Jennifer Meeropol is the granddaughter of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg and the daughter of RFC Founder, Robert Meeropol. Jenn became the Executive Director of the RFC on September 1, 2013. Prior posts on this page were written by Robert (unless otherwise noted), and represent his opinions, which are not necessarily shared by the RFC.
Last week Angels in America closed after a triumphant, award-winning revival on Broadway, more than a quarter century after it first took the theater world by storm. During Angels’ first Broadway run, I was in college and deliberately avoided the press or any discussion about the play. I was writing my thesis, which explored the frames of meaning—historical, legal, cultural, etc.—in my grandparents’ case with a focus on how they impacted the representation and understanding of my grandmother.
Images of small children in cages, crying for their parents, have flooded my email and social media. I’m saddened and enraged as a human being, and as a US citizen I’m appalled by what the government is doing in all of our names. As the granddaughter of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, and the daughter of their younger son, Robert Meeropol, I also have a unique and deeply personal reaction to seeing children separated from parents.
On today’s anniversary of my grandparents’ execution, I’m thinking about two-year-old Angel and his big brother Bryan, who don’t understand why they can’t live with both parents anymore.
My name is Jaya and I am the granddaughter of a political prisoner who has been incarcerated my whole life. I am a junior in high school and this is my first year of homeschooling. I love to learn and explore and discover the world as it is, was, and could be. People often ask me why I decided to switch from traditional school to homeschooling. High School had been difficult for me prior to homeschooling, not because the subjects were more difficult, but because everything had to be slowed down and paced out to ensure everyone could grasp, and later, test on the material.
2017 was a painful, exhausting year. Wide-spread resistance beat back some of the more egregious assaults on human and civil rights—challenging the Muslim ban, stopping attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and showing up in massive demonstrations across the country and around the world. But we all know that the Trump administration has done enormous damage to the environment, undermined civil and human rights, and exacerbated an already unsustainable distribution of wealth at the expense of those struggling to make ends meet.