Jeff Sherr

In Kentucky legal circles, John Rosenberg is not just well-known but is beloved.

Rosenberg is not just respected for his skills, accomplishments and utter commitment to the cause of public law in Appalachia from his base in Floyd County, but is also a hero and inspiration to generations of Kentucky lawyers and advocates.

Imagine the task, then, Jeff Sherr took on in writing and performing the one-man play “Stumbling Stones: The John Rosenberg Story,” which was performed to a sold-out crowd at the Woodford Theatre on Nov. 15.

Sherr is a familiar name to audiences here; he was just nominated for Best Supporting Actor by Broadway World-Louisville for his performance in Woodford Theatre’s production of Henry Miller’s “The Crucible.” What folks likely do not know is that Sherr is a long-time Woodford County resident and himself a lawyer who spent his career in state government.

Sherr said the play “spans two continents and generations, from fleeing Nazi Germany to standing with civil rights workers in Mississippi and coalfield families in Kentucky.”

“Through decades of courtroom battles and community organizing, it is a testament to memory, resilience and the power of collective action—with an intimate thread of love and partnership with his wife Jean at its heart,” he added. “Ultimately, it’s a story of hope, reminding us that the work of justice is never finished and inspiring us to repair the world we live in today, stone by stone.”

Based on the breadth of Rosenberg’s life, hinted at by that description, it is not hard to imagine how daunting it must have been for Sherr to create a watchable piece of theatre. The success of the play is attributed to the light but experienced hand of well-known Kentucky Director Bo List.

Sherr succeeded. And, not just succeeded, but the story he told is compelling, cogent and performed with a seeming effortlessness in embodying the person of John Rosenberg.

I admit to having initially been skeptical. I have known Rosenberg for 25 years and was involved in cases with him. I also knew his story well, having both heard him speak at conferences and during a speech he gave at a U.S. Justice Department event that honored him in Washington.

John was spirited out of Germany as a child with his parents in 1939. As Jews, they escaped in the nick of time, as Jews were already being herded into camps. John lost many family members to the Holocaust. He came to the United States on an immigrant ship, winding up with his family in segregated South Carolina, where his father was a blue-collar worker.

He excelled in school and went on to college and law school on scholarship, and then landed as an attorney in the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Justice Department in the early 1960s. He was assigned to the deep South to fight voting rights cases at a time when doing that kind of work carried a real risk of death or injury. There, he met a co-worker who became the love of his life, Jean – a true partner in all he did. Jean is a woman of renown herself.

And then, finally, he moved to Prestonsburg, Kentucky, where he founded a public law practice with initial federal funding that became AppalReD Legal Aid, which remains one of the premier public service legal entities, not just in Kentucky but nationally.

From this perch, John continued his life’s mission of fighting for justice for folks who had no advocate on their side, and who were more often than not on society’s fringes.

John’s is a big and at times complex story to tell. The goal of doing so in a 90-minute, one-man play seems absurd.

But, Sherr succeeded—the play and his empathetic, natural performance pull the audience into John’s world and life effortlessly. The hard work Sherr must have spent does not intrude—he becomes John Rosenberg.

The minimal staging (a table, chair and a few papers) enhances the play’s focus on a single, consequential life, boring down on the through-line of selfless service, empathy and a determination that justice is something that is not illusory but, instead, achievable.
Sherr, with notes of humor, articulates in both the text and performance a life that for whom most would turn inwards in anger and resentment, but instead is bound up in grace.

One of the vehicles Sherr uses to tell the story is one of John’s signal accomplishments – the long fight to make the “broad form deed” unconstitutional. For nearly a century, this legal device was used to not just de facto dispossess Eastern Kentuckians from their land, but radically reordered the economy of the region. John and AppalReD had brought numerous lawsuits to make these deeds unconstitutional, all unsuccessful (to the everlasting shame of the Kentucky Supreme Court).

Success came when John marshaled the voices and energies of thousands and thousands of ordinary Kentuckians to pass an amendment to the Kentucky Constitution making these deeds no longer enforceable.

In telling this story, going back and forth in time from Germany to the segregated South, to Floyd County, Kentucky to Frankfort, dipping in with anecdotes and integrating a key piece of his life, his love story with Jean, Sherr’s play succeeds in what all successful plays do: an illumination of the human condition.

Sherr’s closing monologue, as John, is a poignant encapsulation of all that went before: “I was raised with three lessons. Tzedakah—not charity, but righteous giving. Because when someone else is in need, I am incomplete. L’dor V’dor—we are not the first, and not the last. We carry forward what was carried to us. Tikkun Olam—the world is broken. Our duty is not to grieve it. It is to repair it. Life had more to teach me. I used to think justice was the end of the road. Win the case, fix the law — and you’d be done. But justice without a home… without a place where people belong… It’s not enough. Jean showed me that. So did the people who trusted me when they had no one else. You fight for justice. But you stay to build a home. You stay — so nobody has to fight alone. That’s the real work.”

Bravo. And, thank you, Mr. Sherr and Mr. Rosenberg, for the needed dose of hope in a time crying out for it