Emanuel Rahm - Mayor 1%: Rahm Emanuel and the rise of Chicagos 99%

Praise for Mayor 1%

This book provides deep insight into the political career of Rahm Emanuel. Painstakingly researched, Mayor 1% provides the reader with the ability to understand the hard-line neoliberal mindset that blinds the man to the harsh realities of entrenched poverty and disenfranchisement. The relentless attacks on Chicagos working class, from the janitors at OHare to the librarians, mental health workers, and members of the Chicago Teachers Union have shown the true nature of a man who will have plenty of money from the billionaires to run his re-election campaign, but none of the love of the people who will not pull the lever for him. Kari Lydersen ends on a hopeful note: that Mayor 1%s brutal reign can actually lead to a better Chicago as people get up, stand up and fight the power.

Karen Lewis, president, Chicago Teachers Union

While banks and corporations continue to enjoy record-breaking profits, working families across Chicago continue to face school closings, foreclosures, and devastating privatization. Lydersens book lifts up the extraordinary power of everyday people to stand up, fight back, dream big, and join together to make transformative change. Rarely does a journalist do such justice to the in the trenches organizing work that is vital to undermining oppressive city policies and abusive corporate influences.

Amisha Patel, Executive Director, Grassroots Collaborative

In Mayor 1% Kari Lydersen surveys the expansive and deeply contested first-term record of Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel. Her work touches every flashpoint of Emanuels kinetic drive to govern the city as he sees fit. Along the way, Lydersen admirably and poignantly gives voice to the activist community that has become the mayors fiercest critic, while calling out his staunchest business allies.

Robert Bruno, University of Illinois at Chicago

Lydersens book demonstrates the type of thorough investigative journalism we need in Chicago to keep all politicians and public servants accountable. It exposes the public policy that the city of Chicago and its constituents didnt expect from a Democratic mayor of the City that Works. Lydersens book shows the real Rahm Emanuel, leading the race to the bottom by killing off good middle-class jobs instead of upholding job standards that help build a strong workforce and the robust economy our city desperately needs.

Tom Balanoff, President, SEIU Local 1

If you want to understand how a Democrat became so reviled among the middle and working class citizens in modern day Chicago, please read this book. This is the story of organized money vs. organized people in the Second City, and the impact of what happens here ripples across the nation in our public schools, in our healthcare centers, and in our streets. It might be that Obama brought the Windy City to the Potomac, but Emanuel attempts the reverse in Chicago, and as Lydersen notes in great detail, Rahm might be a master at fundraising and manipulating the image of his public office, but confrontations are unavoidable when a city manager doesn't respect his electorate.

Adam P. Heenan, Chicago Public Schools Civics Teacher

To the Chicago Mental Health Movement

A Golden Boy

Rahm Emanuel was born in Chicago on November 29, 1959. His family story was one of the many quintessential American Dream tales for which Chicago is famousfirst- and second-generation immigrants making good through hard work, pluck, and family and community connections.

Rahms father, Benjamin Emanuel, was born in Jerusalem to Russian migrs. During the struggle for independence that culminated with the founding of the state of Israel in 1948, he was active in the Irgun Zvai Leumi, a far-right-wing Zionist paramilitary organization widely described as terrorist for carrying out assassinations and attacks on Palestinians and the British, whom they viewed as illegally occupying Israel. The group bombed the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in 1946, killing ninety-one people. Members killed at least two hundred Arabs during the 1930s and 1940s in multiple attacks, including bombings and shootings. And in 1948 Irgun commandos carried out the Deir Yassin massacre, in which more than a hundred Palestinians in the small village were killed, including a group of men who were executed in a stone quarry.

Benjamins family adopted the surname Emanuel in the 1930s to honor Benjamins brother Emanuel Auerbach, who had been killed in the 1930s in an Arab uprising.

Benjamin came to Chicago in 1953 for medical training at Mount Sinai Hospital on the West Side, where he met an X-ray technician named Marsha Smulevitz. She was the daughter of a Romanian from Moldova who had fled pogroms and arrived in the United States alone in 1917, at the age of thirteen. Marshas father, Herman, made a living as a steelworker, truck driver, and meat cutter, and was known as a labor organizer and self-taught intellectual.

Photo by Kari Lydersen.

The Emanuels lived in Uptown, a diverse, somewhat hardscrabble North Side neighborhood, before moving to tony Wilmette.

Benjamin and Marsha married in 1955 and lived for a time in Israel before returning to Chicago, where Benjamin built his pediatrics practice into one of the citys largest.

In a 1997 New York Times profile, Elisabeth Bumiller wrote, Of the three brothers, Rahm is the most famous, Ari is the richest and Zeke, over time, will probably be the most important. Zeke is also, according to his brothers, the smartest. Rahm, naturally, gets the most press attention.... All are rising stars in three of Americas most high-profile and combative professions. All understand and enjoy power, and know how using it behind the scenes can change the way people think, live and die.

The boys spent summers in Israel, where they learned to speak Hebrew. They also attended civil rights protests with their mother. Until Rahm was seven or eight, the Emanuel family lived in an apartment in Uptown, a diverse, somewhat hardscrabble neighborhood near the lake on Chicagos North Side. The boys attended a Jewish day school and spent long hours together riding bikes and hanging out at the nearby Foster Avenue beach.

The boys all took ballet lessons, and young Rahm was known to pirouette around the house. He studied at the Joel Hall Dance Center in Chicago and became a talented dancer; he was even offered a scholarship to the acclaimed Joffrey Ballet at age seventeen. Decades later the nickname Tiny Dancer still stuck with Emanuel, whose five-foot-seven stature surprises many in light of his outsize personality.

Growing Up

In 1967 the Emanuels moved to Wilmette, a lavishly wealthy lakefront suburb north of Chicago, where the median household income in 2010 was more than $100,000 a year and only about 1 percent of the population was African American.

The Emanuel family was close-knit and kept its history of migration and flight from persecution very much alive. The walls were lined with photos of relatives, including some who had perished in the Holocaust. Grandparents, an uncle, and a cousin lived with them for periods of time, and stories of family travails and triumphs were told and retold.

When the boys were teenagers, the family adopted an eight-day-old girl named Shoshana. Benjamin had given the infant a checkup and found shed suffered a brain hemorrhage at birth. According to Bumillers profile, the girls Polish Catholic mother pleaded with him to help find a home for the baby, and after a week of debate the Emanuels decided to take the ailing child in themselves. Shoshana needed extensive surgery and physical therapy, and her childhood was reportedly full of emotional and physical struggles. After graduating from New Trier, she had what has been described as a difficult life, including unemployment and single motherhood, with Marsha later raising her two children.