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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.

—
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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A Message From the Torah for 2026: Live Now in a Way You’ll Be Proud of Later

A Torah scroll. Photo: RabbiSacks.org.

I have always cherished Ludwig van Beethoven’s last words, spoken on his deathbed: “Plaudite, amici, comedia finita est.” “Applaud, my friends, the comedy is over.”

This kind of blunt honesty only comes from people facing their final moments. The masks drop, the posturing stops, and what’s left is pure truth.

Steve Jobs was diagnosed with terminal cancer in October 2003. Remarkably, he lived for another eight years, during which he became deeply reflective, increasingly conscious of his legacy and of life’s meaning in ways he had never been before. 

In the address he gave at the Stanford commencement in 2005, he told the graduating class and their families, “You can’t connect the dots looking forward — you can only connect them looking backward.”

He didn’t say it explicitly, but his words came from a deep awareness of his own mortality. The message was clear. He was looking back on his life, taking stock, and seeing patterns that only become clear near the end. When death feels real, clarity follows.

Jobs also talked to the Stanford students about his failure, about being fired from the company he started, and about death itself. Looking back, his speech feels less like a graduation talk and more like a final message. It wasn’t about money or material things, but about meaning. Some things in life matter. Others don’t. Some things are just noise. Others have real substance.

History is full of moments like this, when great figures, as their lives are coming to a close, suddenly see what really matters. Near the end of his life, Thomas Jefferson wrote to his beloved daughter, Martha Jefferson Randolph, “The last pang of life is in parting from you!” 

What worried him most about death wasn’t losing power or fame, but the pain of being without those he loved. When all is said and done, relationships with our loved ones are what really matter, and our career or achievements pale into insignificance by comparison.

Sir Isaac Newton expressed something similar, though in a different way, as he looked back on his incredible life. Newton, whose discoveries changed how we see the universe, spoke with great humility: “I do not know what I may seem to the world — but as to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself now and then in finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.” 

Even after a lifetime of achievement, he didn’t focus on his success. Instead, he saw clearly how much was still unknown, and how even greatness can feel small when you look at life’s bigger picture.

This is the emotional and moral setting at the start of Parshat Vayechi, which holds the Torah’s great final conversation. Jacob is dying, and he knows it. In his last moments, he gathers his children and speaks to them — not as a nostalgic father looking back, but as someone who truly understands who they are and what each one needs to hear.

If we expect deathbed speeches to be warm and fuzzy, Jacob’s version of one will come as a surprise. Some of his words are blessings, but others are more like rebukes. Reuven is reminded he didn’t reach his potential. Shimon and Levi are called out for their violence. Yehuda is elevated to family leadership, but is also reminded that this role comes with responsibility, not privilege. 

This isn’t a “feel good” speech. It’s a speech that values truth over comfort. And that’s exactly the lesson of Jacob’s last words: legacy isn’t about saying nice things, but about saying what’s needed. Jacob isn’t focused on how his sons feel right now. He cares about who they will become after he’s gone, and how his words will echo through their lives and future generations. 

Which brings us to today’s world, where we tend to focus more on our image while we’re alive and often don’t think about how we’ll be remembered. Social media in particular has taught us to always project an image that’s curated and perfect in the here and now, with no thought about the long term impact.

Everything is about appearances and how things are seen in the moment. We tell our own stories as they happen, believing that if we control how things look, we can control the outcome.

Vayechi breaks that illusion. Jacob reveals something uncomfortable: you can’t write your own legacy. He is brutally honest with his sons, and in doing so, he also faces his own role as a father. He doesn’t hide the truth. He points out their patterns, their tendencies, their choices  —  not to shame them, but to help them see both their strengths and weaknesses, take responsibility, and grow into the best version of themselves.

Vayechi is honest, but it is not hopeless. Yaakov doesn’t say, “This is who you are, and you can’t change.” He says, “This is who you have been — now choose what to do with it.” Steve Jobs ended his Stanford speech with the famous line, “Stay hungry. Stay foolish.” 

But the line before is even more telling. He called death “life’s change agent,” the force that clears away what doesn’t matter to make room for what does. The message is clear: it’s better to let that kind of clarity shape our lives now, instead of waiting until the end. 

Vayechi teaches this lesson. When we reflect honestly, death doesn’t make life smaller — it makes it sharper. It removes pretense and leaves us with what really matters. Seeing our lives from a distance can be cleansing. The key is to live that way now, so we won’t need to revise it later.

It’s an idea that finds a moving expression in Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. Frankl describes a woman who was his patient reflecting on her life, a life that was shaped by suffering and sacrifice as she cared for a severely disabled son. 

Viewing her life as if from its end, she concludes — through tears — that it was not a failure. On the contrary, it was filled with meaning. The pain had turned her life into one of love and responsibility. 

Frankl’s point is devastatingly simple: when life is seen through the lens of its conclusion, meaning often emerges where none had been visible before.

Steve Jobs was right: you can only connect the dots of a life by looking back. But Parshat Vayechi shows us we don’t have to wait until the end to start that process. Jacob connects the dots for his sons while he’s still alive — but more importantly, while they all still have many years to live. 

The challenge he gives us is simple: live now in a way that will make sense later, when we look back. Because when the full story is told, the dots will connect, whether we like the picture or not. The only thing we really control is how we choose to draw them from the start.

The author is a rabbi in Beverly Hills, California. 

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Israel Cannot Outsource Its Survival

Israel’s Iron Dome anti-missile system intercepts rockets launched from the Gaza Strip, as seen from Sderot, Israel May 13, 2023 Photo: REUTERS/Ammar Awad

Israel’s security doctrine has been shaped by a harsh but undeniable reality: hesitation invites criticism, but delay can invite catastrophe.

This is not a posture of arrogance or defiance; it is an expression of responsibility toward all of Israel’s citizens. For Israel, the cost of miscalculation is not theoretical, it is measured in lives. From its founding, Israel has faced existential threats that no other modern democracy has had to confront so consistently or so closely.

Surrounded by hostile actors, terrorist organizations, and regimes that openly question its right to exist, Israel has learned that survival depends on clarity, preparedness, and the willingness to act when necessary, even when such actions are unpopular internationally. Waiting for consensus or permission has historically proven to be something that could endanger Israel’s very existence.

This does not mean Israel rejects peace. On the contrary, Israel has repeatedly demonstrated a willingness to pursue peace where peace is genuinely possible, and cooperation where cooperation enhances security. Peace treaties with former adversaries, regional partnerships, and humanitarian initiatives all testify to Israel’s desire for stability and coexistence. But peace cannot be built on unenforceable promises or blind faith in actors who have repeatedly violated agreements and norms.

Israel will not gamble its existence on assurances that cannot be guaranteed or enforced. Sovereignty, in this context, is not a symbolic concept or a political slogan. It is the concrete ability to defend oneself when no one else will, or when others cannot act in time. Sovereignty means maintaining independent judgment, operational freedom, and the resolve to protect one’s population under all circumstances.

History has taught the Jewish people an enduring and painful lesson: ultimate responsibility for Jewish survival rests with the Jewish State itself. Centuries of persecution, abandonment, and broken promises culminated in a clear understanding that security outsourced is security endangered. Israel’s independence is not only political; it is moral and existential.

Alliances matter. International partnerships, shared values, and moral clarity play an important role in strengthening Israel’s position and legitimacy. Israel values its allies and understands the importance of cooperation in a complex global environment. But when survival is at stake, alliances cannot replace independent decision-making.

No ally can assume responsibility for Israel’s existence, and none should be expected to.

When Israel acts to protect itself, it often ends up protecting others as well. By confronting extremist ideologies, disrupting terrorist networks, and standing as a frontline defender against radicalization, Israel contributes to global security, even when this reality is uncomfortable or inconvenient for the international community to acknowledge.

In the end, Israel’s guiding principle remains clear: peace where possible, strength where necessary, and sovereignty as the final shield.

History has shown that when Israel defends itself decisively, it not only safeguards its own people but helps prevent greater instability beyond its borders. Whether the world is ready to admit it or not, Israel’s self-defense has often served as a defense of shared values and global security itself.

Sabine Sterk is the CEO of Time To Stand Up For Israel.

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Selective Reporting: How Gaza Aid Vetting Became a Media Narrative

Trucks carrying humanitarian aid and fuel line up at the crossing into the Gaza Strip at the Rafah border on the Egypt side, amid a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, in Rafah, Egypt, October 17, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Stringer

Embedding operatives in civilian and humanitarian organizations in Gaza to evade detection by Israeli authorities has been a key strategy of Hamas and other terrorist organizations. Israel has consistently worked to prevent well-intentioned humanitarian organizations from being exploited for these purposes.

This past week, Israel demonstrated yet again its persistence in combating terrorism wherever it may exist by suspending the Gaza operations of 37 humanitarian organizations that refused to cooperate with the rules laid out by Israel.

In March 2025, Israel notified every aid organization in the Gaza Strip that they had to complete a re-registration process to be able to continue their operations in January 2026.

The main requirement asked of the organizations was to submit a list of all employees as part of a security screening process. Those who did not complete the process would be unable to continue their operations.

Many outlets, such as CNN, have framed this as potentially leading to a “humanitarian crisis.” This is despite the total amount of aid from these 37 organizations accounting for only 1% of the total aid entering the Gaza Strip.

Alex Crawford of Sky News claimed that Israel was blocking these organizations “without evidence” that there have been connections to terrorist organizations, calling the groups “respected.”

But there’s nothing respectable about terrorists infiltrating organizations meant to help civilians in need. More than that, this effort is meant to ensure terrorist organizations do not take control of or subvert humanitarian operations.

Throughout the war, humanitarian organizations have been abused by terrorist organizations.

Doctors Without Borders (MSF), for instance, is one of the organizations whose operations are being suspended in the coming months, after it failed to provide a list of its Gaza employees. But MSF has previous form. In 2024, it was revealed that an employee of MSF was active in Islamic Jihad and another was a sniper in a Hamas unit.

Mosab Abu Toha, a Pulitzer Prize winner exposed by HonestReporting for excusing the abduction of Israeli hostages on October 7, likewise joined the choir online to complain about MSF being suspended in Gaza.

He faces a knowledge gap in understanding that Hamas and other terrorist organizations have embedded themselves in civilian infrastructure, including hospitals. And MSF only operates five out of 220 primary care clinics and medical points in Gaza, as per COGAT.

Naturally, this context is omitted from international reports on the NGO suspensions, as it does not fit the narrative. It is thus also telling that the media’s focus has been on the 15 percent of organizations not complying with Israel, rather than the 85 percent who are. This would, however, require the media to question why 37 so-called aid organizations are refusing the simple task of providing a list of their employees.

This is not the first time Gaza’s aid system has been highlighted as being vulnerable to — if not outright compromised by — terrorist infiltration. Hamas has systematically embedded members in civilian infrastructure as a way to control resources. As a result, international aid organizations have repeated claims published by Hamas without any scrutiny. These claims have then been uncritically amplified by the media, creating a self-reinforcing cycle in which Hamas’ aid narratives turned into accepted facts.

While terrorist organizations seek to spread false information about the lack of humanitarian aid in the Gaza Strip, the truth remains that 4,200 trucks filled with aid enter Gaza every week, coordinated between Israel and aid organizations that have complied with the rules. Organizations unwilling to comply and provide a list of employees must explain their persistent refusal to meet this basic requirement of transparency.

The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.

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