Personal Life
Born in Ellenville, New York, to Orthodox Jewish immigrants from Ukraine and Lithuania, Leventhal was eight weeks old when his father died. His mother moved the family to the Lower East Side, where she worked as their tenement's janitor. They then moved to the Bronx, where in 1935, at James Monroe high school, Leventhal, already a member of the Young Communist League, was arrested for organising an "Oxford Pledge" strike, aimed at persuading students to refuse to fight further wars.
He lost his first factory job for union organising, but was hired as an office boy by the songwriter Irving Berlin. Soon he was working as Berlin's "plugger", taking his songs around the nightclubs to be bought by band leaders such as Harry James, the Dorsey Brothers and Benny Goodman. He then joined Goodman's Regent Music Company, before enlisting in the army when the U.S. joined the Second World War. Assigned to India with the Signal Corps, Leventhal sought out the Congress movement, meeting Nehru and Gandhi. He founded American Friends of India, and, at a 1954 party hosted by the Indian delegation to the United Nations, Leventhal met Nathalie Buxbaum, a UN guide, who was to become his wife.
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