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NOTES TO PAGES 109–112
23. Rosalie Wilson, Oral History, ARP. The incident raises the issue of Rand’s relationship
to her ethnic origins. Though her choice of name disguised her Jewish roots,
she was always quick to identify herself as Jewish if anti-Semitic statements arose. Even
so, since she had not chosen her religion she viewed it as largely inconsequential to
her identity. As George Nash argues, this was a fairly common attitude among secular
Jewish intellectuals during a time when religious and ethnic background was not
celebrated as the key to authentic selfhood. Nash, “Forgotten Godfathers: Premature
Jewish Conservatives and the Rise of National Review,” American Jewish History 87, nos.
2–3 (1999): 123–57. Others have found Rand’s Jewish origins to be of some consequence.
The conservative critic Florence King asserts, “Ayn Rand’s whole shtick was a gargantuan
displacement of her never admitted fear of anti-Semitism,” though she offers no
evidence to support this point. King, With Charity toward None (New York: St. Martin’s
Press, 1992), 127. Andrew Heinze makes the more compelling case that Rand should be
considered part of the American tradition of female Jewish public moralists, akin to
Joyce Brothers, Laura Schlessinger, and Ann Landers. Heinze, Jews and the American
Soul (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004) 300–301. Though in later years
the majority of her close friends and associates were of Russian Jewish background and
Rand made her fi rst charitable donation to the state of Israel in 1973, she said and wrote
virtually nothing on the topic of Judaism, nor did she mention the fate of European Jews
during World War II. (Her frequent references to Hitler always came as part of a generalized
discussion about totalitarianism and were usually twinned with reference to Stalin.)
Rand may have had some vestigial loyalty to her birth religion, but as she stated, it seems
to have been largely unimportant to her mature self-concept.
24. Ruth Hill, Oral History, ARP.
25. Jack Bungay, Oral History, ARP; Walter Seltzer, Oral History, ARP.
26. “Actress Peggy O’Neil Dead in Writer’s Home,” Los Angeles Times, April 14, 1945,
A1; Oral History interview with June Kurisu; Albert Mannheimer to Ayn Rand, undated,
ARP 003–13A.
27. B. Branden, The Passion of Ayn Rand, 197, 250.
28. Ruth Hill, Oral History, ARP.
29. Henceforth for clarity’s sake I refer to the manuscript by its published title, Atlas
Shrugged.
30. Rand purchased the volume edited by Richard McKeon, The Basic Works of
Aristotle (New York: Random House, 1941), a classic tome of about 1,500 pages with
excerpts from the Organon, On the Heavens, The Short Physical Treatises, and Rhetoric and
the complete texts of On the Soul, On Generation and Corruption, Physics, Metaphysics,
Nicomachean Ethics, Politics, and Poetics in their entirety. AR to Isabel Paterson, July 26,
1945, Letters, 179.
31. In 1948 Niebuhr was on the cover of Time magazine, an indication of the widespread
interest in his ideas. Richard Wightman Fox, Reinhold Niebuhr: A Biography (New
York: Pantheon Books, 1985); Patrick Allitt, Catholic Intellectuals and Conservative Politics
in America, 1950–1985 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993); Edward Purcell, The
Crisis of Democratic Theory: Scientifi c Naturalism and the Problem of Value (Lexington:
University of Kentucky Press, 1973), chapter 8.
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