Ronald Radosh (b. 1937, New York City) is an American writer, professor, historian, former Marxist, and neoconservative. He is known for his work on the Cold War espionage case of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg and his advocacy of the state of Israel.
His most recent book, co-authored with his wife, scholar Allis Radosh, is "A Safe Haven: Harry S. Truman and the Founding of Israel", published by HarperCollins in 2009.
Radosh was born in the Lower East Side, Manhattan. His parents, Reuben Radosh and Ida Kretschman, were Jewish immigrants from the Russian Empire. He has stated that his earliest memory is of being taken to a May Day parade in New York's Union Square.
During the 1940s and 1950s, he attended the Little Red School House and Elisabeth Irwin High School, both of which were private schools attended mainly by the children of New York's Communists. He also attended the Communist-run Camp Woodland for Children in the Catskill Mountains. His memoirs vividly describe school-day encounters with Mary Travers, Woody Guthrie and Peter Seeger. On June 19, 1953, he demonstrated in Union Square with other members of the Labor Youth League against the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.
Radosh began attending the University of Wisconsin—Madison in the fall of 1955. He has said that his desire at the time was to study history, which Karl Marx considered queen of the sciences, and to become a leader in America's Communist movement. Despite being raised to always defend the actions of the Soviet Union, Radosh developed a close friendship with Prof. George Mosse, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany and convinced anti-Stalinist.
In 1959, he arrived at the University of Iowa intending to work towards his Master's Degree. Despite being raised in a Stalinist family, Radosh was shocked by the revelations of the dictator's crimes which began to be released during the Khrushchev thaw. Although he had been a leader of Madison's Labor Youth League, he eventually broke with the Soviet-backed Party of his parents and became a founding father of the American New Left. In 1961, he returned to Madison to continue working towards his PhD.
Career
Radosh is currently an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C., and professor of history emeritus at Queensborough Community College of the City University of New York. His commentaries on the Rosenbergs and other topics have appeared in The New Republic, The Weekly Standard and National Review, and the blog Frontpagemag.com. His memoirs are entitled Commies: A Journey Through the Old Left, the New Left, and the Leftover Left.
In the 1983 book, The Rosenberg File, he and co-author Joyce Milton conclude that Julius Rosenberg was guilty of espionage and that Ethel was aware of his activities. A second edition in 1997 incorporates newly obtained evidence from the former Soviet Union. Radosh also condemns prosecutorial misconduct in the case.
Family
Ronald Radosh is married to Allis Radosh, an American History Ph.D., with whom he has co-authored two books. The couple reside in Martinsburg, West Virginia. Radosh's son Daniel is an author, blogger and staff writer for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.
American Labor and United States Foreign Policy. New York: Random House, 1969.
Debs. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1971.
A New History of Leviathan: Essays on the American Corporate State. Editor, with Murray Rothbard. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1972.
Prophets On The Right: Profiles of Conservative Critics of American Globalism. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1975.
The New Cuba: Paradoxes and Potentials. New York: Morrow, 1976.
The Rosenberg File: A Search for Truth. With Joyce Milton. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1983; Reissued with new introduction: New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993.
Divided They Fell: The Demise of the Democratic Party, 1964-1996. New York: Free Press, 1996.
The Amerasia Spy Case: Prelude to McCarthyism. With Harvey Klehr. University of North Carolina Press, 1996.
Commies: A Journey Through the Old Left, the New Left, and the Leftover Left. San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2001.
Spain Betrayed: The Soviet Union in the Spanish Civil War with Mary R. Habeck and Grigorii Nikolaevich Sevostianov. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001.
Red Star Over Hollywood: The Film Colony's Long Romance With The Left. With Allis Radosh. San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2005.
A Safe Haven Harry S. Truman and the Founding of Israel. With Allis Radosh. New York: HarperCollins, 2009.
Articles
The Sandbagging of Robert "KC" Johnson
Why Conservatives Are So Upset with Thomas Woods's Politically Incorrect History Book
Books in Review. The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression
