Ralph Anspach

Ralph Anspach was born in Danzig on 15 March 1926, grew up there and belonged to several Zionist youth groups; he escaped Germany for the United States in 1938. At the University of Chicago he heard of camp survivors being shuttled between countries and refused entry to Palestine, and in 1948 he volunteered under cover as an agricultural labourer to fight in Israel's war of independence with the Mahal, the foreign volunteers. He became an economics professor at San Francisco State and in 1973 designed Anti-Monopoly, a game in which players break up monopolies rather than build them. Parker Brothers sued; he counter-sued and fought for ten years, and the case forced into the record that Monopoly had not been invented by Charles Darrow but descended from Lizzie Magie's Landlord's Game. He won, and Anti-Monopoly is still sold.