3.“Being Jewish,” he has said, even though his parents were not particularly devout, “has greatly influenced my intellectual and emotional development.” He was acutely aware, too, of the excruciating toll of the Holocaust, retaining vivid early memories of going through albums of pictures of members of his father’s family who were “murdered by the Nazis.”

4.He was a fan as a boy of the Brooklyn Dodgers and remains bitter about the baseball team’s move to Los Angeles in 1957. It’s not “the sole reason that I’ve developed the politics that I’ve developed,” he has said, but it was a formative disappointment. “I asked him: ‘Did this have a deep impact on you?’ and he said: ‘Of course! I thought the Dodgers belonged to Brooklyn,’” one of his closest friends once said. “It does lay out the question of who owns what.”

5.At Brooklyn’s James Madison High School, from which he graduated in 1959, he ran for student body president on a platform that included raising money for Korean War orphans. He came in third in the election, but the school took up his cause, anyway. Read more

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