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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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Elie Wiesel as an American phenomenon and a family man
How do you tell a story that everyone knows? Oren Rudavsky, in the opening scenes of his recently released documentary Elie Wiesel: Soul on Fire, makes the wise decision to begin his film not through the known facts about Wiesel or the Holocaust, but through a more internal logic of art and dreams.
As Wiesel narrates a dream, we see Joel Orloff’s hand-painted animation of dark figures succumbing to a rising river of blood, leaving the dreamer alone to try to rescue his drowning father. Fingers grasp at bodies as they slip under.
“I don’t know what power aided me,” we hear Wiesel say. “All I know is that I managed to save him all by myself.” As anyone who has read Night knows, Wiesel’s father succumbed to dysentery in Buchenwald. That Elie could not save his father, his wife Marion tells us, was the abiding wound he always carried.
Dreams, in Freud’s view, are wish fulfillments. But this dream-act of (temporary) reanimation also expresses Wiesel’s conviction that the dead are not entirely gone if they are remembered. That may be the redemptive vision that drives Rudavsky, as well. The implicit hope that the dead may be saved opens the film and breaks into full voice at its ending, with Wiesel beautifully singing the messianic anthem “Ani Ma’amin” from the stage of the 92nd Street Y.
As he sings, his face gives way to a lush, grassy landscape rushing by as if we’re passengers on a train, while his voice fades into a choral arrangement. In moving past Wiesel’s face and voice, the film embodies and fulfills Wiesel’s belief that the Jewish story will continue, on PBS as in his family line.
For all its focus on European catastrophe and Jewish longings, the documentary casts Elie Wiesel as an “American Master,” the title of the larger PBS series. Wiesel is an American phenomenon, read in classrooms around the country and, for a time, in the White House. Full disclosure: I appear briefly in the film, discussing the reception of Wiesel’s work and the difference between the Yiddish title of his best-known work, Un di velt hot geshvign (And the world kept silent) and the French/English title of its translation, La Nuit (Night).
One of the film’s extended sequences captures a moment that saw Wiesel at the center of American politics and the global stage, when he passionately implored President Reagan to cancel a planned visit to the German military cemetery in Bitburg, once it had become known that Waffen-SS soldiers were buried there. “That place is not your place,” Wiesel says on national TV, with Reagan looking on. “Your place is with the victims of the SS.”
Details less engraved on collective memory emerge from Rudavsky’s film: the shared friendship both men describe, the attempts behind the scenes to ameliorate the clash, Wiesel’s insistence that he was making no claims about German collective guilt. “Only the killers were guilty,” he said.
This episode establishes Wiesel’s courage and role as a preeminent moral voice of his time. Less clear is the trajectory from the solitary writer in postwar Paris to the man who came to represent the Holocaust experience, when his novel/memoir Night became required reading.
One of the brilliant 13-year-old students who discuss the novel in their Newark classroom suggests such an analysis, in distinguishing between the Eliezer of the story and Elie Wiesel, its famous author. In America and elsewhere, Wiesel became so closely associated with Holocaust memory that the Eliezer/Elie distinction, or alternatives to his distinctive voice, are hardly imaginable.
Not one but two stories drive Rudavsky’s documentary: one of unimaginable catastrophe and loss; and another of privilege and success — both Wiesel’s own stature and the broader rise of the American Jewish community in which this story is embedded. How these two narratives are related is a tale that remains to be told.
And yet, alternatives to Wiesel’s powerful voice are heard in the film. Remarkably enough, they emerge from Wiesel’s own family. Marion Wiesel, who married the war-haunted bachelor when he was 40, recounts that her husband had insisted “from the beginning that he didn’t want children.” And then she adds: “I convinced him.”
Photographs of her during those years as a bride and new mother radiate, and we see the hint of a smile on her husband’s mournful visage. As an old woman, she commands attention. Against the widespread veneration of Wiesel’s pronouncements, she shows herself at least occasionally unpersuaded. Describing Wiesel’s growing religiosity, she comments drily, “I was the pagan in the family.” Served a latke at a family Hanukkah celebration that could easily be played for sentimentality (“the Jewish people live!”), she sniffs: “Doesn’t look like a latke.”
Marion Wiesel’s acerbic tone is particularly welcome as commentary on a topic of increasingly pressing concern. Elie Wiesel, in his Nobel Peace Prize lecture, asserts that he is sensitive to the plight of the Palestinians, “but whose methods I deplore when they lead to violence.” Marion comments: “He didn’t want to criticize Israel under any circumstance. He didn’t want to criticize the occupation. He didn’t want to criticize the settlers. He may not have agreed with them, but he didn’t want to criticize them. Ever.”
In contrast with the moral clarity of his words about Bitburg, what the film presents us with on this issue is a muddle, and if I am reading Marion right, a bit of a family dispute. In this way, the Wiesel family was no different from so many others.
So, too, does Rudavsky complicate Wiesel’s devotion to Jewish survival in focusing on the discomfort of Elisha Wiesel, the couple’s only son, in the role of living symbol of Jewish continuity. Cuddled on Jimmy Carter’s lap, called to the stage at Oslo, Elisha remembers chafing at being “just an appendage” to his famous father.
And yet, as the film ends, he, too, has embraced Judaism anew, laying tefillin on camera. Elisha’s son, Elijah, also takes up the imperative and burden of Holocaust memory, traveling to Sighet to visit his grandfather’s childhood home, now turned into a museum.
In a stirring scene, the Hebrew letters on the gravestone of his namesake — his great-grandfather — appear with growing clarity, illuminated by the trick of scraping shaving cream off the inscription (not recommended by conservators) and the magic of documentary film.
And yet, Elijah Wiesel with the waist-long hair is not the Eliyahu Vizel of the gravestone, just as Eliezer Vizel of Sighet is not quite the same as Elie Wiesel of Oslo and Boston. “Jewish continuity” is a bridge we narrate over the shifting sands of loss and change. The present, past, and future connect for a fleeting moment, only to drift apart like a dream, a film.
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These two anti-Zionist Jews think the Israeli government is so bad, it’s funny
When Matt Lieb started Bad Hasbara, his comedy podcast about so-called Israeli and US propaganda, he had a specific audience in mind: himself.
“A Jewish anti-Zionist podcast that made jokes at the expense of the Israeli government was not something that, as far as I knew, existed,” said Lieb, 41, who in addition to podcasting is a comedian, writer and actor. “I wanted to listen to something like that.”
Lieb also wanted an outlet for his anguish over Israel’s conduct in Gaza after the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attacks — not least because he felt the comedy industry at large had failed to meet the moment. “By December 2023,” he told me, “I realized the mainstream comedic sphere was going to be completely silent about this, and was going to move on to other subjects, because it was too politically charged.”
So Bad Hasbara, which has just released its 176th episode, began as an experiment to see if there were others like Lieb: those who regarded the Israeli and American governments as deceitful and propagandistic, and who, no less importantly, saw Israeli ‘Hasbara’ — loosely defined as the Israeli government’s myriad efforts to advertise its country — as funny and sinister.
As it turned out, there were plenty of adherents to Lieb’s worldview. (The podcast, whose full title is Bad Hasbara: The World’s Most Moral Podcast, first aired in late 2023, and has just surpassed 50,ooo YouTube subscribers.)
“What shocked me was the amount of people who related to the podcast, and who wanted to laugh at the same things I was laughing at.” Lieb said. “And the number one comment that we get from people, other than saying that they like the jokes, is ‘Thank you for keeping us sane.’”
One admirer was 50-year-old Daniel Maté, a Canadian-born, Brooklyn-based lyricist, composer and playwright for musical theater, whose plays included a reimagining of Kafka’s Metamorphosis, entitled The Trouble With Doug, and a sequel to Hansel & Gretl set in modern-day Chicago. Maté also had a fairly sizable social media following, and a disdain for Zionism that rivaled Lieb’s.
After a brief Instagram courtship (more on that later), Maté appeared as a guest on one of Bad Hasbara’s first episodes. Lieb enjoyed the experience so much that he invited Maté to co-host permanently. “People loved our vibe,” Maté told me. “We’re a rare pair, with our combination of experience, sensibility, and our places of overlap. Not to be too self-fluffing,” he added.
And though Bad Hasbara has certainly broadened its focus since Maté came aboard, at its heart it’s about the ways people interact with Zionism — a show about the rhetoric that has accompanied the Israel-Hamas war, rather than an analysis of the war itself.
Early adopters
The podcast’s popularity partly reflects the demand for anti-Zionist perspectives in the media and elsewhere after Oct. 7. It’s hardly the only podcast geared towards Israel’s critics: Medhi Hasan’s left-leaning news outlet Zeteo, for example, recently launched Beyond Israelism, an anti-Israel podcast hosted by If Not Now founder Simone Zimmerman.
Still, neither Lieb nor Maté is a recent convert to the cause. Lieb grew up in a secular, Jewish home in Los Angeles that saw Israel as “an absolute moral good,” but he began to have doubts about Zionism in the mid-2000s, when he was an undergraduate at UC Santa Cruz. “The Marxists and Islamists indoctrinated me into self-hatred,” he joked.
His embrace of anti-Zionism was sealed on his college Birthright trip, he told me, in part thanks to a guest appearance by Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who spoke at an event for Lieb’s and several other Birthright groups.
“It was a very, very hard sell,” Lieb recalled. “And it felt unfair that as someone with, you know, Jewish ancestry, I was being told I had more of a right to this land than someone who was born there, and whose family was born there, who was ethnically cleansed.” (Lieb discussed his Birthright experience at length on Bad Hasbara’s inaugural episode.)
Maté’s opposition to Zionism, by contrast, was more of an inherited condition. His father, the well-known Canadian psychotherapist Dr. Gabor Maté, is a vocal critic of Israel, and in the mid-1980’s, when the younger Maté was coming of age, had become a “pariah in the Canadian Jewish community,” Maté said. He remembers his father being interviewed on Canadian radio, while on a medical trip to the West Bank, and hearing him say that he’d been crying every day since he had arrived because of what he’d seen in the hospitals.
The younger Maté took after his father, politically. Daniel went every summer to the left-leaning Habonim Dror Jewish summer camp, where he says he argued ferociously with his Israeli counselors, some of whom were just out of the army. “I never could get them to see the contradiction between liberalism and Zionism,” he said.
October 7 and beyond
On the evening of Oct. 8, 2023, Maté — who had not yet joined the podcast — went for a walk around his Brooklyn neighborhood. For about an hour, he went live on Instagram with a kind of stream-of-consciousness of despair and frustration, in which he urged his then-20,000 or so followers to properly contextualize the Hamas-led attacks of the previous day; to sympathize no less with Palestinian suffering than Israeli.
“I’d never done an Instagram Live before,” Maté said. “But I had a sense that I needed to un-crazy myself. And I was in a position to help people orient themselves, because I knew what was coming, right? A lot of lies. So I wanted to provide antioxidants.”
Lieb, for his part, had begun uploading sketch videos to Instagram after Oct. 7, in which he played what he saw as a representative liberal Zionist character: that is, someone increasingly unwilling to accept criticism of Israel post Oct. 7. Maté found the character amusing, and told Lieb as much over Instagram. “The videos would always start off with about 45 seconds of decent-sounding politics,” Maté said, “and then would devolve.” Eventually, they set a date for Maté to appear on Lieb’s new podcast. So were the seeds of Bad Hasbara planted.
Both Maté and Lieb agree that the podcast has been buoyed by the procession of news and people coming out of the Middle East. For its first six months, Maté was amazed they never ran out of characters to lampoon. “Hen Mazzig, Eylon Levy, Rabbi Shmuley: It was like the Wu-Tang Clan of propaganda,” he said.
But its blend of levity, righteous indignation and social media fluency has helped Bad Hasbara stand out in an increasingly crowded left-wing media ecosystem. Episodes can be blunt, funny and sarcastic, often quite crude and sometimes willfully provocative. They’re called things like ‘The Greatest Shoahman’ — an episode about Nick Fuentes’ Holocaust denial, naturally — or, on Nov. 8 last year, after Zohran Mamdani was elected mayor of New York City, ‘The Zionist Freakout over Zohran’s win.’ Either host is liable to, in the same breath, give eloquent expression to some important, overlooked morsel of Palestinian history, and then refer to Birthright as an “11-day handjob.”
“I think the combination of moral earnestness and complete lack of decorum is compelling,” said Maté.
And despite its mostly easygoing vibe, they’ve thought carefully about the podcast’s message. “We’ve worked really hard to diversify our guests,” said Maté. “Not for the sake of diversity, but for the sake of completion and for the sake of insight.” The only through line, then, between the academics and musicians and actors and politicians and comics who’ve been guests on the show — Rashid Khalidi, Debra Winger, Peter Beinart, Miko Peled, to name just a few — is that “they all see what’s happening as an unjustifiable moral abomination, and they’re willing, with us, to take apart all of the various ways that it gets justified,” said Maté.
This specific entry requirement means the podcast has hosted some not-uncontroversial guests. Pink Floyd co-founder Roger Waters, who has frequently compared Israel to Nazi Germany, and in Nov. 2023 suggested the Oct. 7 attacks could have been a “false flag operation”, talked to Lieb and Maté in Feb. 2025. Three months later, so did Mohammed El-Kurd, a Palestinian poet, writer and activist whom several mainstream Jewish groups have accused of demonizing Zionism and Jewish Israelis. (El-Kurd is a regular on the college campus circuit; in March 2025, more than 200 Harvard College affiliates and alumni published an open letter arguing that El-Kurd’s appearance at Harvard violated the university’s policies against antisemitism.)
Yet Maté doubts the podcast has reached those who might find such conversations troubling: more passionate defenders of Israel, say, or anyone especially worried that the line between antisemitism and anti-Zionism can sometimes be blurry. “I don’t know how many Zionists listen to our show long enough to stay pissed off,” he said. “It tends to have a certain kind of repellent to it.” It’s also not entirely clear who Maté means by “Zionists.” When asked, he defined Zionism, a little enigmatically, as “the refusal to heal Jewish trauma.”
Much clearer is the podcast’s particular irritation with the idea that Zionism is compatible with liberal values. After all, it’s the doctrine each was raised on, Lieb at home and Maté in his Jewish community more broadly. So if Bad Hasbara has an overarching aim, beyond ridiculing government officials, it’s probably to emphasize what they see as the impossibility of left-wing Zionism. “You can’t be a liberal and Zionist forever,” Maté told me. “You’re fighting yourself.”
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A Super Bowl Ad Against Antisemitism with No Consequence Misses the Mark
Robert Kraft. Photo: New England Patriots/Wikimedia Commons
I greatly respect Patriots owner Robert Kraft and his efforts to warn about the dangers of antisemitism. The Jewish community has largely failed in fighting this disease, for which there is no cure.
Some will also say that no ad will stop antisemitism, and argue that it’s a waste of money to run advertisements at all. But I strongly disagree.
There are a range of people in America, including some who have hatred in their hearts but have not yet acted on it, or some who don’t even know Jews personally. In a world where millions are listening to Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and laughing at Kanye West’s “Heil Hitler,” it would be useful to have some persuasive media strategy against antisemitism.
I’m not sure how many Americans watch Douglas Murray, Ben Shapiro, or follow Hillel Fuld online, but more than 100 million watch the Super Bowl annually.
It is a fantastic decision to spend money on an ad against antisemitism if it can get people’s attention, be emotionally impactful, show consequences for a perpetrator of hate, and make people think for a second.
Many tools must be used in the fight against antisemitism, and there is no reason why ads can’t be one of them. While they won’t likely change the mind of people planning to assault Jews, they might change the minds of others. I have a friend whose son was called a dirty Jew in school. The student likely called him that because he figured there would be no consequence.
This year’s ad — which follows ads in 2024 and 2025 — featured a Jewish boy who is pushed. We see a post-it calling him a “Dirty Jew.” An African-American student puts a blue square on it, and notes that Black people have experienced similar hatred.
The ad is a failure because it doesn’t grab your attention, shows no perpetrator, and more importantly — shows no consequences.
It is a slight improvement over last year’s ad with Tom Brady and Snoop Dogg, as that had zero authenticity. This ad has some authenticity, but by showing no perpetrator, it actually normalizes antisemitism — as if we should expect students to write “Dirty Jew” on the backpacks and lockers of students. We should have seen the student writing it, and seen some repercussions — be it a suspension, students looking at them as losers, or something of that sort.
There should be funds allocated to making meaningful ads about Jew-hatred both on regular TV and online. It is inexplicable that this is not being done, and there are so many Jewish celebrities that could be involved. I just wished Kraft’s ad had done a much better job.
The author is a writer based in New York.