Political Violence Comes to America, Again

Plus, Harvard Dean Henry Rosovsky’s “tit print” gift to Jeffrey Epstein

The shooting death of Republican organizer and activist Charlie Kirk on the campus of Utah Valley University is a moment to mourn and to reflect on the recent rise of political violence in America.

From the 2017 shooting at a congressional baseball practice that injured Rep. Steve Scalise, to the two attempts to assassinate President Trump during the 2024 presidential campaign, to the attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband in 2022, to the April 2025 arson attack on the home of Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, to the fatal attack on Kirk, one can draw connections both to other, apolitical violent crime and also to the apocalyptic rhetoric that depicts political opponents as abnormally malevolent Hitlers-in-the-making.

The impulse to find a policy solution—gun control, better mental-health care, less extreme political rhetoric, stronger religious, moral, family, and community norms against murder—collides with the reality of risks in a free society. Kirk had no death wish but embraced vigorous, nonviolent debate. He was engaged in it at the event at which he was murdered.

One of the things we aspire to here at The Editors has to do with tone: “civil, fact-based analysis, leavened, at times, with a sense of humor. The advocacy and opinion will be with a light touch rather than heavy-handed. Not shrill or extreme or crazy, but common-sense and sane, if sometimes provocative.” It’s better for our business if that’s a unique selling proposition, or at least if it has some scarcity value. But it’d probably be better for the country, and diminish some of the inspiration for political violence, if that general approach were more common.

Recent work: “Qatar and the U.S. Have a Secret Deal” is the headline over my latest piece in the Wall Street Journal. Please check it out over at the Journal if you are interested and have access.

Rosovsky’s gift: When I think of Henry Rosovsky it is of this portrait that hangs both in the Harvard Hillel building—“Rosovsky Hall”—and in Harvard’s Hutchins Center for African & African American Research.

Or of the elegiac piece I wrote about him for Education Next in 2022: “Henry Rosovsky, an Educator, Is Mourned.” (“As dean of Harvard’s faculty of arts and sciences from 1973 to 1984, he had shaped the Harvard core curriculum that was responsible for the really excellent education I got in the early 1990s.”)

There’s a fabulous Talk of the Town profile of Rosovsky (“An Educated Person,” by Lillian Ross) in the December 4, 1978 issue of the New Yorker, that is worth your time for the journalistic craft of it, the higher-education dimension of it, and the Jewish-American history of it.

What I had never thought of, until today, was a 2002 “tit print” by the artist Annie Sprinkle—born Ellen Steinberg—that appears to have been commissioned by Rosovsky for a gift book to Jeffrey Epstein for Epstein’s 50th birthday. Here it is, along with my assessment of the situation:

A page from the supposed Jeffrey Epstein 50th birthday album released by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

A second page from the supposed Epstein birthday album.

The artwork appears in a “friends” section of the book, after a note that says, “Dear Jeffrey, For the man who has almost everything — but never enough of these! Sent with best wishes for your 50th birthday, as ever.”

Maybe it’s all an elaborate forgery—President Trump has denied a contribution to the book that is attributed to him. This birthday was before Epstein had been charged with or convicted of any crimes. The book, released this week by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, also includes pages attributed to Bill Clinton and to both Alan “Ace” Greenberg and James “Jimmy” Cayne of Bear Stearns.

Or maybe Rosovsky was a thoughtful and loyal friend with a mischievous sense of humor who managed to find a nationally prominent Jewish woman artist with a Ph.D. monetizing her breasts by creating art with them.

Sprinkle’s papers are in Harvard’s, or Radcliffe’s, Schlesinger Library, where the catalog describes them as “Closed until processed.” She did not return an email inquiry from The Editors asking about whether she recalled the Rosovsky commission for Epstein or the circumstances around it.

Epstein’s crimes were despicable, and Harvard has said it mishandled its relationship to him as a donor. But the breathless effort to smear Rosovsky (and, by connection, Rosovsky Hall and Harvard Hillel) in association with him appears on the basis of the current evidence to be unwarranted. Trafficking underage women is a horrible crime, but commissioning art by a woman artist involving breasts, or just liking breasts, is not even a misdemeanor, nor should it be. The episode has echoes of the recent flap over the Sydney Sweeney American Eagle jeans/genes ad, in which a culture war moment erupted over the ad featuring the pulchritudinous actress.

The Jeffrey Epstein story seems to resonate with readers in part because it fuels a sense that the bipartisan establishment elites—Clinton, Trump, Rosovsky, Mort Zuckerman, George Mitchell, the rest—are irredeemably corrupt. Some of Epstein’s cronies doubtless were scoundrels, but on the broader picture, I am not that cynical. The more accurate takeaway is that no one is a perfectly accurate judge of character, and that it was possible for even some of the savviest figures to be seduced by a figure like Epstein, who appeared bright, intellectually curious, and wealthy. Let it be a cautionary tale—a posthumous lesson to us all from that master educator, Henry Rosovsky.

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