transmission into postmemory. His most recent book, co-authored with Marianne Hirsch, is Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory. He is also the author of Lives in Between: The Experience of Marginality in a Century of Emancipation; The Creoles of Sierra Leone: Responses to Colonialism; and co-editor, with Mieke Bal and Jonathan Crewe, of Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present. Currently, with Marianne Hirsch, he is writing School Photos in Liquid Time, a book about the hidden lives and afterlives of school-class pictures. He is also working on a series of vignettes, some autobiographical, for a book about the Americanization of Jewish refugee children emigrating from Latin America to the United States in the decade of the 1950s.

Mark A. Stoler

Born in New York City in 1945, Mark A. Stoler earned his BA at the City College of New York in 1966 and his PhD at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1971. He joined the University of Vermont (UVM) faculty in 1970 and became Professor Emeritus in 2007.

Stoler’s areas of special expertise are US diplomatic and military history and World War II. Included among his many publications are Allies and Adversaries: the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Grand Alliance, and US Strategy in World War II (2000) which won the Distinguished Book Award of the Society for Military History in 2002, The Politics of the Second Front: American Military Planning and Diplomacy in Coalition Warfare, 1941-1943 (1977), George C. Marshall: Soldier-Statesman of the American Century (1989), and Allies in War: Britain and America against the Axis Powers, 1940-1945 (2005). He also co-authored Explorations in American History (1987) with Marshall True, Major Problems in the History of World War II (2003) with Melanie Gustafson, and Debating Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Foreign Policies (2005) with Justus Doenecke.

Stoler’s scholarship earned him the University Scholar Award at UVM (1993) and his equally distinguished teaching earned him the Dean’s Lecture Award (1992), the George V. Kidder Outstanding Faculty Award (1984), and the Kroepsch-Maurice Excellence in Teaching Award (2006). In addition to teaching at UVM, Stoler has served as a visiting professor at the US Military Academy at West Point, the US Naval War College, the University of Haifa in Israel, the US Military History Institute, Williams College, and Washington & Lee University. He has also produced two audio/DVD courses for The Teaching Company and served as editor of volumes 6 and 7 of The Papers of George Catlett Marshall (2013 and 2016). Most recently he co-edited with Molly Michelmore The United States in World War II: A Documentary History (2018). He is former president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (2004) and a former trustee of the Society for Military History.

Dietrich Stoltzenberg

Dietrich Stoltzenberg (1926-2007) was born in Hamburg, the son of Hugo Stoltzenberg, a manufacturer and chemist, and Margarethe Stoltzenberg-Bergius, also a chemist. After studying chemistry at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, he earned his degree in 1958 with work carried out under Rudolf Criegee on cyclical hydroperoxide and azohydroperoxide.

He subsequently worked for the chemical industry, among other positions for the firm Phoenix-Gummiwerke and for Unilever in research, development, and production. Since his retirement in 1984 he has worked for various businesses as a consultant on issues of environmental protection and toxicology. As a member of the history of chemistry interest group of the German Chemical Society he has published several articles on the history of twentieth-century chemistry. His biography of Fritz Haber, published in German in 1994, was made a “science book of the year” by the magazine Bild der Wissenschaft and in 1997, Stoltzenberg received the Prize of the German Chemical Society for Writers.

Susan Rubin Suleiman

Born in Budapest, Susan Rubin Suleiman emigrated to the United States as a child with her parents. She earned a B.A. from Barnard College and a Ph.D. from Harvard University, where she has been on the faculty since 1981, now as the C. Douglas Dillon Professor of the Civilization of France and Professor of Comparative Literature. Suleiman has written widely on contemporary literature and culture, and has published poetry and autobiographical works. Budapest Diary (1996) is her memoir about returning to her native city after many years, where she speaks Hungarian "like a native, but with an accent."

Her other books include Crises of Memory and the Second World War (2006), Risking Who One Is: Encounters with Contemporary Art and Literature (1994), Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics, and the Avant-Garde (1990) and French Global: A New Approach to Literary History (2010), co-edited with Christie McDonald.

Suleiman’s many honors include the Radcliffe Medal for Distinguished Achievement, and France’s Palmes Académiques. She has held Fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Radcliffe Institute, and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Suleiman lives in Belmont, Massachusetts.

Christopher Sykes

Christopher Hugh Sykes (1907-1986), second son of diplomat Sir Mark Sykes, was educated at Downside School, Christ Church, Oxford and the Sorbonne in Paris. He spent time in the Foreign Office, as an attaché in the British Embassy in Berlin (1928-29) and at the British Legation in Tehran (1930-31). He attended the School of Oriental Studies in London in Persian studies (1933).

Sykes then travelled to Persia and Afghanistan (1933-34), then an almost unexplored area. Back in the UK, Sykes wrote a biography of the German Persianist Wilhelm Wassmus (1936). He was commissioned in 1939 as a reserve officer in the Green Howards regiment’s 7th Battalion. In June 1940, Sykes joined SO1 (later Special Operations Executive). In October 1941, he went to Tehran as Deputy Director of Special Propaganda under diplomatic cover after the Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran; in November 1942, he transferred to Cairo, where he wrote a light novel, High Minded Murder. Back in the UK in May 1943, he volunteered for the Special Air Service (SAS) and undertook very dangerous work with the French Resistance. His experiences were depicted in Four Studies in Loyalty.

After 1945 Sykes worked for many years in BBC Radio. He wrote frequently for British and American periodicals, including The New Republic, The Spectator, Books and Bookmen, The Observer and the English Review Magazine.

Sykes’ many books include biographies of Orde Wingate (1959), his friend Evelyn Waugh (1975), Lady Astor, Adam von Trott zu Solz, a history of the British Mandate of Palestine, Crossroads to Israel (1965) and several novels.

Joan Templeton

Joan Templeton, Professor Emerita of Long Island University, is a major Ibsen scholar whose work is appreciated worldwide. She is the author of Ibsen’s Women, Munch’s Ibsen and over fifty articles on Ibsen and other dramatists, in PMLA, Modern Drama, Scandinavian Studies, and elsewhere, and the editor of Ibsen News and Comment. The past president of the International Ibsen Committee and the Ibsen Society of America, she has held research fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright program and the American-Scandinavian Foundation. She has taught at the Universities of Paris IV-Sorbonne, Tours and Limoges. Her current project is a book on Shaw and Ibsen for the Palgrave Macmillan Shaw series.
(photo: Maurice Lévy)

Dorothy Thompson

Dorothy Thompson (1893-1961), journalist and broadcaster, was born in Lancaster, New York, the daughter of a Methodist preacher. She was educated at Syracuse University (class of 1914) and found her first work as a publicist and organizer for woman suffrage. In 1920 she sailed to Europe, and for the next thirty years worked as a free-lance correspondent, becoming America’s expert on Central Europe. In 1927 she married the novelist Sinclair Lewis. The union was marred by Lewis’s alcoholism, the pressures of Thompson’s success, and by her sexual ambiguity, which led her, in the early ‘30s, to a love affair with the German writer Christa Winsloe, author of Mädchen in Uniform.

In 1934 she became the first correspondent to be expelled from Berlin on the orders of Adolf Hitler: she was the loudest and strongest voice in American journalism against the menace of the Nazis. Her thrice-weekly column, “On the Record,” was syndicated to hundreds of newspapers; she wrote a monthly essay for the Ladies’ Home Journal and broadcast weekly, sometimes daily, on news topics over the NBC radio network. Time magazine in 1939 called her the most influential woman in America after Eleanor Roosevelt.

Her career declined after World War II, when she argued for a “humane” peace with the defeated Germans and, later, took up the cause of the Palestinian Arabs in opposition to the State of Israel. Divorced from Lewis in 1942, she enjoyed a happy (and lusty) final marriage with the Czech painter Maxim Kopf (1892-1958). She died in Portugal in 1961 and left instructions for her epitaph: “Dorothy Thompson Kopf — Writer.” She was unquestionably the preeminent woman journalist of her era — perhaps of all time in the United States. Peter Kurth wrote her biography, American Cassandra: The Life of Dorothy Thompson.

Nikolaas Tinbergen

Born in The Hague, Netherlands, Nikolaas “Niko” Tinbergen (1907-1988) is widely regarded as one of the founders of ethology, the modern study of natural behavior. Fascinated by animals from a young age, Tinbergen spent much of his childhood on long walks in nature and kept insects, stickleback and newts in his backyard. In 1925, he entered Leiden University to study biology and obtained his PhD in 1932 with a dissertation on the behavior and learning ability of the European beewolf, a solitary wasp preying on honeybees.

A keen observer and gifted experimentalist, Tinbergen quickly gained fame for his detailed accounts of the behavior of a seagull colony in the dunes along the Dutch North Sea and for elucidating the sensory mechanisms of mating behavior in the stickleback. In 1940, Tinbergen assumed a professorship at Leiden University, but resigned to protest the nazification of the university and was imprisoned in a camp for Dutch intellectuals and artists until 1944. After World War II, Tinbergen became a professor of animal behavior at Merton College, Oxford University and remained there until his retirement in 1974.

In 1951, he published the first textbook on ethology, The Study of Instinct, which introduced the English-speaking world to the largely German-speaking literature on the new discipline. His ingenious, life-long friendship and collaboration with Austrian biologist Konrad Lorenz proved instrumental for the development of ethology. Tinbergen’s “four questions” (mechanism, development, adaptation, and evolution) are still considered basic cornerstones in modern biology, and together provide for a complete understanding of natural behavior. Together with Konrad Lorenz and Karl von Frisch, Tinbergen received the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine “for their discoveries concerning organization and elicitation of individual and social behaviour patterns”. He had five children with his wife Elisabeth Rutten (1912-1990), and was a life-long atheist.

Melvin Urofsky

Born in Liberty, New York, in the Catskills, Melvin Urofsky’s Orthodox Jewish family roots were in New York City’s Lower East Side. His father was a bookkeeper, and his mother a telephone operator. A valedictorian of his high school class, Urofsky attended Columbia University on a full scholarship, where he earned a B.A. and a Ph.D. in history in 1968. His first book, Big Steel and the Wilson Administration: A Study in Business-Government Relations, appeared in 1969.

While teaching at Ohio State University from 1964 until 1967, Urofsky began a collaboration with David W. Levy that resulted in the publication of seven volumes of Louis D. Brandeis’ letters. Urofsky then taught at SUNY Albany (1967-1974) before joining Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) as chair of its History Department in 1974. His work on Brandeis inspired Urofsky to enter law school at age 40: in 1983, he earned a J.D. from the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, while teaching at VCU. He is Professor Emeritus of History at VCU and Adjunct Professor at the School of Public Affairs at American University in Washington.

His books include Supreme Decisions: Great Constitutional Cases and Their Impact, American Zionism from Herzl to the Holocaust, which won the Jewish Book Council’s Morris J. Kaplun Award in 1976, and Louis D. Brandeis: A Life which won the University of Louisville Louis D. Brandeis School of Law’s 2010 Brandeis Medal. Urofsky has been a Rich Fellow at Oxford University’s Center for Jewish Studies, a Fulbright Lecturer at the University of New South Wales Law School in Sydney, Australia, a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow at the Bellagio Center in Italy, and a visiting scholar at Ben-Gurion University in Israel.

Claudine Vegh

Claudine Vegh (née Rozengard) was born in Paris in 1934. Her father was from Warsaw and her mother from the Ukraine. In 1939, the Rozengard family left Paris and took refuge in Saint Girons, in southwestern France near the Pyrenees. Claudine’s parents had to flee the area in 1941, leaving Claudine behind with their neighbors in Saint Girons. Her father died while in hiding near Grenoble. In 1945, Claudine returned to Paris to live with her mother. She attended Lycée Hélène Boucher and medical school. She is a child psychiatrist who has always practiced in Paris. Her two children are also psychiatrists.

Alexandra Villard de Borchgrave

Born in Washington DC, Alexandra Villard de Borchgrave is the great-granddaughter of Henry Villard and the daughter of the late United States Ambassador Henry Serrano Villard. She grew up in Norway, Libya and Switzerland, attended the Brillantmont International School in Lausanne, graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in political science and attended the Islamic Institute at the Sorbonne. In Paris she met her husband, journalist Arnaud de Borchgrave.

As a photographer, she has taken portraits of notables including George Bush, Henry Kissinger, and Anwar Sadat. Her work has appeared on the cover of Newsweek and other major international publications.

She co-authored the biography of her great-grandfather, railroad magnate and financier Henry Villard, Villard: The Life and Times of an American Titan, and wrote five books, Healing Light, Heavenly Order, Beloved Spirit, To Catch A Thought and Love and Wisdom. She founded the Light of Healing Hope Foundation in 2010 whose mission is to bring comfort and healing to those in need; the foundation has delivered over 34,000 gifts to hospitals and hospices nationwide.

Judith Wallerstein

Born in New York City, Judith Saretsky Wallerstein (1921-2012) received a Bachelor’s degree from Hunter College in 1943, a Master’s in social work from Columbia University in 1946 and a Doctorate in psychology from Lund University (Sweden) in 1978.

Wallerstein taught as a senior lecturer from 1966 to 1991 at UC-Berkeley and lectured at Harvard, Cornell, Stanford, Yale, the Hebrew University and Pahlavi University Medical School. She was a consultant for the Advisory Commission on Family Law to the California Senate Subcommittee on Administrative Justice, the Commission on Law and Mental Health, State Bar of California, and the California Senate Task Force on Family Equity. In 1971, she started the California Children of Divorce Study which followed 131 children ages 3 to 18 from 60 divorced families in Marin County, California for 25 years. In 1980, she founded the Center for the Family in Transition in Madera, California to provide counseling and education for divorcing couples and their children and to conduct research on divorce and the family.

Wallerstein wrote four best-selling books with Sandra Blakeslee, three about children and divorce (Second Chances, The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce, and What About the Kids) and The Good Marriage: How and Why Love Lasts which first appeared in 1995, the 48th year of her 65-year marriage to Robert Wallerstein, a psychoanalyst who directed research at the Menninger Foundation and was president of the International Psychoanalytical Association.

Wallerstein’s many awards include the Distinguished Teaching Award from the University of California, the Dale Richmond Award of the American Academy of Pediatrics and the San Francisco Foundation’s Koshland Award in Social Welfare. Wallerstein has appeared multiple times on national television and radio, including the Today Show, Good Morning America, Diane Rehm, and the Oprah Winfrey show.

Fredric Warburg

Fredric Warburg (1898-1981) was a distant relative of the wealthy American Warburgs. He attended British “public” schools where he excelled academically but as a Jew, often felt an outsider, finding refuge in his love of books. After serving in World War I as an artillery officer, he graduated from Oxford with a degree in classics and philosophy.

Warburg stumbled into publishing at Routledge & Sons where he spent 13 years. In 1936, he and a partner acquired the publishing firm of Martin Secker. Renamed Secker & Warburg, it became known as anti-fascist and anti-communist, publishing André Gide’s Back from the USSR and George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia. From then on Secker & Warburg published all of Orwell’s books and Orwell and Warburg became intimate friends. Warburg published some 2,000 books by several hundred authors, including Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984, works by H. G. Wells, Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, Simone de Beauvoir, Colette, Alberto Moravia, Günter Grass, Pierre Boulle’s The Bridge over the River Kwai and William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.

T. H. Watkins

Born in Loma Linda, California, Thomas Henry Watkins (1936-2000) grew up on the edge of the Mojave desert and became an outdoorsman because the family went camping in southern California. He attended San Bernardino Valley College and Redlands University. After graduating he moved to San Francisco, where he worked in the mail room at the San Francisco Chronicle while trying to write novels. He attended graduate history classes at San Francisco State.

In the 1960s he worked for American West magazine, where he met the novelist and conservationist Wallace Stegner. In 1969, Watkins became editor of the magazine. In 1976 Mr. Watkins moved to New York, where he spent six years as an editor at American Heritage. In 1982 he became editor of the Wilderness Society’s Wilderness magazine in Washington DC, which he went on to lead for 15 years. In 1997, after Wilderness cut back publication to one issue per year, he moved to Bozeman, Montana where he became the Wallace Stegner distinguished professor of Western American studies at Montana State University.

Watkins was a prolific writer on environmental issues: he authored 28 books, first about San Francisco’s history and architecture and later Righteous Pilgrim: The Life and Times of Harold L. Ickes, 1874-1952, a 1990 finalist for the National Book Award, The Lands No One Knows: America and the Public Domain and The Hungry Years: A Narrative History of the Great Depression. Watkins wrote hundreds of magazine articles for publications such as the Washington Post, the New York Times, Condé Nast Traveler and National Geographic.

Joseph Wechsberg

Joseph Wechsberg (1907-1983) was born to Jewish parents in Ostrava, Moravia, a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His grandfather had been a prosperous banker, but the family assets were lost in World War I. Wechsberg attended Prague University Law School, Vienna’s State Academy of Music, and the Sorbonne. A lawyer for a short while, he worked as a musician on ocean liners and played the violin in Paris nightclubs. In Prague, he became a reporter for the Prager Tagblatt. In 1938 he was a lieutenant in the Czechoslovak army commanding a machine gun company on the Polish frontier and was sent with his wife to the United States to discuss the Sudeten crisis. Both requested asylum after World War II broke out. In 1939, Wechsberg knew only a few hundred words in English, but decided he would someday write for The New Yorker. In 1943, he was drafted into the US Army and sent to Europe as a technical sergeant in psychological warfare. His account of getting back to Ostrava was the first of over one hundred pieces for The New Yorker over three decades — profiles of Artur Rubinstein, Isaac Stern, George Szell, of merchant bankers and of great French restaurateurs, and letters from Berlin, Karlsbad, Bonn, Vienna, Trieste, Budapest, Belgrade, Ankara, Bucharest, Warsaw, Athens, and Baghdad. He also contributed hundreds of articles to magazines such as Gourmet, Esquire, Playboy, The Atlantic and The Saturday Evening Post and wrote features on cuisine and travel throughout Europe.

Russell F. Weigley

Born in Reading, Pennsylvania, Russell Frank Weigley (1930-2004) graduated from Albright College (1952) and received his PhD in history in 1956 from the University of Pennsylvania. His dissertation was published as Quartermaster General of the Union Army: A Biography of M.C. Meigs. Weigley then taught at the University of Pennsylvania (1956-1958) and at Drexel University (1958-1962) before joining Temple University as an associate professor; he became Distinguished University Professor in 1985 and remained at Temple University until his retirement in 1999. He co-founded Temple’s Center for the Study of Force and Diplomacy and was considered the heart and soul of Temple's History department: at one point he supervised 30 PhD candidates concurrently. Weigley was also a visiting professor at Dartmouth College and at the U.S. Army War College at Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

His research and teaching interests centered on American and world military history, World War II, and the American Civil War. One of Weigley’s major contributions to research is his hypothesis of a specifically American Way of War, i.e. an approach to strategy and military operations distinct to the United States because of cultural and historical constraints.

Weigley was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (1969-70), the Athenaeum Literary Award (1983) and the Samuel Eliot Morison Prize of the American Military Institute (1989). He served as President of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania and the American Military Institute. He was an elected member of the American Philosophical Society and the Society of American Historians. He was the eighth holder of the United States Marine Corps Command and Staff College Foundation Chair of Military Affairs.

His books include The Age of Battles: The Quest for Decisive Warfare from Breitenfeld to Waterloo which won the Society for Military History’s Distinguished Book Award, A Great Civil War: A Military and Political History, 1861–1865 which received the Lincoln Prize, Eisenhower’s Lieutenants: The Campaign of France and Germany, 1944-1945 which was nominated for the American Book Award in history in 1983, and The American Way of War: A History of United States Military Strategy and Policy.

Benno Weiser Varon

Born in Czernowitz, Benno Weiser (1913-2010) and his family moved after World War I to Vienna where he began to study medicine and appeared in Jewish political cabaret acts. In 1938 he emigrated to Ecuador, where he also obtained visas for his immediate family and for 150 European Jews. In Quito, he became a prominent journalist, whose columns appeared in the country’s major newspapers. A lifelong Zionist, he later started working for the Jewish Agency, first in Bogota and in 1948 in New York where he headed its Latin America department. In 1960, he and his family moved to Israel where he headed the Israel-Ibero-American Institute. From 1964 until 1972, Benno Weiser, whose name was hebraicized as Benjamin Varon, was Israel’s ambassador to various Latin-American countries, first the Dominican Republic, then Jamaica and finally Paraguay. After his retirement from Israel’s foreign service, he taught at Boston University.

Victor Weisskopf

Victor Weisskopf (1908-2002), born in Vienna, Austria, joined a socialist student group while in gymnasium and started studying physics at the University of Vienna. In 1928, he went to study with Max Born in Göttingen where he received his Ph.D. in 1931. Weisskopf worked on basic quantum physics with Werner Heisenberg in Leipzig, then for a short time with Ernest Schrödinger in Berlin. In 1932, a Rockefeller Foundation grant allowed Weisskopf to join Niels Bohr in Copenhagen and Paul Dirac in Cambridge, England. In 1934-36, Weisskopf was research associate to Wolfgang Pauli in Zurich before working again with Niels Bohr in Copenhagen (April 1936 - September 1937).

Weisskopf fled the Nazis in the fall of 1937 and became an assistant professor at the University of Rochester. From 1943 to 1946 Weisskopf was deputy chairman of the theoretical division of the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, under Hans Bethe. In 1945, he joined the MIT physics department; he was named Institute Professor in 1965, a position he held until he retired in 1974.

Weisskopf played a major role in particle physics in the US and in Europe: he was director general of CERN (Conseil Européen de Recherches Nucléaires) in Geneva (1961-65), and chaired the High Energy Physics Advisory Panel of the US Atomic Energy Commission (1967-73). A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, American Physical Society, Pontifical Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Sciences, Academy of Arts and Sciences, and of many international organizations including French, Austrian, Danish, Bavarian, Scottish, Spanish, and Russian academies, Weisskopf received numerous awards for his work in quantum electrodynamics, in nuclear and elementary particle physics and as an advocate of nuclear disarmament, open exchanges of information among scientists of all nations, and individual freedom. He published over two hundred papers, and several books including in 1991 his autobiography, The Joy of Insight: Passions of a Physicist.

Chaim Weizmann

Chaim Weizmann (1874-1952) was a scientist and diplomat, a leader of the Zionist movement for an entire generation, and the first President of the State of Israel. Born in Motol, Belarus, he studied chemistry in Germany, received his doctorate from University of Fribourg in Switzerland in 1899 and took a position at Manchester University in 1904. He married Vera Chatzman in 1906. They had two sons: Benjamin (1907) and Michael (1916).

Considered a master negotiator, Weizmann convinced the British government to issue the Balfour Declaration just before the British conquered Palestine in November 1917. The document, in which “His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people,” was a turning point in the history of the Jewish people and made Weizmann the figure most identified with the Zionist movement. Weizmann achieved significant breakthroughs in organic chemistry, discovering in 1916 in Manchester a process to synthesize acetone (used to manufacture munitions), and later established leading academic and research institutions in Israel (the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and the Sieff Research Institute in Rehovot, now the Weizmann Institute of Science). He viewed Zionism as fulfillment of political and spiritual independence for the Jewish people and considered science a noble activity, but also the economic basis for a modern economy.

Seeking friendly relations between Zionism and Arab nationalism, Weizmann met with Emir Faisal in 1918. During World War II, he recruited the Jewish home front in Palestine for the British war effort against Germany and fought for the establishment of the Jewish Brigade. He worked to establish democratic institutions in the Zionist movement and for the integration of the State of Israel into the international community.

When the State of Israel was established, Weizmann was appointed President of the Provisional State Council. In February 1949, after the first Knesset met, Weizmann was elected as the first President of the State of Israel. He served in this position, to which he was re-elected in 1951, until his death in November 1952 in Rehovot, Israel.

Vera Weizmann

Vera Weizmann (1881-1966), née Chatzman, was born in the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don. She was a medical student soon to become a pediatrician when, in 1906, she married Chaim Weizmann, a chemist already involved in the Zionist movement. For the next 46 years of their marriage, Vera was his companion, hostess, critic and adviser, with an intimate view of Weizmann’s career as scientist, diplomat and Jewish leader.

Benjamin Welles

Born in Kamakura, Japan, near Tokyo, where his father was third secretary at the US Embassy, Benjamin Welles (1916-2002) attended the Groton School, graduated from Harvard University in 1938 and started working at the New York Times as a copy boy, later becoming a reporter. He joined the Army in 1942 and served with the Office of Strategic Services in North Africa and the Middle East, ending the war as a major.

Welles returned to the New York Times in 1946 and spent 17 years as a foreign correspondent in China, London and Madrid. He covered the Hungarian uprising and the Algerian war against the French. His first book, Spain: The Gentle Anarchy, a biography of Franco, appeared in 1965. In 1963 he returned to Washington to cover national security, and retired in 1972, when he began research on a biography of his father, Sumner Welles: FDR’s Global Strategist, published in 1997, in which he dealt directly with his father’s bisexuality and alcoholism.

Welles came out of retirement in 1981 to serve as deputy assistant secretary of defense for public affairs in the Reagan administration.

Simon Wiesenthal

Born in Buczacz (Austria-Hungary, now Ukraine), Simon Wiesenthal (1908-2005) attended a Jewish Gymnasium and studied architecture at the Czech Technical University in Prague. In 1936, he married Cyla Müller and worked in an architect’s office in Lvov (Poland, now Ukraine), where the couple lived until the outbreak of World War II, when the Soviets occupied Lvov. Wiesenthal’s father had died in World War I. His stepfather was arrested by the Soviets and died in prison, his stepbrother was shot, and Wiesenthal was forced to take a job as a mechanic in a bedspring factory. After the German occupation in 1941, Wiesenthal and his wife were interned in the Janowska concentration camp. When deportations to the death camps began in 1942, Cyla was able to pass as a non-Jew and was taken out of the camp by an underground organization.

From Janowska Wiesenthal was sent into forced labor at the German Eastern Railways. In 1943 he escaped, but was recaptured; he attempted suicide twice and was sent back to Janowska. After the camp was liquidated the retreating Germans force-marched the less than three dozen remaining inmates (out of more than 100,000) from camp to camp, first to Plaszow, then to Gross-Rosen, to Buchenwald and finally to Mauthausen, Austria where Wiesenthal, having barely survived these hardships, was liberated in May 1945 by the US Army. At 6 feet tall he weighed less than 100 lbs but recovered and was reunited with Cyla at the end of 1945. Like millions of Jews and other ethnic groups murdered by the Nazi regime, dozens of members of his and his wife’s families had died in the camps.

Wiesenthal assisted the War Crimes Section of the US Army and later worked for the US Army’s Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and Counter-Intelligence Corps and headed the Jewish Central Committee of the US Zone of Austria. He also worked for Bricha, a Zionist organization for clandestine immigration to Mandate Palestine. Wiesenthal then dedicated his life to tracking down Nazi war criminals and having them prosecuted. He established the Jewish Documentation Center in Linz (1947-54) where Wiesenthal was vice-president of the local Jewish Community, and worked for the AJDC (Joint Distribution Committee) and ORT (Organization for Rehabilitation through Training) in nearby refugee camps reopened in the 1950s for Jewish and non-Jewish refugees from the Soviet Bloc. Wiesenthal moved his office to Vienna in 1961. In 1953, Wiesenthal learned that Adolf Eichmann, coordinator of the “Final Solution”, was in Argentina and forwarded this information to the Israeli consulate in Vienna. Israel’s intelligence service, the Mossad, captured Eichmann in 1960 in Buenos Aires and brought him to Israel for trial. Found guilty, Eichmann was executed on June 1, 1962.

Wiesenthal’s investigations also led to the capture of other Nazi war criminals, such as Franz Stangl, commandant of the Treblinka and Sobibor extermination camps, Gestapo member Karl Silberbauer who arrested Anne Frank in Amsterdam and Hermine Braunsteiner, a notorious camp guard of the Ravensbrück and Majdanek death camps. Wiesenthal’s house was firebombed in 1982, but no one was injured. He published several books, including The Murderers Among Us: The Simon Wiesenthal Memoirs in 1967, The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness in 1969 and another memoir, Justice Not Vengeance: Recollections in 1989.

Wiesenthal received many awards and accolades, including the US Congressional Gold Medal of Honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, an Honorary Knighthood of the British Empire, the French Legion of Honor, the Dutch Erasmus Prize, the Dutch and Luxembourg Medals of Freedom and the United Nations League for the Help of Refugees Award. His work is recognized for continuing to shed light on the horrors of the Holocaust, for calling on governmental intervention in the capture of war criminals. Wiesenthal is remembered as a driven, at times a sole, investigative force. He helped expose Odessa, the organizations which helped former Nazis escape to South America and his work, including his efforts to find prosecution witnesses, is said to have helped bring 1,100 former Nazis to trial.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center, founded in November 1977 in Los Angeles, is an international center for Holocaust Remembrance, defense of human rights and the Jewish people. The Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Research, which contains his archive, opened in 2017.

Richard Willstätter

Born into a Jewish family in Karlsruhe, Richard Willstätter (1872-1942) attended the Technical High School in Nuremberg and the University of Munich where he studied chemistry under Adolf von Baeyer, receiving his doctorate in 1894 for work on the structure of cocaine. He then joined the faculty, continuing his research on alkaloids. In 1905 he became professor at the ETH Zürich where he determined the formula of chlorophyll. In 1912 he moved to Berlin where he became professor of chemistry at the University, and director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry. He studied pigments in flowers and fruits and showed that chlorophyll is a mixture of two compounds, chlorophyll a and chlorophyll b. He received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1915.

Asked in 1915 by his friend Fritz Haber to help develop poison gasses, Willstätter refused but worked on protection, developing an effective filter for which he received the Iron Cross. In 1916 he returned to the University of Munich as successor to his mentor, von Baeyer, and investigated the mechanisms of enzyme reactions.

In 1924, Willstätter retired (at age 52) to protest the University’s growing antisemitism and continued his research at his Munich home. In 1939 Willstätter emigrated to Switzerland and spent the last three years of his life near Locarno writing his autobiography Aus meinem Leben, which appeared in German in 1949 and was translated into English in 1965 as From My Life.

Nelly Wilson

Born in Vienna in 1930, Nelly Wilson (née Jussem) came to England in 1945 as one of the 150 former concentration camp children invited by the British Government to settle there. She graduated with a BA Honours degree in French from the University of Bristol where she subsequently taught as a senior lecturer, after several years of research in France on a doctoral thesis presented at the University of Paris.

Wilson’s longstanding interest in the significance of the Dreyfus Affair and in Charles Péguy’s illuminating reflections on Bernard Lazare’s crucial role in the Affair inspired her book on the subject. Published by Cambridge University Press in 1978, the book was awarded the Jewish Chronicle non-fiction prize. It was followed by a slightly expanded French edition (Albin Michel, 1985). Since her retirement from teaching, she has lectured and written widely on the subject and on other related topics.

George Wise

George Wise is an independent historian. Born in Cleveland in 1944, he holds a B.S. degree in Engineering Physics from Lehigh University, an M.A. in Physics from the University of Michigan, and a Ph.D. in History from Boston University. He worked as a Systems Analyst for Mitre Corporation before joining General Electric (GE) where he spent most of his career as a communications specialist and writer for GE’s Research and Development Center (now GE Global Research) in Niskayuna, New York, where he was known as “GE’s historian”. His books are Willis R. Whitney, General Electric and the Origins of U.S. Industrial Research; Civic Astronomy; and Edison’s Decision. Wise is a co-author of the textbook Exploring Engineering. His papers and articles have appeared in Technology and Culture, Isis, IEEE Spectrum and American Heritage of Science and Technology.

Robert S. Wistrich

Born in Kazakhstan to parents who had fled Poland’s anti-Semitism, Robert Solomon Wistrich (1945-2015) grew up in England where he earned his MA at Cambridge University in 1969 and his PhD at the University of London in 1974. Wistrich, whom The Journal for the Study of Antisemitism called in 2011 the “leading scholar in the field of anti-Semitism study,” joined the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1982 where he became Erich Neuberger Professor of European and Jewish history and in 2002, head of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism.

During 1999-2001, Wistrich was one of six scholars on the International Catholic-Jewish Historical Commission examining the wartime record of Pope Pius XII. He also served as rapporteur on anti-Semitism and related issues for the US State Department, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the Council of Europe, the UN Commission on Antisemitism and Human Rights, and the Human Rights Commission in Geneva.

Among his books, Socialism and the Jews won the American Jewish Committee award, The Jews of Vienna in the Age of Franz Joseph won the Austrian State Prize in History and Israel’s Wiznitzer Prize for best book on Jewish history in 1989 and Antisemitism: The Longest Hatred won the H.H. Wingate Prize for nonfiction in the UK.

Linnie Marsh Wolfe

Linnie Marsh Wolfe (1881-1945), born in Big Rapids, Michigan, received an A.B. from Whitman College and an A.M. from Radcliffe College in 1907. She graduated from the University of Southern California library school and also studied at the University of Washington and the University of California. She worked as a teacher in Washington and a librarian in public libraries and high schools in Los Angeles. In 1924, she married Roy Wolfe.

While working as a librarian, Wolfe became interested in the work of naturalist and author John Muir (1838-1914). She organized trips for schoolchildren to Muir’s home, spoke about him on the radio, and became secretary of the John Muir Association. Wolfe was asked to edit Muir’s journals and notes that had not yet been published: that became John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, published by Knopf in 1938, after which Alfred A. Knopf, Sr. asked Wolfe to write a biography of Muir; the result was Son of the Wilderness: The Life of John Muir, published by Knopf in 1945, which won the 1946 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography.

Charlotte Wolff

Charlotte Wolff (1897-1986) was born into a middle-class family of secular German Jews in Riesenburg, West Prussia. She was attracted to girls and women and her family accepted her sexual orientation. She studied philosophy before obtaining her medical degree in 1926 in Weimar Berlin where she was befriended by Walter and Dora Benjamin. One of the 700 or so women physicians then practicing in the city, Wolff treated prostitutes and poor women in working-class neighborhoods. Her volunteer work at a birth control clinic led her to the fields of psychotherapy, sexology and chirology (the study of hands). After being detained by the Gestapo in 1933, she fled to Paris.

In Paris and the artists’ colony of Sanary, Wolff met an international circle of artists and writers including Maria and Aldous Huxley, Thomas and Heinrich Mann, and Man Ray, who photographed her in 1935. Since her medical degree was not recognized in France and she feared a Nazi invasion of France, Wolff travelled to England in 1936. She became a permanent resident in 1937, with permission to practice psychotherapy but not medicine. At first, she read the hands of Maria Huxley’s friends to earn her living, but soon found work as a researcher and was re-instated as a physician in 1952. She maintained her interest in sexology and published the books Love Between Women, Bisexuality, the novel An Older Love, and the biography Magnus Hirschfeld: Portrait of a Pioneer in Sexology. Before Hindsight, she wrote a shorter memoir titled On The Way To Myself. She died in London, shortly before her eighty-ninth birthday.

Helen Wright

Born in Washington DC, Mary Helen Wright Greuter (1914-1997), the daughter of geophysicist Frederick Eugene Wright who led the Carnegie Institution for Science Moon Project at the Mt. Wilson Observatory, attended Bennett Junior College and earned a Master’s degree in astronomy from Vassar College in 1939. While working at the Vassar College Observatory, Wright became an assistant at Mt. Wilson in 1937 researching the history of telescopes. She worked at the US Naval Observatory in Washington during 1942-43.

In 1943, she became a freelance author and editor. Her best known works include, Explorer of the Universe: A Biography of George Ellery Hale, Sweeper of the Sky: The Life of Maria Mitchell (America’s first woman astronomer) and Palomar, the World’s Largest Telescope. She also wrote and edited many books about the history and methodology of a broad spectrum of sciences, among them mathematics, physics, anthropology and archeology. Wright was a member of the American Astronomical Society, the History of Science Society, and the International Astronomical Union. Wright was also interested in stone carving.

David Wyman

Born in Weymouth, Massachusetts, David Sword Wyman (1929-2018) was the grandson of two Protestant ministers. His father was a mechanical engineer, and his mother a teacher and librarian. Wyman graduated from Boston University in 1951 with a degree in history and received a master’s degree in education from Plymouth State College in New Hampshire in 1961 and a doctorate in history from Harvard in 1966. From 1966 until his retirement in 1991, Wyman taught history at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he was the Josiah E. DuBois, Jr. Professor of History and twice served as chairman of the Judaic studies program.

Wyman first examined the response to Nazism in Paper Walls: America and the Refugee Crisis, 1938-1941 published in 1968. It took Wyman 15 years to research and write its sequel, The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941-1945 which appeared in 1984, rose to the New York Times best-seller list and won the Bernath Prize of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, the Saloutos Award of the Immigration History Society, the Anisfield-Wolf Award, and the National Jewish Book Award, among others. The book went through seven hardcover printings and multiple paperback editions, and was translated into German, French, Hebrew, and Polish, selling more than 150,000 copies worldwide.

The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies was founded in 2003 to promote education and research on the response to the Holocaust. Wyman was also the coauthor, with Rafael Medoff, founding director of the David S. Wyman Institute of A Race Against Death: Peter Bergson, America, and the Holocaust; editor of America and the Holocaust (thirteen volumes of the documents used in The Abandonment of the Jews); and editor of The World Reacts to the Holocaust. Most recently, he contributed a chapter to Dr. Medoff’s Too Little and Almost Too Late: The War Refugee Board and America’s Response to the Holocaust.

Hiltgunt Zassenhaus

Hiltgunt Margret Zassenhaus (1916-2004) was born in Hamburg. Her father, a historian and school principal, lost his job when the Nazis came to power in 1933. A bicycling trip to Denmark in 1933 led Zassenhaus to decide to study Scandinavian languages. She graduated from the University of Hamburg with a degree in Norwegian and Danish in 1939. In 1940, she got a job as an interpreter, censoring the mail, but she resigned in 1942 to start her medical studies in Hamburg. Later that year, the Hamburg prosecutor asked her to censor letters to and from Norwegian prisoners in Hamburg-area prisons. She first refused, but was further pressured and accepted on condition that she would work independently. Instead of censoring the mail, she added messages urging the recipients to send food or warm clothing.

Assigned by the Department of Justice to interpret for and watch Norwegian priests visiting political prisoners, Zassenhaus instead began smuggling food, medicine, and writing materials to the prisoners, protected by the belief of the prison authorities that given her position, she was also informing the Gestapo. At the end of the war, the prisoners were moved to various prisons all over Germany; Zassenhaus created her own records to track some 1,200 Scandinavian prisoners in 52 prisons across Germany. Her records, passed to the Red Cross after Zassenhaus learned that all political prisoners were to be killed on “Day X”, helped save the lives of these prisoners who were evacuated to Scandinavia in 1945.

In 1947 Zassenhaus was smuggled into Denmark in a fish truck even though Germans were prohibited from entering the country. The Danish parliament later legitimized her immigration. She continued her medical studies at the University of Bergen, and graduated as a physician from the University of Copenhagen. She emigrated to Baltimore in 1952, where she completed her internship and residency at City Hospital and opened her medical office in 1954, practicing as a physician thereafter.

Zassenhaus is the only German decorated with the Royal Norwegian Order of St. Olav (1963) for her activities during World War II. She also received the Medal of Honor from the Norwegian and Danish Red Crosses (1948), the Danish Order of the Dannebrog (1964), the German Bundesverdienstkreuz (1969), and the British Cross of the Order of Merit. In 1974, she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by two members of the Norwegian Parliament who had been prisoners of war in Nazi Germany.

Zassenhaus wrote about her experiences during the war in a memoir, Walls, published in English in 1974.

Zbyněk Zeman

Born in Prague, Zbyněk Zeman (1928-2011) had his secondary education interrupted by the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia. During the 1946-47 academic year as a student in Britain, he fell in love with that country and after the 1948 Communist coup, he fled Czechoslovakia and settled in Britain. Supported by the Czechoslovak Trust Fund in London, he completed a history degree at University College London in 1951 before receiving a doctorate at St Antony’s College, Oxford. After a research fellowship at Oxford, Zeman taught at the University of St Andrews until 1976, then led the Comenius Centre of East European Studies at Lancaster University until 1982, when he moved to Oxford to teach European history.

The 1968 Prague Spring spurred Zeman to leave academia for a few years to join Amnesty International where, as first director of its research department, he chronicled human rights abuses more systematically than ever before.

Zeman’s books include The Break-up of the Habsburg Empire, 1914-18 (1961), Nazi Propaganda (1964), The Merchant of Revolution: The Life of Alexander Israel Helpland (Parvus) 1867-1924 (1965), Prague Spring: A Report On Czechoslovakia 1968 (1969), A Diplomatic History of the First World War (1971), The Masaryks: The Making of Czechoslovakia (1976), The Making and Breaking of Communist Europe (1991) and The Life of Edvard Beneš, 1884-1948 (1997).

After the fall of communism in 1989, Zeman returned to Prague where he taught at the university and lived until his death.

Walter Ziffer

Born in 1927 to a German-speaking Jewish family in Těšín, Czechoslovakia, near the Polish border, Walter Ziffer saw his hometown invaded first by Poland, then by Nazi Germany. He and his family were deported in 1942, and Ziffer was interned in eight Nazi concentration and slave labor camps. Liberated in 1945 by the Russians, Ziffer trained as a mechanic and emigrated to the US in 1947 via France. In Nashville, he converted to Christianity in 1951, married, graduated from Vanderbilt University with an engineering degree in 1954, worked for General Motors and was later granted five US patents.

Seeking a more rewarding life, Ziffer earned two master’s degrees, in New Testament and Greek, at Oberlin in 1963 and became a Christian minister. He taught and preached in Ohio, France, Washington DC and Belgium. In 1971, he earned a doctorate in theology from the University of Strasbourg, France. Ziffer directed the Accueil Fraternel language center for missionaries in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, France. He taught at the Faculté de Théologie Protestante in Montpellier, France; the Inter/Met Theological Seminary in Washington DC; the University of Maine; the University of North Carolina Asheville; and Mars Hill University in Mars Hill, NC.

In 1987, Ziffer returned to Judaism, and he now considers himself a Jewish secular humanist. Besides his memoir Confronting the Silence, he has published two books, The Teaching of Disdain and The Birth of Christianity from the Matrix of Judaism.

Susan Zuccotti

Susan Zuccotti received her B.A. in history from Wellesley College, and her PhD in modern European history from Columbia University. She has taught Holocaust and general Western European history at Columbia, at Barnard and at Trinity College.

Dr. Zuccotti is the author of The Italians and the Holocaust: Persecution, Rescue, and Survival which received the National Jewish Book Award for Holocaust Studies in the United States and the Premio Acqui Storia-Primo Lavoro in Italy, The Holocaust, the French, and the Jews, Under His Very Windows: The Vatican and the Holocaust in Italy which received the National Jewish Book Award for Jewish-Christian Relations and the Sybil Halpern Milton Prize of the German Studies Association, Holocaust Odysseys: The Jews of Saint Martin Vésubie and Their Flight through France and Italy, 1939-1945 and of a biography of a French Capuchin priest who, working closely with Jewish friends and associates, rescued thousands of Jews in Marseille and Rome during the Holocaust, titled Père Marie-Benoît and Jewish Rescue. She has also published many articles and reviews in academic journals.

Friderike Zweig

Friderike Zweig is one of the most accomplished 20th century women to have written memoirs of their men. Born Friderike Maria Burger in Vienna on December 4, 1882, she was a teacher, translator, journalist, novelist and political activist at a time when most Viennese women didn’t finish high school. Friderike was married to Felix von Winternitz and mother of two daughters when she began to share a household with Stefan Zweig during the first world war.

The Winternitzes divorced and in 1920, Friderike married Stefan Zweig, then the most widely-translated writer in the world. They established a home in Salzburg that admirers called “the Villa in Europe” where Friderike served as Zweig’s researcher and editor as well as marital partner. Their strong and unconventional relationship survived the chaotic aftermath of the first world war in Austria; the Nazi occupation of Europe; their divorce in 1938; Stefan’s remarriage to Lotte Altmann, whom Friderike had hired as her husband’s secretary; and their separate paths to the Americas.

Their correspondence continued until the day before Zweig’s death by suicide in 1942. Friderike lived almost three decades longer in New York and Connecticut where she devoted herself to literary projects and social activism.

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) was the most widely read German-language author of the twentieth century. Zweig was a secular Jew, a Pan-European and a pacifist. He was born in Vienna on November 28, 1881 and studied there and in Berlin. As a young man, he translated French poetry by Verlaine, Baudelaire, and Verhaeren into German. He quickly branched out into journalism, fiction, biography and writing for the theater. His plays, including the anti-war Jeremiah, were produced throughout Europe. His books were eventually translated into over 50 languages. Today, he is best known for his many works of non-fiction. They include the classic memoir The World of Yesterday and many biographical essays on famous writers and thinkers such as Erasmus, Tolstoy, Balzac, Stendhal, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Dickens, Freud and Mesmer. He lived in Salzburg with his first wife Friderike until 1933, when his books were burned by the Nazis. In 1934, he emigrated to England where he continued writing and met his second wife Lotte Altmann. In 1941, the couple moved to Brazil where they committed suicide in 1942.

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