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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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El-Sayed’s Senate election has divided Michigan Jews. What will bring them together?
(JTA) — DETROIT – The “Jews For Abdul” in the room at the Michigan Democratic Party’s election night watch party were beaming as vote tallies rolled in, pushing Abdul El-Sayed closer to his eventual victory in Michigan’s U.S. Senate race.
“It’s actually hard to put into words what this night, and this moment, means to our movement,” Eli Newell, the Midwest field organizer for left-wing Jewish group IfNotNow, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency shortly before El-Sayed’s victory speech.
Newell added, “We see our agenda of shared safety, equality, justice and a brighter future for all represented in Abdul’s candidacy.”
IfNotNow had mobilized heavily for El-Sayed, bringing a sizable Jewish cohort in from out of state to canvass in Jewish neighborhoods. Newell himself lives in Chicago.
But he and many of the other Jews at the watch party — who almost exclusively tacked left, particularly on Israel — offered a markedly different outlook from the state’s more traditionally pro-Israel Jewish institutions.
Many of the leaders from the latter camp had publicly mobilized against El-Sayed to various degrees during the campaign, objecting not just to his hard-line criticism of Israel, but also to his initial reaction to the state’s Temple Israel attack and his associations with Hasan Piker, the far-left streamer. For those Jews, the candidate’s victory was a more challenging story.
“Personally, I’m not sure I’m on his most favored list,” Rabbi Asher Lopatin, community relations director at the Jewish Federation of Greater Ann Arbor, told JTA the day after El-Sayed’s win.
Shortly after El-Sayed won the Democratic primary, Lopatin took a brief leave of absence from his job to campaign with the Republican nominee, former U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers. He was one of the first Jewish figures in the state to do so publicly.
The week before the election, he also appeared at a Republican Jewish Coalition event boosting Rogers, where he and another rabbi in attendance received shout-outs from the stage.
Now Lopatin and other Michigan Jewish leaders who similarly backed Rogers face a new question: How can they build relationships with a senator they have gone on record as opposing on deeply personal grounds?
“I’m not taking anything back. But I think we have to work with what we have,” Lopatin said. “We have to build relationships with him. We have to build relationships with his supporters.”
Broadening the Jewish tent to include El-Sayed supporters was also on the mind of Decky Alexander, who chairs the Michigan Jewish Democratic Caucus. The caucus had refrained from endorsing the senator-elect during the campaign, and several members of its leadership had openly pledged to vote for Rogers.
Into that void, progressive Jews in the state organized Michigan Jews for Democracy, a grassroots movement to offer an alternative Jewish voice backing El-Sayed.
Now, Alexander said things were shifting. “We need to make sure that we are inclusive in our caucus,” she told JTA, naming Michigan Jews For Democracy as well as Bend the Arc, a progressive Jewish group that had endorsed El-Sayed, as potential new partners she’d like to work with. “I think we need to have those voices at the table.”
The senator-elect’s campaign, on Thursday, pointed to a progressive PAC analysis of voting by ZIP code to argue that El-Sayed had “virtually matched” the 2024 Jewish vote for Michigan’s Jewish senior senator, Democrat Elissa Slotkin. The PAC, Millions of Michiganians, claimed that El-Sayed lost only 1.3% of votes across 72 heavily Jewish precincts that had gone to Slotkin.
Yet uniting such disparate Jewish voices could be easier said than done. In one reliably Democratic, heavily Jewish Detroit suburb in the days leading up to the election, homes could be seen repurposing their old “Haley Stevens for U.S. Senate” yard signs after the pro-Israel congresswoman endorsed Rogers in the race’s final days. El-Sayed beat Stevens in the Democratic primary in August.
Those yard signs went back up after Stevens’ endorsement and were still up after El-Sayed’s victory on Tuesday. Some had new handwritten additions addressed to Stevens: “Proud of you! Stand tall!!”
Prior to Election Day, more than 560 Jews in the state had signed a petition, titled “Michigan Jews Against Extremism,” that pledged to vote for Rogers explicitly because of concerns over El-Sayed’s rhetoric.
While ultimately numbering slightly more than half of the total Jews to sign the open letter supporting El-Sayed, the signatories were influential. They included the president of Detroit’s Jewish federation; the head of the local flagship Holocaust center; and Mark Davidoff, who heads the Michigan-Israel Business Accelerator.
Post-election, Davidoff told JTA that his pro-Israel business group “is prepared to work with all newly elected and returning leaders across Michigan.”
A representative for the “Against Extremism” letter, Kalamazoo-based Troy Zukowski-Serlin, told JTA after the fact that the letter may have been too strongly worded.
“You could just as easily point a finger at the Mike Rogers campaign, with extremism,” Zukowski-Serlin, who had been listed as a Michigan Jewish Democratic Caucus board member until he declared his intent to vote for Rogers, reflected. “That probably got the group off to a bad start.”
Even as the Rogers campaign had courted Jews, it also employed messaging many outside observers pegged as Islamophobic. Some of El-Sayed’s campaign surrogates who liaised with the Jewish community, including Michigan state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, also pointed to Rogers’ associations with Christian nationalist donors.
Today, Zukowski-Serlin said, “I can understand why somebody would vote for El-Sayed.” His own daughter did, for one — and they were far from the only Jewish household in the state to have split their votes.
Echoing a line El-Sayed himself often employed when addressing Jews on the campaign trail, he suggested that, apart from Israel, they were likely aligned on most policy positions.
“There’s plenty of other issues that I think we can find common ground on,” he said. “I think we can get along.”
Other Jewish groups in the state didn’t mince words, even after the race was called and some early-voting exit polls suggested that a majority of Jews in the state may have voted for El-Sayed despite any reservations.
Michigan’s chapter of the Anti-Defamation League was among those to signal what it called “serious concerns” with El-Sayed’s “history of minimizing the fears of the Jewish community and demonizing Israel.”
The ADL’s statement included an olive branch of sorts.
“As we move forward, Senator-elect El-Sayed has an opportunity and a responsibility to demonstrate that he will hear Jewish Michiganders, reject efforts to blame or marginalize them because of their connection to Israel and confront antisemitism with the moral clarity this moment requires,” the organization noted.
Detroit’s chapter of the American Jewish Committee raised similar flags. While recognizing what it called the “historic significance” of El-Sayed becoming the first Muslim elected to the Senate, the AJC statement continued, “Unfortunately this historic moment has been tarnished by the Senator-elect’s continued anti-Israel rhetoric that alienates countless Jewish Michiganders and other supporters of the State of Israel, and endangers American Jews.”
Detroit’s Jewish federation, meanwhile, congratulated “all those elected to federal, state, and local office in Michigan” and offered a veiled plea for restraint without naming the senator-elect.
“Together, we look to those elected to act with wisdom, lead with compassion, and uphold the civic and social values that ensure the safety and inclusion of our community and of all Americans,” the nonpartisan organization’s communal relations arm said in a statement.
Gary Torgow, the Michigan-based chair of the Jewish Federations of North America, told Rogers during the campaign, “We need you to get elected.” On Thursday, Torgow released a post-election statement calling on the local Jewish community to “move forward with optimism, dignity, and pride in who we are.”
Now the work of mending fences begins — not just between El-Sayed and Jewish leaders, but between Michigan’s Jews themselves. Across the state, rabbis offered reassuring messages to their communities, and some were eager to put the divisiveness of the campaign season behind them.
“I think the election divided the Jewish community,” Lopatin said. “I’m excited to get back to uniting them.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Three lessons for American Jews from the failed GOP attacks on the trans community
There are many reasons for the majority of American Jews — proudly American, politically liberal or centrist, supportive of Israel but opposed to nationalist extremism — to celebrate this week’s election, or at least heave a sigh of relief.
But I want to focus on what might seem to be an unusual aspect of this historic moment: the failure of Republican attacks on transgender people. If you live in a deep blue state, you might not have noticed these attacks at all, but if you live in a battleground state, you were likely inundated by them: relentless television ads, millions of phony “Trans & LGBTQ+ Student Resource Guides” mailed to Texas voters from a fake organization, and puerile, false claims about Senator-elect James Talarico.
And what did the Republicans get from this multi-hundred-million-dollar campaign of misinformation?
Bupkis.
Now, this was an unusual election. It’s possible that nothing would have made a difference, given the terrible economy, the pointless Iran war, and the unprecedented corruption of Donald Trump. These were, polls tell us, the core issues motivating mainstream American voters, and they voted, as the saying goes, to throw the bastards out. As The New York Times reported, Republicans vastly outspent Democrats in every competitive Senate race, but still lost nearly all of them. So maybe, in a closer election, the anti-trans attacks might have worked.
But they didn’t, and as I see it, the failure of this massive campaign offers three encouraging lessons for the Jewish community.
First, anyone who knows Jewish history should be grateful for the failure of a vicious attempt to vilify and scapegoat a small, vulnerable minority. Obviously, Jewish people are often that minority — and we were again this year, targeted by both the Far Right and Far Left. Anti-trans activists lied relentlessly about science, Democratic policies, trans people’s lives, sports (and the alleged advantages trans women possess, which have been disproven countless times), and most devastatingly, about the nature of transgender care, which never involves surgery on minors.
All of this was harrowing for me to watch, especially as someone with several trans friends whose lives were being so brutally misrepresented — and directly impacted by rollbacks in healthcare access (including by hospital chains who caved to blackmail by the Trump administration). And as a scholar of Jewish history and theology, and as a queer person myself, it also felt eerily, darkly familiar. Perhaps it’s a cliché to say that when one group is attacked, we are all attacked, but in this case, I felt it viscerally. I am relieved it didn’t work.
Second, despite all the rhetoric and rage-baiting, fundamentally there is a core congruence between what LGBTQ advocates say and what ordinary Americans, including Jewish ones, believe: not the finer points of gender identity, but “live and let live.” Most Americans still do not understand transgender as a phenomenon (yet), and they still have significant concerns, particularly about kids (and sports). But Democrats have finally learned how to talk about this issue, and it’s by appealing to common sense, American values, and even ‘Judeo-Christian’ teachings like loving your neighbor.
For example, Senator-elect Dr. Abdul El-Sayed did a great job framing the issue as about private medical decisions that should be left between families and their doctors. Comedian and influencer Suzanne Lambert framed the issue around love and respect, even when we don’t understand ‘the other.’ James Talarico made light of his opponent’s pathetic attempts to impugn his masculinity, while also refusing to throw trans people under the bus.
No Democrat ran on trans rights as a signature issue. But the best Democrats didn’t run away from it either.
Which brings me to my third point: Moderate Americans can agree to disagree, and still unite on core concerns. The middle 40% of America is not made up of culture warriors or Christian Nationalists. And it seems (I would love to see exit polling data on this) that they saw the endless ads and attacks for what they were: an attempt to distract from the core issues. Despite Elon Musk’s massive investments in hysteria — perhaps motivated by his inability to accept his own trans daughter — most centrist Americans are more focused on stuff that actually impacts them. It’s not that they agree with, or even understand, transgender issues. It’s that they don’t need to agree on everything in order to vote for a political candidate.
The same is true, of course, for issues bitterly dividing the American Jewish community today. Both right and left seem to have adopted the worst aspects of so-called “cancel culture,” in which any deviation from ideological purity on a single issue is grounds for exclusion. Thus we have seen progressives like Scott Wiener be bullied by the Far Left and critical-of-Israel politicians like El-Sayed demonized by the Center and Right.
In the High-Intensity-Jewish bubble, it can seem as though Israel, Palestine, and the relationship between Anti-Zionism and antisemitism is all-consuming. I’ve felt that way myself. But outside the bubble, in fact most American Jews understand that there are more important issues. 62% of Jewish Michiganders voted for El-Sayed, for example. And in exit polls conducted over the last several elections, American Jews have not ranked Israel among their top concerns (we don’t yet know if that was true this year), despite what they hear from lobbyists and mainstream organizations.
Indeed, many leaders, particularly in the New York metro area, have alienated their own communities by insisting that some views are “beyond the pale,” or that Jews are physically unsafe, or that contact with this or that media figure renders one untouchable, as if a podcast interview is a contagious disease like the Biblical tzaraat.
Successful politics doesn’t work that way. As the cliches go, politics is the art of the possible, and it makes for strange bedfellows. We don’t agree on every issue with everyone we vote for, or are interviewed by. That is how we win — and, in this case, rescue the democracy that has made the American dream possible for generations of Jews.
I’m not suggesting that everything is now rosy for trans people in America. That is far from the case. Even as the nationwide anti-trans attacks failed, state level initiatives passed that seriously harm trans populations. Trans activists are regarded by our own government as domestic terrorists. And misinformation continues to run rampant. The work remains ahead to re-introduce actual trans people, lives, medicine, and science to middle America. And that will take a long time.
But that’s the long-term work. In the short term, elections are about making compromises, and I’m encouraged that this attempt to scapegoat a tiny and vulnerable minority, which happens to include several friends of mine, ended in failure. There is much that we in the Jewish community can learn from it.
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Liberal Jews hail wave of Democratic victories a day after the election
(JTA) — While liberal Jewish Americans reveled in a blue wave of victories after Tuesday’s pivotal midterm elections, centrist and conservative voices issued words of caution about the increasing fragility of the country’s relationship with Israel.
The pro-Israel liberal group J Street hailed the results as a “resounding victory for new politics on Israel and Palestine,” celebrating that 98% of J Street-backed candidates were projected to win their races.
“We are proud to have supported a record number of candidates who share our commitment to Israel’s future, democracy and a peaceful resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” Jeremy Ben-Ami, president of J Street, said in a statement that lists all the successful politicians that had the lobby’s support.
Voters, he argued, rejected the president’s policies and “made clear they want a different direction for America and a different approach in the Middle East.” He pointed to the losses of Republican stalwarts Susan Collins in Maine and Mike Lawler in New York, calling them “prominent champions of the old approach to Israel politics.”
The day before, J Street had said it “ran the largest super PAC investment in organizational history,” raising $10 million for more than 200 candidates. The lobby warned, however, that “AIPAC and its supporters will continue to influence American foreign policy, finding creative ways to override the will of voters with dark money.” AIPAC didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Halie Soifer, CEO of the liberal Jewish Democratic Council of America, likewise lauded the Democratic victories as a referendum on Trump, quipping that the president asked voters to “pretend he was on the ballot in the midterms, and Jewish Americans did just that.”
“Jewish voters are not a monolith, but they widely disapprove of Donald Trump,” she said in a statement, describing the administration’s agenda as “antithetical to core Jewish values.”
Soifer added, “Jewish Americans want leaders who will lower costs, defend our freedoms, stand against antisemitism, support Israel’s security, and hold the Trump administration accountable for its corruption, cruelty, and lawlessness.”
This cycle was JDCA’s largest-ever midterm Jewish voter engagement, involving a seven-figure investment in vast mobilization efforts, the group said in a statement.
JDCA noted that its political action committee ran many targeted ads, including in Ohio and Texas, where Democratic Senate candidates Sherrod Brown and James Talarico defeated their Republican rivals. The group also said its PAC funded ads for successful House candidates Cait Collins in New York, Piya Dandiya and Jared Moskowitz in Florida and Christina Hines in Michigan.
But not all Jewish Democrats were thrilled by the outcome.
Jeff Robbins, a Boston-based attorney and former Democratic Senate staffer, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, said the “obvious” bad news coming out of the election was the normalization of “a vitriolic, occasionally untethered, and all too often fact-less attack on Israel and its bona fides.”
A registered Democrat, Robins said, “it’s painful to hear the enemies of Israel celebrating as they have today, and claiming that this is their referendum on Israel.”
Robbins said that such habituation was already clear in last year’s election of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, an outspoken critic of Israel. This cycle’s shift, he added, was apparent in the success of Abdul El-Sayed in his Michigan Senate race and the primary loss of Democratic Rep. Dan Goldman to former city comptroller Brad Lander.
Robbins also expressed concern about “the push among anybody wanting a career in the Democratic Party” to distance themselves from Israel, which in many cases amounts to antisemitism, he said.
He particularly called out the House wins of Christopher Rabb in Philadelphia, Claire Valdez and Darializa Chevalier in New York City, Melat Kiros in Denver and Troy Jackson in Maine. Jackson, Robbins added, ended up repeating anti-Israel diatribes that have become popular among many members of the progressive left.
“The fact that he defeats somebody who was a stalwart and very knowledgeable friend of Israel, Susan Collins, is more bad news,” he said.
Robbins stressed that the Jewish community must take the results as a “warning sign” and stop assuming that “raising money and honoring people and dinners” is sufficient, without “making the case in the public square.” Members of the pro-Israel Jewish community cannot “just assume that people will realize that, of course, the victims of a genocidal attack are not the perpetrators of a genocide,” he added.
At the same time, Robbins, who also served in the United Nations Commission on Human Rights under former president Bill Clinton, pointed to other results he was happy with. “The good news is that the Democrats elected a number of people who are moderate and therefore sensible when it comes to the realities of the Middle East, and those people’s voices in Congress may be a blessing.”
He acknowledged that the voices of these moderates who support Israel could be consequential in the Democratic caucuses in both the House and the Senate.
Jonathan Greenberg, director for combatting antisemitism at Defending Education and a former AIPAC staffer, called the election as “a disastrous night for the Republican Party.”
“I really don’t think there’s any way for a conservative to look at what happened last night and say that there’s a silver lining,” added Greenberg, who ran for state office in Illinois as a Republican in 2012 but now is unaffiliated.
He called upon Republicans to seize the opportunity to rebuild a stronger foundation, after “years of bad rhetoric and a cycle full of bad candidates.” He slammed Democrats for failing “to police their own side,” while also recognizing that some moderate Israel supporters were successful in this election.
“If the the more blue dog-type Democrats who got elected last night are willing to stand up to the crazies in their party and say, ‘This isn’t us, and you’re not welcome to say things like that in our party,’ then, yeah, that would be great,” he said.
Greenberg credited Rep. Jared Moskowitz, a Florida Democrat, for his outspokenness on this issue, while stressing that “he can’t be the only one.” In Moskowitz’s primary race, he was a staunch defender of Israel against progressive challenger Oliver Larkin.
“You have to have a critical mass of passionate people – the ascendant far left has that right now,” Greenberg added. “If the center doesn’t organize itself and forcefully push back, then they’ll lose.”
For Robbins, this tumultuous period for American Jews has been a long time in the making and is hardly a surprise. He said he has warned Israelis for the past 10 to 15 years about an anti-Zionist shift in the Democratic Party, but he has repeatedly received the response, “Hakol b’seder,” the Hebrew phrase for “everything is OK.”
“I would say, ‘No, kol is not b’seder,’” Robbins concluded.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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