Abraham "Abe" Osheroff (October 24, 1915 – April 6, 2008) was an American social activist, carpenter, war veteran, documentary filmmaker, and lecturer.
Biography
Early life
Osheroff was born on October 24, 1915 into a family of Russian-Jewish immigrants, Sarah and Louis Osheroff, in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, New York. He spoke Yiddish and "a good smattering of Russian" before English and graduated from the City College of New York.
In the early 1930s, Osheroff began political work. In 1931, during the Great Depression, the police arrested him for moving the furniture of evicted families back into their houses. A policeman, who was a member of the American National Socialist Bund, beat up Osheroff while he was incarcerated and called him a "Goddamn Jew." Around this time, he joined the Communist Party. In 1935, aged 20, he was organizing miners' unions on behalf of the party and raising aid for striking workers.
Spanish Civil War
When the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, Osheroff at first felt no real compulsion to go and fight, but changed his mind after watching footage of the bombing of Guernica by the Luftwaffe. He believed no one should be allowed to inflict such suffering on others and get away with it. He joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in April 1937, survived the sinking of the MV Ciudad de Barcelona, and was shot in the knee at the Battle of Fuentes de Ebro. After recovering, he served as an instructor in topography at Tarazona before returning home in July 1938.
Later life
After returning to the United States, Osheroff ran for a seat in the 23rd Kings County district of the New York State Assembly on the Communist ticket. He polled roughly 3% of the vote. After America entered World War II, he enlisted in the U.S. Army to fight the Third Reich in Europe. The Army did not allow him to go overseas because they were concerned about his political views. Instead, he served as an instructor with the rank of sergeant, based primarily in the South.
At the beginning of World War II, he married his first wife, Sylvia, with whom he had a son named Carl. After the war, he taught at the Jefferson School of Social Science in New York, a Marxist adult school with ties to the Communist Party. After his first wife divorced him, he married Claire Rosenbaum in New York City and they went semi-underground in 1949, moving around the country, working as a carpenter under an assumed name after a tip-off that he was pursued by the FBI. While building the Mileston Community Center, Osheroff stayed with Hartman Turnbow, a leader of the movement in Holmes County.
In 1974 he completed the documentary Dreams and Nightmares, on the Spanish military bases sold to Francoist Spain by Richard Nixon, which shocked many, as at the time Nixon was still a popular president. Dreams & Nightmares won the top award at a socialist documentary film festival in Leipzig, then in Socialist East Germany. Permission to return to Spain in 1971 in order to create the documentary was obtained because Osheroff, despite his lack of experience, succeeded in duping the authorities of Francoist Spain.