What evidence from the reading beneath could be use to prove that the Rosenburgs are guilty?
(1 paragraph response)

What evidence from the reading beneath could be used to prove that the Rosenburgs are not guilty? ( 1 paragraph response)

The Rosenbergs and the Greenglasses Julius and Ethel Rosenberg lived in a three-room New York City apartment. In 1950, they appeared to be an ordinary couple raising two young sons, Michael, age seven, and Robert, age three. Although they both grew up in the same predominantly Jewish neighborhood on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Julius and Ethel did not meet until Julius was a student at City College of New York (CCNY). Ethel had been an advanced student in high school and graduated early at the age of fifteen. She enjoyed singing and acting, but never aspired to attend college. Ethel met Julius at a New Year’s Eve dance where she was singing. They married in the summer of 1939, right after he received his degree in electrical engineering from CCNY.

The couple had a common interest in politics. Julius had been introduced to left-wing political ideas in college. This was the time of the Great Depression. Many Americans were out of work and living in dire poverty, while the nation as a whole suffered through an unprecedented economic crisis. Like many on the left at the time, Julius came to believe that communism would be a better economic system for the United States because it sought to address the problems of poverty and unemployment and to prevent future economic depressions. Ethel also embraced communism. At her job as a shipping clerk, she became upset with the working conditions and led 150 of her coworkers in a strike against the company. Ethel was fired for her union activities, but her experience left her convinced that a communist system would benefit all workers. For a few years before their sons were born, Julius and Ethel were active members of the Communist Party. On occasions, they hosted party meetings in their apartment. Ethel’s younger brother, David Greenglass, and his wife, Ruth, also joined the political movement, becoming members of the Young Communist League. David was an impressionable teenager who looked up to Julius. In early 1944, Julius and Ethel withdrew from the Communist Party and stopped receiving subscriptions to the Daily Worker, the party’s official voice. It is possible that the couple did not stop their communist activism, but were distancing themselves from formal party involvement while secretly working as spies for the Soviets.

In 1943 and 1944, the Communist Party in the United States had more members than at any other point in its history. At the time, as the Second World War reached its climax, the United States was allied with the Soviet Union. Many in the U. S. were drawn to the communist ideology because they saw the Soviet Unions as a leader in the struggle against fascism. In addition, as the Nazi regime in Germany pursued its murderous treatment of Europe’s Jewish population, many Jewish Americans, like the Rosenbergs and Greenglasses, became converts to communism. Confessed spy Harry Gold later explained why he favored the Soviet Union: “Nazism and fascism and anti-Semitism were identical…anything that was against anti-Semitism I was for” (Hornblum, 2010, pp. 39-40).

When David Greenglass went into the army in 1943, he was proud to serve his country, but he also felt pride in furthering the communist cause by supporting the Soviet Union and recruiting fellow soldiers into the Communist Party. As a soldier, Greenglass was assigned to the Manhattan Project lab facility in Los Alamos, New Mexico. He worked as a machinist and later became foreman in the high explosives unit.

inspector (Radosh and Milton, 1997).

Judge Irving Kaufman presided over the Rosenberg-Sobell trial in March of 1950. The jury was comprised of eleven men and one woman. One of the jurors was African American. The rest were white. None of the jurors was Jewish. The lack of diversity and absence of Jewish representation would spark controversy after the trial, when some of the supporters of the Rosenbergs came to claim that the couple did not have a fair trial. However, both the prosecution and the defense had rejected potential Jewish jurors during the jury selection process (Burnett, 2004).
The prosecution called many witnesses, including Harry Gold, David Greenglass, and Max Elitcher, another friend of Julius’ from CCNY. All confessed to spying on behalf of the espionage ring. Ruth Greenglass also testified. Among the evidence submitted by the prosecution was a replica of a Jell-O box that Greenglass had testified was cut and given to him as a recognition signal, and sketches of the A-bomb and other equipment that Greenglass also recreated for the prosecution, based on the ones he claimed to have drawn and passed to Harry Gold.