Rahm’s father, Benjamin Emanuel, was born in Jerusalem to Russian émigrés. 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.1
Benjamin’s family adopted the surname Emanuel in the 1930s to honor Benjamin’s brother Emanuel Auerbach, who had been killed in the 1930s in an Arab uprising.2 Young Benjamin went to Czechoslovakia—he had been studying in Switzerland—in a failed attempt to smuggle guns to the Zionist underground. And he was reportedly bashed on the head by a British soldier’s baton so forcefully that it left a permanent dent in his skull.3 Author Jonathan Alter described Benjamin as a “Sabra”: the term, derived from the Hebrew word for prickly pear cactus, is used to describe native-born Israelis, and also denotes “abrupt and aggressive” personalities that could “mask sensitive souls.”4
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. Marsha’s father, Herman, made a living as a steelworker, truck driver, and meat cutter, and was known as a labor organizer and self-taught intellectual.5 Smulevitz grew up to be a civil rights activist as well; she later served as a chapter chair of the Congress of Racial Equality. At one point she also owned a North Side club that featured live rock music. She later became a psychotherapist, and was still practicing when her son became mayor of Chicago.6
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 city’s largest.7 Their three sons—Ezekiel (Zeke), Rahm, and Ariel (Ari)—were an energetic, competitive, and gifted bunch from early on, and the three boys would all reach pinnacles in their professions. Zeke, two years older than Rahm, became a nationally prominent oncologist and medical ethicist; he served as a department chair of bioethics at the National Institutes of Health and played a role in President Barack Obama’s health-care reform legislation, carried out while Rahm was White House chief of staff. Ari, a year younger than Rahm, became a famous talent agent widely known as the inspiration for foul-mouthed, hard-charging Ari Gold on the HBO show Entourage. And Rahm, of course, became a prominent political operative, elected official, and fundraiser who, like Ari, was also graced with a prime-time TV alter ego: the impatient, arrogant, and profane White House chief of staff Josh Lyman on the political drama The West Wing.8
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 America’s 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.”9
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 Chicago’s 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.10 They often had to defend themselves against kids who picked on them because they were Jewish or even because they mistook Rahm—with his curly dark hair and deep tan—for an African American.11 The Emanuels were plenty able to defend themselves; roughhousing and wrestling were a way of life for the rowdy and competitive boys, as Zeke later described in a memoir.12 Rahm was literally born into this atmosphere: Zeke described how he and a cousin played a game called “bounce the baby,” in which they jumped on a sofa bed “like a couple of jackhammers” and tried to knock infant Rahm—“Rahmy,” as Marsha called him—onto the floor.13
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.14
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.15 The Emanuels lived in one of the more modest homes, not a sprawling mansion. But the boys attended New Trier Township High School, iconic as one of the nation’s most elite public high schools, with academic, athletic, and extracurricular programs and facilities worthy of a university.16 In his 1991 book Savage Inequalities, Jonathan Kozol contrasted the lush, privileged atmosphere of New Trier with impoverished public schools in East St. Louis, Illinois—driving home the message of two racially and economically separate Americas. NBC Chicago blogger Edward McClelland noted that “there’s something about New Trier Township that ignites class resentment. It’s a symbol of elite education, a finishing school for the sort of young people most of us only met by watching Risky Business or Mean Girls.”17
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.18
When the boys were teenagers, the family adopted an eight-day-old girl named Shoshana. Benjamin had given the infant a checkup and found she’d suffered a brain hemorrhage at birth. According to Bumiller’s profile, the girl’s 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.19
Writer and editor Alan Goldsher, who grew up near the family in Wilmette, later published a revealing reminiscence about the Emanuel household. In a 2012 story for the Jewish Daily Forward, he described Benjamin Emanuel, “aka Dr. Benny,” as “a faux-crotchety alpha male, the proverbial grump with a heart of gold, the kind of person who would offer to administer allergy shots at his home rather than at his office, just because it was difficult for the patient’s working mother to get her son to said office before closing time.”20
Goldsher had to stay long enough to make sure he didn’t have a bad reaction to the medication, and this usually meant hanging out in the Emanuels’ backyard. “Generally, my sojourns behind the house were solitary and unexciting,” he wrote.
But every once in a while, Dr. Benny’s two high school aged sons paid me a visit. It was common knowledge around Wilmette that Rahm and Ari Emanuel were bullies—hyper-intelligent bullies, but bullies nonetheless. (This was unlike their father, who only pretended to be a bully.) Rahm and Ari were, respectively,