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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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Holocaust survivor event features a Rob Reiner video address — recorded just weeks before his death
(JTA) — At a virtual Holocaust survivor event on Thursday, beloved Jewish film director Rob Reiner gave a pre-recorded address where he urged those watching to be “resilient.”
For the survivors, families and advocates who tuned into the virtual event hosted by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, or Claims Conference, Reiner’s words carried added weight, having been recorded just weeks before he and his wife, Michele Singer Reiner, were killed in their home on Sunday.
Ahead of Reiner’s pre-recorded remarks, Greg Schneider, the executive vice president of the Claims Conference, said that Reiner had begun working on the organization’s annual International Holocaust Survivors Night a few years ago, including appearances in the virtual screening in 2023 and 2024. The organization has disbursed restitution money to survivors since 1951.
Schneider then read a quote from a 2017 Jewish Telegraphic Agency interview with Reiner.
“Yes, all this is reflected in my work. It’s my sensibility. I’m a Jew. I was raised a Jew. I value honesty and integrity and knowledge and education and all those values I was raised with,” said Schneider, quoting Reiner.
Concluding his introduction to Reiner’s address, Schneider said, “Rob and Michelle, we will carry on your values of acting with honesty, integrity, knowledge and education.”
As Reiner came on the screen, surrounded by posters from some of his most acclaimed films, including “The Princess Bride” and “A Few Good Men,” he began by describing his family’s “personal connection” to the Holocaust.
“Thank you again for asking me to join your evening, I can tell you that what you’re all about means a lot to me,” Reiner said in the video. “Personally, my wife, her mother, was in Auschwitz, and her whole family died there. Her mother was the only survivor, and my aunt was also in Auschwitz.”
On Wednesday, the USC Shoah Foundation shared a 1994 video of Singer Reiner embracing her mother, Holocaust survivor Nicole Silberkleit, who described her children as “very understanding, loving, and affectionate.”
https://www.instagram.com/p/DSYmPLmEshI/
In his address, Reiner then shifted his focus to urging “resilience,” which was the theme of the virtual event to honor Holocaust survivors.
“I know the theme of the evening is resilience, and if ever we needed to be resilient, it’s now,” he said. “We’re living in a time where what’s happening in our country is scary and reminiscent of what we’ve seen happen in the past, and we just hope that we can all survive this and that we can hold on to our democracy, but I want to just thank everybody for being there, and let’s be resilient.”
The Claims Conference’s event was part of an annual menorah lighting ceremony on the fifth night of Hanukkah to honor survivors. It concluded with around 100 survivors lighting candles at the Western Wall in Jerusalem.
This year, Claims Conference officials also used the event to draw attention to antisemitism, with the survivor event taking place just days after 15 were killed during an antisemitic attack on a Hanukkah event in Sydney, Australia.
“Even in these difficult days, when antisemitism is rising and Jewish communities around the world are under attack — this very week on the first night of Hanukkah in Sydney, Australia — we draw strength and inspiration from you, the survivors, from your personal and collective resilience,” Schneider told the group of survivors in Jerusalem.
One of the victims of the attack, Alex Kleytman, was a Holocaust survivor who had passed World War II living with his family in Siberia.
“Lessons from the past should have protected Holocaust survivor Alex Kleytman – a husband, a father and a grandfather,” the Claims Conference wrote in a post on Facebook Sunday. “Educating about how words of hate can turn into violence must not be a hollow promise.”
The couple’s 32-year-old son, Nick, briefly appeared in a Los Angeles court Wednesday after he was charged in connection to his parents’ killing. He has been charged with two counts of first-degree murder with a special circumstance of multiple murders.
The other Reiner children, Jake and Romy, shared a statement with People on Wednesday expressing their grief over the loss of their parents.
“Words cannot even begin to describe the unimaginable pain we are experiencing every moment of the day,” the statement said. “The horrific and devastating loss of our parents, Rob and Michele Reiner, is something that no one should ever experience. They weren’t just our parents; they were our best friends.”
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In Reykjavik, Hanukkah offers a chance for Iceland’s tiny, isolated Jewish community to come together
(JTA) — REYKJAVIK — December light is brief in Iceland. It was not yet 4 p.m., and by the time the giant menorah was lit in downtown Reykjavík, the day had already slipped into darkness. A steady drizzling rain blurred the streetlights and soaked the pavement where fewer than 100 people gathered, roughly half of the country’s Jewish population, which has always been small and largely unseen.
The celebrants were calm, almost subdued; security was not. Armed plainclothes police ringed the area. They moved through the crowd while surveillance drones hovered overhead. Air support was on standby, measures almost unheard of in a country that tops the world’s most peaceful list.
The gathering took place just hours after news broke of the most recent terrorist attack on Jews, this one a celebration of Hanukkah at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia.
Rabbi Avraham Feldman and his wife, Mushky, welcomed the crowd, their voices steady but restrained. Iceland’s minister of foreign affairs, Þorgerður Katrín Gunnarsdóttir, followed, and she lit the menorah herself. Curious passersby slowed, some watching silently before moving on. The event passed without incident.
“The attack in Sydney reminds us that darkness is not only something we read about in history books. It still exists in the world and appears suddenly and violently,” said Avraham Feldman, who is associated with the Chabad movement, which makes public menorah-lightings a centerpiece of its outreach around the world.
“Hanukkah does not ask us to deny this darkness,” he added. “Instead, Hanukkah teaches us that each and every one of us can create light and positivity. Even a small light pushes away great darkness. And when many lights stand together, we overpower the darkness.”
In a statement issued the same day, Gunnarsdóttir condemned the attack in Sydney, which took place at a Chabad event. “I strongly condemn the horrific attack on those celebrating Chanukah at Bondi Beach in Australia,” she said. “There is no place, anywhere, for antisemitism or terror. I extend my heartfelt condolences to the victims, their loved ones, and others affected.”
Her presence at the Hanukkah event carried significance well beyond the ceremony itself. Iceland’s government has been among Europe’s most vocal critics of Israel, and public discourse around the war in Gaza has been intense. Jewish teens have reported increasingly tense relationships with their peers, and the national broadcaster recently announced that it would boycott the Eurovision song contest over Israel’s participation.
For some Jews in Iceland, the political situation has shaken their sense of acceptance.
“It has become very different for me since Oct. 7,” said an American Jew living in Iceland who asked to remain anonymous. “Before, I was fairly widely open about being Jewish, but the landscape has changed.”
When he and his spouse moved into a new home last year, he ordered a mezuzah for the front door, but he hesitated to put it up. “For the first time, I found myself concerned about placing my Hanukkah menorah in the window,” he said, even as he added that most Icelanders would likely not recognize the symbol anyway, given the prevalence of seven-armed electric advent lights in windows each December.
For some present, having Gunnarsdóttir at the Hanukkah event offered a rare and meaningful signal that support for a vulnerable minority need not be conflated with geopolitics.
“It’s so special to have the foreign minister join us today, to stand with us, support the community, and offer her continued friendship,” said Mushky Feldman said. “We’re honored to have her speak tonight and light the first candle.”
Jewish life in Iceland has no long historical footprint. There are no historic synagogues, no Jewish neighborhoods, and no centuries-old institutions. Holidays are celebrated in rented spaces or private homes. Until 2018, there was not even a resident rabbi. The community is made up largely of immigrants — including an Israeli jewelry designer who was the country’s first lady for 13 years until 2016 — their children, and Icelanders who have claimed a Jewish identity later in life.
“How do you teach your children what it means to be Jewish without a ready-made community?” asked Reykjavík resident Adam Gordon, an American Jew. “The answer is that we must create that community ourselves.”
Practical challenges abound. “Supplies can be difficult to come by,” said the American Jew, who decided that he would light a menorah. “I finally placed a bulk order from abroad with enough Hanukkah candles to get me through the end of this decade.”
An obstacle is the traditional Icelandic approach to religion. Most Icelanders are nominally Christian but the country is known as one of the most secular in Europe. (Judaism became an official state religion in 2021, following Avraham Feldman’s advocacy.)
“Icelanders see Jewishness as a function of religion, which they largely see as a quaint if outdated view of the world incompatible with their collective level of political and moral evolution,” said Mike Klein, an American Jew living in Iceland.
“Discussions about my being Jewish often become uncomfortable, partly because of the current political predicament, but also because Icelanders find it strange that I would choose to make my life difficult by maintaining my Jewish identity when I’m otherwise relatively well accepted,” Klein added.
Others echo the same tension. A Jewish American living in Iceland, who declined to be named out of concerns about identifying publicly as Jewish, said antisemitism in Iceland is often rooted in misunderstanding rather than explicit hatred. “There is a lot of ignorance,” she said.
“Many Icelanders have no idea that there are only about 15 million Jews in the world, and that while we are few, we are not a monolith. We have different ways of connecting to our Jewish identity, that it is not only rooted in religion, but culture, a shared heritage.”
At the same time, some Icelanders have embraced the community in meaningful ways. Finnur Thorlacius Eiríksson first encountered Jewish life in 2017, when he met an Israeli couple visiting Iceland. When they later moved to the country and invited him to a Passover seder in 2018, he joined.
“The experience was a positive one, which prompted me to attend more events where I got to know the Jewish community in Iceland quite well,” he said.
Eiríksson now holds the distinction of the only non-Jew known to be registered as a member of the official Jewish community. He attends major holidays and events and is even considering converting to Judaism.
“Thankfully, nearly all my Jewish friends are open about being Jewish,” he said. “They know it never helped the Jewish people to hide their identity, so they wear their Jewish identity with pride.”
Andrea Cheatham Kasper, who is Jewish and lives in Iceland with her family, said her Shabbat table has become a cornerstone of connection.
“Our Shabbat table has been central in our home and also as our way to make friends and build community,” she said. “Relationships have grown there, some immediately and some after many meals together.”
Kasper said she does not hide being Jewish or Israeli but avoids online political battles. “My goal is to focus on face-to-face relationships and interactions that are human, not political,” she said. “What I have found is that the noise comes from the loud voices, and they aren’t always representative.”
At the lighting, the menorah flickered against the rain and the early darkness. Children stood close to their parents. Photos were taken to share with family far away, and fresh-baked sufganiyot (jelly-filled donuts) were passed out to the crowd.
“Events like the menorah lighting become these precious moments when we can gather and celebrate together,” said Gordon. “None of us came to Iceland to deepen our Jewish practice, but we don’t want to abandon it. Instead, we want to weave it together with our Icelandic identities.”
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Mamdani Transition Team Appointee Resigns After ‘Money Hungry Jews’ Social Media Posts Resurface
Candidate Zohran Mamdani speaks during a Democratic New York City mayoral primary debate, June 4, 2025, in New York, US. Photo: Yuki Iwamura/Pool via REUTERS
An appointee of New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani resigned just one day after her selection this week, following the exposure of decade-old social media posts that contained antisemitic language and stereotypes.
Catherine Almonte Da Costa, who had been named Mamdani’s director of appointments, stepped down Thursday after social media posts from around 2011–2012 resurfaced in which she used phrases echoing classic antisemitic tropes, including references to “money hungry Jews.”
The Anti-Defamation League condemned the comments, saying they “echo classic antisemitic tropes and otherwise demean Jewish people,” and questioned how such remarks were not uncovered during the vetting process for a senior role in the incoming administration. Shortly after the controversy broke, Da Costa’s X account was taken offline.
In a statement announcing her resignation, Da Costa expressed remorse for the posts, calling them and inconsistent with who she is today. In a statement, Da Costa said she “spoke with the Mayor-elect this afternoon, apologized, and expressed my deep regret for my past statements. These statements are not indicative of who I am.” Mamdani accepted her resignation, stating that he believed her apology to be sincere.
The episode has intensified scrutiny of Mamdani’s transition team and personnel choices as he prepares to take office. Mamdani, a progressive lawmaker, has previously faced criticism from Jewish and pro-Israel groups over his rhetoric and positions related to Israel, prompting heightened sensitivity to issues of antisemitism surrounding his administration.
Jewish communal leaders said the incident underscores broader concerns about tolerance for antisemitic language within progressive political circles and the need for more rigorous screening of public officials and senior staff. Several noted that public servants must be held to a high standard, particularly at a time of rising antisemitism in the United States.
Halle Soifer, the CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, expressed approval of Da Costa’s resignation.
“Glad to see that Catherine Almonte Da Costa has resigned. The views she expressed are unacceptable and intolerable,” she said.
Sara Forman, executive director of the New York Solidarity Network, also praised Mamdani’s “cutting ties” with Da Costa, but cautioned that ““had she said ‘Zionist’ instead of ‘Jew’ the response from the incoming Mamdani administration and the outcome we just witnessed would likely have been quite different.”
David Friedman, the former US Ambassador to Israel, expressed a more skeptical view of Da Costa’s decision to step down.
“Seems like every Mamdani appointee has something in common — an intense dislike for Jews,” he said.
The resignation marks an early setback for Mamdani’s mayoral transition and is likely to keep questions about antisemitism and accountability at the forefront as his administration begins to take shape. Mamdani has repeatedly stressed his commitment to protecting New York City’s Jewish community amid ongoing concern over rising antisemitism in the city and his own anti-Israel viewpoints.
Mamdani, a far-left democratic socialist and anti-Zionist, is an avid supporter of boycotting all Israeli-tied entities who has been widely accused of promoting antisemitic rhetoric. He has repeatedly accused Israel of “apartheid” and “genocide”; refused to recognize the country’s right to exist as a Jewish state; and refused to explicitly condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada,” which has been associated with calls for violence against Jews and Israelis worldwide. During his tenure in the NYC City Council, Mamdani spearheaded the “Not on our dime!: Ending New York Funding of Israeli Settler Violence Act,” legislation which would ban charities from using tax-deductible donations to aid organizations that work in the West Bank. In 2021, Mamdani issued public support for the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement—an initiative which seeks to economically and diplomatically isolate Israel in the first step to its eventual destruction.
Notably, on Oct. 8, 2023, 24 hours following the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust, Mamdani published a statement condemning “Netanyahu’s declaration of war” and suggesting that Israel would use the terror attacks to justify committing a second “Nakba.” Mamdani then said that Israel can only secure its long term safety by “ending the occupation and dismantling apartheid.”