Harvey Milk

From the prizewinning Jewish Lives series, a lively and engaging biography of the first openly gay man elected to public office in the United States, a man fiercely committed to protecting all minorities “This elegantly written and well-researched book recovers the Jewishness that has too often been erased or glossed over in the mythologizing of a gay icon.”—Helene Meyers, Tablet Harvey Milk—eloquent, charismatic, and a smart-aleck—was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977, but he had not served even a full year when he was shot by a homophobic fellow supervisor. Milk’s assassination at the age of forty-eight made him the most famous gay man in modern history; twenty years later Time magazine included him on its list of the hundred most influential individuals of the twentieth century. Before finding his calling as a politician, however, Milk variously tried being a schoolteacher, a securities analyst on Wall Street, a supporter of Barry Goldwater, a Broadway