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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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Germany’s far-right victory in eastern state election portends ‘disaster’ for centrists
(JTA) — The far-right Alternative for Germany’s victory in the northeastern state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, its second in the region in as many weeks, underscores the growing popularity of the anti-immigration, nationalist party at the expense of the country’s political center.
The center-right Christian Democratic Union, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s party, had its worst result in any state or federal election with just 4.9% of the vote, falling short of the 5% minimum needed to enter the legislature. It’s the first time in history the party was shut out of a state parliament.
Merz himself admitted the result was a “disaster” for the CDU, saying he would remain chancellor and press on with his economic reform agenda.
The AfD won 38.2%, according to preliminary results in the sparsely populated state on the Baltic Sea, home to some 1.6 million people. The AfD’s result on Sunday more than doubled its 16.7% share in the state’s last election in 2021.
The party’s rise in the east signals it is breaching the consensus of Germany’s liberal, multicultural order and meticulously built barriers against the far right since the Nazi era. Two weeks ago, the AfD crushed its opponents in Saxony-Anhalt, sending shockwaves through Europe.
At the same time, the socialist Left Party swept to victory on Sunday in Berlin, challenging centrist coalitions from the other side of the political spectrum. Such coalitions have long dominated the country but are now fighting to keep alienated voters amid economic stagnation and global instability.
In Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, the AfD was followed closely by the center-left Social Democrats (SPD) with 35.5% of the vote. The SPD outperformed opinion polls under the leadership of state premier Manuela Schwesig, who cast herself as a bulwark against the AfD while promising to strengthen the economy, education and social services. The Left Party trailed with 6.5% and the Greens with 5.7%.
Despite winning the largest share of votes, the AfD could struggle to form a government without an outright majority in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. Other large parties have refused to work with the AfD, which advocates for deporting refugees, opposing multiculturalism, protecting “German identity,” abolishing current public broadcasting and ending sanctions on Russia. The SPD could form a left-leaning coalition with the Left Party and the Greens.
In Saxony-Anhalt, the AfD also fell short of a majority with almost 44% of the vote, but has a greater chance of forming a government. The party is currently negotiating to govern with the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), a populist party with left-wing and right-wing positions that won 5.3% of the vote.
Leif-Erik Holm, the AfD’s candidate for state premier in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, said on election night that his party had a “mandate to govern.” He later acknowledged to the public broadcaster NDR that the AfD is ultimately unlikely to be part of a governing coalition, but said he expected the other parties to be “open to dialogue.”
Alice Weidel, the AfD’s national co-chair, celebrated the Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania result in an interview with the broadcaster ZDF.
“We are the strongest force and have reached the mainstream of the population, and we are the new people’s party in Germany,” said Weidel.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Germany’s far-right victory in eastern state election portends ‘disaster’ for centrists appeared first on The Forward.
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Coexistence is the only way and one state is a fantasy
For some time now, right-wing Zionists and left-wing Anti-Zionists have been mirror images of one another, both insisting on a one-state solution for Israelis and Palestinians. To be sure, the visions are different: one is of a Jewish-dominated ethnostate with a permanently subjugated non-Jewish minority, the latter either a utopian democratic fantasy or a violent, forced reversal of 1948.
As different as they are in some respects, though, both visions are delusions.
Clearly, many on the left still want to reverse 1948, to remove the “settler-colonialist Zionist entity” from the land and return control of it to its indigenous Palestinian inhabitants. (Never mind that the boundaries of Palestine and their demarcations of identity are, themselves, relics of colonialism.) Setting aside the virtues of these goals, it would be entirely unprecedented for a state to self-destruct in this way.
The model, of course, is apartheid-era South Africa. But whatever similarities Israel does or does not have to that state, there are critical differences as well. Most importantly, apartheid ended because of a combination of factors: international pressure (the original Boycott / Divestment / Sanctions campaign); the moral leadership of figures like Nelson Mandela; but also the fact that, by the late 1980s, nearly half the white South African population was itself opposed to apartheid, and elected a leader, F.W. de Klerk, who pledged to end it and did.
There is no analogue in present-day Israel. The upcoming Israeli elections are about many things, but the continued existence of Israel as a Jewish state is not one of them. Nor is the maximalism, ferocity, and one-sidedness of the left likely to somehow persuade Israeli Jews that erasing the Jewish state would be a good idea. Quite the contrary.
Which means that the only way to return to 1947 would be by force: an international military campaign against a nuclear power that has no intention of removing itself from the map and whose population believes it has nowhere else in the world to go. Needless to say, this scenario is as implausible as it is evil.
Of course, BDS advocates would claim that economic sanctions, the suspension of foreign aid, and international opprobrium would be enough to cause the Jewish state to voluntarily evolve into a non-Jewish, binational democracy. But the vast majority of Israel’s seven million Jewish citizens are resolutely opposed to such a change, and without military force, externally-mandated ‘regime change’ rarely happens: just look at Iran, North Korea, and occupied Tibet.
And what about the Palestinians? Does anyone truly believe that seven million Palestinians, most of whom understand themselves to be occupied, displaced, subjugated, and repressed by the state of Israel, are interested in joining hands with the same Israelis who have oppressed them for seven decades to create a new state free from ethno-nationalist trappings? Of course not. They want a state of their own, which they deserve. They, like Israelis, want to be in charge of their own destinies, to promote their own cultures, to build a society that reflects who they are and who they aspire to be.
Now, ‘two states’ may take many shapes: geographical contiguous entities, or a confederation of two governmental authorities, or others. But in some form, Palestinians and Israelis must be in charge of themselves.
This may not be an ideal arrangement, but it is the only pragmatic one. In principle, I am sympathetic to the arguments that any kind of ‘special’ nationalism, including ethno-nationalisms like Zionism, will inevitably lead to the extremism we now see in much of Israel, Europe, and the United States. In the Israeli world, such arguments were made by Yeshayahu Leibowitz and Adin Steinsaltz decades ago, and were recently discussed in a fascinating online back-and-forth between Shaul Magid and Irwin Kula. Perhaps, in retrospect, a ‘thick’ patriotism like Zionism was a mistake and Israel should only have aspired to be, as many of its initial founders wanted, a state like any other. Maybe, as soon as Zionism became religiously significant (to Israelis and non-Israelis alike), the stakes became too high.
But as the Talmudic rabbis said, avar zmano batel korbanо — basically, the horse has left the barn. Israel as a Jewish state is a reality and the overwhelming majority of Israelis want it to continue. It is not South Africa, and the dream of one democratic state from the river to the sea is a pipe dream with no tether to the actual realities of the 14 million people who live there.
And then there’s the fantasy on the Right, which is even darker.
The Right, too, wants one state from the river to the sea, only this state is an ethno-nationalist, non-democratic Greater Israel built on repression and minority rule. And (as Abdul El-Sayed aptly noted) unlike the Left, it has been building that reality on the ground for three decades now, most recently in its sociocide of Gaza and its policy of hachraah (compulsion) in the West Bank, which a recent BTzelem report describes as an “elimination project.” As B’Tzelem leader Yuli Novak put it in a recent New York Times op-ed, these policies are creating “a new phase of the political project to make Israeli Jewish control permanent while dismantling the conditions for Palestinian collective life.”
Here, too, it is hard to adjudicate between implausibility and immorality, but I’ll focus on the former. Already, Israel has lost the support of around a quarter of Americans, and a clear majority of American Jews disapprove of Israeli policies even as they do believe that Israel has the right to exist as a Jewish, democratic state. Do the likes of Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich really believe that the world will simply stand by and watch Israel ethnically cleanse the West Bank without, at the very least, disastrous economic and political consequences?
Israel is a small state that, for now at least, depends on American foreign aid and the (limited) support of the world community. Even if it were militarily and morally possible to institute formal apartheid in Greater Israel, it is simply unrealistic to believe that the world will simply allow Israel to do so. Nor do half of Israeli Jews want such a dreadful, dystopian, and endlessly violent future.
These fantasies on Left and Right are not idle delusions. They are impeding the real work that is necessary to move, however slowly, toward sustainable coexistence.
First, Israelis will hopefully soon elect a new government that will rein in the extreme nationalists and take a more realistic, ethical, and constructive stance toward the Palestinians. There is not an Israeli-Jewish majority that is ready for an independent Palestinian state tomorrow. But there is, it seems, a majority that wants the ethnic cleansing, ultra-nationalism, and settler-extremist vigilantism to end, and that, at least, is a step toward coexistence — a step toward normalization.
Will the next Israeli government be as progressive as I, personally, would like? Almost certainly not. But will it be more progressive, or at least less regressive, than the current one? This is what I pray for. Contrary to what the Left and Right insist, there are many kinds of Zionism. Even if only for pragmatic reasons, I support the more progressive, just, and coexistence-oriented kind.
But American one-staters on both sides have obstructed it.
On the Right, hundreds of millions of American dollars have put thumbs on the Israeli-electoral scales for decades, while AIPAC and others have obstructed reasonable steps toward coexistence, such as conditioning military aid on Israeli compliance with international legal norms.
Meanwhile, on the Left, the insistence that all Zionism entails racism, colonialism, and genocide makes pragmatism more difficult, as any deviation from the anti-Zionist line renders progressive politicians treyf. And then, of course, is the rhetoric: blood libel, genocide, antisemitism, apartheid. Everyone on the other side is evil: musicians, politicians, artists, filmmakers, rabbis, and activists are all either Jew-haters or genociders, with no other options in between.
I think I speak for a majority of American people and American Jews when I implore everyone to tone it the f—k down.
If it isn’t clear by now, reasonable, non-hateful people profoundly disagree about how to understand what happened in Gaza, how it relates to what happened on Oct. 7, and how to negotiate living with people who strongly disagree with one another.
And I think a majority of American Jews are sick to death of the extremism. I’ve been canceled by both sides, personally, and I can testify to the exhaustion. I think we are sick of both sides’ ignorance, intolerance, and the inability to listen to multiple narratives.
We’re sick of the Left ignoring Israeli security and the Right only talking about Israeli security. We’re sick of the Left talking only about Palestinian safety and the Right never talking about Palestinian safety. We’re sick of the Right failing to acknowledge Palestinian dispossession and the Left failing to acknowledge the UN resolutions of 1947, the Holocaust, or the ancient Jewish ties to the land. We’re sick of the Right refusing to watch videos and films about Gaza, and the Left refusing to watch them about Oct. 7. (And no, we’re not trying to compare, equate, or measure the horror in one way or the other.)
Closer to home, we’re sick of the hypocrisy, hysteria, and weaponization of overheated rhetoric on all sides. We’re sick of how the Right refuses to call out (in the last month alone) concentration camp imagery, Islamophobia, and actual genocidal rhetoric on its side while harping on any insufficiently-apologetic apology by an accused antisemite. And we’re sick of how the Left refuses to call out voices who say that supporters of Israel are making themselves into targets of violence or that Bibi Netanyahu is an Emmanuel Goldstein-George Soros style puppetmaster of everything wrong with the world. Everyone in this rhetorical battle is living in glass houses and throwing stones at the other side.
Most of all, we’re sick of the incitement, the self-righteousness, the certainty, the maximalism, the rage-bait, the bullying, the demonization, the good guys/bad guys narratives, the harassment, the ‘de-normalization’ and the inability to tolerate disagreement. All, again, on the Left and the Right alike.
Most of us know that the Israeli government has behaved appallingly over the last few years. What happened in Gaza began as a defensive war but became a war of annihilation, with horrifying amounts of death and an aim, among some at least, to destroy Gazan society. But most of us also know that Israel is not a colonialist enterprise because Jews have no home country to which they can return, that Hamas is evil, that Jewish ties to the Land of Israel date back thousands of years, and that the Jewish state, for better or for worse, has been a reality for almost 80 years and is not going to self-destruct.
At the end of the day, whatever some left-wing activists or right-wing billionaires might like to happen in the Middle East, neither Israelis nor Palestinians are going anywhere. Eventually, in ten years or a hundred, these groups will have to live alongside each other, in one form or another. The clock cannot be turned back. Coexistence is the only way.
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Ontario Jewish community saddened, but not shocked, by shootout outside synagogue
(JTA) — TORONTO – Doug Warren, 56, was attending Kol Nidre services at the Sons of Jacob synagogue in Belleville, Ontario on the eve of Yom Kippur on Sunday. Prayers were just about to begin when he heard the gunshots.
“The rabbi had just started to call us into the sanctuary. We were stepping inside, and we heard this loud bang, and we all stopped,” Warren, a member of the congregation, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “It sounded like someone was banging the window or the door.”
It was a 29-year-old former Canadian soldier exchanging gunfire with a police officer stationed outside the synagogue. The shooter, Sean Ward 29, of Quinte West, Ontario., died from his wounds on Tuesday. The officer, Const. Jeff Smith, a 13-year veteran of the force, remains in the hospital in critical condition.
Little is known of Ward, who served in the Canadian military from 2017 to 2022, and was never deployed.
“We knew this was going to happen,” Warren, a member of Sons of Jacob and a resident of Belleville. told JTA. “We’ve been saying as Jews that we’re very concerned with the rise of antisemitism. What did you think was going to happen? People weren’t taking it seriously.”
As the gunfire continued, congregants scrambled to find safety. “Some people suggested we should go to the basement, others said we should go out the back door,” he recalls. “At the same time, you’re just frozen because you don’t know what’s going on or what to do. Eventually the shots stopped.”
Warren said the congregation is extremely grateful to Smith, who was stationed outside the synagogue in an unmarked vehicle. “This guy’s a hero. I can tell you the gunman was coming for us inside, and he was trying to take out our armed protection first,” he said. “We’re praying for [Smith’s] recovery.”
Once police arrived at Sons of Jacob, they instructed everyone to wait inside until the area was clear. Congregants were then taken to the Belleville police station, where they were offered donuts and coffee, which Warren said they politely declined on account of fasting for Yom Kippur.
Richard Marceau, General Counsel and Senior Vice President of The Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, echoed Warren’s concerns. “I wish I could say that I was surprised or shocked, but I was not,” says Marceau. “Unfortunately, in 2026 in Canada, we’ve come to expect this type of thing. It just tells us that the promise of Canada has been broken.”
The Belleville shooting came two days after the arrest of 19 year-old Alexander Parfitt after posting online threats to shoot up a synagogue in Southern Ontario.
Marceau said that Canadian politicians have not sufficiently addressed the threat of antisemitism. “There has been an all-level failure in the political sector and in law enforcement,” he said. “It is a failure to understand the threats that Jews are facing.”
According to Marceau, anti-Israel and anti-Zionist discourse have also contributed to rising antisemitism and endangered Canadian Jews. “Anti-Zionism is driving violence against Canadians, and the double standard against Israel is playing a role,” Marceau said. “Politicians need a clear plan, not just to talk about extremist ideologies, organizations and foreign state actors. There needs to be a meeting of all levels of government to ensure that the extremist networks are disrupted.”
Anti-Israel sentiment was a point of contention Sunday evening. Canadian Jewish politician and leader of the New Democratic Party (NDP) Avi Lewis posted on X shortly after 8 p.m. that on Yom Kippur he was “reflecting on the fact that we have not done our part to stop an ongoing genocide being committed in our name.”
About an hour earlier, Ward opened fire outside Sons of Jacob. It was not clear whether Lewis knew the shooting had occurred when he had posted. He did not respond to a request for comment.
Canadian Member of Parliament Anthony Housefather responded to Lewis’ post, stating that “holding Canadian Jews and Jews across the world collectively responsible for events over which they have no control is despicable.”
Lewis said in an post the following day that the attack “is yet another reminder of the work that remains to create a Canada that is truly safe for people of all faiths, including Jewish people – to worship, to come together, to live without fear.” In a press conference he rejected claims that he was collectively blaming Jews for Israel’s actions.
Despite the events Warren witnessed on Sunday evening, he remains assured in the resilience of his local Jewish community. Unable to access their synagogue, Warren says the Sons of Jacob congregation gathered at a Best Western hotel on Monday evening for services.
“We want to keep going, but we know it’s not going to be easy. We might get emotional when we first get back inside the synagogue, and we’ll just have to work through that,” he says. “This will not stop us.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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