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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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One of America’s first Jewish farms was nearly lost to history. Now these Brooklyn parents are risking everything to keep their family’s legacy alive.
The 350-square-foot Brooklyn apartment where Malya and William Levin live with their four children is barely big enough for their family, much less their ambitions. From this compressed space, they’re reaching for something vast — the revival of one of America’s first Jewish farms, built by William’s ancestors in rural South Jersey.
Their quixotic quest is larger than acreage; it’s continuity, in a time and place where nothing stays rooted for long. It’s a tight staging ground for an unusually wide dream.
“We aren’t just trying to save land,” Malya said, their toddler Julius perched on her lap. “We are trying to save the story.”
The story she’s referring to reaches back to 1882, when 43 Jewish families fled pogroms in Russia and the Pale of Settlement. They carried what they could — and what they couldn’t bear to leave behind.
Backed by Baron de Hirsch and other Jewish benefactors who believed farming could offer both refuge and respectability, they were sent not to the teeming tenements of Manhattan but to a thousand acres of pine forest and sandy soil.
It was a bold wager: Eastern European Jews, often caricatured in their home countries as “unproductive,” could instead be seen growing their own food as capable, contributing citizens. Those same Jewish immigrants — tailors, peddlers, clerks — could become farmers, rooted and self-reliant, all trying to prove that Jews could stand on American land and make it yield.
“It’s almost a completely different story than we’re used to hearing,” said Adrienne Krone, a religious studies professor at Allegheny College and the author of Free-Range Religion. “We’re used to the Lower East Side and factories and crowded apartments, and what was happening in these farming communities was almost the exact opposite.”
Around the same time, dozens of such Jewish agricultural colonies were established across the United States, including in Louisiana, Utah, and both Dakotas. Yiddish-speaking socialists established a similar settlement, Happyville, in South Carolina.
In New Jersey, they called their 1,000-acre settlement the Alliance Colony.
What began as tents and barracks grew into a rural Jewish community of hundreds of families: homes, vineyards, chicken farms, a school, three synagogues, and a mikvah. The colonists built a tobacco factory that failed, and a button factory that didn’t. Reinvention wasn’t strategy so much as muscle memory.
Among the colony’s early leaders was William’s great-great-grandfather, Moses Bayuk. His generation carved Alliance out of wild ground: clearing land, organizing the community, building the institutions that held it together.
After World War II, a second wave of immigrants arrived in the region — Holocaust survivors who settled in nearby Vineland and Pittsgrove and built successful chicken farms. For decades they sustained a thriving Jewish agricultural center across South Jersey.
But by the 1970s, most families had moved into city jobs. The Jewish presence waned. The land quieted.
What led them back to the farm
For William and Malya, the draw toward Alliance was never just historical. It was personal.
Malya, 41, grew up in New Jersey steeped in Jewish text and memory. She is the daughter of Rabbi Arthur Kurzweil, the noted author whose career has long focused on Jewish continuity. Her childhood was Orthodox, threaded with rituals that made the past feel close enough to touch.
William, 54, arrived at Jewish life differently. He didn’t grow up religious. His first real brush with Judaism came through, of all things, animation: In the early 2000s, before the days of YouTube and social media, he was making viral Jewish videos that somehow found their way across the internet. Several, including a cartoon in which a robot meets 50 Cent and raps about the Ten Plagues, reached millions.
“I didn’t even know what the word frum meant until Frumster hired me,” he said of the Orthodox dating site. “They paid me in a Frumster.com membership.”
It worked.
He met Malya at a Jewish singles event in 2009. They married the next summer, on Tu B’Av, known as the Jewish festival of love.
“We both had a penchant for offbeat stuff,” Malya said. “Neither of us wanted to be accountants and move to the suburbs on Long Island.”
That sensibility carried them to Sukkahfest 2014 at the Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center in Connecticut, where they witnessed a modern Jewish farming movement that wove land, ritual, ecology and community into a single experience.
“It was beautiful and intoxicating,” William said.
“All these young Jews were so into farming,” Malya added. “And we were like: Wait, we have the first Jewish farm.”
Their cramped apartment in Brooklyn feels like the furthest thing from this expansive ideal. A desk presses into a couch, the couch brushes against the mattress where William and Malya sleep. In the lone bedroom, their four children climb into a handmade Jenga-tower of bunk beds.
William opens a cigar box filled with brittle letters from Alliance’s earliest families — the kind of fragile paper that survives only because someone keeps choosing to protect it. For the couple, preserving the land has always meant preserving the story stitched through it.
The idea gained force. The place that kept resurfacing was the 85 acres William’s extended family still owned in the old Alliance Colony, land that had never fully slipped from their hands.
So the couple, an animator and an elder justice attorney, did something audacious: They spent their life savings to buy it back.
When the vision met reality
Their vision was expansive. They imagined retreats, Shabbatons, Jewish holidays at the farm, a hybrid life where city and country sat side by side. But figuring out what the land could actually do required trying almost everything.
They planted organic vegetables and heirloom crops. Built raised beds. Experimented with fruit trees. Started a micro-vineyard. (“Who doesn’t want wine tasting on a kosher vineyard in a historic Jewish farm?” Malya asked.) They considered raising geese, then heritage chicken breeds with old-sounding names. Partnered with local growers. Applied for grants. Taught programs on Jewish agricultural history.
Some ideas lived a season. Some never made it out of the notebook. They tried all these things because not trying felt like betrayal.
They fielded proposals — some compelling, some outlandish. A solar company wanted to cover their fields with panels. A hemp grower pitched them on the green rush. One man wanted to install cryptocurrency servers in the barn, a futuristic-sounding plan that fizzled when William learned the man was tied to a dubious investment scheme.
The Levins were not just fighting weeds and property taxes. They were fighting the economics that hollowed out rural America; the cultural drift that carried Jews away from small towns; the logistical strain of raising four children while holding two demanding jobs.
“We weren’t trying to be homesteaders,” Malya said. “We were trying to find something sustainable that didn’t require uprooting our whole life in Brooklyn.”
Their approach — try, fail, adjust, try again — echoed the original colonists. “Honestly, it’s what we’re doing,” Malya said. “Throwing these things against the wall and seeing what sticks, just like they did.” Reinvention has always been part of Jewish life here, as it is for many small communities trying to stay alive.
Some things they tried did stick.
Descendants began returning for regular Alliance reunions, gatherings that grew each year. Young Jews from the city arrived curious about Jewish farming. And as activity grew, the synagogue — which has hosted High Holiday services continuously since 1889 — flickered back to life, hosting monthly Shabbat services.
A visit to the farm
Driving to the site of the Alliance Colony 60 miles west of Atlantic City, the landscape dissolves into fields of corn, hay and soybeans. The road straightens, the sky widens, and then the white wooden synagogue appears. Tall, narrow, arched windows, still standing after 136 years.
Howard Jaffe is waiting on the steps.
He is 70, with a long white beard, a ponytail, and a gold hoop earring. He looks like a Jewish Santa Claus who once sold jewelry at Grateful Dead concerts — which, as it happens, he did.
His grandfather prayed in this sanctuary. Howard has made it his mission to maintain it. “This place raised me,” he says, and swings the door open. “I guess now I raise it.”
The building is neither grand nor fragile. It simply persists. Inside, the sanctuary offers the cool hush of old buildings: sunlight slanting across pews, floorboards worn to a soft gloss by generations of feet from farmers, factory workers, and families.
He walks upstairs to the women’s gallery, a reminder of the building’s Orthodox roots. From here, the sanctuary stretches below like a diorama. Then Howard opens a small doorway into the attic, a low, sloping space where traveling rabbis once slept, the rafters forming a rib cage of wood.
The Alliance Cemetery, 20 acres across the road, tells the story more plainly than any archive. The early graves belong to the colonists who cleared the land; the later ones to the survivors who arrived after the war and tried to build something new.
Howard stops to brush leaves from one stone. Names repeat across the rows: Gershal, Shiff, Brotman — the same names that mark the roads nearby. Some headstones tilt like old teeth; others sink into the earth as if tired of holding their stories upright. A few mark children. Many bear Hebrew inscriptions weathered thin by rain and time.
Deeper in, on a small rise, stands the cemetery’s most arresting structure: a large Holocaust memorial carved with the names of camps: Auschwitz. Buchenwald. Dachau. Treblinka.
It was built in the 1990s, by Irving and Esther Raab, who met in Auschwitz and immigrated to the area after the war. It’s where they built a successful kosher poultry business, at one point employing 12 butchers. Howard worked for them for a stretch, managing the killing room.
Its heavy stone rises among wooden farmhouses built by immigrants who had fled an earlier era of violence. It’s a reminder that the colony, like so much of American Jewish life, was shaped both by those who fled Europe in the 1880s and those who survived it in the 1940s.
Today, thanks to the Levins’ efforts and a new documentary about Alliance, Howard finds himself giving more tours than he has in years — to school groups, descendants, even curious Mennonites.
The work of reanimation
To the left of the cemetery stands a bright mural, painted last summer, which retells the colony’s story in bold colors. A shtetl burning. A steamship crowded with families. A wide field waiting for them. The present looking back at the past, asking what it still requires.
The last panel centers on William’s own lineage. In vivid purples stands Moses Bayuk holding a cluster of grapes from the Alliance vineyards — grapes that Welch’s once bought from this very farm.
The mural is not decoration. It is instruction: a reminder of how the story began, painted so it cannot be forgotten by whoever comes next.
Past the mural stands William’s grandparents’ home, which had long sat empty. But the bones were good: the clean lines of midcentury design, a peaceful view of fields, the kind of quiet that city families crave.
So the Levins renovated it.
They’ve now opened it as a kosher Airbnb, a place where Jewish families could spend Shabbat, celebrate holidays, or simply breathe outside the city without worrying about kitchen logistics. It wasn’t the centerpiece of their vision, but it became a steady foothold — a way to bring people onto the land, reconnect them with Alliance, and slowly rebuild around the place.
When the Levins go down to Alliance, they line up events — a tour, a talk, a small gathering — that fold into their monthly visits. The point isn’t profit. It’s presence.
For Krone, the professor who studies Jewish agricultural communities, what the Levins are doing at Alliance is not a resurrection. It’s a reanimation.
“Alliance is unique in that they have this historic connection,” she said. “They’re part of a contemporary movement of Jews reconnecting to agriculture, but they’re doing it in a place where there has been that connection before, and they’re very intentional about that.”
In her view, the Levins have already begun shifting the trajectory.
“I think they’ve reinvigorated it,” she said. “They’re growing food through collaborations, hosting events, drawing descendants back at regular reunions, keeping the synagogue active. The community that’s forming around them — that’s already the project.”
In a world where Jewish stories often end with what was lost, Alliance is a rare one still asking what might yet be found.
When William and Malya talk about Alliance now, they sound like hopeful realists with a mortgage. The early, expansive dream has settled into something steadier — less about rebuilding a vanished colony and more about tending what remains so it can keep growing.
“We really like our life in Brooklyn, but we also really like having this other place that is meaningful,” Malya said. “It’s rare for Jewish kids in America to have a place where their family has six generations of history.”
Alliance has always been an exercise in reinvention: first by the colonists, then by the survivors, and now by a family trying to reconcile two very different forms of Jewish life. The Levins move between the noise of one life and the quiet persistence of another.
They are not trying to rebuild the past. They’re trying to keep it from disappearing. And in doing so, they’ve carved out a place where Jewish life, in all its improvisation and resilience, can still take root.
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Liberal Zionist groups criticize Trump administration’s travel ban on those with Palestinian Authority passports
(JTA) — The Trump administration has extended its travel ban to Palestinian Authority passport holders amid a crackdown on legal immigration and travel.
The White House said the ben was needed because “several U.S.-designated terrorist groups operate actively in the West Bank or Gaza Strip and have murdered American citizens.”
“Also, the recent war in these areas likely resulted in compromised vetting and screening abilities,” the announcement continued. “In light of these factors, and considering the weak or nonexistent control exercised over these areas by the PA, individuals attempting to travel on PA-issued or endorsed travel documents cannot currently be properly vetted and approved for entry into the United States.”
The ban formalizes a practice revealed this fall when the United States declined to issue visas to Palestinian officials, including Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, to attend the United Nations General Assembly. It includes waivers for certain cases, including athletes traveling to compete in the Olympics or World Cup.
The expansion of the travel ban was condemned by several liberal-leaning Jewish groups, including J Street, a liberal Zionist advocacy and lobby group.
“At a time when the Trump administration claims that it is working to advance the second phase of the Gaza ceasefire deal, its decision to bar Palestinian travel to the US is both deeply damaging and counterproductive,” said Adina Vogel-Ayalon, J Street’s vice president and chief of staff, in a statement. “Rather than advancing stability, this policy further delegitimizes and weakens the Palestinian Authority at the very moment when US policy should be focused on strengthening its capacity to sideline Hamas, improve governance, and help stabilize and secure Gaza and the West Bank.”
Hadar Susskind, the president and CEO of New Jewish Narrative, a progressive Zionist Jewish organization, also criticized the ban.
“We urge the administration to reverse these restrictions and to pursue security policies that are targeted, evidence-based, and consistent with human rights,” said Susskind in a statement. “True security is built through inclusion, engagement, and justice—not through walls or racist bans.”
The White House announced the ban on travelers with P.A. passports on Tuesday along with similar prohibitions on nationals from Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, South Sudan and Syria.
The countries join 12 others whose passport-holders were barred from entering the United States starting in June, which included Afghanistan, Myanmar, Chad, the Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen.
“AMERICA FIRST SECURITY 🇺🇸,” wrote the White House in a post on X. “President Donald J. Trump just signed a new Proclamation, STRENGTHENING our borders & national security with data-driven restrictions on high-risk countries with severe deficiencies in screening & vetting.”
The new additions come as the White House continues to impose severe restrictions on immigration following the shooting of two National Guard members by a suspect who is an Afghan national last month.
Last week, the Trump administration also rolled out new draft regulations that would require travelers from Israel and dozens of other countries to provide five years of social media history for entry to the United States.
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Richmond mayor facing resignation calls over posts calling Sydney massacre ‘false flag’
Bay Area Jewish leaders are calling for the resignation of Richmond Mayor Eduardo Martinez after he re-shared multiple LinkedIn posts that called Sunday’s massacre of Jewish people in Sydney an Israeli “false flag attack.”
Martinez, who was elected by the city just north of Berkeley in 2023, also shared posts claiming that “the root cause of antisemitism is the behavior of Israel and Israelis.”
Martinez has since removed the posts from his account and apologized for sharing them “without thinking” — but he did not disavow the false flag conspiracy theory about the attack. He clarified only that “we know that antisemitism was here before the creation of the state of Israel.”
“As I’ve said many times before, we should not conflate Zionism with Judaism,” Martinez wrote on LinkedIn. “They are two separate beliefs.”
He later added, “I want to assure everyone that these postings are my opinions (or my mistakes) and mine only. They are not statements from my office or the city of Richmond. If I make a mistake, that mistake is mine only. Once again, I apologize for posting in haste without full understanding of the posting.”
He did not discuss the attack, which killed 15 people and injured dozens.
The Jewish Community Relations Council of the Bay Area was outraged by Martinez’s online activity and left cold by his apology. It called for his resignation Thursday in a statement posted to JCRC social media.
“These actions reflect a consistent and deeply troubling disregard for the safety and dignity of Jewish people,” the organization wrote on Instagram. “They erode public trust and send a chilling message to Jewish residents that they are neither protected nor respected by their own mayor.”
The local chapter of the Anti-Defamation League, ADL Central Pacific, also condemned the post.
“There’s no excuse for an elected leader to be amplifying warped antisemitic conspiracy theories that seek to blame the victim,” ADL regional director Marc Levine wrote in a statement to J. The Jewish News of Northern California. “The Australian community has already faced enough tragedy over the last few days. We hope Mayor Martinez will reconsider his hurtful words, which have absolutely no place in public discourse.”
The Forward has reached out to Martinez for comment.
Martinez’s LinkedIn posts were the latest in what local leaders say is a slew of antisemitic incidents during the progressive’s tenure. In 2023, just weeks after the Oct. 7 attacks, Martinez
Martinez, a former schoolteacher, posts regularly about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on LinkedIn, sometimes multiple times per day.
In August, speaking at the People’s Conference for Palestine in Detroit, Martinez likened the Oct. 7 attack to someone snapping after being bullied on the playground, J. reported, adding that whether he supported Hamas was “complicated.”
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