Uncategorized
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.
Uncategorized
New York City Council pushes action on antisemitism without Mamdani
The announcement Thursday by New York City Council Speaker Julie Menin of a new task force dedicated to combating antisemitism — co-chaired by a critic of Mayor Zohran Mamdani — is setting up potential tension between the City Council and the mayor’s office over how to respond to the rise in antisemitism.
So is the introduction of a measure that could limit protests outside synagogues, part of a package of new Council bills aimed at antisemitism.
Councilmember Eric Dinowitz, a Democrat from the Bronx, who was selected along with Brooklyn Councilmember Inna Vernikov, a Republican, as co-chair of the seven-member working group, said they intend to take a more assertive legislative role in addressing rising concerns among Jewish New Yorkers “in a way that may be different than what the mayor wants to do.”
That includes weighing the adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, which considers most forms of anti-Zionism as antisemitic, as a framework for investigating hate crimes — a position Mamdani opposes. “I believe that IHRA has a good structure for defining antisemitism,” Vernikov said in an interview. In 2023, Vernikov passed a resolution to create an annual day to “end Jew-hatred.”
On his first day in office earlier this month, Mamdani drew criticism from mainstream Jewish organizations for revoking an executive order by former Mayor Eric Adams that adopted the IHRA definition of antisemitism. Liberal Jewish groups oppose that framework. Some support the Nexus Document, which states that most criticism of Israel and Zionism is not antisemitic. The mayor has declined to say how his administration will define antisemitism when determining which cases to investigate or pursue.
Mamdani has kept open the recently created Mayor’s Office to Combat Antisemitism, which he said will pursue his vision to address rising acts of hate against Jews. Mamdani said on Thursday that he’s in the final stages of selecting an executive director for that office.
Dinowitz, who also chairs the council’s Jewish Caucus, said it was important to move forward in parallel with the mayor’s efforts. “We are a separate, co-equal branch of government that has our own ideas and initiatives that we need to pursue to keep Jewish New Yorkers safe,” he said. Dinowitz, who represents the heavily Jewish neighborhood of Riverdale, added that most members of the task force are not Jewish, underscoring that antisemitism is not solely a Jewish issue.
Antisemitic incidents accounted for 57% of reported hate crimes in 2025, according to the NYPD. The new year started with a rash of antisemitic incidents across the city. On Thursday, a 36-year-old man was charged with attempted assault as hate crimes after repeatedly crashing into the entrance of the Chabad-Lubavitch world headquarters in Brooklyn the night before. On Tuesday, a rabbi was verbally harassed and assaulted in Forest Hills, Queens, and last week, a playground frequented by Orthodox families in the Borough Park neighborhood in Brooklyn was graffitied with swastikas two days in a row. In both incidents, the suspects have been arrested.
Vernikov’s past remarks draw scrutiny
Thursday’s announcement also drew controversy.
Vernikov has faced criticism for incendiary remarks on social media and has been a vocal critic of the Democratic Party’s approach to antisemitism. During the mayoral election, she warned that “Jihad is coming to NYC” if Mamdani wins, and called him a “terrorist-lover.” In response to a Yiddish-language campaign flyer, she wrote that Mamdani wants Jews “to burn in an oven.” She called the Jewish liaison for State Attorney General Letitia James a “Kapo Sell Out” for praising Mamdani’s outreach. In 2023, Vernikov was arrested after being pictured with a gun at her waist as she attended a pro-Israel counter-protest near a pro-Palestinian rally at Brooklyn College. A judge later dismissed the charges against her.
The progressive Jews For Racial & Economic Justice, which endorsed Mamdani through its affiliated political arm, The Jewish Vote, called Vernikov’s appointment unacceptable. Sophie Ellman-Golan, a JFREJ spokesperson, said Vernikov “regularly diminishes the seriousness of antisemitism by reducing it to a political cudgel.”
Menin, who some see as a check on the mayor and a potential guardrail on his actions, defended the appointment. “The Jewish Caucus voted to have this task force,” Menin told reporters. “Obviously, I don’t agree with the comments that she made in the past, and I’ve made that known to her.” Menin, the first Jewish speaker of the City Council, has pointed to the symbolism of her elevation alongside Mamdani, the city’s first Muslim mayor, as an opportunity to “take the temperature and the rhetoric down.”
Vernikov confirmed that the Jewish Caucus approved her selection, but insisted the speaker was involved in the initiative.
In the interview, Vernikov noted that Mamdani “has said things and done things that make the Jewish community very fearful.” She added that she hopes the mayor will translate his pledge to fight antisemitism into concrete action, “but until then, we have a trust issue with him.”
Mamdani addressed Vernikov’s attacks in an interview with Bloomberg TV on Thursday. “I know that there are so many in this city who have to deal with similar kinds of smears,” he said. “But what I know that New Yorkers want to see, what I want to see, is a humanity embodied in our politics, not the language of darkness that has taken hold.”
Menin’s legislative package to counter antisemitism
Also on Thursday, Menin introduced a legislative package as part of her five-point plan to combat antisemitism, including a proposal to ban protests near the entrances and exits of houses of worship, $1.25 million in funding for the Museum of Jewish Heritage, and the creation of a city hotline to report antisemitic incidents.
Mamdani said he broadly supports the package but expressed reservations about the proposed 100-foot buffer zone around synagogues and other houses of worship. “I wouldn’t sign any legislation that we find to be outside of the bounds of the law,” he said.
At a press conference, Menin said the measure was designed not to restrict protest but to prevent confrontations. “Enforcement is not based on speech or viewpoint,” she said. “It is based on conduct that endangers others.”
The Council will vote on the measures at its next meeting in February.
The post New York City Council pushes action on antisemitism without Mamdani appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Here’s exactly why it’s dangerous to compare ICE to Nazis
It may feel morally clarifying to compare ICE to Nazis in moments of outrage. But those comparisons are also historically inaccurate, and politically counterproductive.
Nazism remains historically singular, both because of its eliminationist antisemitism and its state-driven project of industrial genocide. No other political movement has so entirely organized its worldview around the idea that a specific people constitutes a cosmic threat. The Nazis were driven by the belief that the mere existence of Jews endangered humanity, and that Jews therefore had to be physically annihilated everywhere.
A clear understanding of this truth has been absent amid renewed controversy over federal immigration enforcement and protests in Minneapolis. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz compared children hiding in fear from ICE raids to Anne Frank hiding in Amsterdam, in terror of capture by Nazi Germany. Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich compared ICE operations under President Donald Trump’s administration to the tactics of Hitler’s Brownshirts. They have been joined by many others, including in this publication.
Comparison is a central tool of historical and political analysis, and Nazism can and should be compared to other ideologies. But flattening the particular contours of Nazism strips it of its distinctive genocidal logic, and risks pushing us to take the wrong messages from its horrors.
When Nazism becomes a general synonym for “bad politics,” the Holocaust becomes a moral prop rather than a historically specific catastrophe. This is especially painful for Jews, but it also distorts the memory of the regime’s many other victims: Roma and Sinti, people with disabilities, prisoners of war, queer people and political dissidents, among others.
Part of what drives these comparisons is cultural familiarity. The Holocaust and the Gestapo are widely understood shorthand for the worst imaginable abuses of state power. Invoking Nazi metaphors often says more about present anxieties — foremost among them the fear that the United States may be sliding toward authoritarianism — than about historical reality.
Those anxieties are profound, and legitimate, especially when it comes to the concerns about injustice toward immigrants. Federal immigration enforcement has long prompted alarm about the abuse of civil liberties, including concerns about racial profiling, excessive force, family separation and opaque chains of accountability.
These problems span multiple U.S. administrations, showing that vigilance and legal challenge are always necessary. Calling them “Gestapo tactics,” however, as some national leaders have, obscures rather than clarifies the issue.
It conflates a flawed system operating within a still-robust framework of legal challenges and public scrutiny with a secret police apparatus designed for totalitarian control and genocide. For instance, in Minnesota, a federal judge threatened to hold the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in contempt for repeatedly defying court orders requiring bond hearings, prompting the agency to release a detainee. The fact that judges can and do continue to compel compliance, even amid sharp disputes over enforcement, shows that the U.S. remains a democracy rather than a secret police state.
There are countries today in which opposition parties are banned, protest is routinely criminalized, courts are fully captured by the regime, and independent media are systematically dismantled — such as Russia, Iran, or Venezuela. In those contexts, the language of secret police, one-party rule, and total state control describes concrete institutional realities.
It does not do so here. Yes, the U.S., like many countries today, is experiencing measurable democratic backsliding. But it remains far from an authoritarian regime. Much of the press remains free, despite significant pressure from the White House as well as structural pressures from corporate ownership, and continues to report extensively on immigration enforcement controversies. Independent courts have ruled against unlawful revocations of immigration protections. Protests in places like Minneapolis have mobilized large numbers of participants and, rather than being criminalized, are showing efficacy in getting the administration to change its course.
Learning from the Holocaust does not require declaring that everything is Nazism. Collapsing the distinction between democratic backsliding and full-fledged authoritarianism weakens our ability to diagnose what kind of political danger we are actually confronting. It might even weaken resistance: Mistaking slow erosion for a finished catastrophe can breed despair instead of motivating strategic action.
Nazi parallels also corrode political discourse itself. If ICE is the Gestapo, and Trump is Hitler, then Republican voters become Nazis by implication. This forecloses the possibility of democratic repair.
While far-right extremist currents undeniably exist within the MAGA movement, it is also a broad political camp that includes voters motivated by a variety of factors, including economic anxiety, distrust of elites and religious identity. Collapsing all of this into “Nazism” is analytically lazy and politically disastrous.
All that on top of the risk of historical whitewashing that comes with this rhetoric. If every abuse is Nazism, then nothing is Nazism, and the lessons of the Holocaust — foremost among them the necessity of vigorously combatting antisemitism in our society — are lost.
Of course, supporters of Trump also engage in similar rhetoric, calling their own opponents Nazis. Ending this cycle of mutual Nazi-labeling is essential if the country hopes to move forward. Historical memory is a tool, not a weapon. We can confront injustice without exaggeration. And the best way to defend democracy is not to demonize our opponents, but rather to speak clearly, act responsibly, and work to build a political culture that can actually heal.
The post Here’s exactly why it’s dangerous to compare ICE to Nazis appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Italian rapper Ghali’s planned Winter Olympics set draws backlash over his Gaza advocacy
(JTA) — Italian rapper Ghali’s slated performance at the opening ceremony for this year’s Winter Olympics in Milan has drawn criticism from Italian leaders over his past activism against Israel.
Ghali Amdouni, a prominent Milan-born rapper of Tunisian parents, will be joined by a host of performers including Andrea Bocelli and Mariah Carey during the opening ceremony on Feb. 6. This year, nine Israelis will compete, including the national bobsled team for the first time.
The selection of Ghali drew criticism from members of Italy’s right-wing League party.
“It is truly incredible to find a hater of Israel and the centre-right, already the protagonist of embarrassing and vulgar scenes, at the opening ceremony,” a source from the party told the Italian outlet La Presse. “Italy and the games deserve an artist, not a pro-Pal fanatic.”
In early 2024, Ghali drew criticism from Italian Jewish leaders and Israel’s former ambassador to Italy, Alon Bar, after he called to “stop genocide” during his performance at the Sanremo Italian song festival. The spat later spurred protests outside the office of the Italian public broadcaster RAI.
On X, the rapper has also criticized other artists for not using their platforms for pro-Palestinian activism and appeared to refer to the war in Gaza as a “new Holocaust.”
Ghali’s selection comes as Italy has become an epicenter of pro-Palestinian activism that has been sustained even as such activism has receded in other places. In October, over 2 million Italians took part in a one-day general strike in support of Palestinians and the Global Sumud Flotilla. The previous month, a separate general strike was organized in response to call from the country’s unions to “denounce the genocide in Gaza.”
According to a study of global antisemitism published in April by Tel Aviv University, Italy was one of two countries that saw a spike in antisemitic incidents from 2023 to 2024. A September survey from the pollster SWG found that roughly 15% of Italians believe that physical attacks on Jewish people are “entirely or fairly justifiable.”
Italian Sports Minister Andrea Abodi said he does not believe Ghali will make a political statement on stage.
“It doesn’t embarrass me at all to disagree with Ghali’s views and the messages he sent,” said Abodi, according to the Italian outlet La Repubblica. “But I believe that a country should be able to withstand the impact of an artist expressing an opinion that we don’t share. And that opinion will not, in any case, be expressed on that stage.”
Noemi Di Segni, the president of the Union of the Italian Jewish Community, told Italian media that she was hopeful Ghali would receive instructions ahead of his performance.
“It is clear that I hope Ghali has received instructions or guidelines on the ‘role’ he is expected to play. So I hope he will understand what he needs to do in that context and at that moment,” Di Segni told the Italian outlet La Milano. “I am confident that he will understand what he is called upon to do in that context and at that moment.”
The post Italian rapper Ghali’s planned Winter Olympics set draws backlash over his Gaza advocacy appeared first on The Forward.