FORUM: "POKING HOLES IN BALLOONS": NEW APPROACHES TO COLD WAR CIVIL RIGHTS Flemming v. Nestor: Anticommunism, the Welfare State, and the Making of "New Property" KAREN M. TANI Ephram (Fedya) Nestor, a Bulgarian-born immigrant to the United States, was "an unusual person," according to his second wife Barbara. She met him in 1933 when he was selling vegetables from his car and remembers not really liking him. "He stayed too long," he "talked too much," and worst of all to this devoted radical, he "passionately espoused the cause of Communism [but] he didn't know too much about it." Interviewed when she was ninety, sharp-witted Barbara Nestor still recalled how Fedya em- barrassed her at a Marxist study group with his "foolish" statements and obvious lack of knowledge about Marx or communism. His family agreed he was "not much of a Communist" when he joined the local party in 1936 and could not be trusted with the simplest duties.' Nonetheless, the federal 1. Barbara Nestor, interview by Sherna Berger Gluck, December 27, 1974, interview 06c segment 6 segkey: a1602, "Women's History: Reformers and Radicals," The Virtual Oral/Aural History Archive, California State University, Long Beach, Calif., http://www.csulb.edu/voaha (16 January 2006); Dorothy Healey and Maurice Isserman, Dorothy Healey Remembers: A Life in the American Communist Party (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 122. Karen M. Tani is a law clerk to Judge Guido Calabresi, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and a Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of Pennsyl- vania <
[email protected]>.