Judge Aaron Jaffe: Reforming Illinois

About the Book

Judge Aaron Jaffe: Reforming Illinois is an oral history of Aaron Jaffe’s legislative, judicial, and executive branch careers. It is also a story of how the author met Judge Jaffe and gained wisdom from a master politician operating in one of America's most notorious political battlegrounds. As legislator, Jaffe changed rape laws to reflect victims' perspectives. Though white, he was recruited to the Black Caucus because of a better voting record than other legislators, black or white. As judge, he presided over divorce laws he passed as legislator and, in Chancery Court, preserved the Auditorium Theatre for Roosevelt University. As chair of the Illinois Gaming Board, he kept Illinois from adding other episodes to its scandal-ridden traditions. In mutual appreciation, Aaron Jaffe listened to stories of genuine characters in Illinois politics that defy the imagination of fiction writers. Their hilarious foibles, machinations, and insights appear in this volume, alongside Judge Jaffe's witty observations about humans as political animals.

About the Author

Dr. Charles M. Barber is professor of history emeritus at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago. He taught, researched, and served there from 1967–2000. He holds a bachelor of arts degree from Princeton University (1960) and a PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (1971). Dr. Barber has presented papers on German-Americans and Illinois politics at history conferences around the Midwest and nation. His work on Chicago’s German-Americans protecting their choral heritage against nativist pressures from World Wars I and II is published in the Yearbook of German-American Studies (1995). His work on Senator William Langer of North Dakota, the American Aid Society of Chicago, and His Eminence, Cardinal Aloisius Muench, Bishop of Fargo, 1935–1959, and Papal Visitator Apostolicus in post-World War II Germany, won the 1999 Editor’s Award of the State Historical Society of North Dakota. His chapter on Senator Langer and German expellees (“The Isolationist as Interventionist: Senator William Langer on the Subject of Ethnic Cleansing, March 29, 1946”) appears in Ethnic Cleansing in 20th Century Europe, Steven Vardy and Hunt Tooley, editors (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). Dr. Barber also has written forewords for scholarly works and memoirs centering upon the ethnic cleansing of roughly fifteen million Germans from eastern Europe in the aftermath of World War II (Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, A Terrible Revenge: The Ethnic Cleansing of the East European Germans, 1944–1950 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994; Raymond Lohne, The Great Chicago Refugee Rescue (Rockport: Picton Press, 1997; and Luisa Lang Owen, Casualty of War: A Childhood Remembered (College Station, Texas A & M University Press, 2003, among others). Charles Barber currently resides in Mandan, North Dakota. Since 2008 he has written an opinion column for an alternative paper in Fargo, North Dakota: The High Plains Reader (http://hpr1.com). This column is written from the perspective of an historian and an activist in the liberal wing of the Democratic Parties in Cook County, Illinois and western North Dakota, and it draws “early and often” on his sessions and experiences with Judge Aaron Jaffe.