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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.
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Europe’s smallest Jewish community gets a home of its own — complete with geothermal mikvah
(JTA) — REYKJAVIK, Iceland — Until recently, this city located near the Arctic Circle was one of the few places in Europe where organized Jewish life did not exist — no synagogue, no ritual bath, no communal building. That changed this week, as the Jewish community in Iceland opened the Beit Shvidler Jewish Center of Iceland, the country’s first-ever Jewish center.
The center is housed in a renovated, roughly 9,000-square-foot building in downtown Reykjavik that once operated as a bar and, before that, as the headquarters of a political party. It sits just minutes from where the husband-and-wife team of Rabbi Avraham and Mushky Feldman have lived and worked since arriving on the island in 2018. The project has been funded largely through community donations.
The center includes a synagogue, a seminar room seating nearly 80 people, a kosher shop, a community kitchen, a youth center, a library lounge and a security center, amenities the community has never had access to in one place.
There is also a mikvah, or ritual bath, that is heated geothermally, using the abundant underground volcanic heat that provides much of the country’s power.
“Jews here were yearning for a synagogue, for a rabbi, for some sort of a community,” Avraham Feldman said of the years before the couple’s arrival, “and it has been amazing to fill that need.”
Community members agree.
“Iceland has a highly diverse, dispersed and diffused Jewish community; given that we’re an isolated island, we all kind of washed up here,” said Michael Klein, an American Jew living in Iceland since 2020.
“The Feldmans managed to pull together the resources, the building and the work to turn a disused political party headquarters and restaurant into a Jewish center that can serve not only our small community but the far larger group of visitors from all over the Jewish world who come for our natural beauty and peaceful isolation,” added Klein.
Jewish life in Iceland has always been sparse and intermittent. Jewish traders are known to have passed through as early as the 1600s. Still, the organized Jewish presence dates to the late 1800s, and the first practicing Jew believed to have settled permanently was Fritz Natan, a businessman who, in 1917, built Iceland’s first five-story building.
For decades afterward, Jewish life in Iceland survived on the efforts of a handful of dedicated volunteers who coordinated informal gatherings, often meeting in rented spaces or in the basement of Hallgrímskirkja, the country’s most recognizable church. The U.S. Navy base in the town of Keflavík, near the international airport, occasionally provided Jewish chaplains until it closed in 2006. But there was still no permanent institution, no resident rabbi, and no dedicated building, a gap that led some to call Reykjavik the only European capital without a synagogue.
That began to change in 2018, when the Feldmans relocated from the United States to Reykjavik to establish a Chabad-Lubavitch presence, becoming Iceland’s first permanently stationed rabbi and his wife in the country’s documented history of a thousand years. The couple started small, hosting Shabbat dinners and holiday services out of their living room. Estimates of the community’s size hover around 300 self-identified Jews, out of Iceland’s total population of about 400,000.
Momentum built quickly. In 2020, the Jewish community celebrated its first native Torah scroll, commissioned by a donor in Switzerland and completed with the help of the Icelandic congregation. A year later, the Icelandic government formally recognized Judaism as an official religion, opening the door to officially recognized Jewish weddings and allowing residents to direct part of their religious tax to the community. How many have done so is not public information.
By 2024, the community had outgrown its rented rooms and church basements and purchased the building that became the new Jewish center, roughly tying one in Fairbanks, Alaska, as the northernmost Chabad houses in the world. The building sits in Reykjavik’s compact downtown, just blocks from the iconic Rainbow Street and Harpa Opera House that make the city one of the most Instagram-friendly sites in the world.
In a city that caters to tourists, and for a community built largely from immigrants, longtime Icelandic Jewish families, and people who married into Icelandic life, the new center represents something rare: a shared physical home.
“It’s been clear for a long time that we need a home for our community,” said one Jewish resident in Iceland, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because not all of his colleagues know he is Jewish. (Iceland’s relatively small number of Jews means that there is little record of antisemitism; anti-Israel sentiment is strong, with the country one of five to boycott the Eurovision song contest this year over Israel’s participation.)
“It’s not like we’ve been hiding or aren’t a strong community; we celebrate holidays together, and there are Shabbat dinners,” he continued. “But I think it’s important that we have this center. Seeing it opened is very moving and important.”
Like many Jewish institutions in Europe, the center will ensure security by being open only to members of the community or visitors who reach out in advance.
Avraham Feldman said the space will hold a display case with three small prayer books donated by early Jewish residents, the only known surviving physical remnants of Jewish life in Iceland before his arrival, a reminder of how recent, and how hard-won, this permanence has been.
“The result of this center is a combination of home, family, and permanence that was unimaginable when I started visiting 14 years ago and was only a mere dream when I moved here in 2020,” Klein said.
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Armenia’s Jews hope Israeli recognition of 1915 Ottoman genocide will jumpstart bilateral ties
(JTA) — YEREVAN, Armenia — Last Friday night, 13 mostly Russian-speaking Jews and three Arab Muslims gathered under a cherry tree next to the popular Common Grounds coffee shop in Yerevan — capital of the world’s oldest Christian country — to welcome Shabbat.
Samson Karapetyan — the son of an Armenian Christian father and a Jewish mother from Azerbaijan — recited the Hebrew blessing for wine over a glass of Georgian Palavani kosher merlot. Karapetyan, 29, stood at the head of a table piled high with hummus, falafel, pita, stuffed grape leaves, babaganoush and other Middle Eastern delicacies supplied by a local Lebanese caterer.
Then everyone, including the three invited Arabs, joined in a spirited rendition of “Lecha Dodi” — with printed transliterations in English for those not familiar with the traditional Jewish melody.
“I’m so glad we have a community here,” said Ekaterina Goldschmidt, 32, a tattooed landscape architect who showed up to the Shabbat dinner with Teya, her little black Kokoni dog.
The dinner was organized by Yerevan Jewish Home, a social network formed by Russian-born journalist and blogger Nathaniel Trubkin in the wake of Vladimir Putin’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. That ongoing war spurred a large exodus from both countries and brought as many as 2,000 Jews to Armenia — boosting the ex-Soviet republic’s tiny Jewish population tenfold and injecting new blood into what had been a stagnant, dwindling community of mostly pensioners.
The explosion of Jewish life came against the backdrop of frosty ties between Armenia and Israel, the country that absorbed the most Ukrainian and Russian Jewish emigres since the war’s start. The chill has been a consequence of Armenia’s close relations with neighboring Iran as well as Israel’s unwillingness to offend Turkey by naming as a genocide the Ottoman massacre of 1.5 million Armenians during World War I.
Another key obstacle has been resentment over Israel’s extensive weapons sales to neighboring Azerbaijan, with which Armenia has fought several border wars in the Nagorno-Karabakh region.
Those obstacles may be falling away. Last year in Washington, predominantly Muslim Azerbaijan and mostly Christian Armenia signed a peace treaty at the urging of U.S. President Donald Trump — garnering praise from Jewish leaders in both countries.
And on June 29, Israel’s Cabinet unanimously passed a resolution recognizing the 1915 genocide. That declaration now goes to the full Knesset where, despite intense lobbying from both Turkey and Azerbaijan, it will likely be ratified — making Israel the 36th country to take that step.
“The Jewish community here is happy that Israel has finally recognized this genocide,” Trubkin told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “Every self-respecting Jew knows what happened to the Armenians, though of course many Armenians are asking, ‘Why only now?’ It’s all about politics.”
Added Karapetyan: “Everyone understands that our two nations have a similar heritage, with a similar destiny. It is impossible, when you speak about the Shoah, to not also speak about the Armenian genocide. If we study one of them, we need to study the other.”
Both Turkey and its ally, Azerbaijan, immediately condemned the Cabinet vote; the chief rabbi of Azerbaijan’s Ashkenazi congregation in Baku, Shneur Segal, has already urged Israel to reverse it immediately.
The reaction from Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan was cold. Suggesting that Israel is motivated purely by geopolitics, he told reporters the day the change was announced: “We believe that not entering into the issue of the weaponization of the Armenian genocide is in the interests of the Republic of Armenia. Therefore, we do not see any need for a response.”
Other external factors appear to be drawing Yerevan and Jerusalem closer together.
Late last month, some 350 women representing the Israeli labor federation Histadrut gathered at Yerevan’s Megerian Carpet Restaurant to mark International Day of Women in Diplomacy. The event featured popular songs in Hebrew by prominent Georgian vocalist Kristi Japaridze as well as a performance of traditional Armenian music and dance.
The Histadrut visit — the largest such Israeli delegation to tour Armenia in years — was organized with help from Israeli House, an NGO based in Jerusalem. Founded in 2012 by former Jewish Agency official Itsik Moshe, the network promotes Israeli culture and business, and now operates in 30 countries including both Azerbaijan and Turkey.
Moshe, who is also president of the Israel-Georgia Chamber of Business, said Israeli House will open its next outpost in Armenia sometime in August or September.
Assisting Moshe is Andranik Arakelyan, an educational consultant at Yerevan’s National Polytechnic University, though a specific location has yet to be decided. In its final form, he suggested, Israeli House could include a business center to showcase Israeli tourism as well as innovations in agriculture and medicine.
“I consider Israeli House as a cultural first step for strengthening ties between our two nations. The rest is up to politicians and diplomats,” said Arakelyan, 36, a Christian who spent four years in Glendale, California, a predominantly Armenian suburb of Los Angeles.
“This is the best time for our countries to get closer,” Arakelyan said, while acknowledging that “a small minority” of Armenians hold antisemitic views. “Many parties here question the timing of this [genocide] recognition, calling it a political maneuver. But when the draft becomes resolution in the Knesset, Armenians will see that it wasn’t fake.”
Marina Kozliner, a community activist who has long campaigned for this recognition, said reaction among the 10,000 or so Armenian Jews and Christian living in Israel has been mixed.
“On one hand, there is real happiness. Our community has waited for this for decades,” said Kozliner, the daughter of a Jewish father and an Armenian atheist mother who is based in Bat Yam, just south of Tel Aviv. “On the other, many people feel it came at the wrong political moment. Because of that, something that should have been a moral decision has become a political tool, and that has taken away part of the joy.”
She added: “Still, I prefer to look ahead. Armenia is making real efforts to move toward peace and to normalize relations with its neighbors, including Azerbaijan. That gives many of us hope for a more stable future in the region.”
In fact, the same day Trubkin and his friends were celebrating their Shabbat dinner in Yerevan, Narek Mkrtchyan, Armenia’s ambassador to the United States, received prominent pro-Israel philanthropist and Trump supporter Miriam Adelson in Washington, D.C.
“We had an interesting and substantive conversation regarding the Armenia-U.S. agenda, investment opportunities in Armenia, and the country’s rich historical and cultural heritage,” Mkrtchyan posted on Facebook, adding, “Mrs. Adelson expressed great interest in considering a visit to Armenia.”
Eric Hacopian, a political analyst who made his career advising Democratic candidates in southern California, suggested that such a meeting “could not have happened a few months ago.”
But when it comes to Armenian-Israeli relations, he said, it’s important to take a long-term view of the genocide declaration from Jerusalem..
“I think something like this five to 10 years ago would have meant a lot more. It means a lot less now,” he said. “One reason is that [Prime Minister Pashinyan] is particularly anti-nationalist and more focused on normalization of ties with Turkey and Azerbaijan, so they won’t engage directly with Israel.”
He predicted a long-term shift. “I’m very confident that over the next 10 or 15 years, we’re going to see a switcheroo, in which Israel will have much better relations with Armenia, and more problematic relations with Azerbaijan,” Hacopian said. “I see relations improving, mostly because Turkish-Israeli relations are going downhill, and Israel’s relations with Azerbaijan are entirely transactional — oil for weapons and access to Iran.”
And if and when the Islamist regime in Iran collapses, Azerbaijan’s strategic importance to Israel declines as well, and Armenia’s increases. For one thing, Hacopian noted, Armenia’s economy is booming. In 2018, per-capita GDP was around $4,500; this year, it’ll likely surpass $10,000 — helped along by the presence of information technology giants including AMD, Synopsis and Invidia.
“The one ‘X factor’ no one notices is that the IT business is booming. Israeli IT firms are already here, and data centers are being built,” he said. “You cannot be in the IT business in this region if you don’t have relations with Israel.”
Meanwhile, Jewish life is taking root in Armenia, thanks largely to the efforts of Trubkin and his friends in the Yerevan Jewish Home network.
Goldschmidt, the tattooed landscape artist with the dog, was born and raised in Saratov — a major city southeast of Moscow. She left Russia in 2023, about a year after it attacked Ukraine.
“When everything started, I shared my opinions and told everyone what I thought. Eventually, I had to leave; otherwise I’d have ended up in jail,” said the young woman, who moved to Berlin and then spent four years in Limassol and Nicosia with her Cypriot ex-boyfriend. She’s now been in Armenia for the past six months — where she proudly wears a Star of David necklace — and wants to open an art gallery here.
Karapetyan, who recently spent a semester at the European Institute for Jewish Studies in Sweden, sees a future for liberal Judaism among the newcomers to Armenia.
“Jews here cannot relate to the Orthodox way of life. They like their freedom, and they’re not used to having separate seating for men and women,” he said. Karapetyan said that he has discussed joint projects with Rabbi Gershon Burshteyn, who has led Yerevan’s only synagogue — the Mordechay Navi Jewish Religious Center of Armenia — since 1996.
Trubkin says his Telegram chat has around 600 people.
“Every week, I meet several new people asking about Jewish life in Armenia — people from Russia, from Israel, from Moldova. For some of them, it’s their second round of emigration,” he said, adding that he’s looking to establish a physical presence for Yerevan Jewish Home. “And we’re also establishing a new Armenian-Israeli organization for business and culture.”
The sense of optimism is palpable, even with an undercurrent of concern about the influence that Turkey plays in the region. But if Israel fails — for whatever reason — to formally recognize the Armenian genocide after raising expectations, all bets are off.
“I sincerely hope that the Israeli government will complete this process and that the Knesset will adopt an official resolution recognizing the Armenian genocide,” said former Knesset member Alexander Tsinker, co-chair of the Armenia-Israel Public Forum. “Otherwise, it would be, to put it mildly, unacceptable.”
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Americans’ views of Israelis have grown more negative, survey finds
(JTA) — While Americans view Israelis far more favorably than the Israeli government, their opinion of the Jewish state’s residents has continued to decline, according to a survey released Thursday by the Pew Research Center.
The survey, which surveyed 12,574 U.S. adults from May 4 to May 17, 2026, found that 52% have a favorable opinion of the Israeli people, compared with 42% who held an unfavorable opinion.
A similar share held a favorable view of Palestinians, with 50% saying they held a favorable opinion while 44% had unfavorable views. The margin of error for the full sample was plus or minus 1.3 percentage points.
The survey found that Americans’ views of Israelis have grown increasingly negative in recent years, while views toward Palestinians have remained steady. In 2022, 67% of U.S. adults held a favorable view of Israelis, dropping to 52% this year, while views of Palestinians have dropped from 53% to 50%.
Unfavorable views of Israelis rose from 25% in 2022 to 42% this year, while unfavorable views of Palestinians rose from 39% in 2022 to 44% this year.
In contrast, the majority of Americans, 62%, held unfavorable views of the Israeli government, while 69% said they held an unfavorable opinion of the Palestinian Authority, which governs in the West Bank, and 84% said they had an unfavorable view of Hamas.
The Pew survey was conducted prior to Hamas’ announcement Monday that it will dissolve its government in Gaza ahead of its transfer to the Palestinian technocratic committee that was established by President Donald Trump’s Board of Peace.
The survey comes as a number of recent polls show, for the first time, Americans sympathize more with Palestinians than Israelis.
Opinions of Israeli and Palestinian people were split among Republicans and Democrats, with 65% of Republicans holding a favorable view of Israelis compared to 43% of Democrats. Roughly two-thirds of Democrats held a favorable view of Palestinians, compared to one-third of Republicans.
Just over half of Democrats now hold an unfavorable view of Israelis, up from 31% in 2022. Among Republicans, the share that held a negative view towards Israelis also rose from 17% in 2022 to 31% in 2026.
U.S. adults under 30-years-old were also more likely to hold a favorable view of Palestinians, at 58%, than Israelis, at 32%. According to pollsters, the attitude was largely driven by young Democrats, of which 72% held a positive view toward Palestinians and just 26% held a positive view of Israelis.
Among Jewish respondents, the poll found that attitudes toward the Israeli people and government had declined in recent years. Since 2024, their favorable views of the Israeli people had fallen from 89% to 83%, and favorable opinions toward the Israeli government had fallen from 54% to 47%.
It also found that 40% of Jewish adults in the U.S. view the Palestinian people favorably, compared to 58% who said they viewed Palestinians unfavorably. Just 10% of Jewish adults said they held a favorable view toward the Palestinian Authority, and 2% said they held a favorable view of Hamas.
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