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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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The post Letty Cottin Pogrebin wants Jews to own up to the corrosive power of shame appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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These Jewish college students have some ‘nonnegotiables’ for El-Sayed
At the University of Michigan, first-year student Robert Kashan, 18, and sophomore Jacob Reich, 19, sat behind a large blue sign. “Some things are nonnegotiable,” it declared in all caps.
The sign laid out their requirements for any candidate seeking their support: a commitment to Jewish safety, “including for Zionist Jews,” and supporting Jewish statehood in Israel, among other positions.
“Zionism is a legitimate part of the Democratic coalition, and a lot of us are feeling less represented by the Democratic Party,” Kashan told the Forward.
The students are part of a broader “Nonnegotiable” movement in Michigan, a coalition of Jewish Democrats who are spelling out their dealbreakers for candidates ahead of the Senate election between Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed and Republican nominee Mike Rogers.
The movement has attracted national attention, with hundreds of rabbis across 34 states signing on to the “Nonnegotiable” demands. Meanwhile, about 20 students at the University of Michigan have publicly signed, while hundreds more offered support anonymously, according to Reich.
The “Nonnegotiable” supporters aren’t saying whom they’ll vote for if their concerns aren’t addressed — or whether they’ll vote at all. But they are pushing back against the assumption that Jewish voters will, as the saying goes, “vote blue no matter who,” urging El-Sayed to engage with their demands if he hopes to earn their support.
That’s in contrast with two other Jewish political camps, including a group called Michigan Jews for Democracy that endorsed El-Sayed. Their petition, which has garnered almost 1,000 signatures, notes that some signatories hold reservations about El-Sayed but are voting for him nonetheless as a check on President Trump.
“We understand that a vote is not a valentine; it’s a strategic chess move,” the petition reads.
A competing petition, dubbed “Michigan Jews Against Extremism,” has drawn hundreds of signatures from Michigan Jews who plan to vote for Rogers. That petition similarly emphasizes that Rogers voters may still have reservations about the candidate: “Our vote for Mike Rogers does not require that we agree with him on every issue or that we support President Trump,” it reads.
“Nonnegotiable,” meanwhile, rejects the idea that Jewish voters would have to choose between Zionist and Democratic values. Some have criticized the nonnegotiable movement for ignoring the reality of the electoral choice at hand. Others have called it “a veiled attempt to excuse the actions of Jewish Democrats who want to feel validated about voting for Mike Rogers.”
But Kashan and Reich, who met at Hillel and plan to major in political science, said the “Nonnegotiable” movement was the only way they could see themselves engaging in the election, as they felt increasingly pulled between their identities as Democrats and as Jews.
Some Michigan Jews have expressed alarm at El-Sayed’s questioning of whether Israel should exist as a Jewish state and his decision to campaign alongside controversial Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, who has been accused of antisemitic rhetoric. Rogers, who Trump has endorsed, earlier this week called El-Sayed “anti-Jew.”
In a letter to Michigan Jews, El-Sayed has vowed to “stand up against antisemitism and take the threat of violence against our Jewish community incredibly seriously.” He has also hired a Jewish liaison in the final weeks leading up to the election.
This will be the first election when Kashan, who just turned 18, is eligible to vote, and Reich’s first national election after voting in a local primary in his hometown of Palo Alto, California. For both, voting Democratic in their first major election had once seemed like a given.
“I’m a Jewish Democrat, and I want Democrats to take the Senate,” Reich said. “I want to vote for a Democrat in my own state.”
They’re still holding out hope that will happen — and that, with less than two weeks until the Nov. 3 election, El-Sayed will sign on to their petition.
And if he doesn’t? Neither student is ready to say.
The post These Jewish college students have some ‘nonnegotiables’ for El-Sayed appeared first on The Forward.
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Does anyone in Jerusalem care what happens to us?
An Israeli think tank has put on paper what most American Jews know in their kishkas: Israel’s actions over there affect our safety here.
So here’s my question: Does anybody over there care?
The report, published by The Institute for National Security Studies (INSS), drew on the input of 20 Jewish leaders from five countries. It concluded that Israel’s actions since the Hamas attack on Oct. 7, 2023 have normalized hostility toward Israel, divided Jewish communities, sapped the political influence of pro-Israel organizations and fueled antisemitism.
Those actions include damaging statements by government officials, limits on humanitarian aid to Gaza at the height of the war, widespread damage to civilian infrastructure in Gaza and unchecked settler violence in the West Bank. The authors also cited as inflammatory “the proliferation of images of civilian death and suffering in Gaza” — though the actual civilian death and suffering has also alienated and enraged many outside Israel, including Jews.
“The conflict is not only over there in the Middle East, it is local all over the Jewish world now, and Diaspora Jewry has skin in the game,” said Theodore Sasson, one of the report’s authors, in an interview with JTA’s Andrew Silow-Carroll, who first wrote about the study.
To be clear, the report doesn’t excuse, exonerate or rationalize people who commit antisemitic acts. “Jews and Israelis are not to blame for antisemitism,” the report states.
“What we’re saying is that Israel is not the cause” of antisemitism, Sasson said, “but enlightened Israeli policy can seek to maintain robust Diaspora support for the state of Israel and can deny the antisemites the material that fuels their mostly spurious claims.”
This is not a novel connection. Three previous academic studies, in Belgium, Australia and the U.S. found statistically significant links between Israeli military operations that result in high Palestinian casualties and spikes in reported antisemitic incidents abroad. Not surprisingly, a Mellman group poll found that 56% of U.S. Jewish voters believe Israel’s policies have fueled antisemitism.
None of this means Israel shouldn’t act in its own interest and put the security needs of its own population first. Antisemites would continue to exist even if Israelis did nothing but play backgammon and sip arak. The report is not about eradicating antisemitism, but about Israeli actions that provoke and endanger Jews abroad — and what Israel can do about those.
I get the principled resistance to a report that seems to shift some of the burden of antisemitism onto the Jews. David Bernstein of the North American Values Institute told Silow-Carroll that American Jews aren’t agents of Israel, and that nobody would say an African country’s actions endanger African Americans. That’s not entirely true — the 9/11 attacks increased hate crimes against American Muslims and bigots targeted random Asian Americans during the COVID-19 pandemic. Pretending actions have no consequence even if the reaction is illegitimate is principled, but naive. If Israel can lower the temperature, it should.
But here’s the sad fact about the current Israeli government: it doesn’t even lower the temperature for its own citizens.
Exhibit A is Oct. 7. This is the government on whose watch that horror happened, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has never engaged in a full, independent accounting of what went wrong. How do you prevent future Oct. 7s when you don’t know the weaknesses that enabled it in the first place?
Exhibit B is the flydubai near-disaster, which we in the Diaspora have already mythologized as yet another example of Israeli courage and pluck. It was that, but also a result of a complete breakdown of government responsibility. Israel’s rules should have kept the Omani pilot out of that cockpit, but, as Channel 12 reported, Minister of Transportation Minister Miri Regev took no action despite multiple warnings. Regev, a close ally of Netanyahu, remains in her job.
Finally, Exhibit C: Police under National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir have failed to curb violent crime in Israel’s Arab communities which recorded 252 murders in 2025 — and 2026 is on track to surpass that record.
Israel’s supporters often comfort themselves with the mantra that Israelis love life while their enemies love death. But this government has been pretty cavalier about life.
If that’s how Israel’s leaders treat their own citizens, is it so surprising they fail to be overly concerned about Jews abroad? Last year saw the highest death toll from antisemitic attacks in 30 years, while the agency Israel created specifically to deal with such calamities has been AWOL. The Ministry for Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism, a Tel Aviv University report found, has “not contributed in any meaningful way to the cause, and in some cases has been an embarrassment.”
All this is happening as the screws are tightening on Jewish communities in Australia, France, Italy, Canada and elsewhere. But Israel, established in part to keep Jews safe, has, under this government, too often increased or ignored the dangers. Zionism is supposed to be the Diaspora’s Iron Dome, but this government, by inexorably, deliberately foreclosing on the possibility of a democratic Jewish state, is functionally anti-Zionist.
The report listed several measures Israel could take to reduce the threat to Diaspora communities, among them controlling the incendiary rhetoric of government ministers and opening a diplomatic path with the Palestinians that stops the slide toward a single, non-democratic state.
One of the report’s recommendations is that Israel set up procedures to assess how its policies affect Jews abroad. In other words, the think tank is asking the government to start caring, formally.
It’s hard to imagine any of that happening unless, on Oct. 27, Israelis vote the current government out.
“Netanyahu cannot be part of the healing process. It is Netanyahu from whom we must be healed,” David Horovitz, the far-from-radical founding editor of The Times of Israel, wrote this week in an editorial titled, “For Israel’s Sake, Netanyahu Has to Go.”
As it turns out, it’s for all our sakes.
The post Does anyone in Jerusalem care what happens to us? appeared first on The Forward.
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How schools are teaching about Israel now, and winning back Jewish donors
Silicon Valley philanthropists Eli and Jeanette Reinhard are known for their generosity to Jewish causes, from the local Jewish federation to the counterterrorism project at the Washington Institute for Near East Studies. They are especially generous on the campus of their alma mater, Stanford University, where Eli Reinhard helped found the Jewish Studies department and the Hebraic book section at the university library.
But that was before the Hamas attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and the anti-Israel protests that followed on U.S. college campuses, including Stanford. When the couple was asked to help fund the university’s new Israel Program, they thought long and hard.
“We have had to answer the question internally within our family: Why are you doing this? Why here?” Jeanette Reinhard told the Forward.
“We like investing in meaningful change. We felt we could have it here.”
But they did have one condition: they wanted to shake hands with University President Jonathan Levin.
“We wanted to look in his eyes and say, ‘Are you behind this?’” Reinhard said.
At a time when private donors seem to have grown wary of endowing university professorships or programs in Jewish or Israel Studies, for fear their name will one day be attached to a problematic curriculum, universities are rethinking how to frame and where to house their courses of study about Israel.
“The splits are real and they go across the country,” said Indiana University Professor Alvin Rosenfeld. “A lot of donors giving good money to some of these universities are really very angry about the way the money is being spent and they are reassessing.”
Rosenfeld founded Indiana’s Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism, the oldest such institute in the country and one of several models that schools have recently adopted either to assuage donors’ concerns, address an urgent gap after Oct. 7 or both. Schools including New York University, University of Michigan and Brandeis followed Indiana’s approach.
Other campuses have tried different models. This fall, the Harvard Kennedy School folded Israel into its Middle East Initiative, and Stanford University inaugurated the Jan Koum Israel Studies Program within its Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. The Stanford program was supported by an endowment from the family foundation of the founder of What’s App plus additional support from the Reinhards.
“I think our track record has convinced a number of donors and potential donors of our intellectual independence and seriousness of purpose,” said Larry Diamond, Stanford’s Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, where the Israel program is housed. “The proof has been in what we have done and the credibility that we have built.”
Israel as one among many
Harvard has received only “modest” financial support for its Israel program, but its necessity prompted Middle East Initiative Director Tarek Masoud to launch it anyway.
Israel joins other country-specific programs at the Kennedy School dedicated to studies of Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and Syria and fulfills Masoud’s longtime goal of expanding the initiative beyond Arab countries. Two major gifts financed the Kuwait Foundation for the Advancement of Science and the Emirates Leadership Initiative. The Syrian Transition Lab and Israel Program do not have the same kind of backing.c
But the Israel program also meets a demand, Masoud said. When he taught a course last spring titled “Arguing the Israel Palestinian Conflict,” he said students camped out in the hall to plead their case for admission.
The program grew out of Masoud’s Middle East Dialogues series, which over the years has welcomed a wide range of speakers, from President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who helped broker the Abraham Accords, to Arab American University associate professor Dalal Saeb Iriqat, whose social media posts calling the Oct. 7 Hamas attack a “normal struggle 4 #Freedom” sparked outrage.
“This is not going to be a place where Israel is protected,” Masoud said. “It’s a place where Israel and Israelis will be engaged, fully and openly, without bias or animus.”
In other words, the mission is scholarship and critical thinking, not advocacy. The only political stance the Harvard program takes is that it does not exclude or boycott any country, including Israel.
The addition of Israel to the initiative comes amid Harvard’s ongoing fight with the Trump administration over research grants, international student enrollment and a newly launched Department of Labor investigation into foreign visas. Other schools such as Columbia University have struck agreements with the Trump administration to review regional area programs, starting with the Middle East. Though a year later, there had been no reforms.
But the Harvard program is not a response to the conversations on campus or an effort to appease the administration, said Israel Program Director Barak Sella. It is a response to the critical role of Israel in the region, he said. A senior research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Sella focuses on U.S.-Israel relations and the evolving relationship between American Jews and Zionism.
“With all due respect to the complicated conversations we’re having on campus, which deserve the highest level of respect, the real issues are the people in that world, these economies, these societies,” Sella said. “That is our focus. How do I support making the Middle East a more prosperous and safer place to all the people who inhabit it?”
As a student at the Kennedy School during Oct. 7, Sella witnessed firsthand the disinformation and discourse on campus. He admired Masoud’s courage to platform different points of view, “but opinions that have serious intellectual capacity behind them, not just driven by who is the loudest on social media.”
“The role of Middle East studies at universities it’s not to import the conflicts of the Middle East into American society,” Sella said. “Our role is to use the resources we have, the privileges, opportunities and platform to export solutions to the Middle East.”
To do that effectively, Israel can’t be isolated from the other countries. It must be treated as part of the region, he said.
“The issue is that when you look at the Middle Eastern studies centers, unfortunately in many cases, you see Israel excluded and not treated in the lens we want to treat it — another country in the Middle East that has its advantages, its setbacks, its good actors, its bad actors,” Sella said.
Israel as democracy
Stanford intentionally took a different approach when launching its Israel program. At the time its pilot was launched, there was no Middle East Studies department in which to integrate. But even if there had been, Diamond said, that was not an option.
“The record of Israel studies programs being located in that type of center at other campuses has raised a number of issues and problems,” Diamond told the Forward, though he didn’t specify where it has been an issue or how.
Though schools like University of Maryland and Boston University offer Israel Studies minors as part of their Jewish Studies departments, that didn’t seem to be a viable home at Stanford, as that department more often partners with religious studies, history and comparative literature. That gap sparked the Reinhards’ interest.
“After Oct. 7, Stanford was certainly not immune to some of the stuff we saw on various college campuses,” Jeanette Reinhard said. “And the question was raised in our heads, ‘Well, where is Jewish studies in all of this? Why is Jewish studies not there to be actively countering the misinformation?’ And that’s when we realized that’s not really what Jewish Studies is designed to do.”
Instead, Diamond proposed studying Israel among other democracies, which is why Stanford launched the pilot within its Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) in Fall 2022. During this period, the program hosted webinars and events, including a revival of the annual Daniel Pearl Memorial lecture, which it co-sponsored with the campus Hillel. The program also organized a conference comparing Israel and California’s responses to climate challenges.
“We went from strength to strength and more than proved proof of concept,” Diamond said. “As a result, we raised considerable money in the annual gifts, and we eventually attracted the confidence of two endowment donors,” referring to the Reinhards and the Koum Family Foundation.
Amichai Magen, director of the Jam Koum Israel Studies Program, said the program has broad appeal across campus. Classes include students from East Asia, Southeast Asia and the Middle East, and more than three-quarters of those enrolled have no family or personal history in Israel. At least one of his courses, titled “Israel: Society, Politics, and Policy,” is cross-listed with political science, international relations and Jewish Studies.
“Israel has so much to offer in terms of its history, culture, society, legal field, politics, external relations, innovation, and security (to name just a few) that, in our courses and other programming, we mainly focus on the lived experience of Israelis,” Magen said.
While there are no courses reserved to study anti-Zionism and antisemitism, those topics naturally come up in class conversations as students discuss the Jewish historical experience.
“Inevitably, when you teach and program about Israel, you also wind up having to address the attempts to stigmatize and isolate the state of Israel, and the complex relations between antisemitism and anti-Zionism,” said Diamond, who also cofounded the Stanford Community Forum on Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias.
Anti-Zionism question
Addressing Israel through the lens of those who hate it is yet another approach universities have adopted. Indiana’s Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism has made anti-Zionism a central focus of research at the institute, which just secured a $6 million grant from the National Endowment of the Humanities.
Over the next three years, five working groups of a dozen scholars each will study various aspects of what drives contemporary antisemitism – including religion, digital communication, political culture and rhetoric – how it manifests and how to curb it. Anti-Zionism will be a theme that runs through all five. The institute will work with the Wilson Center, a public policy think tank in Washington D.C., which will formulate public policies to address it.
“There’s no way to address today’s hostility toward today’s Jews without understanding hostility toward the Jewish state,” Rosenfeld told the Forward.
While there is no Israel Studies program per se at Indiana, the Jewish Studies department does house the Olamot Center, which hosts Israeli scholars and teaches some classes about Israel.
Günther Jikeli, the associate director of the institute, who is known as one of Israel’s fiercest defenders on campus, has secured funding for a partnership with the business school focused on entrepreneurship and innovation in the Start-Up Nation. Students will explore how such a resource-scarce nation blossomed into a global hub for technological innovation.
Jikeli and Rosenfeld hope the partnership sparks curiosity among students to learn more. Jikeli recently stepped down from a controversial stint as interim director of Indiana’s Jewish Studies program. Shortly after his appointment, he stripped travel funding from an anti-Zionist graduate student in the program and declined to say whether he would allow the department to support any research that was critical of Zionism. Interim co-directors have taken his place after an unsuccessful yearlong search for a permanent replacement.
“Numbers of Jewish Studies programs have appointed faculty members who don’t line up with the donors when it comes to Jewish values, and especially when it comes to Zionism and anti-Zionism,” Rosenfeld said. “Is there unanimity of opinion among faculty? No. Is it hampering the work we need to do? No.”
Jeanette and Eli Reinhard understand the anger and wariness of their peers, but to them, it doesn’t make sense to withhold money from education that could help solve the problem.
“There are no guarantees in life,” Jeanette Reinhard said. “Fifty years from now, who knows? You have to say what’s here right now that we have reasonable hope in.”
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