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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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The post Letty Cottin Pogrebin wants Jews to own up to the corrosive power of shame appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Anti-Israel Conservative Activist Ousted From White House Religious Liberty Commission Over Behavior
Carrie Prejean Boller speaks during a White House Religious Liberty Commission hearing on Feb. 9, 2026. Photo: Screenshot
Carrie Prejean Boller, a conservative activist appointed to the White House Religious Liberty Commission during the Trump administration, was removed from the panel following outrage over her repeated downplaying of antisemitism and defense of antisemitic podcaster Candace Owens.
Dan Patrick, lieutenant governor of Texas and chair of the US President Donald Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission, announced the news on the social media platform X on Wednesday.
“Carrie Prejean Boller has been removed from President Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission. No member of the commission has the right to hijack a hearing for their own personal and political agenda on any issue,” Patrick posted. “This is clearly, without question, what happened Monday in our hearing on antisemitism in America. This was my decision.”
The controversy arose during a public hearing intended to address rising antisemitism in the United States. Instead of focusing on the growing threats facing Jewish communities, Prejean Boller repeatedly pressed witnesses on Israel and Zionism, questioning whether opposition to the Jewish state should be considered antisemitic.
Prejean Boller, a conservative activist and former Miss California, repeatedly pressed witnesses about Israel’s actions in Gaza and religious leaders on their views of Zionism, drawing audible boos from the audience and confusion from her colleagues. At one point she asked a Jewish activist if he would condemn Israel’s military response to Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, despite the hearing’s official focus on domestic antisemitism. Prejean Boller also donned a Palestinian flag pin on the lapel of her suit, telegraphing her support for the anti-Israel ideological cause.
During the hearing, she also accused Rabbi Ari Berman, president of Yeshiva University, of Islamophobia after he declared that anti-Zionism — the belief that Israel does not have a right to exist —is an antisemitic ideology. Berman argued that attempts to delegitimize the existence of the world’s sole Jewish state, while showing ambivalence toward the existence of dozens of Muslim states, indicates anti-Jewish sentiment.
Members of the commission expressed visible surprise at Prejean Boller’s line of questioning and repeated downplaying of antisemitism. Jewish student activist Shabbos Kestenbaum took aim at Prejean Boller after she asserted that the young activist had conflated antisemitism with harboring anti-Israel sentiment.
“She decided that this should be a debate on Israel’s conduct in Gaza, which I’m not entirely sure how that affects American students being discriminated against,” Kestenbaum said, “given that there are hundreds of millions of Catholics, including some who are on this commission, speaking at this commission today, who would vehemently disagree with such a grandiose assertion.”
Additionally, Prejean Boller issued an impassioned defense of pundits Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens, asserting that neither are antisemitic.
Owens, one of the country’s most popular podcasters, has spent the past two years spreading antisemitic conspiracy theories on her platform. She has called Jews “pedophilic,” argued that they persecute and murder Christians, minimized the Holocaust, and asserted that they are responsible for the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
Carlson, meanwhile, has platformed Holocaust deniers on his show and falsely accused Israel of wantonly killing Palestinian children. Last year, he appeared to blame the Jewish people for the deaths of both Jesus and conservative activist Charlie Kirk.
Following Prejean Boller’s dismissal, Owens took to X to sing her praises and accused Israelis of being “occult Baal worshipers.”
“Zionists are naturally hostile to Catholics because we refuse to bend the knee to revisionist history and support the mass slaughter and rape of innocent children for occult Baal worshipers,” Owens posted.
A report from the Wall Street Journal later revealed that Sameerah Munshi, a Muslim community advocate and member of the commission’s advisory board, had been recording Prejean Boller during her performance. The outlet also said that she and Prejean Boller appeared to be texting during the hearing, implying that the firebrand was fed talking points.
Later that day, Prejean Boller posted a photo of herself smiling next to Munshi at an event hosted by Palestine House of Freedom, an NGO founded by anti-Israel activist Miko Peled. The organization has drawn criticism over its alleged ties to extremist groups. The organization hosted a fundraiser for Birzeit University, whose student council is reportedly dominated by the Hamas-affiliated Al-Wafaa bloc.
Multiple commissioners and Jewish advocacy groups expressed alarm over Prejean Boller’s behavior, accusing her of hijacking a hearing meant to confront domestic antisemitism and using it as a platform to direct criticism toward Israel. They argued her conduct reflected a broader trend of using anti-Zionism as a cover for antisemitic rhetoric.
The backlash was swift, with religious liberty advocates and Jewish leaders calling Prejean Boller’s stated beliefs incompatible with the commission’s purpose.
Still, Prejean Boller remained defiant.
“I will continue to stand against Zionist supremacy in America. I’m a proud Catholic. I, in no way will be forced to embrace Zionism as a fulfillment of biblical prophesy [sic]. I am a free American. Not a slave to a foreign nation,” she posted on X on Tuesday.
However, the activist faced a number of denunciations from fellow Catholics who accused her of misrepresenting their faith to launch antisemitic attacks against Israel.
“From one Catholic to another: nobody is upset with you for your Catholic faith,” wrote Tim Chapman, president of the conservative think tank Americans Advancing Freedom. “Catholics can and should support Israel.”
“If Zionist means I think Israel has a right to exist, then I’m a Zionist, and so is the Catholic Church,” added conservative activist Lila Rose.
Following the viral incident, Prejean Boller gained over 50,000 new followers on X and has continued to attack Israel and Zionists, those who believe the Jewish state has a right to exist.
“I will never bend the knee to the state of Israel. Ever. I am more determined than ever to speak plainly about political Zionism and the lies we’ve been sold to justify endless war, dead children, and blank checks,” she wrote on X.
The commission was established by Trump to examine religious freedom issues and was intended to focus on concrete challenges facing Jewish communities, including bias and harassment. It is supposed to produce a report for Trump on religious liberty later this year.
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This Jewish Olympian prays with her mom before every race
Kamryn Lute’s Olympic ritual doesn’t start on the ice. It begins with a text to her mom: “Dear God,” she types. “Please help me do my best.”
Kamryn, 21, is the only member of Team USA’s speedskating squad to have had a bat mitzvah – or a beloved pug who shared her Hebrew name, Elisheva.
The pre-race prayer with her mother is the final buffer against the chaos of what’s to come. The words themselves are a contract with uncertainty. “My parents instilled in me that all that we can do is our best,” Kamryn said. “I just repeat that in my head. And then it’s out of my hands.”
As she bides her time in the athletes’ village — she’ll be making her Olympic debut on Saturday — Kamryn scrolls through messages from her mom and newsletters from her synagogue back home, grounding herself in faith and family.
Routine is everything. She wakes early and eats in the cafeteria with competitors from around the world. “We’re training every day,” she said via Zoom on Wednesday, sitting on the edge of her twin bed in the dorm-style room she shares with a teammate.
Born at Manhattan’s Mount Sinai Hospital and named at Central Synagogue, Kamryn spent her early years shuttling between New York and Washington, D.C., as her parents followed careers in government and diplomacy. Her dad, Douglas, worked in both the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations, and her mom, Jane, worked at the United Nations.
Her journey to Milan began in her living room. In the winter of 2010, short track speedskating phenom Apolo Ohno carved impossible lines across the TV during the Vancouver Olympics. Kamryn, then five, pointed at the screen. “I want to do that,” she announced ambitiously to her parents. They assumed her interest would fade. It didn’t.
Kamryn, who is 5′ 10”, has not stopped since. She won her first medal on a broken ankle at the age of 7. By eight, she was a national champion. She has set 10 national records.
At 17, she nearly made it onto the team for the Winter Olympics in Beijing. In Milan, Kamryn is competing in two events: the 3000-meter relay and, individually, in the 1500 meters.
Short track is a study in contradictions: grace pitched against danger, speeds nudging 35 miles an hour, each lap a negotiation with physics and fate. Kamryn has trained for 16 years to make the improbable look inevitable — a victory, if it comes, measured in centimeters and seconds.
“Actually,” she admitted, “I’m scared of heights, so I’m just happy we’re on the ground, compared to skiing and ski jumping.”
Kamryn’s pursuit of speedskating took her west, where she trains with the U.S. team. She’s a junior at the University of Utah, majoring in economics with a minor in French. When not training or competing, she’s focused on coursework and her long-term goal: to become a lawyer, a path inspired in part by her mother’s career in public service. “I’ve known for 10 years now that I want to go to law school,” Kamryn said.
The importance of faith
Kamryn is the youngest of four girls, and part of a blended, interfaith family. The family’s Jewishness is foundational: lighting Shabbat candles, memberships at both Central Synagogue in Manhattan, which is Reform, and the Conservative congregation Etz Hayim in Arlington, Virginia, just outside D.C.
“Being Jewish is a big part of our identity,” Jane Lute, Kamryn’s mother, said in an interview with the Forward. “It’s grounding. I tell my girls, courage is contagious in a crowd. You were born to a crowd. Never fear doing the right thing.”
Before the games began in Milan, Jane told Kamryn to recite the Shehecheyanu — the blessing for new experiences — during the opening ceremony, which Kamryn did. “I listen to my mom,” she said with a laugh.
On race day, Kamryn’s rituals are methodical: 90 minutes of warm-up, bike and stretches, hip hop and rap in her ears. “I always get nervous when I race,” she said. “But once the race starts, everything else disappears.”
Jane’s expectations are as precise as her daughter’s routines. “It’s impossible for you to disappoint anyone in your life at this stage,” she told her daughter. “Don’t put that pressure on yourself. Do pay attention to your character. Pay attention to how you conduct yourself.”
Whether the Olympics end in a blur of medals or missed turns, the duo will likely send the same post-race text they always do.
“God is good,” Jane usually types.
Kamryn’s reply is always the same: “Baruch Hashem.”
The post This Jewish Olympian prays with her mom before every race appeared first on The Forward.
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New York Democrat Comptroller Candidate’s Plan to Divest From Israel Is Imprudent, Republican Opponent Says
Joseph Hernandez, Republican candidate for New York State Comptroller, speaking with voters. Photo: Hernandez campaign
The plan of a Democratic candidate for New York comptroller to divest the state of its holdings in Israel bonds violates the fiduciary duties of an office which oversees the management of hundreds of billions of dollars in pension funds and other assets, his Republican opponent, Joseph Hernandez, told The Algemeiner during an exclusive interview on Monday.
Hernandez, a Cuban refugee whose family fled the Castro regime, explained that the proposal, promised by former Kansas state Rep. Raj Goyle (who moved to New York after a failed bid for US Congress in 2010), would amount to an endorsement of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel while alienating a country widely regarded as arguably the most reliable US ally.
Israel bonds, he added, are one of the safest assets a government could own. He has promised to invest $1 billion in them if he is elected.
“From a purely financial perspective, these are good investments. You would put your own money in this for sure, and you shouldn’t apply politics to the equation,” he said. “Imagine if we stopped investing the bonds of other foreign countries or vice versa because of disagreements over policy. That’s just bad decision making.”
“The economic rationale for investing in Israeli bonds is impeccable,” Hernandez continued. “Israel has an exploding technology sector producing giant leaps in artificial intelligence and the next generation of health care and biotech. We should be partnering with them in these areas, beyond the bonds. I think the relationship, from an investment perspective, should be broader. As the fiduciary and ultimately as the sole trustee of the New York State pension fund, I will seek ways not only to increase investment on the bonds side but also to collaborate on bringing the next generation of technologies to New York and promote a new era of job growth in the state.”
In New York City specifically, records show that Israel bonds, historically yielding approximately 5 percent annually, have outperformed many alternatives.
As for the state overall, Israeli firms pour billions of dollars and tens of thousands of jobs into the local economy, and business experts have warned that a push for divestment could lead Israeli-associated and Jewish-owned companies to leave.
A study released by the United States-Israel Business Alliance in October revealed that, based on 2024 data, 590 Israeli-founded companies directly created 27,471 jobs in New York City that year and indirectly created over 50,000 jobs when accounting for related factors, such as buying and shipping local products.
These firms generated $8.1 billion in total earnings, adding an estimated $12.4 billion in value to the city’s economy and $17.9 billion in total gross economic output.
As for the entire state, the report, titled the “2025 New York – Israel Economic Impact Report,” found that 648 Israeli-founded companies generated $8.6 billion in total earnings and $19.5 billion in gross economic output, contributing a striking $13.3 billion in added value to the economy. These businesses also directly created 28,524 jobs and a total of 57,145 when accounting for related factors.
From financial tech leaders like Fireblocks to cybersecurity powerhouse Wiz, Israeli entrepreneurs have become indispensable to the innovation ecosystem. The number of Israeli-founded “unicorns,” privately held companies with a valuation of at least $1 billion, operating in New York City has quadrupled since 2019, increasing from five to 20.
However, anti-Israel activists in the US have been pushing for state and local governments, in addition to businesses, universities, and various cultural forums to divest all assets from Israel-linked entities in accordance with the BDS movement.
The BDS movement seeks to isolate Israel on the international stage as the first step toward its elimination. Leaders of the movement have repeatedly stated their goal is to destroy the world’s only Jewish state.
Goyle’s plan would enact the divestment component of BDS by aiming to limit Israel’s capacity to issue bonds for the purpose of borrowing money, a core function of government which raises capital for expenditures such as roads and bridges while contributing to economic health, market stabilization, and a high credit rating.
The New York Post reported last month that Goyle wants to fully divest $338 million in foreign assets, including Israel bonds, from New York’s retirement fund.
“I’m here to tell you that when I am comptroller, we will not renew the foreign bond portfolio of the state comptroller’s office and that includes Israel bonds,” Goyle told a gathering of supporters of the left-wing Working Families Party. “We will not send a blank check for [Israeli Prime Minister] Benjamin Netanyahu’s war crimes in Gaza.”
The state comptroller’s office manages pensions for state and municipal workers and runs the Common Retirement Fund, one of the largest pension funds in the country with a $291 billion investment portfolio. It currently holds about $337.5 million in Israel bonds.
“I live in New York, the largest Jewish population outside of Israel. I see what this community contributes to America and to our society,” he said. “The relationship that we have is unbreakable and it is one we should continue to invest in both socially, politically, and financially.”
Across the political spectrum, Israel bonds are widely considered wise investments.
“They’re stable, they’re guaranteed, they’ve never had a problem, and it’s a good investment,” state Assemblyman David Weprin, a Democrat and former chair of the New York City Council Finance Committee, told the Post.
Goyle is not the only New York Democrat advocating a rupture in the state’s financial relationship with Israel. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who entered office last month, has been an outspoken supporter of the BDS movement.
Mamdani, a far-left democratic socialist who has made anti-Israel activism a cornerstone of his political career, has repeatedly accused Israel of “apartheid” and refused to recognize its right to exist as a Jewish state.
Such positions have raised alarm bells among not only New York’s Jewish community but also Israeli business owners and investors, who fear a hostile climate under Mamdani’s leadership.
His election came after former New York City Comptroller Brad Lander refused last year to renew some Israel bonds in the city’s pension fund, which is a separate entity. The office of then-Mayor Eric Adams accused Lander of pushing a political agenda by moving to withdraw millions of dollars in city pension funds from bonds issued by the Jewish state.
On Monday, Hernandez pledged to be beholden to New York’s taxpayers and not fringe ideological groups.
“There’s a reason that this is an independent elected role,” he concluded. “It’s supposed to be a role that doesn’t take political filters or use politics for decision making. This is about fiduciary duty and what it is in the best interest of the taxpayers, and I intend to execute to that effect.”
Both Goyle and Hernandez are vying to unseat incumbent state Comptroller Tom DiNapoli, a Democrat.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.