Sen. Ron Wyden at a Senate Finance Committee hearing on Capitol Hill on June 12, 2025. Photo by Getty Images
When U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden was a boy, his father spoke of life with his parents in Nazi Germany. Their greatest fear was the Gestapo’s “knock on the door.” The Jewish family fled to the States in 1937. Eighty-eight years later, Ron Wyden watched in horror as Donald Trump sent National Guard soldiers and Marines to Los Angeles amid tensions over immigration raids and as Trump threatened to dispatch troops to other American cities.
Six days before Trump began his second term in office, Ron Wyden, 76, published his first book, It Takes Chutzpah: How To Fight Fearlessly For Progressive Change. In an interview, the Oregon Democrat said that while writing the book he did not anticipate that a second Trump administration would lead to this “very ominous time with great threats being made that people can see on any screen in America.”
As shaken as Wyden is by America’s crisis, he professes the belief that the republic won’t crack, that its institutions will hold, that democracy will prevail, but with a fight. This is an optimism inherited through his parents, both of whom successfully made it out of Nazi Germany, but also from his accomplishments in shaping major legislation. But America is drastically different than it was when Wyden’s book was released. The Democrats are locked out of power. It’s difficult, if not impossible, to enlist Republicans as partners to craft and pass legislation for fear of bringing Trump’s wrath down upon them.
Wyden told me that the lessons of the Holocaust and the tenets of Judaism are energizing him to take a prominent role in fighting Trump’s power grabs and returning the nation to stability and decency.
Peter Wyden, Sen. Wyden’s father, was the embodiment of the good kind of chutzpah his son wrote about. An influential journalist and author whose books focused on abuses of power, Peter was brash, not afraid to make noise, indomitable, and bursting with charisma. Full disclosure: I met Peter Wyden while I was working as a foreign correspondent in Germany and we were close friends until his death in 1998. 14-year-old Peter emigrated with his parents to the U.S. in 1937. Sen. Wyden’s mother, Edith, came from a prominent family. Her father, George Rosenow, was a well-known hematologist in Germany and later in America. Edith and her parents fled Nazi Germany in 1936. Peter Wyden and Edith Rosenow served in the U.S. Armed Forces during World War II. They married in 1947 and had two sons: Ron and his brother Jeff. Both sides of the family lost relatives during the Holocaust.
The following interview has been edited for space and clarity.
How old were you when you first learned about relatives who perished in the Holocaust?
I first learned about it when I was about 10. It was not in detail, but it was in the context of my dad taking the lead because he was the storyteller in the family: Mom and dad had to leave the place where they were born, called Germany, because of a very evil person, who was interested in killing the family because we were Jewish.
What influence did your family’s history have on your choice to go into public service?
My dad told me at a young age what we (Jews) remember about the Nazis, more than anything else, was the knock on the door. That continues to drive much of my interest today, as somebody who’s called the Senate’s leading privacy hawk.
Were you raised to be religious?
I always knew I was a Jew. I had my antenna up for discrimination. I had listened to that. My parents, particularly my dad, never went a day without thinking about being a Jew and what it means. But in terms of organized religion, not a lot.
How would you describe your relationship to your faith now?
I consider myself to be a Jew who believes in what Judaism is all about, and I’ve tried to take it into public service. I felt from the beginning as I got involved with senior citizens that I was being bold, and taking on the odds that a 20-something Jewish kid could make a difference in terms of working with older people. I knew enough about Judaism to know that a basic tenet of the faith is perfecting the world.
Tell me about your mother’s influence.
As I wrote in the introduction, I’m not on this Earth if my mother as a very young Jewish woman didn’t say that the men failed to understand what Hitler was all about. She told me this. She said the men thought Hitler was kind of a kook, it would pass at some point, but not the great threat that some were talking about. My mom had chutzpah when she persuaded the men in her family in 1930s Berlin to take Hitler seriously.
What influence did your great-grandfather (Leopold Rosenow, a prominent Berlin figure in the early 20th century) have on your career?
I came to deeply admire Leopold’s progressive style and spirit. It was no accident that his progressive fights, like battling the phone giants, became a fight I picked up with then-Congressman Al Gore in the early 80s and battled the big phone lobbies that mistreated small-business owners.
Your book came out six days before Trump took office for his second term. Your book strongly criticizes Trump and the Congressional Republicans, but has overall an optimistic tone. When you wrote the book did you have any idea what Trump would do if he were elected, and that it could be this dangerous?
I believed that it was more dangerous than Trump One. But I didn’t anticipate the kind of thing we have seen on our screens. We’re in a very ominous time with great threats being made that people can see on any screen in America, and it’s all about Donald Trump saying in effect that the law really doesn’t apply to him. That’s what this is all about. He gets up in the morning and he has a whim, the whim takes over and the law is sidelined again. We need to alert the country to the constitutional crisis that is in front of us every hour now.
