Box 5

Scope and Contents

Correspondence between Shaftel and family, colleagues, friends, and former students, roughly from the 1930s through the 1950s. Includes a large quantity of letters written during World War II, when Shaftel served in the United States Air Force (1942-1946).

Scope and Contents

One folder of records from Shaftel's time at Harvard in the 1930s. One folder of Shaftel's personal writing, including poetry and ghost writing.

Scope and Contents From the Series:

Correspondence between Shaftel and family, colleagues, friends, and former students, roughly from the 1930s through the 1950s. Includes a large quantity of letters written during World War II, when Shaftel served in the United States Air Force (1942-1946).

Abstract The Oscar Shaftel papers contains correspondence, flyers, press clippings, memos, press releases, transcripts of testimony, and subject files documenting student activism at Queens College in the late 1940s and early 1950s and the effect of McCarthyism on academic freedom in New York State. Oscar Shaftel, one of the original faculty members at Queens College, was fired in 1953 under Section 903 of the New York City Charter for refusing to testify in front of the Senate Internal Security...