Uncategorized
Letty Cottin Pogrebin wants Jews to own up to the corrosive power of shame
(JTA) — When a lawyer for Donald Trump asked E. Jean Carroll why she didn’t scream while allegedly being raped by Donald Trump, I thought of Letty Cottin Pogrebin. In her latest book, “Shanda: A Memoir of Shame and Secrecy,” she writes about being assaulted by a famous poet — and how the shadow of shame kept women like her silent about attacks on their own bodies.
That incident in 1962, she writes, was “fifty-eight years before the #MeToo movement provided the sisterhood and solidarity that made survivors of abuse and rape feel safe enough to tell their stories.”
Now 83, Pogrebin could have coasted with a memoir celebrating her six decades as a leading feminist: She co-founded Ms. magazine, its Foundation for Women and the National Women’s Political Caucus. She served as president of Americans for Peace Now and in 1982 blew the whistle on antisemitism in the feminist movement.
Instead, “Shanda” is about her immigrant Jewish family and the secrets they carried through their lives. First marriages that were kept hidden. An unacknowledged half-sister. Money problems and domestic abuse. An uncle banished for sharing family dirt in public.
“My mania around secrecy and shame was sparked in 1951 by the discovery that my parents had concealed from me the truth about their personal histories, and every member of my large extended family, on both sides, was in on it,” writes Pogrebin, now 83. “Their need to avoid scandal was so compelling that, once identified, it provided the lens through which I could see my family with fresh eyes, spotlight their fears, and, in so doing, illuminate my own.”
“Shanda” (the Yiddish word describes the kind of behavior that brings shame on an entire family or even a people) is also a portrait of immigrant New York Jews in the 20th century. As her father and mother father move up in the world and leave their Yiddish-speaking, Old World families behind for new lives in the Bronx and Queens, they stand in for a generation of Jews and new Americans “bent on saving face and determined to be, if not exemplary, at least impeccably respectable.”
Pogrebin and I spoke last week ahead of the Eight Over Eighty Gala on May 31, where she will be honored with a group that includes another Jewish feminist icon, the writer Erica Jong, and musician Eve Queler, who founded her own ensemble, the Opera Orchestra of New York, when she wasn’t being given chances to conduct in the male-dominated world of classical music. The gala is a fundraiser for the New Jewish Home, a healthcare nonprofit serving older New Yorkers.
Pogrebin and I spoke about shame and how it plays out in public and private, from rape accusations against a former president to her regrets over how she wrote about her own abortions to how the Bible justifies family trickery.
Our conversation was edited for length and clarity.
I found your book very moving because my parents’ generation, who like your family were middle-class Jews who grew up or lived in the New York metropolitan area, are also all gone now. Your book brought back to me that world of aunts and uncles and cousins, and kids like us who couldn’t imagine what kinds of secrets and traumas our parents and relatives were hiding. But you went back and asked all the questions that many of us are afraid to ask.
I can’t tell you how good writing it has been. I feel as though I have no weight on my back. And people who have read it gained such comfort from the normalization that happens when you read that others have been through what you’ve been through. And my family secrets are so varied — just one right after the other. The chameleon-like behavior of that generation — they became who they wanted to be through pretense or actual accomplishment.
In my mother’s case, pretense led the way. She went and got a studio photo that made it look like she graduated from high school when she didn’t. In the eighth grade, she went up to her uncle’s house in the north Bronx and had her dates pick her up there because of the shanda of where she lived on the Lower East Side with nine people in three rooms. She had to imagine herself the child of her uncle, who didn’t have an accent or had an accent but at least spoke English.
You describe yours as “an immigrant family torn between loyalty to their own kind and longing for American acceptance.”
There was the feeling that, “If only we could measure up, we would be real Americans.” My mother was a sewing machine operator who became a designer and figured out what American women wore when she came from rags and cardboard shoes, in steerage. So I admire them. As much as I was discomforted by the lies, I ended up having compassion for them.
It’s also a story of thwarted women, and all that lost potential of a generation in which few could contemplate a college degree or a career outside the home. Your mother worked for a time as a junior designer for Hattie Carnegie, a sort of Donna Karan of her day, but abandoned that after she met your dad and became, as you write, “Mrs. Jack Cottin.”
The powerlessness of women was complicated in the 1950s by the demands of the masculine Jewish ideal. So having a wife who didn’t work was proof that you were a man who could provide. As a result women sacrificed their own aspirations and passions. She protected her husband’s image by not pursuing her life outside the home. In a way my feminism is a positive, like a photograph, to the negative of my mother’s 1950s womanhood.
“I’m not an optimist. I call myself a ‘cockeyed strategist,” said Pogrebin, who has a home on the Upper West Side. (Mike Lovett)
You write that you “think of shame and secrecy as quintessentially Jewish issues.” What were the Jewish pressures that inspired your parents to tell so many stories that weren’t true?
Think about what we did. We hid behind our names. We changed our names. We sloughed off our accents. My mother learned to make My*T*Fine pudding instead of gefilte fish. Shame and secrecy have always been intrinsically Jewish to me, because of the “sha!” factor: At every supper party, there would be the moment when somebody would say, “Sha! We don’t talk about that!” So even though we talked about what felt like everything, there were things that couldn’t be touched: illness, the C-word [cancer]. If you wanted to make a shidduch [wedding match] with another family in the insular communities in which Jews lived, you couldn’t let it be known that there was cancer in the family, or mental illness.
While I was writing this memoir, I realized that the [Torah portion] I’m listening to one Shabbat morning is all about hiding. It is Jacob finding out that he didn’t marry Rachel, after all, but married somebody he didn’t love. All of the hiding that I took for granted in the Bible stories and I was raised on like mother’s milk was formative. They justified pretense, and they justified trickery. Rebecca lied to her husband and presented her younger son Jacob for the blessing because God told her, because it was for the greater good of the future the Jewish people.
I think Jews felt that same sort of way when it came to surviving. So we can get rid of our names. We wouldn’t have survived, whether we were hiding in a forest or behind a cabinet, a name or a passport, or [pushed into hiding] with [forced] conversions. Hiding was survival.
I was reading your book just as the E. Jean Carroll verdict came down, holding Donald Trump liable for sexually assaulting her during an encounter in the mid-’90s. You write how in 1962, when you were working as a book publicist, the hard-drinking Irish poet Brendan Behan (who died in 1964) tried to rape you in a hotel room and you didn’t report it. Like Carroll, you didn’t think that it was something that could be reported because the cost was too high.
Certainly in that era powerful men could get away with horrible behavior because of shanda reasons.
Carroll said in her court testimony, “It was shameful to go to the police.”
You know that it happened to so many others and nobody paid the price. The man’s reputation was intact and we kept our jobs because we sacrificed our dignity and our truth. I was in a career, and I really was supporting myself. I couldn’t afford to lose my job. I would have been pilloried for having gone to his hotel room, and nobody was there when he picked up an ashtray and threatened to break the window of the Chelsea Hotel unless I went up there with him.The cards were stacked against me.
In “Shanda,” you write about another kind of shame: The shame you now feel decades later about how you described the incident in your first book. You regret “how blithely I transformed an aggravated assault by a powerful man into a ‘sticky sexual encounter.’”
I wrote about the incident in such offhand terms, and wonder why. I wrote, basically, “Okay, girls, you’re gonna have to put up with this, but you’re gonna have to find your own magical sentence like I had with Behan” to get him to stop.
You write that you said, “You can’t do this to me! I’m a nice Jewish girl!” And that got him to back off.
Really painful.
I think that’s a powerful aspect of your book — how you look back at the ways you let down the movement or your family or friends and now regret. In 1991 you wrote a New York Times essay about an illegal abortion you had as a college senior in 1958, but not the second one you had only a few months later. While you were urging women to tell their stories of abortion, you note how a different shame kept you from telling the whole truth.
Jewish girls could be, you know, plain or ordinary, but they had to be smart, and I had been stupid. I could out myself as one of the many millions of women who had an abortion but not as a Jewish girl who made the same mistake [of getting pregnant] twice.
The book was written before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. In the book you write powerfully about the shame, danger and loneliness among women when abortion was illegal, and now, after 50 years, it is happening again. Having been very much part of the generation of activists that saw Roe become the law of the land, how have you processed its demise?
Since the 1970s, we thought everything was happening in this proper linear way. We got legislation passed, we had litigation and we won, and we saw the percentage of women’s participation in the workplace all across professions and trades and everything else rise and rise. And then Ronald Reagan was elected and then there was the Moral Majority and then it was the Hyde Amendment [barring the use of federal funds to pay for abortion]. I was sideswiped because I think I was naive enough to imagine that once we articulated what feminism was driving at and why women’s rights were important, and how the economic reality of families and discrimination against women weren’t just women’s issues, people would internalize it and understand it and justice would be done.
In the case of Roe, we could not imagine that rights could ever be taken away. We didn’t do something that we should have done, which is to have outed ourselves in a big way. It’s not enough that abortion was legal. We allowed it to remain stigmatized. We allowed the right wing to create their own valence around it. That negated solidarity. If we had talked about abortion as healthcare, if we had had our stories published and created organizations around remembering what it was like and people telling their stories about when abortion was illegal and dangerous…. Instead we allowed the religious right to prioritize [fetal] cells over a woman’s life. We just were not truthful with each other, so we didn’t create solidarity.
Are you heartened by the backlash against restrictive new laws in red states or optimistic that the next wave of activism can reclaim the right to abortion?
I’m not an optimist. I call myself a “cockeyed strategist.” If you look at my long resume, it is all about organizing: Ms. magazine, feminist organizations, women’s foundations, Black-Jewish dialogues, Torah study groups and Palestinian-Jewish dialogues.
Number one, we have to own the data and reframe the narrative. We have to open channels for discussion for women who have either had one or know someone who has had one, even in religious Catholic families. The state-by-state strategy was really slow, but Ruth Bader Ginsburg wanted that. She almost didn’t get on the court because she didn’t like the nationwide, right-to-privacy strategy of Roe but instead wanted it won state by state, which would have required campaigns of acceptance and consciousness-raising.
So, the irony is she hasn’t lived to see that we’re going to have to do it her way.
You share a lot of family secrets in this book. Is this a book that you waited to write until, I’ll try to put this gently, most of the people had died?
I started this book when I was 78 years old, and there’s always a connection to my major birthdays. And turning 80 – you experience that number and it is so weird. It doesn’t describe me and it probably won’t describe you. I thought, this could well be my last book, so I needed to be completely transparent, put it all out there.
My mother and father and aunts and uncles were gone, but I have 24 cousins altogether. I went to my cousins, and told them I am going to write about the secret of your parents: It’s my uncle, but it’s your father. It’s your family story even though it’s my family, but it’s yours first. And every cousin, uniformly, said, “Are you kidding? You don’t even know the half of it,” and they’d tell me the whole story. I guess people want the truth out in the end.
Is that an aspect of getting older?
I think it’s a promise of liberation, which is what I have found. It’s this experience of being free from anything that I’ve hid. I don’t have to hide. Years ago, on our 35th wedding anniversary, we took our whole family to the Tenement Museum because we wanted them to see how far we’ve come in two generations.
—
The post Letty Cottin Pogrebin wants Jews to own up to the corrosive power of shame appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
Xi, Trump Agree Strait of Hormuz Must Be Open, Iran Should Never Have Nuclear Weapons, White House Says
Vessels in the Strait of Hormuz, Musandam, Oman, May 8, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Stringer
A ship was reported seized off the coast of the United Arab Emirates and was heading for Iranian waters on Thursday, a British navy agency said, as the US and Chinese leaders met in Beijing to discuss global problems including the Iran war.
After the talks between US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping, a White House official said the two leaders had agreed that the Strait of Hormuz should be open, and that Iran should never obtain nuclear weapons.
China is close to Iran and the main buyer of its oil. Iran has largely shut the strait to ships apart from its own since the US-Israeli war on Iran began on Feb. 28, causing a major disruption to global energy supplies.
The US paused the bombing last month but added a blockade of Iran‘s ports.
DIPLOMACY ON HOLD
In an interview with CNBC in Beijing, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said he believed China would “do what they can” to help open the strait, which he said was “very much in their interest.” Before the war, about a fifth of global oil and liquefied natural gas supplies passed through the strait.
But diplomacy to end the conflict has been on hold since last week when Iran and the US each rejected the other’s most recent proposals.
In the latest incidents on the trade route, an Indian cargo vessel carrying livestock from Africa to the United Arab Emirates was sunk in waters off the coast of Oman.
India condemned the attack and said all 14 crew members had been rescued by the Omani coastguard. Vanguard, a British maritime security advisory firm, said the vessel was believed to have been hit by a missile or drone which caused an explosion.
Separately, British maritime security agency UKMTO reported on Thursday that “unauthorized personnel” had boarded a ship anchored off the coast of the United Arab Emirates port of Fujairah and were steering it toward Iran.
“The company security officer reported that the vessel was taken by Iranian personnel while at anchor,” Vanguard said.
Security in that area is particularly sensitive, as Fujairah is the UAE‘s sole oil port on the far side of the strait, allowing some exports to reach markets without passing through it. Iran included that part of the coast on an expanded map it released last week of waters it claimed were under its control.
Still, Iran appears to be making more deals with countries to allow some ships to pass through the strait – if they accept Tehran’s terms.
A Japanese tanker crossed on Wednesday after Japan’s prime minister announced that she had requested help from the Iranian president. A huge Chinese tanker also crossed on Wednesday, and Iran‘s Fars news agency reported on Thursday that an agreement had been reached to let some Chinese ships pass.
Iran‘s Revolutionary Guards said 30 vessels had crossed the strait since Wednesday evening, still far short of some 140 that typically crossed daily before the war, but a substantial increase if confirmed.
According to shipping analytics firm Kpler, some 10 ships had sailed through the strait in the past 24 hours, only a slight increase from the five to seven ships that have crossed daily in recent weeks.
Iran‘s Judiciary Spokesperson Asghar Jahangir said on Thursday the seizure of “US tankers” violating Iranian regulations was being carried out under domestic and international law.
IRAN‘S THREAT ‘SIGNIFICANTLY DEGRADED’
Thousands of Iranians were killed in the US and Israeli airstrikes in the first weeks of the war, and thousands more have been killed in Lebanon since the war reignited fighting between Israel and the Iran-backed terrorist group Hezbollah.
Lebanese and Israeli envoys were meeting with US officials in Washington on Thursday in efforts to end the hostilities.
There has been little progress in talks on ending the war in Iran since a single round of talks was held in Pakistan last month.
Trump said his aims in starting the war were to destroy Iran‘s nuclear program, end its capability to attack its neighbors and make it easier for Iranians to overthrow their government.
A senior US admiral told a Senate committee on Thursday that Iran‘s ability to threaten its neighbors and US interests in the region had been dramatically reduced.
“Iran has a significantly degraded threat, and they no longer threaten regional partners, or the United States, in ways that they were able to do before, across every domain,” Admiral Brad Cooper said. “They’ve been significantly degraded.”
But Cooper declined to directly address reports by Reuters and other news organizations that Iran, which stockpiled arms in underground facilities, had retained significant missile and drone capabilities.
Iran‘s rulers, who had to use force to put down anti-government protests at the start of the year, have faced no organized opposition since the war began. And their closure of the strait has given them additional leverage in negotiations.
Washington wants Tehran to hand over the uranium and forgo further enrichment. Iran is seeking the lifting of sanctions, reparations for war damage, and acknowledgment of its control over the strait.
Uncategorized
Nicholas Kristof’s Claims, Sourcing in Column on Israel Under Scrutiny
New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof. Photo: Screenshot
New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof’s latest article, which accuses Israeli soldiers and prison guards of widespread sexual abuse against Palestinian prisoners, has prompted a wave of backlash, with critics arguing the column is riddled with false claims and based on questionable sourcing linked to the Hamas terrorist group.
Israel plans to sue the Times over the column, which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called a “blood libel about rape.”
A joint statement by Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar described the op-ed by Kristof, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, as “one of the most hideous and distorted lies ever published against the State of Israel in the modern press” and said the country would sue for defamation.
The column accused Israel of “sexual violence against men, women, and even children” by Israeli security personnel, including allegations that prisoners were stripped naked, groped, penetrated with objects, and raped by specially trained dogs.
The Foreign Ministry also accused the Times of timing Kristof’s column, “The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians,” to appear a day before the release of an independent Israeli report, similarly titled “Silenced No More,” which found that Hamas systematically used sexual violence during the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel and against hostages in captivity in Gaza.
The ministry said the Times had been approached with the Israeli report “months ago.”
That report, conducted by an independent group, the Civil Commission on Oct. 7 Crimes by Hamas Against Women and Children, is based on an archive built over two years, with more than 10,000 photos and video segments, over 1,800 hours of footage, and more than 430 testimonies.
The report outlines rape, gang rape, and sexual torture of both women and men, including intentional burning and mutilation, and one case where family members were coerced into performing sexual acts on one another.
“There was laughter. There were jokes. They were passing them from one to another. It wasn’t — it was done for fun,” one survivor of the massacre at the Nova festival told the commission in testimony.
“I heard one rape where they were passing her around. She was probably injured, judging by her screams — screams you have never heard anywhere. It’s between silence and screams, between pain and wanting to die,” she said.
The acts constitute war crimes, crimes against humanity, and acts of genocide, according to the authors of the nearly 300-page report, who recommended that both Israeli and foreign courts prosecute the perpetrators, noting that the victims of Oct. 7 represented 52 nationalities.
Former Canadian justice minister Irwin Cotler served as a principal contributor to the report, which was also endorsed by Sheryl Sandberg, Hillary Clinton, former UN special adviser on the prevention of genocide Alice Wairimu Nderitu, former chief prosecutor of the UN Special Court for Sierra Leone Prof. David Crane, and former Israeli Supreme Court president Aharon Barak.
Kristof’s column on Tuesday cited an unnamed Palestinian journalist who said he “was held down, stripped naked, and as he was blindfolded and handcuffed, a dog was summoned. With encouragement from a handler in Hebrew, he said, the dog mounted him.” Canine experts have noted that training a dog to rape a human – especially a male – is extremely unlikely, if not impossible.
He also claimed to have shared the abuse allegations with former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert, who responded, “Do I believe it happens? Definitely.”
But Olmert later issued a statement to the Times saying that he “did not validate these claims.”
“Mr. Kristof’s article includes claims of extraordinary gravity: that Israeli authorities have directed the rape of children, that dogs have been used as instruments of sexual assault, that systematic sexual torture is state policy,” he said in the statement, which The Free Press published. “I have no knowledge supporting these claims as I said to Mr. Kristof. Therefore, the positioning of my quote after pages of such allegations misrepresents my views.”
Kristof also relied on corroboration from Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, a Geneva-based non-governmental organization that watchdog NGO Monitor and Israeli authorities allege has ideological and operational links to Hamas. Its chairman, Ramy Abdu, who made social media posts on Oct. 7 and 8, 2023, that praised the Hamas-led attacks on Israel, has been accused by Israeli authorities of being an operative for Hamas-affiliated institutions, and the group is frequently accused of spreading pro-Hamas propaganda and disinformation.
Writing on X, Netanyahu said that he instructed his legal advisers “to consider the harshest legal action,” adding that the report “defamed the soldiers of Israel and perpetuated a blood libel about rape, trying to create a false symmetry between the genocidal terrorists of Hamas and Israel’s valiant soldiers.”
“We will fight these lies in the court of public opinion and in the court of law,” he said.
But a lawsuit would face steep hurdles, especially if filed in the US, where the Times would likely argue Kristof’s column was protected opinion and Israel would have to prove “actual malice” under American defamation law, according to an article in The Jerusalem Post. Even an Israeli judgment could be difficult to enforce in the US if American courts found it incompatible with First Amendment protections.
Cardozo constitutional law professor David Rudenstine told Haaretz that such a case would be unlikely to succeed, explaining that libel claims generally require an identifiable person to show reputational and financial harm, meaning the case would likely have to be brought by Netanyahu or another official rather than Israel as a whole.
“It would be Netanyahu v. The New York Times, just like Donald Trump suing The New York Times,” Rudenstine told the paper.
Even then, the plaintiff would face the high US bar of proving the Times knew the claims were false or acted with reckless disregard for the truth.
The Times defended the column, saying it was “extensively fact-checked.”
Uncategorized
Why do some people think Mike Lawler is Jewish?
For Rep. Mike Lawler, a practicing Catholic, the antisemitic insult hurled at him this week was not just a ugly political attack by an intoxicated political scion. It highlighted how closely the Hudson Valley Republican has become linked to New York’s Jewish community because of the district he represents, the relationships he has built and his role as one of the GOP’s strongest pro-Israel voices.
“I have one of the largest Jewish populations anywhere in the country in my congressional district, and I’m not going to stop standing up for my constituents,” Lawler told reporters on Wednesday, a day after William Paul, the son of Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, confronted him in a Washington bar and blamed “Jews” for political attacks — targeting Lawler because he believed the New York rep was Jewish. Paul later apologized and said he has a drinking problem for which he is seeking treatment.
Lawler, 39, represents New York’s 17th Congressional District, a suburban swing seat in Rockland and Westchester counties that has the nation’s largest Jewish population per capita. Lawler narrowly defeated Democratic incumbent Sean Patrick Maloney in the last midterm elections by a slim 2,000-vote margin, with strong support from the large Hasidic communities in Monsey, New Square and New Hempstead.
The episode reflected how deeply Lawler has become associated with Jewish causes and support for Israel. Lawler, who previously served two years in the New York State Assembly, took credit for lowering the temperature in Rockland County after local GOP officials in 2019 posted a video widely criticized as antisemitic. After his election to Congress, Lawler chose a seat on the influential House Foreign Affairs Committee, saying it was because support for Israel is important for the people in his district. He now serves as chair of the Middle East and North Africa Subcommittee.
He was the lead sponsor of the bipartisan Antisemitism Awareness Act that would require the Department of Education to use the controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism — which classifies most anti-Zionism as antisemitic — when investigating allegations of discrimination. It passed in the House in 2024 by an overwhelming majority of 320-91, but was stalled in the Senate due to resistance over constitutionally protected free speech. It was reintroduced in the House last year.
More recently, Lawler partnered with Rep. Josh Gottheimer, a moderate Democrat from New Jersey, on a bipartisan House resolution condemning antisemitic rhetoric from online personalities including Hasan Piker and Candace Owens.
His close ties with Orthodox and Hasidic leaders have also become a hallmark of his political brand. During the 2024 campaign, Lawler brought former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy to visit the Hasidic communities and rabbinic leaders —and twice the current speaker, Mike Johnson — to shore up support for his reelection. Former Rep. Mondaire Jones, who ran against Lawler in 2024, had to delete a social media post that some deemed insulting to Orthodox Jews after he remarked that the former Republican leader’s meeting with Rabbi David Twersky, the 84-year-old spiritual leader known as the Skverer Rebbe in Rockland County, “was a waste of everyone’s time.”
Those relationships have given Lawler unusual credibility in communities that have historically leaned Democratic. Kamala Harris carried the district by a narrow 50-49 margin in 2024, and it voted for Joe Biden by a 59-39 margin.
The combination of his district’s demographics and his outspoken support for Israel has increasingly tied Lawler politically to Jewish communal issues.
“I am proud to be a Zionist,” Lawler proclaimed at the annual legislative breakfast hosted by the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York in February,
A Lawler spokesperson did not make the congressman available for an interview with the Forward on Thursday.
At that breakfast, Lawler joked about his physical resemblance to New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, whose handling of antisemitism and criticism of Israel has left many Jewish voters uneasy.
“I know some of you looking at me may look and say, ‘Looks like Zohran Mamdani,’” Lawler quipped, referring to their similar trimmed black beards. Noting that the two served together in the New York State Assembly and regularly played poker in Albany, Lawler said the similarities end there.
“On issues of combating antisemitism and support of the State of Israel, there are strong differences,” Lalwker said. “And I think one of the things that I have spent my time in Congress focused on is strengthening the U.S.-Israel relationship and being unapologetic about it.”
Lawler is gearing up for a difficult reelection campaign. National Democrats see him as a top target. Five candidates are competing in the June 23 Democratic primary.
Earlier this year, Lawler challenged the Democratic candidates to condemn a TV ad sponsored by the Institute for Middle East Understanding, which attacked him for prioritizing aid to Israel. Lawler said the commercial “traffics antisemitic tropes.”
With a handful of suburban swing districts likely to decide control of the House, Lawler’s support among Jewish voters could once again prove politically decisive.
The post Why do some people think Mike Lawler is Jewish? appeared first on The Forward.