Justus Rosenberg

Justus Rosenberg (January 23, 1921 – October 30, 2021) was a literature professor who spent most of his life teaching in the United States, ending his career as a professor emeritus of languages and literature at Bard College. Before that, as a teenager he began playing a role in saving many lives when the Nazis overran France, working first as part of a French-American network organized to help anti-Nazi intellectuals and artists escape from Vichy France to the United States, and later as a member of the French Resistance during World War II, providing assistance as well to the US Army.

Personal life Rosenberg was born in the Free City of Danzig on January 23, 1921. He came from a Jewish home where his Polish-born parents He was 16 when he left his father, Jacob, a successful businessman, and his mother, Bluma (née Solarsky), a homemaker; In 2020 he published his autobiography, The Art of Resistance: My Four Years in the French Underground: A Memoir.

He turned 100 on January 23, 2021, and died on October 30. He was then seventeen.

The Committee helped such figures as Hannah Arendt, Marcel Duchamp, Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, and André Breton to escape; Rosenberg personally accompanied Heinrich Mann and Franz Werfel, along with their wives Nelly Mann and Alma Mahler-Werfel, on foot across the Pyrenees to Spain. and courier, carrying messages and forged identity papers to those the group was trying to save. “I looked very blond, very Germanic and younger than my own age, so I wouldn’t be stopped often to be asked for papers, because I looked so innocent and angelic,” he told the International Rescue Committee in an interview. He earned his PhD at the University of Cincinnati in 1950, and held post-docs at Columbia University and Syracuse University before obtaining positions at Swarthmore College, The New School, and Bard College. He taught at Bard from 1962 until he retired.

His linguistic skills led to teaching language courses in French, German, Russian, Yiddish, and Polish at Swarthmore as well as Bard. At Bard he affiliated with the programs in French and Jewish studies, as well as literature, and taught traditional literature courses on such subjects as classic 19th century French, Russian, and German literature, as well as popular compilation courses, for example, one entitled "10 Plays that Shook the World." After his retirement, he continued teaching, broadening his subject matter to include modern literature from Africa, the Middle East, India, and Asia; at The New School he taught a weekly course in political and cultural history.

He published many scholarly works on French and German literature along with linguistic subjects, especially to do with translation. He was invited as a guest professor at universities at various European universities as well as in Singapore, and received many honors including one from the New York Council for the Humanities.