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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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In Trump’s assault on democracy, echoes of Nazi Germany but new glimmers of hope that America will be different
In the final, tumultuous years of the Weimar Republic, a succession of arch-conservative chancellors ruled by emergency decree rather than go through the Reichstag, the German parliament. Germany had become a democracy in name only, as reactionary power brokers steered the nation deeper into totalitarian waters, ultimately opening the door for Hitler.
As we approach our mid-term elections, America too is at a pivot point — with the burning question being whether Donald Trump’s grip on MAGA lawmakers can be broken so that Congress, feckless like the Reichstag of the late Weimar Republic, can resume its constitutional role as a check on the executive.
It’s a matter of life or death for American democracy as it nears its 250th birthday.
As Trump’s poll numbers tank while GOP lawmakers’ support for him endures, I find myself musing about the Weimar Republic and the self-immolation of its national legislature.
In the final months before they came to power on Jan. 30, 1933, Hitler and the Nazis were actually on the ropes. After they had become the largest party in the Reichstag in July elections a year earlier, two million Germans abandoned the Nazis in an election that November. Many Germans were less enamored of the Nazi leader, fatigued by a sense that the Nazis thrived on disorder. The spell seemed to be breaking. Does this ring a bell? Economics also played a role: Germany was finally emerging from the Great Depression.
But the German republic had already been brought to a breaking point by street fighting, political chaos, the Great Depression, and a coterie of arch-conservative power brokers who schemed and maneuvered to scrap Germany’s first democracy. They included Chancellor Franz von Papen.
Papen was unable to form a majority coalition after the July 1932 election because of huge gains by the Nazis and losses by other key parties, so he continued to govern by emergency decree with the consent of President Paul von Hindenburg, relying on the broad emergency powers of Article 48 of the constitution that had already hollowed out parliamentary rule.
More internal scheming resulted in Papen’s ouster after the November 1932 election. He was replaced by General Kurt von Schleicher, a master of intrigue. But Schleicher lasted only two months, as disagreements raged over whether to give Hitler a role in the government, and what that role should be. The reactionary schemers eventually reached a consensus: Let Hitler have the chancellorship but keep him in check by loading the cabinet with archconservatives like Papen. Once Hitler became chancellor on Jan. 30, 1933, it didn’t take him long to outmaneuver all of the other schemers, who became puppets of the Nazi leader instead of the puppet masters.
Germany’s political establishment — all but the Social Democrats and the banned Communists — ceremoniously handed the keys over to Hitler on March 23, 1933, when the Reichstag passed the Enabling Act, dismantling parliamentary democracy and giving Hitler dictatorial powers.
Which brings us to the question: Whither American democracy?
Under Trump, our Congress has been reduced to a shell of its former self, an American analog of the toothless Reichstag. As Trump has launched assault after assault on the pillars of American democracy — on the judiciary, on higher education, on free speech, our election system, the rule of law, and even on unflattering but true chapters in American history — Republicans have kept quiet, fearing Trump’s wrath and retribution.
But now there are glimmers of hope. Trump’s broken promises, self-aggrandizement, megalomania, corruption, utter indifference to everyday Americans’ economic suffering, and relentless catering to the country’s wealthiest are finally catching up with him. New polls put his approval rating at a dismal 37%. In a New York Times/Siena poll, just 28% of voters approved of how Trump is handling the cost of living, while only 31% approved of his war with Iran. Even Fox News had him at 39% approval. That same poll showed GOP support for Trump weakening considerably on his handling of the economy.
Economic pain is driving the collapse. The soaring costs of the war in Iran, Trump’s vanity projects, and his proposed $1.8 billion slush fund for the Jan. 6 insurrectionists, coupled with his push for lifetime immunity for himself and his family to commit tax fraud, have incensed voters who are already struggling to afford groceries, gas, housing and health care.
As Americans make impossible choices, the 47th president touts the glitzy White House ballroom he wants to build and his plans for an arch that would dwarf the Arc de Triomphe, all while prosecuting a war that has closed the Strait of Hormuz and driven up prices worldwide. The widening gap between Trump’s self-indulgence and the country’s hardship is finally producing something late Weimar never managed: a meaningful break in the habit of submission to an aspiring strongman.
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This Jewish artist hadn’t painted in more than 5 decades. Then came Oct. 7.
Sid Klein has finally found his subject. More than half a century after he scrambled to pick a topic for his senior art project at Brooklyn College—and settled on exploring the porcelain curves of a toilet bowl in a 20-painting series—he’s discovered a purpose.
Klein, 78, took a five-decade hiatus from art between college graduation and retirement. He picked his brushes back up just a few months before the events of Oct. 7.
Upon hearing of the Hamas attacks, Klein processed the news with acrylics. Soon, he began looking back to the Holocaust. He felt compelled to render contemporary and historical victims of hatred on paper and ultimately take on the mantle of combatting antisemitism, not with words or weapons but with images.
“For the first time in my life, I’m so motivated in my art,” Klein told me over Zoom from his home in South Florida. “All of a sudden I went from, ‘I don’t know what I want to paint,’ to, ‘I’ve got to make a record of this so people can look at these paintings and see what does antisemitism naturally lead to.’”
Born and raised in Brooklyn, Klein noticed at a young age that he could depict objects in three dimensions. “I started drawing with Crayola crayons with paper that my mom would pick up [at] the local five and dime,” he said.
But his mother died when he was seven, leaving his father to raise three children on his own. Though they weren’t particularly religious, Klein said, he attended yeshiva. The extra-long school day helped his working single father make sure he was safe. Klein continued dabbling in art through elementary and high school.
The Holocaust was not part of his education, as far as he remembers, not at the yeshiva and not later in college, where he flitted from pre-law to economics to philosophy before settling on fine art. “I’d never been exposed to it,” he said. “I’d never seen the photographs. I consciously avoided the photographs.”
“I was living in this bubble so I could pretend that antisemitism did not exist,” he said.
He remained in that bubble through business school and a long career in marketing. During that time, “painting didn’t even cross my mind,” Klein said. “For 55 years, I focused on the business and totally ignored the art.”
It wasn’t until his career drew to a close that he thought he might try again. “I wanted to give it a try and see what was left,” he said. But he wanted to keep painting only if he had a worthy subject, which he found in the wake of the Hamas attacks.
“That murder affected me in a profound way,” said Klein, who has two sons and five grandchildren living in Israel. “I started painting in my mind what these 1,200 people would have looked like. And that was my return to art.”
The segue from the horrors of Oct. 7 to those of the Holocaust felt natural to Klein. “For me, all of those are one of the same. They’re all Jew hatred at different times in history,” he said. “The amount of evil in our world is just—I don’t know how to measure it.” There are endless tragedies, he said, “but I’m focusing on our people.”
Klein paints in a corner of the family room he’s designated as his studio. He regularly pores over hundreds of black-and-white photos taken in ghettos and camps, looking for his next subjects to call out to him.
In one photograph, he recalled, he saw lines upon lines of women and children, standing near cattle cars, waiting, exhausted. He distilled the scene to one row of imminent victims in “Innocents.” They’re “going to be taken to a gas chamber and they’re going to be dead in 20 minutes or a half hour, and they don’t know that,” he said. On the right, a boy tugs at his mother’s coat. The woman on the far left balances the small child in her arms alongside her pregnant belly. In the middle, another grasps a toddler’s hand. Their eyes implore the viewer to grapple with their fate.
Several of Klein’s Holocaust works were displayed earlier this year at the Gross-Rosen Museum in Rogoźnica in Poland, on the grounds of the concentration camp system of the same name, where an estimated 120,000 people were imprisoned and 40,000 died.
“As employees of a Memorial Site, we have constant access to disturbing historical photos and documents; these are undeniably important, but viewing the victims through the eyes of an artist is an entirely different, more intimate experience,” Bartosz Surman, who works for the museum’s education department, told me. Surman estimated that approximately 4,000 people saw Klein’s work there between January 27 and March 31. “For a Memorial Site located in a village of fewer than a thousand people, we consider it a significant success and a testament to the power of Mr. Klein’s work,” he said.
Four thousand miles away, “My Zaidy” hangs on the wall at the Dr. Bernard Heller Museum in downtown Manhattan as part of the exhibition “Proverbs, Adages, and Maxims.”
The man in the painting wears a star under his heart. The bright yellow patch and pearlescent and gold shimmer of his face contrast with the matte blue of his coat and hat. But turning the corner of the exhibition, it’s the eyes that catch you. “I left them blank, so you can put in his eyes, any eyes you want,” Klein said—his zaidy’s or yours or a stranger’s.
The eyes may be missing but the gaze is powerful, as though this old man, as he approaches his cruel end, is staring and saying, “Look at me. Do you see what’s happening? Why are you just standing there?”
“A lot of bubbes and zaides were exterminated,” Klein said, including his paternal grandfather. But the zaidy in the painting isn’t Klein’s, exactly, he said. He can’t recall ever seeing a photo of him. Instead, he painted another elderly man in a photo that struck him: This is what a zaidy selected for the gas chamber looks like. This is what Klein’s zaidy could have looked like.
“I decided I was going to do a painting, and fill that hole in my heart,” Klein said.
“There’s something very haunting about the hollowed, empty eyes,” museum director Jeanie Rosensaft told me over the phone. “We were very touched, because although [Klein] has not had a long resume of art production, we felt that the image that he provided was very compelling.”.
Klein is one of 58 artists in the exhibition, and his work will be included in a tour the museum is organizing following its New York run, which ends June 24. “We hope that he continues on this path,” Rosensaft said. “It’s really essential that art bear witness to the past and provide a bridge to the future.”
Seeing the pain
Klein’s next painting, he told me, was inspired by a photo of two small children, empty bowls in hand, begging for food.
“If I had more working space, I would make my paintings bigger,” said Klein, who says he hopes to one day create life-size portraits. “Right now you’ve got to get pretty close to see what the hell is going on,” he said. “I want size to be part of your experience seeing the pain.”
Spending his days sifting through Holocaust photos and painting its victims takes a toll. “When I paint, I become emotionally involved. But when it’s done, I listen to my music for a couple of hours, and that gives me the emotional strength to continue,” says Klein, who puts on Vivaldi, Mozart, or Brahms, for example. “After I do a painting, I need this music to settle my nerves.”
“Sometimes I say, ‘Klein, try something else!’” he said. But he can’t imagine abandoning his subject or newfound mission for any others. Which means he’ll need more of that music in the years to come, as might those viewing his paintings.
“A lot of my work is grotesque,” Klein said, and that’s intentional. “I want to shake you up.”
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How can I explain to my 93-year-old mother why it suddenly seems ok to hate Jews?
My mom — 93 years old, still sharp, a lifelong Democrat, a woman who has read The New York Times nearly every day for the last five decades — called me this week, in something approaching shock, to tell me she had read Nicholas Kristof’s latest op-ed.
“I can’t believe what they’re saying,” she said of the piece, whose claims — particularly one, questionably sourced, involving the alleged rape of a prisoner by a dog — drew accusations of serious journalistic malpractice. To me, this felt like more than flawed reporting. It bore the unmistakable contours of a modern blood libel.
“How can they print this?” my mom asked. “What’s happening in the world?”
Sometimes we encounter an unexpected threshold, and suddenly the familiar world appears altered. The Kristof column was such a threshold for my mother. Her parents were immigrants; her mother left a Romanian shtetl as a child, crossing the Atlantic with her younger brother when they were 12 and 9 years old. They came because Jews were fleeing rapes and murder. If you are an American Jew of Eastern European descent, there is a decent chance your family history contains some version of this story — that of people fleeing pogroms.
You may remember the most recent example of such an attack. It happened on Oct. 7, 2023 — the first pogrom carried out in the age of smartphones.
To say that things have felt strange and frightening for many Jews worldwide since that horror is like saying clouds produce rain or honey is sweet. Strangest of all is the speed with which, in many quarters, people sought to not just explain the atrocity, but actually justify it.
What has tormented me almost as much as the violence itself is the astonishing pace at which animus toward Jews, or toward “Zionists,” has become normalized in spaces where one might once have expected understanding. And yes, I know, people are weary of hearing Jews explain why hostility directed at the overwhelming majority of Jews who believe in Jewish self-determination often bleeds into hostility toward Jews themselves. I know all the caveats. I know all the disclaimers. I have read them too. Still, it increasingly appears that anti-Zionism in many quarters has become not merely tolerated, but a litmus test.
The range of what can be said aloud has changed. So have the categories of people toward whom contempt may be openly directed. Prejudice against Jews that can once again — as in an era many thought was gone forever — pass as a kind of moral sophistication.
Each week there is a new reason to think about all this. A Democratic congressional candidate in Texas named Maureen Galindo has crossed yet another Rubicon of human foible and weakness. Galindo reportedly proposed transforming a detention center into a prison for “American Zionists” and described it as a place where many Zionists would undergo “castration processing.”
I cannot say categorically that Galindo represents a new political era. She may not. Fringe figures have always existed. But that a candidate seeking office within one of America’s two major political parties — a candidate who advanced to a Democratic runoff after finishing first in a crowded primary field, with roughly 29% of the vote — used this grotesque language is notable.
Maybe she’ll lose badly. Maybe she’ll vanish from the political stage. That wouldn’t change the fact that her statements did not produce immediate and universal condemnation.
Every era contains extremists. But sometimes institutions cease to treat extremism as radioactive, and begin treating it first as eccentricity, then as another perspective deserving “consideration,” then activism, then orthodoxy.
Is that happening here? I’m wondering. So is my mother.
I have spent much of my life among artists, intellectuals, musicians, progressives — a cohort that once seemed animated by an instinctive suspicion toward ethnic hatred in all forms. Increasingly, Jews appear exempt from that instinct. “Galindo is just another crazy person,” I’ve heard people say. I see. Just another crazy person competing seriously in a Democratic primary after proposing internment camps for “American Zionists.”
This is not about Galindo alone. It is also about institutions. About The New York Times, whose reporting and opinion pages remain, for millions, a moral compass. My mother did not call me outraged after reading Kristof. She called bewildered. She called sad. This was the newspaper she’d followed through wars, assassinations, civil rights struggles, and presidents of every variety. Her confusion and grief now pains me more than I can say. When exactly, she seemed to be asking me, did this happen? When did support for Israel become, in some circles, evidence of moral defect? When did “Zionist” become a slur, not a description of a legitimate ideology?
When did suspicion toward Jews become newly accessible, provided it arrived draped in the language of liberation?
All of this feels both cosmic and deeply personal. I have yet to meet a Jew who does not feel some shift beneath their feet.
And to them I say: do not cower. Do not hide your Jewishness. Do not keep your love for Israel or for Jews a secret. Go and do something singularly Jewish. Reorient yourself toward whatever you understand God to be. And if God feels impossible, then orient yourself toward the continuity of the Jewish people.
May we go from strength to strength. Mom, if you are reading this, that goes especially for you.
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