Herb Brin (1915–2003)

Herb Brin was born to a family of Polish-Russian Jewish immigrants in Chicago, Illinois. He attended Crane Junior College, then DePaul University and the University of Chicago. He became a journalist in the 1930s, reporting on poverty, gangland killings and corrupt politics for the legendary City News Bureau of Chicago. After the United States entered World War II in 1941, he enlisted in the Army. After the war, he returned briefly to the City News Bureau but then moved to California, where he worked as a feature writer for The Los Angeles Times. He wrote six volumes of poetry, and two travelogues about post-war Germany and the Holocaust, Ich Bin Ein Jude: Travels Through Europe on the Edge of Savagery and Where Are the Children? In 1954, he mortgaged his house in order to start a small chain of weekly Jewish community newspapers named Heritage that was successful throughout the 1960s and 1970s. He continued to write occasional features and in 1962, represented the LA Times at the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Shortly before his death, he completed his autobiography, Shouting for Justice.