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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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Piers Morgan is what’s wrong with media coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — and I can’t stop watching him
Piers Morgan’s online debate about Nicholas Kristof’s New York Times op-ed containing allegations of Israeli dog rape was loud, chaotic and unenlightening — and I couldn’t stop watching it.
That’s a problem. Morgan’s format is a trap. On his YouTube talk show, Piers Morgan Uncensored, he pits people holding intransigent, often extreme positions against each other, goads them to yell at one another across Zoom, and positions himself as the voice of reason in the middle. It’s hateporn — addictive, and not reflective of reality.
And yet Piers Morgan Uncensored and many similar YouTube- and social-media based news programs are where people increasingly get their information and engage with controversial issues like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
These programs rack up views by persuading viewers there is no middle ground, no moderate position, no alternative to conflict. And their strategy is working.
The Kristof episode, which racked up 340,000 views in a day, is titled, “Torture Does NOT Work!” — all Morgan show names have one word in all caps and end in an exclamation point.
It begins with people shouting. “You are not a journalist!” Ana Kasparian, a commentator on another YouTube show, shouts at podcaster and online anchor Emily Schrader — before Morgan comes on to introduce the segment.
He quickly recaps the lurid details from Kristof’s New York Times oped, “The Silence That meets the Rape of Palestinians,” and a newly issued nearly-300 page Israeli report on Hamas sexual violence.
“As far as I’m concerned, the only cause is basic human decency,” Morgan says in his cool British accent, “If your first instinct about either report is to look for ways to smear them, you might have run out of that yourself.”
Yet the six deeply partisan guests spend the next 45 minutes smearing the reports, and each other.
Morgan’s introductory call for human decency is not a plea, it’s a ploy. He plays the mature voice of reason standing between the extremist pro-Israelis and the pro-Palestinians — not to persuade them to come to a moderate position, but rather to exploit the most virulent voices in order to generate clicks, while still claiming the cover of journalism. This approach causes real harm by giving extremists a megaphone, and a degree of exposure that all but guarantees that people actually trying to build a better future go unheard.
A recipe for drama
Morgan repeats this formula over and again. In an episode entitled, “Netanyahu CONNED Trump!” Dave Smith, a sidekick to Joe Rogan, accuses Israel of dragging the United States into the Iran war. In “I’m SICK of it!” commentator Megyn Kelly launches into a similar attack on Israel.
Morgan has had long interviews with white supremacist and proud antisemite Nick Fuentes (“What a crock of S***!”). In “STAND for Dead Soldiers!” Morgan hosted four Israelis at the extreme ends of the political spectrum and watched them fight when one refused to stand as a siren sounded to honor Israel’s fallen soldiers.
Not extreme or dramatic enough? How about the time Morgan hosted Crackhead Barney, a Black pro-Palestinian street activist, to explain why she harasses celebrities to get them to say, “Free Palestine.”
“I’m truly shocked/disgusted that @piersmorgan would have this nutjob & clearly unwell person to go on his show and even remotely try to talk about Palestine or the war,” wrote the Gazan-born activist Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib.
Alkhatib is a moderate Palestinian who works for a peaceful solution to the conflict. He has, unsurprisingly, not been on Piers Morgan Uncensored.
Instead, Morgan’s choice of guests is calculated for maximum friction, a function of an attention economy that monetizes the time people like me spend watching the fights.
From ‘Animal House’ to Piers Morgan
Luring viewers this way isn’t exactly new. President Ronald Reagan called The McLaughlin Group, a current affairs program that ran on public television for 34 years beginning in 1982, “the political equivalent of Animal House”— more drunken frat house than graduate seminar. McLaughlin begat Crossfire, a CNN political debate program hosted by a younger Tucker Carlson that Jon Stewart once compared to pro-wrestling.
In 2025, Morgan, who came up in British tabloids before a long stint at CNN, moved away from traditional broadcast TV and went all in on social media and his YouTube channel.
His success on that platform is part of a larger shift in media from major institutions to independent personalities, and from actual news — the dutiful and expensive process of finding out and relaying what’s actually happening in the world — to opinion that spins itself as reporting, which is far cheaper and more entertaining.
That shift has come as audiences have moved from loyalty to long established institutions to following enterprising, independent personalities. The podcaster Joe Rogan has 20.9 million subscribers; Carlson has 5.6 million; Morgan’s show has 4.42 million subscribers and over 1.36 billion total views.
In other words, Morgan is not some guy some people watch now. He is what people will be watching in the future.
A bias toward extremes
That prospect should alarm us. Morgan’s shows rarely feature people working toward compromise or reconciliation. A Piers Morgan Uncensored discussion spotlighting the many civil society groups in Israel working toward coexistence? A show where he sits down with Arab and Jewish Israelis who share a vision for a common future? A segment that highlights the actual, albeit rare, instances of cooperation?
Pipe dreams. All that is also happening in Israel and the West Bank — but Piers Morgan Uncensored effectively censors it.
Compare that to Jon Stewart, who on The Daily Show last month conducted a long interview with the Palestinian and Israeli co-authors of The Future Is Peace, a book that calls for moving beyond violence and stalemate to a shared future. Same approach — a streaming interview on a hot-button topic, with an eye toward entertainment — but radically different editorial choices.
That episode garnered a mere 400,000 views. Morgan’s comparative millions of eyeballs may, in his mind, justify his guttersweeping approach to international conflict. And in his defense — and mine, for watching — it’s never boring. He can be a thoughtful and provocative interviewer, and his not-ready-for-primetime, self-created show allows him, when he so chooses, to platform voices that more mainstream venues overlook, like former Israeli Speaker of the Knesset and longtime peace activist Avrum Burg.
Alas, he stuck the erudite former statesman with a diehard evangelical and a firebreathing American Jewish conservative pundit. That episode is called, “A SHAME on Judaism!”
Whatever this is, it’s not journalism. But it is the future.
The post Piers Morgan is what’s wrong with media coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — and I can’t stop watching him appeared first on The Forward.
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Rashida Tlaib Introduces Resolution ‘Recognizing Ongoing Nakba’
US Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) addresses attendees as she takes part in a protest calling for a ceasefire in Gaza outside the US Capitol, in Washington, DC, US, Oct. 18, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Leah Millis
US Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) on Thursday reintroduced a congressional resolution recognizing the 78th anniversary of what she described as the “ongoing nakba,” using the Arabic term for “catastrophe” deployed by Palestinians and anti-Israel activists to refer to the establishment of the modern state of Israel in 1948.
The resolution, introduced on the anniversary of Israel’s independence, accuses the Jewish state of carrying out “ethnic cleansing,” “apartheid,” and “genocide” against Palestinians, language that many pro-Israel lawmakers in Congress and advocacy groups strongly reject as inflammatory and inaccurate. The measure also calls for renewed US support for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), an agency that has faced mounting scrutiny from Israel and several Western governments over allegations that employees participated in or supported Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel.
In a statement announcing the resolution, Tlaib argued that the so-called nakba “did not end” with the Arab-Israeli war in 1948 and continues today through Israeli military operations and settlement expansion.
“War criminal Netanyahu and his cabinet have repeatedly threatened to ethnically cleanse the entire Palestinian population in Gaza, annex the land, and permanently occupy it. Today, they are extending these same threats towards southern Lebanon,” she said, referring to Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and military operations against US-designated terrorist groups Hamas and Hezbollah. “As we mark the 78th anniversary of the Nakba, we honor all of those killed since the ethnic cleansing of Palestine began and all those who have been forced from their homes and violently displaced from their land.”
Activists often invoke the term “nakba” when discussing the displacement of some 750,000 Palestinian Arabs following Israel’s War of Independence, many of whom left the nascent state for varied reasons, including that they were encouraged by Arab leaders to flee their homes to make way for the invading Arab armies. At the same time, about 850,000 Jews were forced to flee or expelled from Middle Eastern and North African countries in the 20th century, primarily in the aftermath of Israel’s declaring independence.
Tlaib’s resolution is co-sponsored by several prominent progressive Democrats, including Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY), Ilhan Omar (MN), Ayanna Pressley (MA), and Summer Lee (PA).
The move is likely to draw fierce criticism from pro-Israel lawmakers and Jewish organizations, many of whom argue the resolution ignores the historical context surrounding Israel’s founding and the 1948 war. Israel accepted the United Nations partition plan in 1947 to create two states, one Jewish and one Arab, while neighboring Arab states rejected it and launched a military invasion after Israel declared independence.
The resolution also calls for a so-called Palestinian “right of return,” a demand insisting that potentially millions of descendants of Palestinian refugees should be able to return to the land of Israel, a step that, according to proponents, would result in the abolition of the world’s only Jewish state.
“This immense trauma, including the loss of their loved ones and connections to the communities they grew up in, needs to be repaired. True peace must be built on justice and the inalienable right of return for Palestinian refugees,” Tlaib said in her statement.
While refugees are generally defined as those who flee a country out of credible fear of persecution, UNRWA uniquely defines Palestinian refugees to include all descendants of those who left the land, regardless of where they were born.
Tlaib, the only Palestinian American member of the US Congress, has emerged as one of Israel’s loudest critics on Capitol Hill, repeatedly accusing the Jewish state of genocide and drawing rebuke from fellow lawmakers.
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Toronto Sees 50% Drop in 2025 Hate Crimes, Yet 82% of Religiously Motivated Attacks Target Jews
A member of law enforcement personnel works at the scene outside the US Consulate after shots were fired, in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, March 10, 2026. Picture taken with a mobile phone. Photo: REUTERS/Kyaw Soe Oo
Even as Toronto recorded an overall decline in reported hate crimes last year, newly released data shows the city’s Jewish community continued to face disproportionately high levels of targeted antisemitism and violence amid an increasingly concerning social climate.
On Thursday, Toronto Police released its annual hate crime statistical report, showing that Jews accounted for 82 percent of all religiously motivated hate crimes in 2025, compared to 14 percent targeting Muslims.
Even though the Jewish community makes up less than 3 percent of Toronto’s population, officials now warn that Jewish residents are 14 times more likely than other residents to be targeted in a hate incident.
With 81 anti-Jewish hate crimes recorded, Jews and Israelis were the targets of 35 percent of all reported hate incidents in the city.
Despite a 50 percent overall decline in reported hate crimes, from 443 in 2024 to 231 in 2025, Toronto has seen a 40 percent increase in such incidents so far this year compared with the same period last year.
Toronto Police Chief Myron Demkiw noted that, even with the overall decline, the Jewish community continued to be the primary target of hate-motivated offenses.
“We are steadfast in our commitment to confronting hate in all its forms and making it easier for people to come forward and report incidents of hate,” Demkiw said in a press release.
Because police-reported hate crime data only includes incidents that come to the attention of authorities and are later confirmed or suspected to be hate-driven, official figures likely underestimate the true scale of such incidents.
Over the past two years, Toronto authorities have expanded law enforcement capacity and resources to investigate hate crimes by establishing a Counter-Terrorism Security Unit and increasing specialized training for officers, while also strengthening Holocaust education initiatives and introducing digital literacy programs for youth aimed at countering online radicalization.
Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs Vice President Michelle Stock called the latest statistics “deeply alarming,” warning of a broader reality of hostility that Jewish families across the city are confronting on a daily basis.
“Toronto prides itself on being a city where people of all backgrounds can live openly, safely and without fear. Those values are undermined when any community no longer feels secure expressing its identity in public,” Stock said in a statement.
“From synagogues to schools to public displays of Jewish identity, blatant attacks against the Jewish community are becoming more frequent and more brazen,” she continued. “Jewish Canadians are being targeted simply for who they are. No one should have to think twice about wearing a kippah, attending synagogue, sending their children to Jewish schools or participating openly in Jewish life.”
The city’s figures reflect a broader nationwide rise in antisemitism and anti-Israel hostility, with the Jewish advocacy group B’nai Brith Canada reporting a record high in anti-Jewish hate crimes in 2025 for the second consecutive year, documenting 6,800 such cases across the country.
According to the latest report, antisemitic incidents nationwide increased by 9.3 percent last year, surpassing the previous record total of 6,219 set in 2024.
With an average of 18.6 incidents per day, this figure represents a 145.6 percent increase from 2022, before the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Early 2026 data already indicate the country is now on track to see its most violent year against the Jewish community in recent memory, with more violent antisemitic attacks recorded so far this year than during all of 2025, B’nai Brith Canada reported.
In total, 11 violent antisemitic incidents have already been recorded across the country since January, surpassing the 10 violent cases documented during all of last year
“These brazen attacks on Jewish Canadians are a sign of a crisis of antisemitism that has spiraled out of control,” Simon Wolle, chief executive officer of B’nai Brith Canada, said in a statement.
“Violence such as this, which has escalated from targeting synagogues to targeting Jewish people directly, does not occur in a vacuum. It is what happens when governments fail to act despite mounting evidence that antisemitism is becoming more normalized and dangerous,” Wolle continued.
Last week, a group of Jewish worshippers standing outside the Congregation Chasidei Bobov synagogue in Montreal was targeted in a drive-by shooting, leaving one person with minor injuries.
A week earlier, three visibly Jewish residents were targeted in a separate antisemitic attack when suspects opened fire with a gel-pellet gun, causing minor injuries.