Connect with us

Uncategorized

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.

—
The post Letty Cottin Pogrebin wants Jews to own up to the corrosive power of shame appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

Post Views: 1,314
Related Topics:
Continue Reading

Uncategorized

Israeli Christian Leader: Tucker Carlson ‘Doesn’t Want the Truth,’ Endangers Christians Elsewhere by Lying About Israel

Tucker Carlson speaks on first day of AmericaFest 2025 at the Phoenix Convention Center in Phoenix, Arizona, Dec. 18, 2025. Photo: Charles-McClintock Wilson/ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect

Firebrand podcaster Tucker Carlson drew a barrage of heat from Israelis after claiming he was “detained and interrogated” during a brief stop at Ben Gurion Airport on Wednesday, with former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett calling him “a chickens**t” and “a phony” and an Israeli Christian leader describing him as “an enemy of Israel” for lying about the country’s treatment of Christians.

Shadi Khalloul, founder of the Israeli Christian Aramaic Association and a former Knesset candidate, accused the former Fox News host-turned-far-right conspiracy theorist of “destroying Christian-Jewish relations” all over the world and “endangering the persecuted Christian community in the Middle East” by portraying Israel as hostile to Christianity.

“The truth is exactly the opposite,” he said, describing Christians in Israel as enjoying freedom and equal opportunity.

In Khalloul’s telling, Carlson is choosing scenes and storylines that travel well online, then skipping the reporting that might complicate them. 

“Tucker Carlson doesn’t want the truth. The truth doesn’t exist in his lexicon,” Khalloul told The Algemeiner. 

Earlier this month, Khalloul invited Carlson to a tour of Christian communities and holy sites in Israel, including a meeting with his brother-in-law, the head of the Maronite Church of Israel, but received no response. 

“If he [Carlson] was really willing to help, he would come interview us, hear our views, our narrative,” Khalloul said, adding the podcaster would then be able to “expose the oppression of Christians in Lebanon, in Iraq, in Syria, and under the Palestinian Authority by a radical Islamic propaganda agenda,” rather than “talking about me and my community as being persecuted by Israel.”

He pointed to anti-Christian violence in Syria, including a recent church bombing in Damascus, and to the arrest of Maronite official Moussa el-Hajj in Lebanon after he was arrested by Hezbollah operatives at the Lebanese border carrying money and medicine sent from Israel’s Christian community. 

Christian communities all over the region are continuing “to shrink while we here are thriving and increasing in numbers and happily living in Israel,” Khalloul said. 

Khalloul’s comments came after Carlson spent only a few hours in Israel on Wednesday for an interview with US Ambassador Mike Huckabee and chose not to leave the Ben Gurion Airport facility before flying out of the country.

Bennett described the polemical commentator’s visit as a staged drive-by meant to give him a basis for future anti-Israel commentary.

“Tucker Carlson is a chickens**t,” Bennett posted on the social media platform X.

Carlson, who has been “spouting lies about Israel for the past two years,” didn’t even step foot in the country, Bennett wrote, and instead posted a photo taken in the airport logistics zone to “pretend he’s actually IN Israel (so he can later claim that he’s a serious reporter who toured Israel).”

He “whined” and “made up a story that he’s being supposedly harassed by our security (didn’t happen),” he continued. 

“Next time he talks about Israel as if he’s some expert, just remember this guy is a phony!” Bennett concluded. 

Carlson’s version, carried by outlets including the New York Post and the Daily Mail, said airport security took passports and “hauled” his executive producer into a room and interrogated him about the interview Carlson had just recorded with Huckabee. 

Huckabee pushed back publicly, writing on X: “EVERYONE who comes in/out of Israel (every country for that matter) has passports checked & routinely asked security questions.”

Israel’s Airports Authority also rejected Carlson’s account, saying he and his team were not “detained, delayed, or interrogated” and were only asked “a few routine questions” in a side room inside the VIP lounge “solely to protect their privacy.”

“No unusual incident occurred,” the authority said, adding that it “firmly rejects any other claims.”

Carlson’s airport detention story was “another lie” by “someone who is always inventing stories,” according to Khalloul.

Carlson’s own platform promoted the trip as a fact-finding mission. In a monologue titled “We’re headed to Israel. Here’s why,” his site said he was traveling to “get answers to questions that no one will answer.”

His show page also carried an episode billed as “Israel’s Purging of Christians From the Holy Land and the Plot to Keep Americans From Noticing,” part of a series focused on Christian treatment by the “US-funded Israeli government.”

Commentators on social media pointed out that Carlson’s posting “Greetings from Israel” from an airport logistics zone, then flying out, does not amount to visiting the country in any ordinary sense.

Carlson’s brief trip to Israel contrasts with his interview of Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2024, when he spent multiple days in Russia praising the country on video and infamously marveling at the use of locks on shopping carts — a common feature in Europe.

The podcaster’s visit to Israel also differed from his trip to Doha in December, when he interviewed Qatari Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani and revealed his plans to purchase a home in the country. Qatar has been a long-time backer of the Muslim Brotherhood, including its Palestinian offshoot Hamas, an internationally designated terrorist group.

Carlson has ramped up his anti-Israel content over the last year, according to a study released in December by the Jewish People Policy Institute (JPPI), which tracked the prominent far-right podcaster’s disproportionate emphasis on attacking the Jewish state in 2025.

In September, for example, the podcaster appeared to blame the Jewish people for the crucifixion of Jesus and suggest Israel was behind the assassination of American conservative activist Charlie Kirk.

Post Views: 11
Continue Reading

Uncategorized

Australian Bar Shut Down for Displaying Posters of Netanyahu, Putin, Trump in Nazi-Like Uniforms

Adolf Hitler in Nuremberg in 1938. Photo: Imperial War Museums.

A live music bar and cafe in Australia was shut down by local police on Wednesday for displaying posters that depict world leaders and others, including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US President Donald Trump, wearing Nazi-like uniforms.

The Dissent Cafe and Bar in Canberra Central said in a Facebook post that ACT Policing, the community policing arm of the Australian Federal Police, shut down the venue for two and a half hours on Wednesday night. Police said they were investigating a complaint about possible hate imagery relating to five posters in the venue’s window display. A scheduled performance at the bar and cafe was also canceled because of the shutdown.

ACT Policing said in a statement on Thursday that it declared the cafe a crime scene and officers would investigate whether there was a breach of new Commonwealth law about hate symbols. Police noted that they asked the venue’s owner to remove the posters and he refused.

“Officers attended the premises and had a discussion with the owner, with officers seeking to remove the posters as part of their investigation into the matter. The owner declined this request and so a crime scene was established,” read the police statement. “Five posters were subsequently seized and will be considered under recently enacted Commonwealth legislation regarding hate symbols.”

The Dissent Cafe and Bar had displayed in its front windows posters depicting Netanyahu, Trump, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, US Vice President JD Vance and Tesla co-founder Elon Musk in Nazi-like uniforms. The posters were created by the artist group Grow Up Art and underneath them were signs in the window that said “Sanction Israel” and “Stop Genocide.” Grow Up Art displayed the same images as part of a billboard poster campaign last summer and they are also sold on t-shirts. The artist group nicknamed the men in the posters collectively as “The Turd Reich,” a play on the Third Reich, the name for the Nazi dictatorship in Germany under Adolf Hitler’s rule.

Dissent Cafe and Bar has defended the artwork, saying it is “clearly and obviously parody art with a distinct anti fascist [sic] message.”

“In what is obviously harassment the ACT police have declared a crime scene at Dissent and tonight’s gig is unfortunately canceled,” Dissent Cafe and Bar wrote on Facebook when the closure happened on Wednesday.

The posters have since been placed back in the windows of the live music bar, but the images are now covered with the word “CENSORED” in red. ACT Policing said on Thursday they are still investigating the posters and are also “seeking legal advice on their legality.”

“ACT Policing remains committed to ensuring that alleged antisemitic, racist, and hate incidents are addressed promptly and thoroughly, and when possible criminality is identified, ACT Policing will not hesitate to take appropriate action,” police added.

Post Views: 25
Continue Reading

Uncategorized

At Board of Peace Debut, Trump Announces Global Commitments for Gaza Reconstruction

USPresident Donald Trump speaks at the inaugural Board of Peace meeting at the US Institute of Peace in Washington, DC, US, Feb. 19, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

US President Donald Trump told the first meeting of his Board of Peace on Thursday that nations had contributed $7 billion to a Gaza reconstruction fund that aims to rebuild the enclave once Hamas disarms, an objective that is far from becoming a reality.

The disarmament of Hamas terrorists and accompanying withdrawal of Israeli troops, the size of the reconstruction fund, and the flow of humanitarian aid to the war-battered populace of Gaza are among the major questions likely to test the effectiveness of the board in the months ahead.

The meeting in Washington came amid a broader push by Trump to build a reputation as a peacemaker. It also took place as the United States threatens war against Iran and has embarked on a massive military buildup in the region in case Tehran refuses to give up its nuclear program.

The Board‘s founding membership does not include some key US Western allies concerned about the scope of the initiative.

In a flurry of announcements at the end of a long, winding speech to representatives from 47 nations, Trump said the United States will contribute $10 billion to the Board of Peace. He did not say where the money would come from or whether he would seek it from the US Congress.

MOSTLY MIDDLE EASTERN MEMBERSHIP

Trump said contributing nations had raised $7 billion as an initial down payment for Gaza reconstruction. Contributors included Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, United Arab Emirates, Morocco, Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Uzbekistan, and Kuwait, he said. The membership is mostly made up of Middle Eastern countries, plus leaders from outside the region who may be looking to gain favor with Trump.

Estimates for rebuilding Gaza, which was reduced to rubble after two years of war, range up to $70 billion.

Trump proposed the board in September when he announced his plan to end Israel’s war in Gaza. He later made clear the board‘s remit would expand beyond Gaza to tackle other conflicts worldwide, a point he reiterated on Wednesday by saying it would look into “hotspots” around the world.

Trump said FIFA will raise $75 million for soccer-related projects in Gaza and that the United Nations will chip in $2 billion for humanitarian assistance.

The Board of Peace includes Israel but not Palestinian representatives. Trump‘s suggestion that the Board could eventually address challenges beyond Gaza has stirred anxiety that it could undermine the UN’s role as the main platform for global diplomacy and conflict resolution.

“We’re going to strengthen the United Nations,” Trump said, trying to assuage his critics, even though the United States is in arrears on making payments.

Trump said Norway would host a Board of Peace event, but Norway clarified it was not joining the board.

IRAN SABER-RATTLING

Even as he talked up himself as a man of peace, Trump rattled sabers against Iran.

Trump said he should know in 10 days whether a deal is possible to end a standoff with Tehran. “We have to have a meaningful deal,” he said.

Trump said several nations are planning to send thousands of troops to participate in an International Stabilization Force that will help keep the peace in Gaza when it eventually deploys.

Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto announced his country would contribute up to 8,000 troops to the force.

The plan for the force is to begin working in areas Israel controls in the absence of Hamas disarmament. The force, led by a US general with an Indonesian deputy, will start in Israeli-controlled Rafah. The aim is to train 12,000 police and have 20,000 troops.

“The first five countries have committed troops to serve in the ISF – Indonesia, Morocco, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, and Albania. Two countries have committed to train police – Egypt and Jordan,” International Stabilization Force commander Army Major General Jasper Jeffers said on Thursday.

HAMAS DISARMAMENT A KEY ISSUE

Hamas has been reluctant to hand over weaponry as part of Trump‘s 20-point Gaza plan that brought about a fragile ceasefire last October in the two-year Gaza war.

Trump said he hoped the use of force to disarm Hamas would be unnecessary. He said Hamas had promised to disarm and it “looks like they’re going to be doing that, but we’ll have to find out.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in Israel that Hamas will be disarmed one way or the other. “Very soon, Hamas will face a dilemma – to disarm peacefully or disarmed forcefully,” he said.

In Gaza, Hamas spokesperson Hazem Qassem said in a statement that the real test of the Board of Peace “lies in their ability to compel the occupation to halt its violations of the ceasefire, to oblige it to meet its obligations, and to initiate a genuine relief effort and launch the reconstruction process.”

The Board of Peace event had the feel of a Trump campaign rally, with music blaring from his eclectic playlist that included Elvis Presley and the Beach Boys. Participants received red Trump hats.

Hamas, which has resumed administration of nearly half the enclave, says it is ready to hand over to a US-backed committee of Palestinian technocrats led by Ali Shaath, but that Israel has not allowed the group into Gaza. Israel has yet to comment on those assertions.

Nickolay Mladenov, a Bulgarian with a senior role in the Board of Peace, said at the meeting that 2,000 Palestinians have applied to join a new transitional Palestinian police force.

“We have to get this right. There is no plan B for Gaza. Plan B is going back to war. No one here wants that,” said US Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

Post Views: 31
Continue Reading

Copyright © 2017 - 2023 Jewish Post & News