This is Writing It, the podcast about academics and writing. I'm Rachel Gordon. Here, we aim to make the process of writing and publishing a bit more transparent and a bit less overwhelming. Through conversations with editors and academics at all stages, from full professors to graduate students, independent scholars, and postdocs, we share stories, lessons, and helpful habits from our writing lives. Today, we're speaking with martin Siegel, who is the author of the recent book, Judgment and Mercy, the turbulent life and times of the judge who condemned the Rosenbergs. And Martin Siegel clerked for judge kaufman on the second circuit after graduating from harvard law School. He then served as an assistant U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York and a staffer on the U.S. 
Senate Judiciary Committee. He now practices law in Houston and teaches American legal history at the University of Houston Law Center, where he also directs the Appellate Civil Rights Clinic. So your biography was published by Three Hills Imprint of Cornell University Press, and I have to admit that's part of what caught my eye. This is a really great biography, and it is written in a very page turning way. So our listeners can definitely feel free to suggest it to non-academic friends who are interested in American history and biography in the Cold War. It reads very well. And Cornell's books are beautiful, and they do great history and biography. But you are perhaps someone who doesn't need an academic press in the way that some tenure track folks do. 
And so I'm curious, what made you choose this route of the trade division of an academic press for your book? Sure. Well, I started out by, I mean, I began, I guess step one was trying to find an agent. So the goal was to publish with a trade press, if that's the right phrase, commercial press. And again, I'm knowing not a great deal about the process, although my wife had published a book a couple of years earlier with Oxford University Press. I knew a little bit about it from her, but otherwise I didn't know much about publishing world, I learned that step one is to get an agent and you can't really approach commercial presses without one. So I tried to do that and did end up with an agent at the end of a kind of long process. 
That agent failed to place it at a commercial press. And so it seemed like the alternative, therefore, the way to get it published was through an academic press. And I had felt like the subject matter all along might be eligible for a trade press. And as you pointed out, I wrote it in a way that I hoped would appeal to non-academic readers and even to non-lawyer readers, even though it's a biography of a judge. But on the other hand, I understood also that it would be appropriate for an academic press, or I thought it would. So that's how I landed beginning to investigate academic presses. And this was a, I mean, I really knew nothing about them. And I had read that sort of how you go about trying to get an agent and approach commercial presses. 
I knew, again, just from more reading that you didn't need an agent to try to place a book with an academic press. But I think, as you pointed out, I was a sort of unusual character for academic presses because I'm not a full-time academic. And so I wondered if that might impede my ability to place it with a university press. So I then just began looking for appropriate university presses. you know, presses that published in this area that focused on history and biography that had a history of publishing, you know, legal related titles. There's a lot of Jewish content in this book. So I was looking at presses that also have Jewish studies, you know, lines of books. So that's how I wound up with Cornell. 
Cornell, the specific thing I think that attracted me to Cornell aside from, you know, you mentioned they publish history and biography. So I noticed that. And I also noticed they published some in the space of, uh you know jewish history but they have a particular imprint um that's focused on new york related history um and so and that's what that's where i ended up publishing. That's what three hills is. It is a trade, I guess, a trade like sort of line for them um but it's focused on new york and not just history, but also fiction and photography. There's a pretty wide range of new york related topics that they publish. And, you know i i went sort of down the road with a few other academic presses that also had appropriate 
kind of histories of publishing that fit this book. But I settled on Cornell ultimately because that just seemed like a really great fit. Yeah. So I'm assuming you got the Reader's Reports experience too. Is that part of? Yeah, it was. Again, that was all due to me. I mean, I had no idea that they, in essence, almost farm out, if that's the right way to put it, the decision or at least the approval, some level of approval. to these outside experts who aren't affiliated with the university necessarily. They're just subject matter experts. So, yeah, I learned that was going to be necessary and had to wade through that and was eventually, I don't know how common, I don't know if this is common or not, but I got those reports, I assume that's standard, and, you know, which gave me the feedback it did and had the requisite approval. 
We've been talking to a lot of guests about that process of readers' reports. It is often difficult difficult, sometimes even painful, you know, depending on what they write in them. But, you know, but maybe ultimately, and with some perspective, academic authors often have the feeling later, you know, that that actually probably really helped improve the book. I'm wondering if at this point, since the book has been out for a while, it's been a while since you were staring down those readers reports for the first time, how you feel about what they might have done for your manuscript? I mean, to be honest, they did not really have a great effect on the manuscript. There were some relatively small, or, you know, I guess, minor-y kinds of suggestions that made sense to me, and I tried to sort of incorporate. 
But it wasn't a case of, you know, you should revise it in a sort of significant way and do X, Y, and Z. I had a couple of, with a couple of other presses that I think, if I understand the process correctly, operate, operated slightly differently. Like they, there was a more initial review, maybe is the way to put it, by some outside folks and i was getting a little bit more of that, um, there. But at Cornell, that, that wasn't the case. So yeah, so it wasn't, it was, I guess, a step that had to be gone through, but it didn't really influence the book very much. Okay. And then that doesn't sound like a particularly painful experience the kind of yeah it wasn't. 
I guess in this case, for me, it wasn't, um, which i'm glad about and right that's that's lucky i guess Some of our listeners might be wondering why or why they might be considering a trade division of an academic press. What's your sense of what you got, you know, attention wise editorially or from the marketing department that was different about going this way? Yeah, well, I, you know, I felt like I got a lot. I it's hard for me to speak to how it's different since this is my only experience. So I can't really compare it to a non-trade unit or division of an academic press. And, you know, there was editorial review, for sure. The person at Cornell who did that was great and read it and had a lot of great suggestions, many of which I did try to incorporate as best I could. 
So that, you know, the editorial part of it was really excellent. The trade part of it, again, I have nothing to compare it to, so I can't speak to it that well. I mean, they certainly made an effort to get the word out to... all kinds of reviewers ranging from just in every media from high to low um and and i feel like they did a good job with that. And when I, some of that came, you know, a little bit, not much, but some of that came from me in the sense that i knew, for example, some legal publications that they would not ordinarily be familiar with, I don't think um and so when i would give them the heads up about sending it to X, Y, or z legal publication or legal reviewer who wrote for a bar journal, let's say something like that. 
They were always, you know, they were quite responsive with that. Um, you know, having said that, I, I, you would certainly know much more than i would, but I, I gather that in all walks of publishing, certainly even in commercial publishing, except for the very top sort of level of author, who's already a quite a known quantity, or perhaps has produced a book that the publishing houses so enthusiastic about that they're really counting on it. I mean, it sounds like that, except in cases like that, it almost always falls to the author to really publicize the book these days. And I assume that's true in the academic world. And it has mostly been true for me. And so that's, you know, that's what I've tried kind of haplessly as a non-publicist and a non-specialist to do. 
Well, you did get a wonderful big New York review of books review by linda Greenhouse, which i guess i'm just curious how that works. Did the press know that was going to happen and and give you a heads up? Or, or, you know, how did that end up? Yeah, the press did uh that was an outlet where they told me right away, there was interest when they pitched the book to that outlet. I didn't, you know, as actually is referred to in the review itself. I had had some prior contact with Linda Greenhouse, who was interviewed for the book and is quoted in the book because she's a journalist who back in the 1980s covered Judge Kaufman. So I got to know him a little bit. 
So she was a good person to interview and provided some valuable stuff that's in the book. But I didn't know she, you know, I didn't know she was reviewing it for the New York Review of Books. I had sent her a copy before, probably separately, you know, entirely separately from whatever the press was doing when approaching outlets like the New York Review of Books. But I don't know. I have no idea how that review came about. In other words, I don't know if she took the copy I sent her and wanted to review it for them, or they published it. I have no clue how that happened. So yeah, it was great to see. But the inner workings of it, yeah, I don't know. 
One of the areas where I'm guessing it might be helpful to be in that trade division is the cost of the book. We've talked to some academic writers who've worked to try to urge the press to keep the price of their book kind of low. I'm wondering if maybe you didn't even need to do that because in this part of Cornell, maybe that's sort of part of the deal is you get it to actually be an affordable book. Yeah, you're exactly right. That pressure was coming from them to me and not the other way around. And that's, I gather, a large element in that is just the length of it, obviously. And so... And I'm someone who tends to overwrite. Maybe some of your listeners do too. 
And so that was that probably in terms of all the kinds of editing that I did to produce the final book, that was the most challenging and most time consuming was just to cut the length, which I recognized, you know, was going to be good for all kinds of reasons and whatever would be a more affordable or normal sort of price. And that pressure did come from them as well. So we kind of, so it was a happy, happy convergence there, I guess. And I don't remember, is it a, Is it an under $30 book or? It's no, it's, well, I mean, it's official cover prices around 35. Okay, right. Which is kind of normal now for those hardcover. I guess, yeah, that's right. 
Yeah, yeah. Great. I wanted to talk to you too about just writing biography, which is something that many of our listeners are doing. You wrote about someone you actually knew. What were the challenges of approaching his life? Yeah, well, I didn't, there weren't, challenges so much that way. And then I'll tell you the reason for that. It's because I worked for him at the very end of his life. I was really just there for about six months. And for three or so of those months, as I sort of detail at the very end of the book, he was ill. And so I actually got to know him, you know, I got to know him a little bit, obviously, but less so than almost everyone else who worked for him in that capacity. 
And as the book also demonstrates the folks who were his law clerks over the years had really strong opinions about him because he was a difficult boss. And he just had a really distinctive personality. He was kind of a tough taskmaster. Could be warm and funny when he wanted to be, but he did drive his law clerks. And many of them came away from that experience without the best of impressions of him. A few came away and remained very close to him, you know, with positive views. All of them, almost all of them felt like at a minimum, it had been good training. But I didn't really have those kinds of strong opinions one way or the other. So it's true that I knew him and that's certainly what got me started on the book and what interested me about him. 
But I do think I was able to be, or I hope I was able to be more objective than I think almost all other law clerks might have been just for the reason that they knew him better and would have worked for him longer than I did. Yeah. Something about that, like your personally having a lack of strong feelings about did come through and sort of made it easier in a way, I think, for the reader to trust that you were sort of basing it on all the research you had done. Yeah. And I'll say that it's funny, you were asking me before about the feedback from the outside reviewers, because there was some feedback to the effect of, you know, we had initial concern that, and I got this from the press too, concern that 
It couldn't be objective because I was too close to him. Because someone who worked for him, it would be assumed, you know, was too close to him and fond of him and, you know, would have viewed the relationship as a sort of mentor-mentee kind of relationship. So there was that concern there. And I think that's right. You kind of have to get into the manuscript a little bit to see that, you know, hopefully it doesn't come through much. Yeah. Since we're recording during this Oppenheimer movie era, and we knew it took decades decades for those writers to write that biography of Robert Oppenheimer. And there were two of them at that. So I'm curious to hear how long you were at this and whether there were stages of the writing of it and any time that you had to take away a significant time off from writing the biography. 
Yes, absolutely. So I started this. I really wanted to start it the day after his funeral. And the book opens with his funeral, which was not the typical memorial service. It was disrupted by protesters. That's something that really caught my attention. It was so unusual and shocking and stayed with me. And, you know, after his death, I was sitting there kind of alone in his chambers. My co-clerk got reassigned almost immediately to another judge. So for weeks I was just sitting there alone. I mean, the secretary also left shortly after. Eventually, a historian and archivist from the Library of Congress came in to start going through the papers. And as they were headed out the door in boxes, I just wanted to stop and start working then and there. 
I just thought the guy was fascinating and worth a book. But I certainly couldn't do that. I couldn't just take the time off from that. I needed to get to work and had a commitment to a law firm and all of that. I was 25. 26. So, you know, it wasn't feasible and not in academia. So it wasn't the kind of thing I was expecting to be doing or had the time to do. So I began working on it a couple of years later in 1994 when I had a couple of three months between jobs. And I just, you know, the sort of desire to do it hadn't really left. And I had some free time and I just began, you know, doing some of the very early research that was going to be necessary. 
And then over the years, up until around 2020, 2015, I guess, 2015, 2016, I would work on it, you know, in bits and pieces when I had a little time. If my legal practice was slower, if, again, I was between one job or another, I did that thing that I bet a lot of your, you know, guests and listeners try to do because it is a good thing to try to do. I just couldn't keep it up, which is to wake up at five in the morning and try to write something. Before my kids got up and before I did take them to school, I kept that up for a couple of months at best, probably. So I made a little bit of progress over the years. 
It was good that I did that because I was able to interview people in the early 2000s, his very first law clerks from the 1950s, including the one who was there for the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg trial, who I would not have had access to if I had not started this until, like I said, 2015 or 2016. So that was great. But in the end, I hadn't made all that much progress. And even though I'd taken a couple of research trips, and I don't know if you added up all the nights and weekends and mornings and uninterrupted months or so between jobs, I don't know how much it would add up to. But I'd made a little bit of progress, but not that much. 
And I decided then that I just wasn't going to get anywhere unless I took time off to finish it. And I just kind of felt like I had to make a decision. Do I want to produce this or not? And it took... a little bit of sacrifice in the sense that I had to stop working as a lawyer and getting income. And at that point in my career, I was fortunately able to do that somewhat. So from really 2016 through 2019, I was working on it pretty full time. And I needed to do that. I wouldn't have finished this otherwise. I really needed to do that. I'm also just the kind of person who, if I get diverted, I'm not... A lot of people are great at being able to do three things at once, and I'm not one of them. 
I found myself... Often when I would put it down and come back to it nine months later, because I had all the time, I would just be reinventing the wheel. I was bad at, I was very bad at documenting where I left off, you know, and what needed to be done next. So I'd have to spend days going back through old emails and figuring out, you know, had the FBI responded to this FOIA request that I sent three years ago? And if not, what do I do about it now? And it just, I just was not getting anywhere, really. So that's what my process was like. Yeah, I can't imagine, like, psychologically and emotionally, what it was like to carry that project with you for so long. 
Although I'm guessing since you were actually doing other work and had other projects going on in your career and teaching that you had other places to get some sort of work satisfaction from. Yeah, very much so. I mean, this was a minor sideline that I didn't, you know, it was in the back of my mind, but I didn't think about it much. It's certainly not what I was focused on. And I wasn't, I was never sure I would finish it or could do it or that it was doable. So it wasn't as if, well, I know I'm going to do this one day and I'll just kind of keep it going. It was more like, well, this is a kind of side project and it would be really great if I could finally do it or turn it into something one day. 
So it required a sort of more calculated decision, I guess, ultimately that okay, there's, you know, enough here and I've done enough where I can kind of see how to do it maybe. And this is what I'm going to do. You know, it's worth taking the time off for this and diverting my career and, you know, depending on the savings a little bit and, you know, getting it done. Yeah. And actually, you know, many academics are with a project this long and it kind of is their main work. So I'm guessing in some ways it might have felt almost life-changing to have it then be out or as it was going into production, what has this been like now to have it out in the world? 
Yeah, that's been great. And again, I know your listeners who published and the ones who were on the verge of publishing and thinking about what it's going to be like when they publish have experienced this or will. It is great. It's really satisfying. I mean, I think the day when the box arrived and there were actual books, not long PDFs, not drafts, not documents into which You could insert edits, but here it is. It's in a book. And you've seen the picture of the cover, the email attachment. But to hold it, that's pretty remarkable and really satisfying. I'll tell you also, just on a personal note, my dad, and I'm sure this was a large part of the impetus to do this book, my dad was a history professor. 
He taught at the University of Houston for 51 years. And I talked to him about this book over the years. and even very encouraging. So that was just an extra level of satisfaction to be able to actually get it and show it to him. And you could see, you know, for years, I felt like I'm talking to him about this book, but I'm not really doing it. And he's going to think I'm, you know, just full of hot air, you know, to actually completed it, you know, on that level, to have something to hand to him. It was the very end of his life. He died a few months later. It was really, really gratifying. I bet. Yeah. We've talked with a lot of guests about writing communities, writing groups, friends and colleagues people send work to. 
Not everyone has this kind of writing community and maybe not everyone even wants it. But I'm curious if that was part of your process. What kind of readers, if any, did you have of your work as you went? Yeah. Well, no. I mean, I think that would be great. And I didn't have it. And I... probably should have sought it out in some way. I'm not sure how I could have achieved it exactly. I could see how it's maybe more readily accessible in academia. I, for years and years, was just sort of sitting here, you know, doing it alone. And it's also, you know, again, in academia, you're expected to produce books. Yeah, I think, I feel like when I would tell people I'm doing this, you know, you'd get a sort of curious and sometimes interested or sometimes not response, but it's a 
bit odd. Eventually, I had a friend say something to me like, does anybody else do this? This is the thing that you can do? You know anyone else doing this? And I said, no. So I didn't really have a writer's community, which I think I would have benefited from along the way to be asking questions to and getting feedback from. It wasn't until really shortly before publication, which is to say after review, certainly by those outside folks, after acceptance of the manuscript from Cornell, He possibly, well, I don't know if it was after their edits, maybe right before or at the same time the editor there was doing some edits. I said, I did at that point finally send it to a couple of friends of mine because I was looking for a very specific kind of feedback, which Cornell had not provided actually. 
Their outside reviewers had been historians, but they had not sent it to a law professor. And I felt like that was a, that's a gap, I thought, because there's a lot of, there's doctrine in the book, there's, legal history in the book, aside from just political history or Cold War history or social history, you know. And I wanted someone's feedback on that. And so I've got a friend who's a law professor at University of Akron in the law school. She read it. And I have another friend who's not a law professor. He's a professor of European history, but he had been a lawyer. I was an old law school friend of mine. So I knew he would bring something a little different to it than just a non-lawyer historian. 
So those are the only outside readers. And my dad, although by then he couldn't, This was a manuscript, and by then he couldn't really comment much. But I wish along the way I'd had that. And that's a great question. Yeah. I mean, sometimes the spouse or parent who's just interested in reading is part of what gets us to sort of write more. So that can be pretty helpful, too. And I'm glad you said that because I should credit my spouse. She did read. She's a former lawyer, hasn't practiced for many years, but a great writer in her own right. And she's published a book herself. And she did read. manuscript even before it, probably before it went to Cornell. Um, so yeah, I did have that but but i took your question really to mean, you know, as i'm researching, as i'm doing initial writing, you know, would it have been good to have a community of people doing something similar so i could bounce ideas off of? 
And yeah, I think it would have been. Your writing style is great, as i mentioned. And so i'm curious, you know, for academics, this is often a difficult thing to get back to or get to writing in in such a clear, non-jargony way, did this come naturally for you or how do, how did you accomplish it? Well, um, right. I mean, I don't have that background in academic writing. So whatever the sort of good and good of that, and if there's any bad, the bad of that, um, were just the kind of habits or, or, you know, whatever the features of that are. Um, I, I don't really have, didn't have at the outset. Um, so i was always looking to write something kind of accessible to the 
really just to non-lawyers, just to educated readers, period. And I've done a fair amount of writing, certainly not the length of the book, but I've done a fair amount of writing on legal topics, some of the poor non-lawyers, op-ed pieces, things of that nature. So I had a little bit of experience with it. And I'll say the trend, and this has been long running now among legal writers, meaning not necessarily the legal academy, but lawyers writing for judges, there's long been a push, at least 30 years or so, to sort of de-jargonize that. There's a lot of, you know, there's a ton of legal jargon um it's got its own set of, you know, expressions and latin and language you know uh all unique to lawyers, just like any other field and uh there's there's been a push to try to have more accessible writing and more uh more flair in that writing, more entertaining writing, just even when you're writing a legal brief on almost any topic um so i 
I think having bought some of that, I think that's mostly been for the good when it comes to law practice also. One of the challenges you might have been dealing with that will be familiar to many academic listeners is that you had a figure, Judge Kaufman, who doesn't have a household name, like a recognizable name. You know, he doesn't have that kind of celebrity or name recognition, I guess is what I meant to say. So how did you sort of overcome that or deal with the challenge of of letting readers know this is someone important? Yeah, that's a really good question. But someone very recently said to me, I can't remember who it was, but someone said to me, this is the only biography I've ever seen where the name of the subject is not in the title or the subtitle. 
And I hadn't thought about that. I guess that's true. That would be sort of rare. His lack of being, you know, a household name, even a household name for lawyers outside of New York, at least, was a real hurdle. It was a real conundrum. And the obvious way to solve it, and I feel like in the end, the way it was addressed, you know, in a way in which I'm not totally happy, is to lean on the Rosenbergs because everyone's heard of that case. And that's what he's famous for. And so that, their name does appear in the subtitle. It's obviously a famous incident in American history and certainly in American legal history. So that becomes the hook. The reason I don't really love that, although I concede it's sort of necessary, is that I didn't really set out to write a book about the Rosenbergs. 
And the reason I didn't set out to write a book about the Rosenberg case is that we already have a lot of them. There are good books about that case. There's very little new to say about it, so much so that I ran across a journal article, and I don't remember where it was published, but the title of the article literally was, Is There Anything New to Say About the Rosenberg Case? And I was reviewing another book from years ago or maybe commenting on some other article. I don't know why that was the title of it, but I agree there isn't much new to say about about the case. I wanted to write about him, and I wanted to write about, you know, more than the Rosenberg case. 
I wanted to write about the rest of his career. He handled all these other famous and important cases that aren't as closely associated with him, but were important, both just in American history generally and more so in legal history. And to the degree, obviously, I knew I'd be covering the Rosenberg case at length. To the degree I was doing that, I wanted to show how it affected him personally, since I knew that had been dramatic. I wanted to show how it affected his later career. work and his jurisprudence. And I wanted to examine the case. I thought maybe the only sense in which the case, there was something, if not new, at least different to say about the case, was to do so more from a legal angle. 
The major books about the rosenbergs have not been written by lawyers and they don't focus on the performance of the judge. They naturally focus on was the couple guilty? What was the evidence? What was the nature of soviet espionage? Topics like that. of course, are understandable. I wanted to approach him as a lawyer and look at the trial and look at his legal factors, what was in his head when he sentenced them. So that's maybe, you know, that's a slightly different perspective anyway. But more than that, I didn't really want to write a Rosenberg book. But then to come back to your question, you know, if he had not been in, you know, if he hadn't handled that case, he would not really be worth a book. 
And which is why, as what Greenhouse says in that review, there aren't many biographies of judges below the level of the Supreme Court. So it was it was the case that made him worth a book. And yet sort of, I wanted to write about other stuff. So I don't know if I've solved it, the puzzle you begin your question with, but those are the factors. Yeah. I was also really taken with your chapters. They're, they're, I think pretty short, although I think that's actually just the trend in especially things that are, are trade press. I personally prefer that. And I know a lot of my academic friends want to move towards that to shorter chapters. I also loved the table of, contents, the chapter titles were very evocative. 
I often do look at a table of contents when I'm sort of thinking of buying a book and it's telling me the story of the book there. And I felt like I was getting the feel of this life and the chapters and the content from your table of contents instead of it being sort of dry, you know, those straightforward chapter titles we sometimes use in academia. Yeah. Was that, did that just sort of come naturally to you or what made you go that way? Yeah. I mean, I, I, You know, again, it really was the goal to get lay readers. So, and I guess, you know, that kind of popular history that I'm familiar with and have been reading all my life in narrative nonfiction, you know, that's employed there. 
So that's the world I'm much more familiar with. Not that I don't read stuff from university presses, but I think largely I was probably just imitating, you know, what I'm more comfortable with in my own reading and my own sort of personal history. Yeah. So I guess you answered another question there, which is about sort of what you've read that has influenced you. And I wonder if you could tell us about just some authors or titles of sort of popular history. Yeah. Well, I mean, I guess in the world of, you know, biography, there's like, you know, Cairo and then there's most everybody else. So, which is not fair. There are, of course, tremendous biographies written by lots of great biographers. But I am a huge sort of Cairo fan, and that's influential. 
Manchester, certainly. You know, I read a great, probably the best judicial biography I've read. Not long ago, for this class I'm on, there was a biography of Justice Harlan, the first Harlan. And I'm embarrassed to say I've got to look up at my bookshelf to remind me who the author was. It was Peter Kanellis, who, if I'm remembering correctly, had been a writer for the Boston Globe. I think I have that right. I was a journalist, was his background. And that's, you know, doing something very similar to what I try to do in mine, which is to tell the story of a life in the law, make these cases accessible because, you know, they're about things that really affect our everyday lives and that had a historical impact, and try to show the person. 
You know, that's something that's often, I won't say it's missing from academic analyses, but, you know, as you would expect, it sometimes gets short shrift when you're looking at In the legal world, anyway, we don't get somebody's jurisprudence. You know, you tend to focus on the output more than the personality of the person involved. And yet I think really in, you know, very much in Kaufman's case, his personality, I think, dictated a lot of what he did from nine to five and a lot of the paper that flowed out of his office into the case books. It's not just the ideas there or the legal arguments. It's his... you can see him sort of on the page, you know, his feverish personality, his hyperactivity. 
That's what made, that's part of what made him, it's now a pejorative of what we would call an activist judge because he was an activist everything. And so when found in the judiciary, you know, when he landed in the judiciary, that's what he would be. So, and that's not just due to ideas or philosophies, it's due to his inner constitution, I thought, you know. Has this process with book one made you want to write another book? And is biography something you'd consider if so? Yeah, absolutely. I love biography. It's such a, it's easy, you know, like it's, it provides this natural framework and there's a kind of pole star you can keep, you know, you're here, you're a North star that you're focused on, even if you, even if there are digressions and you're bringing in wider history or social developments, it kind of keeps you ultimately focused. 
keeps the story focused. So it's easy in that way. And I do really like the form and always have. I'd love to write another book. I don't know sure what it will be about and not sure I'll get the sort of freedom to do that and the time to do that. But I hope so. Yeah, I'd love to. I was talking to a friend recently about biography because I am also working on one. And this friend said, I can't imagine being responsible for the telling of another person's life story. And that's just a responsibility I don't want. I, you know, I feel some of that, not enough to make me not want to do biography, but I wonder what you think about that comment. 
I think that that comment shows incredible insight from someone, less so from an actual biographer, someone who's immersed in it, that thought will occur to them. But to have that thought, you know, as a non-biographer, I think really is insightful. I absolutely felt that and feel that, even more so, I think, as I approach the end and it kind of had taken shape and I could kind of see what it was. Right. But you just, you want desperately, you just think it's, you've got to do justice, you know, to this person. And you want to get every facet of them sort of represented and yet not get lost in the weeds, you know, have a, have a kind of whole picture. And in the end, you know, having spent all the time I spent on and written what I've written, you know, of course I hope I got it right, but there's so much I, you just can't know, you know, there's so much you don't know. 
You're limited to, what they happen to put down on paper. You may be over reading you know, remarks here and there, giving them greater significance and they really deserve it um it's yeah it is a lot of i mean i did i feel that it is a lot of responsibility and in the end, what is it it's just it's just the best, hopefully, you know, faithfully objective representation this writer could come up and researcher could come up with. That's the best you could say for it, right? It's not really it's not really that person because we can't really get that. I mean, I think I'm used to that a little bit. I think in those terms, a little bit as a lawyer, because, you know, if you, if you try a case, it isn't, you know, is it truth, you know, that you've presented in court or is it just, it's just witnesses recollections, right? 
Long after the facts, it's just whatever they remember about an episode or an incident. And that's what becomes the kind of quote unquote truth. But, but, you know, it's, Is that really what happened? Is that the complete story? You know, that I feel the same, more so with biography. It is a big responsibility. Yeah. You know what you said about dealing with what they've written or not written, the silences in their archive. I'm thinking of that with Judge Kaufman. When I was reading your biography, I was thinking how much anti-Semitism probably informed kind of a lot of his personality, which I guess I tend to think is true for so many people. Jews who were living during the first half of the 20th century. 
And you usually can't find them writing about anti-Semitism. I mean, their letters might never include that word, but it seems like it's usually sort of deep in there, you know, embedded inside of them. And I wonder how you dealt with that issue with him. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that's been a focus of analysis in the Rosenberg case for a long time. So I certainly went into it thinking about that and wondering to what degree was his decision in that case or his behavior in that case influenced by his Judaism, by his cultural Jewishness? Would he have looked at them differently than certain other judges? As I say in the book, I think he did. But you're absolutely right. That's nowhere really that I can think of just here offhand in his papers. 
And he had a life, as far as I can tell, that wasn't terribly marred by anti-Semitism at the same time that it was all around him. It would have been the case that when he graduated law school, he suffered from the same discrimination, job discrimination, that all Jewish law graduates did at the time. Large established firms wouldn't take them. They were limited to solo practices or very, you know, very small outfits usually run by other Jewish lawyers. So that would have been a really ever-present sort of part of his reality. And yet there's no, you know, certainly no complaint I found about that anywhere, no hint of recognition. He was unusual in the sense that he went to Fordham, was, you know, was Jews in New York looking for a free or low-cost education, went to CCNY. 
So he was educated in this kind of Catholic way. environment, even though lots of Jewish students there, it's not as if he was a lone Jewish student, but the tenor of the school and some of the curriculum was, you know, directly Catholic. And yeah, I just, I think it was there, but subsumed. I mean, the reference to it, I found that I, again, this is one of those things like, am I overreading it? But it really was interesting to me and telling was this letter that I quoted at the end of the chapter on the Rosenberg sentencing from his wife, but not a letter, just a card to him. And she says, you know, begins, don't let the commies get you down. We all, you know, we as a family, we all love and admire you. 
And she says in that short note of only three or four sentences, you know, where could we go from here? And that I thought really, that really was meaningful to me. Where could we go for this, this sense of Jewish insecurity? You know, this is, we're here. We have to, this is a home. We have nowhere to go. It's been, for Irving Kaufman, it was a great home, but As I say in the book, I find it impossible to believe that kind of attitude didn't color his view of the Rosenbergs and how he ultimately responded to what he saw as their betrayal of the United States. Yeah, that letter was incredible. I mean, they were probably sort of the 1% of American Jews anyway, living on Park Avenue. 
She was coming from money and privilege. And yet she felt that too, that, that line almost seemed sort of eerie because the rest of the letter was kind of cheery, like, you know, the cheerleader wife cheering you on, but underneath there is that insecurity. Yeah, exactly. Just jumped off the page. That kind of tension and fear and possible recognition or sense of non-belonging, you know, was always over the horizon or under the surface or something. And that's, you know, if you read his remarks at sentencing, especially when he put them in writing about a year or so later in December of 1952, when he issued an opinion denying their request for a modification of the sentence. You know, he has a few lines like the defendants were, you know, raised in this country, mirrored on our institutions, educated. 
I mean, you can feel this sense of personal betrayal there because he had done so well. And, you know, why would anybody of his, any background akin to his, and they all started in the same place, why would anyone do what the Rosenbergs did? That's what he could never really come to grips with, I think. Yeah. Yeah. He had some of that like American Jewish exceptionalism feeling, you know, even as alongside that kind of ambient anti-Semitism that that sort of shaped everything. One thing we've been asking all guests is what is something you wish you had known about writing earlier in your career, writing or publishing? Wow. I wish I'd known. I didn't know anything, really. You know, I didn't know anything. Like I said before, I knew next to nothing about the process of publication. 
So the main thing I didn't know is would this get published? Because I said I started working on this in 94 and would devote a little bit of time to it over the years. And even in 2015, 2016, when I set aside my daily work life to do this, I didn't know if it would get published. I didn't talk to anyone in the publishing world. I didn't wouldn't have had anyone to talk to, you know, really that I knew. And ultimately what I mean by that is I didn't, I wrote the whole thing. So I didn't, you know, do a proposal and a chapter and send that off and see what the reaction to it was. I wrote the whole thing. And one reason I did that is because I felt like if I tried to like just do some bit of it to see if it would get published, you know, and I began getting negative reactions, I would probably stop. 
In other words, I felt like the only way I can make myself really do it and commit to it was to do it. And not only do it if, you know, I thought it was going to get published or if someone was telling me it was going to get published or what. So, you know, there was an awfully nervous moment that I'm sure you probably covered with some of the folks you've interviewed right around 2020, the pandemic, because that was when I was getting, you know, sort of the door to maybe publishing with the commercial press was closing and I had to learn about and approach university presses that right in February, March 2020, when there was all this dire writing about, you know, are universities going to, how many colleges and universities are going to be keeping their doors open for the next couple of years, let alone will they have the resources or time and attention for something like a university press? 
So, you know, I was awfully unsure and anxious about whether now that I was turning to university presses, Would they publish anything? Would they just pause all projects or publish anything? And at that point, you know, the manuscript was almost all done. And I sort of felt like I was going to face the embarrassment of having to tell people who I've been telling for years about this book that it just wasn't going to get published. So I don't know if that's that doesn't quite answer that. What do I wish I'd known before? But well, part of what's interesting there is some folks we've spoken to have mentioned that they did, you know, if they were thinking they might go trade press or even trade press division, that they did their proposal and then waited to hear. 
So I'm wondering, is part of what you're saying that in the future, if you're thinking trade, you you might try that or or is it personally that it works better for you to just write the whole manuscript? I mean, it definitely worked better for me. I might try that the second time around. I think I'd be a little more, I'd feel more secure about it. You know, in the process, much more now. Maybe rejection on that front wouldn't be as discouraging as I kind of was thinking it would be the first time around. So, yeah, I could see doing that. But, of course, the downside of that is, and I'd love to talk to people who do that, because they're, I think, better writers and thinkers than I am, maybe, because... 
that your proposal and even maybe that chapter possibly is so shaped by the later stages of your work i think it's much easier in a way it's more time consuming um and maybe ultimately fruitless if it doesn't get published but it's easier to do what i did because if you've written almost all of it before you do the proposal you really kind of know what it is um i can't really i've read you know a couple of friends have sent at least one friend has sent a proposal that they, which misguidedly, because I don't know, I don't know what I'm doing, but this person, since I published a book, this person sent me a proposal and just wanted my feedback on the proposal. 
And I could kind of, I felt like from the proposal that that author wasn't completely sure, you know, what he was doing, you know, and, and that's because they probably weren't far enough along on the project exactly. So that's the one, that's one upside of doing it the way I did is you know what it is anyway. And that's got to make for a better proposal and a you know, maybe a more cohesive chapter. You also probably have your best chapter because you've written most of them, you know, by then. Yeah, no, I know what you mean. This seems like a paradox. How can you do this great proposal when you're not far enough into the project to really be steeped in it and know what it is? 
I guess there's a sweet spot there for authors who really know what they're doing. You know, they've done enough and they can produce the proposal. For me, I was almost all done by the time I, I mean, not all, I guess I had a couple chapters left, but I was mostly done. Another question we've been asking folks is if there is a writing practice or habit that has been working for you. Well, I just approached it, you know, when I set aside time to do this full time, I had to approach it the way I approach working as a lawyer. So that just means, you know, I kept the same hours. And a lot of what I do, really most of what I do as a lawyer is research and write. 
I'm the kind of lawyer, I'm an appellate lawyer. Most of what we do is produce articles. written briefs. I'm not in court very much. I'm not meeting with clients very much. So my job already was kind of sitting here and researching and writing. So it wasn't all that big a difference to be doing this, especially since it's legal writing to some degree or writing about law. So that was what worked for me, was keeping to the very same schedule and habits of other kinds of work. And probably when I was trying to do it in bits and pieces and therefore wasn't doing that, that probably accounted for some of the difficulty I had stopping and starting that way because I was, you know, sort of at loose ends. 
Much easier. I mean, it's a luxury, but much easier if you can, you know, this is my job. It's what I'm doing every day. I'm working on this book, just like I'd be working on a brief, just like I'd be working on an article. I'm going to sit here and research and write. That was, you know, productive and successful for me. Did that mean you were writing from nine to five? Yeah. Well, I mean, that's another thing. I would try to think. I would mostly... I would research and write as I went along. In other words, I did not complete all the research and then sit down to do all the writing. So yeah, so there were times when that time was spent reading or researching or whatever. 
But yeah, when I was sitting in front of the computer, I was writing. And sure, I'm just like writing a brief, which for me can take two or three weeks at a time longer, depending on the complexity. That's what I was doing here. Well, thank you so much, Martin. This has been really interesting. And I know our listeners will appreciate hearing about writing this biography. So thanks for taking the time to speak with us. Absolutely. Thanks so much. I really appreciate it. Thanks for listening to Writing It, the podcast about academics and writing, sponsored by the Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Florida. Visit our podcast description to find out how to contact us and send us your questions about academic writing and publishing. 
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