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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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Dozens of Anti-Israel Agitators Charged With Criminal Trespassing Over University of Washington Riot
Event hosted by “Super UW,” a revolutionary student organization that promotes Hamas, jihad, and anti-Zionism, in October 2023. Photo: Chin Hei Leung / SOPA Images/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect
Prosecutors in King County, Washington have filed criminal trespassing charges against 33 students and non-students who illegally occupied the University of Washington’s Interdisciplinary Engineering Building (IEB) during the 2025 spring semester to pressure college officials to boycott Israel, reportedly sparing them from being held accountable for property destruction to the tune of $1 million.
“This is an important step in ensuring accountability for those who perpetrated this occupation, in addition to the suspensions that the students arrested in the building received through the student conduct process,” the University of Washington said in a statement on Tuesday. “We value free speech and expression but also must continue to be a campus community where dangerous, unlawful actions are not tolerated.”
It added, “We appreciate the hard work by the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office, UW police, and law enforcement partners who investigated a complex case involving a large number of individuals.”
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, a pro-Hamas student group calling itself “Super UW” raided the IEB in May and refused to leave unless school officials acceded to its demand to terminate the institution’s partnerships with The Boeing Company, whose armaments manufacturing the students identified as a resource aiding Israel’s war to eradicate the Hamas terror group from Gaza.
“We are taking this building amidst the current and renewed wave of the student intifada, following the uprising of student action for Palestine after the heroic victory of Al-Aqsa Flood on October 7th,” the group said in a manifesto, referring to Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel. “The University of Washington is a direct partner in the genocide of the Palestinian people through its allegiance to its partnership with Boeing. Boeing manufactures the F-15 fighter jets, Apache helicopters, Hellfire missiles, and 500-pound bombs which israel [sic] uses to murder entire Palestinian families and destroy Palestinian homes, schools, and mosques.”
The illegal demonstration involved students establishing blockades near the building using bike racks and chairs, burning trash — while setting off sizable fires — that they then left unattended, and calling for violence against the police. Law enforcement officers eventually entered the building equipped with riot gear, including helmets and batons, and proceeded to arrest 33 protesters who later received charges for trespassing, property destruction, disorderly conduct, and conspiracy to commit all three, according to law enforcement statements at the time.
The defendants have been charged by the Kings County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office, which has not explained its decision to decline to prosecute the full range of alleged crimes committed in May.
The cohort is not the first to evade the severest possible penalties for demonstrations that escalated to a riot.
On Monday, a New York state judge overturned disciplinary sanctions imposed on a group of anti-Israel protesters who illegally occupied Columbia University’s Hamilton Hall and interned janitorial staff while destroying property to protest the Israel-Hamas war.
Twenty-two current and former students, all of whom contested their punishments anonymously, may soon walk away without being held accountable following Judge Gerald Lebovits’s ruling that Columbia’s actions were “arbitrary and capricious.” Lebovits went further, citing the students’ concealment of their identities with masks and keffiyeh scarves as evidence that the university lacked evidence to determine that they were actually in Hamilton Hall despite that they had been arrested on the scene by the New York City Police Department (NYPD).
“In the disciplinary proceedings against the 22 Columbia students, the sole evidence that they were present in Hamilton Hall during its occupation was a report reflecting that petitioners had been arrested,” he wrote. “No evidence was offered in the disciplinary proceedings of actions taken inside Hamilton Hall by any particular student, as opposed to the conduct of the group of occupiers as a whole.”
Lebovits, after arguing that the group should not be disciplined even as he described their infractions, then argued that illegally occupying Hamilton Hall is a “decades-long tradition.”
In a statement shared with The Algemeiner on Wednesday, Columbia University noted that Lebovits’s vacating the disciplinary sanctions does not take effect for 30 days, during which time university lawyers may pursue other legal avenues.
“The order does not take effect for at least 30 days, and no student who was disciplined for the occupation of Hamilton Hall can return to campus at this time,” a university spokesperson said. “Columbia is considering all of its options, including seeking a stay of the order and appealing the decision.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Qatar, Saudi Media Shoot Down Tucker Carlson Conspiracy as ADL Warns Iran Conflict Fueling Online Antisemitism
Tucker Carlson speaks at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, Oct. 21, 2025. Photo: Gage Skidmore/ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
Two Arab monarchies which remain steadfast in their refusal to recognize Israel’s right to exist have nonetheless dismissed conspiratorial claim of Mossad false flag attacks against them alleged by far-right podcaster Tucker Carlson.
The dismissals of Carlson’s assertion came as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) released a new report warning that the ongoing US-Israeli military operation against Iran “triggered an immediate online surge of antisemitic, anti-Zionist, and conspiratorial commentary that spanned the ideological spectrum.”
In a Monday video, Carlson asserted that it “hasn’t been reported, but it’s a fact that last night, in Qatar and Saudi Arabia, authorities arrested Mossad agents planning on committing bombings in those countries.”
Israel’s intelligence agency reportedly played a critical role in the killing of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in Tehran on Saturday, but there is no evidence to suggest Mossad agents were arrested this week for operations against Qatar and Saudi Arabia.
“Why would the Israelis be committing bombings in Gulf countries, which are also being attacked by Iran? Aren’t they on the same side?” Carlson asked, insisting that “Israel wants to hurt Iran, and Qatar, and the UAE, and Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain, and Oman, and Kuwait.”
Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) signed the Abraham Accords in September 2020 to normalize relations with Israel, and the three countries have enhanced ties since then.
On Tuesday, Majed Al-Ansari, a spokesman for the Qatari Foreign Ministry, responded to a reporter’s request to confirm Carlson’s claim. He refused to do so, answering he “has no information about any cells of the Israeli intelligence service Mossad at the moment.”
However, Qatar’s State Security Service separately announced the arrest of two cells it said were operating on behalf of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).
Then on Thursday, the Saudi Arabian state-owned Al Arabiya news outlet reported that it has “learned from its sources that claims alleging that Saudi Arabia and Qatar had arrested Mossad agents planting bombs in Gulf countries are baseless and untrue.”
Reports widely circulated this week that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman privately petitioned US President Donald Trump for months to strike Iran, a position that would align with Israel’s stated goal of trying to dismantle Iran’s military capabilities.
Carlson has previously praised Qatar and its House of Thani monarchy, which has ruled the country since 1851. The former Fox News host announced on Dec. 7, 2025, that he had purchased property in the country, and dismissed charges that Qatari funding had influenced his turn toward anti-Israel commentary, speculations which had circulated among right-wing figures and earned him the epithet “Tucker Qatarlson,” popularized by conservative talk radio host Mark Levin and former far-right Florida congressional candidate Laura Loomer.
Interviewing Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani at the Doha Forum, Carlson said, “I have been criticized as being a tool of Qatar, and I just want to say, which you already know, which is I have never taken anything from your country and don’t plan to.”
Qatar has long aligned itself with Hamas and its ideological wellspring, the Muslim Brotherhood, providing a safe haven for the leadership of both organizations. Thani’s choice to support the revolutionary Islamist group and its terrorist wing in Gaza has exacerbated tensions with Saudi Arabia and the UAE, both which regard the Brotherhood as an existential threat.
Meanwhile, on Tuesday the ADL released a report documenting how Carlson’s anti-Mossad conspiracy theory accompanied torrents of online Jew-hate. Researchers noted Carlson’s comments in particular, writing that he “further portrayed Jewish influence in the US as a hidden, malevolent force driving the country toward war through deception and ‘demonic’ control, and made unsubstantiated claims about Gulf states arresting ‘Mossad’ agents planning bombings.”
The ADL further captured how Carlson “used his response to the attacks in Iran as an opportunity to again promote the antisemitic conspiracy theory of Israeli involvement in 9/11.”
The report describes how in his Monday podcast Carlson “advanced a number of antisemitic conspiracy theories, including that Israel had foreknowledge of 9/11 and has orchestrated US involvement in other conflicts through manufactured intelligence, while framing Israel as covertly manipulating American foreign policy for its own agenda.”
Far-Right podcaster Candace Owens promoted this conspiracy theory on Tuesday when she shared a video of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu countering the charge that Israel targeted civilians, saying “you see the difference. The tyrants of Tehran target civilians. We target the tyrants of Tehran to protect civilians.”
Owens wrote on top of the video: “You murdered 3,000 Americans on 9/11. For starters.”
The ADL’s researchers spotlighted Owens’ role in boosting antisemitic voices.
“Actors like the neo-Nazi Aryan Freedom Network, right-wing online provocateur ‘Sneako,’ and controversial streamer Hasan Piker in particular appeared across multiple high-reach posts, including those amplified by figures with millions of followers, like Owens,” the report stated.
Owens also shared a deep fake image created with artificial intelligence that promoted antisemitism. The report featured a screenshot of Owens writing “Operation Epstein Fury fully explained:” to introduce a reposting of an image showing Trump wearing a white Israel hat, standing in front of two large Israeli flags, and speaking from a podium with the slogan “Operation Epstein Fury.”
The text accompanying the image, written by an account called “TooWhitetoTweet,” reads “It’s not complicated. American goyim are blowing up Iranian goyim because America is controlled by the people who call us goyim and Iran isn’t. Operation Epstein fury helps achieve Greater Epstein in the Middle East.”
“Operation Epic Fury” is the name the US has given to its military campaign against Iran. Owens’ play on words appears to be a reference to the late financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, whose Jewish heritage has been exploited as a pretext to openly express hatred toward Jews, amplifying conspiracy theories that falsely attribute the sex abuse scandal entirely to the Jewish community. Some anti-Israel voices have falsely claimed that Trump launched strikes against Iran at the behest of the Jewish state.
The ADL’s researchers documented the depth of this “Operation Epstein Fury” rebranding, finding “over 35,000 mentions and 28,000 unique authors on X by 4:00 PM ET on February 28 alone, growing to over 91,000 mentions from more than 60,000 unique authors about 48 hours later. The phrase is rapidly being weaponized by extremist actors to advance antisemitic tropes.”
On Sunday, Jonathan Greenblatt, the ADL’s CEO and national director, wrote on X: “Now the same old prejudiced voices such as Hassan Piker, Candace Owens, Stew Peters, and others with millions of followers are capitalizing on this moment to spew ugly antisemitism and spread vile conspiracy theories. You can argue about the merits of the conflict or how the campaign has been conducted, but people of goodwill can do so without resorting to antisemitism and rejecting bigots in our midst.”
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Argentine Prosecutor Seeks Indictment of 10 Suspects — Including Iran’s New IRGC Chief — in 1994 AMIA Bombing Case
People hold images of the victims of the 1994 bombing attack on the Argentine Israeli Mutual Association (AMIA) community center, marking the 30th anniversary of the attack, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, July 18, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Irina Dambrauskas
The lead prosecutor in the case of the 1994 bombing of the Argentine Israelite Mutual Association (AMIA) Jewish community center in Buenos Aires on Wednesday requested the indictment of 10 Iranian and Lebanese nationals suspected of involvement in the deadly attack.
Among those named was Ahmad Vahidi, who on Sunday was appointed the new head of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), an Iranian military force and internationally designated terrorist organization. He replaced Mohammad Pakpour, who was killed last week during the US-Israeli military campaign against Iran, which has resulted in the death of several high-ranking officials.
In 1994, Vahidi commanded the IRGC’s Quds Force, which is responsible for managing Iran’s proxies and terrorist operations abroad. Argentine President Javier Milei designated the force as a foreign terrorist organization in January, as the country’s Jewish community marked the 11th anniversary of the death of prosecutor Alberto Nisman, who investigated the AMIA bombing.
“What I asked was for authorities to move swiftly against the 10 defendants so a trial in absentia can be held as soon as possible and the public can see the evidence the Argentine state has compiled over the past 30 years,” the current Argentine prosecutor on the case, Sebastian Basso, told local news outlet Radio Mitre.
The 10 suspects set to stand trial include former Iranian and Lebanese ministers and diplomats, all of whom are subject to international arrest warrants issued by Argentina for their alleged roles in the country’s deadliest terrorist attack, which killed 85 people and wounded more than 300.
Last year, Basso — who took over the case after the 2015 murder of his predecessor, Nisman — also requested that federal Judge Daniel Rafecas issue national and international arrest warrants for Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei over his alleged involvement in the attack.
Basso’s legal action marked a significant departure from Argentina’s previous stance in the case, under which the Iranian leader was regarded as having diplomatic immunity.
Khamenei was also killed during Saturday’s US-Israeli strikes targeting senior Iranian leadership in Tehran.
Since 2006, Argentine authorities have sought the arrest of eight Iranians — including former president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who died in 2017 — yet more than three decades after the deadly bombing, all suspects remain still at large.
Despite Interpol issuing red notices for their arrest, neither Iran nor Lebanon has granted their extradition, allowing the suspects to remain beyond the reach of Argentine authorities.
“It was them who carried out the attack,” Basso said. “They are puppets of Iran and both the masterminds and perpetrators behind the bombing.”
According to Basso, the investigation unit made contact in 2025 with a group of Iranian dissidents who provided inside information that helped advance the case.
“That was vital for us, because it allowed us to reconstruct what happened in Iran, understand how the regime works, and how Hezbollah was created and sustained,” the Argentine prosecutor said.
Last year, Argentina ordered, for the first time, that suspects be tried in absentia following a legal change in March that removed the requirement for defendants to be physically present in court.
Despite Argentina’s longstanding belief that Lebanon’s Shiite Hezbollah terrorist group carried out the devastating attack at Iran’s request, the 1994 bombing has never been claimed or officially solved.
Meanwhile, Tehran has consistently denied any involvement and has refused to arrest or extradite any suspects.
To this day, the decades-long investigation into the terrorist attack has been plagued by allegations of witness tampering, evidence manipulation, cover-ups, and annulled trials.
In 2006, former prosecutor Nisman formally charged Iran for orchestrating the attack and Hezbollah for carrying it out.
Nine years later, he accused former Argentine President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner — currently under house arrest on corruption charges — of attempting to cover up the crime and block efforts to extradite the suspects behind the AMIA atrocity in return for Iranian oil.
Nisman was killed later that year, and to this day, both his case and murder remain unresolved and under ongoing investigation.
The alleged cover-up was reportedly formalized through the memorandum of understanding signed in 2013 between Kirchner’s government and Iranian authorities, with the stated goal of cooperating to investigate the AMIA bombing.
However, Milei, who took office in 2023, branded Iran “an enemy” of his country last year and has expressed strong support for his country’s Jewish community and the State of Israel.