On June 10, 1925, Nat Hentoff was born in Boston, Massachusetts to Russian Jewish immigrants. "I grew up in Roxbury, then a ghetto of Boston. It was in the 1930s and early 1940s, a time of righteous anti-Semitism around the country, but nowhere more fierce than in Boston. Indeed, one journalist, John Roy Carlson, having explored most of the major cities in the nation, concluded in a book that Boston was the capital of American anti-Semitism.

"There were pamphlets, broadsides, newspapers that spread the inciteful word that Jews were simultaneously in the highest ranks of international communism while also being capitalist bloodsuckers who were draining the very life out of working people.

"The printed assaults were scary in view of what the radio and the press told us of what was happening in Germany. But far more frightening were the raids--the squadrons of young hooligans descending on our neighborhood and...