Letters to the Editors: Trotskyists & Dr. Barsky
To the Editors:
Thank you to all those involved in the preparation of the Barsky issue, including Nancy Phillips for her financial support. I always read the magazine with interest, but this issue was of personal importance to me. Dr. Barsky was a close friend of my father, Dr. Benjamin Segal, an OB-GYN who delivered many of the “red diaper babies” in New York City and worked with Dr. Barsky on various medical and political projects. (I donated my father’s papers to NYU’s Tamiment Library, so I cannot now refer to specific organizations in which they were both involved.)
When my father’s passport was revoked by the U.S. State Department, in the 1950s, my parents vacationed in Mexico since, at that time, no passport was required for Americans to travel there. I joined them in Cuernavaca in the summer of 1954, where I became acquainted with exiles from Franco’s Spain and with some of the “Hollywood 10” who had settled there.
Mimi S. Daitz
To the Editors:
I write to take issue with your description of the MacDonalds as “Trotskyites” in the article “Dr. Barsky and the Paradoxes of Refugee Aid” (December 2024). To do so is to defer to the pejorative used by the CP (or shall we say “Stalinists”?). Trust me, I know, as I was raised by the latter and temporarily became one of the former. In addition, followers of Trotsky (Trotskyists) are communists; followers of Stalin don’t have a monopoly on the franchise.
Curious about MacDonald’s affiliation, I went to Wikipedia and learned (if it is trustworthy) that “Macdonald, originally a committed Trotskyist, broke with Leon Trotsky over the Kronstadt rebellion which Trotsky and the Bolsheviks had suppressed in 1921. He then moved towards democratic socialism.” That jibes with my limited familiarity with him. Perhaps a correction is in order.
In solidarity,
Frederick Warren
