Today is not the 50th birthday of Kitty Genovese. She was born on July 7, 1935, so had she reached her 50th birthday, it would have been celebrated long ago. And today is not the 50th anniversary of the day Kitty Genovese was murdered. She died on March 13, 1964, so the 50th anniversary of her death was commemorated exactly two weeks ago.
But today, March 27, 2014, marks the day her name made the leap from private to public, 50 years to the day after the New York Times published an article about her murder that made “Kitty Genovese” a name many of us still recognize 50 years later.
And the two people responsible for that article, A. M. Rosenthal (metropolitan editor for the New York Times) and Martin Gansberg (a New York Times editor who had voluntarily chosen to step back into the role of a reporter), were two Jewish men in their 40s. Rosenthal was born and raised in the Bronx. Gansberg was born and raised in Brooklyn. Both men were just finishing college when unequivocal proof about the Holocaust first reached American shores. Does that make this “a Jewish story”? Yes!
Click HERE to read of summary of the Kitty Genovese case on Wikipedia.
