My Anglo-Judaica collection includes some ephemera from the British campaign to save Julius and Ethel Rosenberg from execution in the United States. It is not my intention, as a collector of Anglo-Jewish books and ephemera, to get involved in the question of their guilt or innocence. However, there was an undercurrent of anti-semitism in this story. In New York, a city that was at the time one third Jewish, there was no Jew on the jury.
Veterans of campaigns and demonstrations – Anti-Apartheid and Soviet Jewry – in London will recognise the style of ephemera. The leaflet scanned below is printed on cheap newsprint. The London press release appears to have been typed onto a Gestetner stencil and then printed.
The members of the British National Rosenberg Defence Committee appear to have been mostly Soviet friendly members of the British Labour Party, or associates of the British Communist party. Dudley Collard wrote a popular book published by the Left Book Club entitled “Soviet Justice and the Trial of Radek and Others”, which attempted to justify various trials that had taken place in the Soviet Union. Dame Leah Manning was a Labour Member of Parliament during the 1930s and 1940s, an educationalist and social reformer.
Jewish Miscellanies 