An Introduction

The early years

Abe Osheroff was born in 1915 to parents who had fled from the extreme poverty and anti-Semitism of Czarist Russia. Osheroff was then "raised in an atmosphere mildly socialistic" in a Brooklyn ghetto, where people  "worked together to build trade unions." At a very early age, he became a "radical humanist" that was "deeply moved by anything unjust, unfair" and realized that "it would take drastic changes" to improve the world.

As a teenager growing up in Brooklyn, Abe Osheroff organized a group of his friends into something called the Brownsville Athletic and Cultural Club, with the dual purposes of lifting weights and listening to classical music.

But it was the beginning of the Great Depression of the 1930s, and a neighborhood leftist recruited Osheroff and his friends for a different mission: helping evicted tenants by carrying the furniture landlords dumped on the sidewalk back into the rented apartments.

Osheroff thought it was a good idea--but the police didn't agree. He was caught in the act and beaten by cops who called him a "dirty Communist Jew bastard"--"all  of which was true," Osheroff said, "except for the bastard part."  For Osheroff, that was the start of more than 70 years of political activism, fighting the good fight for what the left calls social justice, and what he calls radical humanism.