Word: rosenberg
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...CONSIDER your crime worse than murder." Judge Irving Kaufman declared when he sentenced Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to death in 1951 for conspiring to spy for the Soviet Union. And two years later in June. 1953, the Rosenbergs went to the electric chair in Sing-Sing prison. But that was not to be the end of the debate over the Rosenbergs. Questions linger today about not only the verdict but also the nature of the trial, the justice of the death sentence, even the significance of the information (on the construction and composition of the atomic bomb) which the Rosenbergs...
...flurry of retrospective books, articles, and essays. Seen from this distance, the trial seems to have serious implications for our democratic ideals and for our foreign relations with the Russians. Walter and Miriam Schneir's Invitation to an Inquest, a revised edition with new evidence suggesting the Rosenbergs' innocence, and Ron Radosh and Joyce Milton's The Rosenberg File, arguing their guilt, have drawn particular attention. In addition, this month in New York City's Town Hall, these two couples will debate the issue anew...
Even setting aside the blatant disregard in all these moves for basic constitutional, first amendment rights, the coincidence of this hightening with the revival of interest in the Rosenberg case crystallizes a bitter irony. Much of the evidence for the Schneirs' new chapter and for the Radosh and Milion work--as well as for articles in The New York Times, Vanity Fair, Time Magazine and others--would never have come to light if not for the release, after a legal battle lasting eight years, of more than 160,000 pages of previously classified FBI documents concerning the Rosenbergs. These contain...
...Daniel and his sister. Susan, standing fear-fully at the podium with their parents lawyer), and the seemingly unwarranted descent of a swarm of FBI officials upon the Isaacson home are understandable as evocations of Daniel's emotional perspective. But if one is searching for a statement on the Rosenberg case, such scenes come off as manipulative powerplays intended to win over the audience's sympathy for the Rosenbergs/Isaacsons using emotional rather than rational or factual devices...
...regard Daniel as either pure fiction or pure political statement. The social and political issues raised in the movie--justice in American society, the value of political activism, the vulnerability of civil liberties--could never appear as prominently and powerfully as they do without the legacy of the Rosenberg case: but the film resists giving answers on those issues by presenting them from a stubbornly emotional and subjective stance...