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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.
—
The post Letty Cottin Pogrebin wants Jews to own up to the corrosive power of shame appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Columbia University Professor Who Praised Oct. 7 Massacre Still Teaching Zionism Course
Pro-Hamas demonstrators at Columbia University in New York City, US, April 29, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Caitlin Ochs
Columbia University has retained a professor who celebrated Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel — where the Palestinian terrorist group sexually assaulted women and men, kidnapped the elderly, and murdered children in their beds — allowing him to teach a course on the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, Joseph Massad, who teaches modern Arab politics and intellectual history, published an encomium to Hamas in The Electronic Intifada which lauded the Oct. 7 atrocities as “astounding,” “awesome,” “incredible,” and the basis of future assaults on the Jewish state. Additionally, Massad went as far as to exalt the Hamas paragliders who flew into a music festival to slaughter the young people attending it as the “air force of the Palestinian resistance.”
“Perhaps the major achievement of the resistance in the temporary takeover of these settler-colonies is the death blow to any confidence that Israeli colonists had in their military and its ability to protect them,” Massad wrote.
Massad went on to boast that an estimated 300,000 Israelis had been displaced from their homes during the attack while mocking the Biblical story of the Exodus, a foundation stone of the Jewish faith which tells the story of the Jews’ escaping slavery in Egypt.
“Reports promptly emerged that thousands of Israelis were fleeing through the desert on foot to escape the rockets and gunfire, with many still hiding inside settlements more than 24 hours into the resistance offensive,” he continued. “No less awesome were the scenes witnessed by millions of jubilant Arabs who spent the day watching the news, of Palestinian fighters from Gaza breaking through Israel’s prison fence or gliding over it by air.”
According to Columbia University’s website, this academic semester Massad will teach a course titled “Palestinian-Israeli Politics and Society,” which “provides a historical overview of the Zionist-Palestinian conflict to familiarize undergraduates with the background of the current situation.” The class will also go over the history of “the development of Zionism through the current peace process.”
The decision to continue allowing Massad to teach a course on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict comes amid Columbia’s insisting that it is combatting antisemitism and ideological bias in the classroom.
In July, university president Claire Shipman said the institution will hire new coordinators to oversee complaints alleging civil rights violations; facilitate “deeper education on antisemitism” by creating new training programs for students, faculty, and staff; and adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism — a tool that advocates say is necessary for identifying what constitutes antisemitic conduct and speech.
Shipman also announced new partnerships with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and other Jewish groups while delivering a major blow to the anti-Zionist movement on campus by vowing never to “recognize or meet with” the infamous organization Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), a pro-Hamas campus group which had serially disrupted academic life with unauthorized, surprise demonstrations attended by non-students.
“I would also add that making these announcements in no way suggests we are finished with the work,” Shipman continued. “In a recent discussion, a faculty member and I agreed that antisemitism at this institution has existed, perhaps less overtly, for a long while, and the work of dismantling it, especially through education and understanding will take time. It will likely require more reform. But I’m hopeful that in doing this work, as we consider and even debate it, we will start to promote healing and to chart our path forward.”
Columbia University had, until that point, yielded some of the most indelible examples of anti-Jewish hatred in higher education since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre in southern Israel set off explosions of anti-Zionist activity at colleges and universities across the US. Such incidents included a student who proclaimed that Zionist Jews deserve to be murdered and are lucky he is not doing so himself and administrative officials who, outraged at the notion that Jews organized to resist anti-Zionism, participated in a group chat in which each member took turns sharing antisemitic tropes that described Jews as privileged and grafting.
On Tuesday, Columbia again stated its intentions to combat antisemitism and foster intellectual impartiality, saying it has appointed new officials and monitors to oversee its compliance with a $200 million settlement it reached with the federal government, a resolution which returned some $400 million which US President Donald Trump canceled over allegations it had refused to correct the allegedly hostile environment.
That agreement, as told by Secretary of Education Linda McMahon, called for Columbia to “bring viewpoint diversity to their Middle Eastern studies program.”
On Wednesday, Middle East expert and executive director of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME) Asaf Romirowsky told The Algemeiner that Massad’s remaining on Columbia’s payroll is indicative of the university’s hesitance to enact meaningful and lasting reforms.
“Joseph Massad is a notorious tenured antisemite who has spent his career at Columbia bashing Israel and Zionism, a poster child for BDS and a scholar propagandist activist. Furthermore, he has shown his true colors time and time again defending Hamas and calling the 10/7 barbaric attack on Israel ‘awesome,’” Romirowsky said.
Noting that Columbia’s own antisemitism task force said in a December report that the institution employs few faculty who hold moderate views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he added, “By allowing Massad to continue teaching and spreading his venom, Columbia is only codifying the dearth of knowledge as it relates to the Middle East. It should take the finding of the report and act upon it by getting rid of the tenured radicals they allowed to hijack the institution.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Julie Menin wants to be a bridge in the Mamdani era
Julie Menin, the newly-elected speaker of the New York City Council, understands the significance of becoming the first Jew to lead the city’s legislative body.
“We live in a day with the first Muslim mayor of New York City and now the first Jewish speaker of the Council serving at the same time,” Menin, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, said in her inaugural speech.
In a recent interview, Menin said she views it as a “historic time for the Jewish community” amid rising antisemitism and tension over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and believes it is up to her to “bridge divides, as opposed to the kind of divisiveness that we’ve seen.”
When she was officially selected as speaker – the second-most powerful government position in America’s largest city – Rabbi Joseph Potasnik, vice president of the New York Board of Rabbis, remarked, “In medical terms, the word Menin is a protein that suppresses disease. We need more Menin to stop the spread of this disease of hatred.” Potasnik, who is a veteran chaplain of the fire department and was a member of Mamdani’s transition team, called Menin a leader “who knows the way, who shows the way and who goes the way.”
Menin’s leadership and relationship with Mayor Zohran Mamdani will be tested in the coming weeks as he comes under growing scrutiny from New York’s Jewish community over his anti-Zionist worldview and revocation of executive orders tied to antisemitism and pro-Palestinian protests.
Mainstream Jewish leaders see Menin as a check on the mayor and a potential guardrail on his actions. A recent Honan Strategy Group poll of 848 NYC voters found that 39% want Menin to be a check on Mamdani’s agenda, while 38% want her to fully embrace it.
The Menin-Mamdani relationship faces its first test
In her first legislative move, Menin introduced last week a five-point plan to combat antisemitism that includes a bill that would ban protests around entrances and exits of houses of worship; provide$1.25 million in funding to the Museum of Jewish Heritage; and create a hotline to report antisemitic incidents. Mamdani said he broadly supports the package but expressed reservations about the proposal to establish a 100-foot buffer zone around synagogues. A City Hall spokesperson said the mayor would wait for the outcome of a legal review before taking a position.
Mamdani told the Forward on Wednesday he has yet to discuss the specifics of the bill and would veto it if he determines it’s illegal. “I wouldn’t sign any legislation that we find to be outside of the bounds of the law,” he said.
Menin, who has already appeared several times alongside Mamdani — including in a social media clip promoting new public restrooms — said that, given her career as an attorney and her experience serving in a senior role at the New York City Law Department, she would not have introduced legislation that lacks legal standing.
“I feel very confident that the bills that we are going to put forward absolutely meet that legal muster,” she said. Menin declined to say whether she would seek to pass it with a veto-proof majority to get it signed into law, but said that her private conversations with Mamdani on the matter have been productive.
“I feel we’re going to have very broad-based support in the council,” she said. “They do not infringe upon the peaceful right to protest, but they do ensure that both congregants and students can enter and exit their respective facilities without intimidation and harassment. And I look forward to continuing to have productive conversations with the mayor on this topic.”
Menin will also be talking with a powerful group of progressive members, all of whom backed her bid for speaker. The body’s progressive caucus now includes 24 members, two short of a Council majority. The Jewish Caucus, which Menin attended last week, has seven members.
The Council is expected to vote on the set of bills at next month’s meeting.
Menin said passing the plan on an “aggressive and fast timetable” is crucial. “It’s obviously very important to call out antisemitic incidents as soon as they happen,” she said. “But we need far more than words. This is real decisive action to combat antisemitism.”
Fighting antisemitism and hate
Menin said she has a record of confronting antisemitism in public life.
When she was first elected to the City Council in 2021 — after serving as the city’s census czar during the 2020 count — she devoted her first town hall meeting to the issue. The virtual forum, attended by hundreds of constituents, brought together antisemitism experts and law enforcement officials to discuss how to report and prevent hate crimes. The meeting followed two incidents in her Upper East Side district. One involved a social media post by a popular comedy club that likened COVID-19 vaccination mandates to the Holocaust. Menin’s condemnation prompted a defamation lawsuit against her, which was dismissed. The other was the discovery of a swastika stamped on a $100 bill withdrawn from an ATM by a local woman.
Menin stressed the need to build relationships with other faith communities and “take the temperature and the rhetoric down” by focusing on “our commonality of spirit, not the differences.”
When she served as chair of the Community Board 1 in the 2000s, Menin supported the Islamic Cultural Center near Ground Zero, despite facing significant opposition and death threats. Menin mentioned in the interview a Muslim high school student in her district who formed a Muslim-Jewish club with a Jewish best friend after the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel as an example of shared values.
Menin said she will continue the tradition of leading a City Council mission to Israel during her tenure, a contentious issue in recent city elections. In 2021, the Democratic Socialists of America local chapter required candidates who sought their endorsement to pledge not to travel on a sponsored trip to Israel. Her predecessor, Adrienne Adams, was the first speaker to break that tradition, in 2022, citing budget negotiations.
Favorite dish at the Shabbat table
Menin is an active member of Central Synagogue, a Reform congregation in Midtown Manhattan.
Her mother, Agnes Jacobs, and grandmother survived the Holocaust hiding in a cellar in Hungary, and her grandfather was killed. They first lived in Sydney, Australia for 6 years and then settled in a rent-controlled apartment in New York City’s neighborhood of Yorkville, known as “Little Hungary.”
Her favorite dish on the Friday night dinner table is palaschinta, a Hungarian crepe, using the toppings her grandfather liked — apricot jam and walnuts, and layered with chocolate.
Her bagel choice: sesame with scallion cream cheese.
The post Julie Menin wants to be a bridge in the Mamdani era appeared first on The Forward.
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Iran Regime Defections Mount Amid Crackdown, Trump Threat: Reports
A demonstrator lights a cigarette with fire from a burning picture of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei outside the Iranian embassy during a rally in support of nationwide protests in Iran, in London, Britain, Jan. 12, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Toby Melville
There are growing signs of cracks in the Iranian regime, with increasing reports of defections as Iran continues its deadly crackdown on nationwide, anti-government protests despite a US military buildup in the region.
Hundreds of junior and mid-level officers have recently defected from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and affiliated Basij paramilitary force, Israel’s channel 12 reported on Wednesday, citing Western intelligence sources.
Such a development could weaken the regime’s ability to suppress the demonstrations.
Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei reportedly ordered the IRGC to take control of the crackdown in part due to fears of defections by the police and regular armed forces.
“He [Khamenei] is in closer contact with the IRGC than with the army or the police, because he believes the risk of IRGC defections is almost non-existent, whereas others have defected before,” a senior Iranian official told The Telegraph. “He has placed his fate in the hands of the IRGC.”
The Institute for the Study of War noted that the regular Iranian military “is generally less ideological and more representative of the Iranian population than the IRGC, which increases the risk that [army] members could defect.”
However, there have been additional signs that the IRGC, an internationally designated terrorist group, could be dealing with internal dissent.
The Intelligence Organization of the IRGC issued a statement earlier this month castigating the protests as part of a “terrorist” plot orchestrated by the US and Israel to topple the regime. In a now-deleted section of the statement, the IRGC also warned that any “defiance, desertion, or disobedience” among the military would be met with “trial and decisive action.”
“The apparent removal of this language likely reflects concerns about triggering a panic, but it nevertheless exposes the depth of anxiety among regime officials,” wrote Janatan Sayeh, a research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a think tank based in Washington, DC.
Meanwhile, the IRGC’s Intelligence Organization also said that it was “dealing with possible acts of abandonment,” similarly suggesting that some Iranian security forces may have already defected or that the regime is concerned about such a possibility.
A Kurdish human rights organization reported earlier this month that the regime had arrested “dozens” of security officers in Kermanshah City who refused to fire on protesters.
Meanwhile, multiple Iranian officials outside the security forces have openly defected.
An official serving in Iran’s Interior Ministry told the news outlet Iran International that he has defected from his post and joined the protests, urging US President Donald Trump to intervene against the Islamic Republic.
Iran International also reported that Alireza Jiranieh Hokambad, a minister-counselor and the second highest-ranking official at Iran’s UN mission in Geneva, has defected and sought political asylum in Switzerland.
Meanwhile, US Central Command announced on Tuesday that it is deploying additional fighter jets to the Middle East, citing rising regional tensions as unrest inside the Islamic Republic deepens.
“The F-15’s presence enhances combat readiness and promotes regional security and stability,” CENTCOM wrote in a post on X.
A U.S. Air Force F-15E Strike Eagle assigned to the 494th Expeditionary Fighter Squadron lands at a base in the Middle East, Jan. 18. The F-15’s presence enhances combat readiness and promotes regional security and stability. pic.twitter.com/QTXgOsOozV
— U.S. Central Command (@CENTCOM) January 20, 2026
The US has also deployed other military assets to the region, including the USS Abraham Lincoln Carrier Strike Group.
Amid growing international backing for protesters and intensifying pressure on Tehran over its violent crackdown, several Iranian diplomats have reportedly made quiet overtures to European authorities in recent weeks about seeking asylum, as senior officials are said to be preparing contingency escape plans and stockpiling resources.
British Conservative Member of Parliament Tom Tugendhat said earlier this month that intelligence reports indicate that Iranian senior officials are putting contingency measures in place, “which suggest that the regime itself is preparing for life after the fall.”
“We’re also seeing Russian cargo aircraft coming and landing in Tehran, presumably carrying weapons and ammunition, and we’re hearing reports of large amounts of gold leaving Iran,” the British lawmaker told Parliament.
Meanwhile, Iranian-French journalist Emmanuel Razavi told the French news outlet Nouvelle Revue Politique that Iran’s parliamentary speaker Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf is applying for a visa, while a nephew of former President Hassan Rouhani has also reportedly submitted a request to France.
There have been additional reports that Khamenei has a backup plan to flee the country if security forces fail to suppress the protests or begin to defect.
The Iranian leader would reportedly flee to Moscow, following the path of ousted Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in December 2024. However, many experts have cast doubt on reports that Khamenei, who has not left Iran for decades, plans to flee, arguing the 86-year-old leader will likely die in the country.
Defections could tip the scales in favor of the protesters. But even if the regime succeeds in stamping out the unrest, some observers argue the Islamist theocracy has no long-term future in Iran.
With pressure mounting at home and abroad, experts say it remains unclear how Tehran will respond — whether by escalating militarily beyond its borders or by offering limited concessions to ease sanctions and mend ties with the West.
The nationwide protests, which began with a shopkeepers’ strike in Tehran on Dec. 28, initially reflected public anger over the soaring cost of living, a deepening economic crisis, and the rial — Iran’s currency — plummeting to record lows amid renewed economic sanctions, with annual inflation near 40 percent.
With demonstrations now stretching over three weeks, the protests have grown into a broader anti-government movement calling for the fall of Khamenei and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and even a broader collapse of the country’s Islamist, authoritarian system.
According to the US-based human rights group HRANA, 4,519 people have been killed during the protests, with another 9,049 fatalities under review. At least 5,811 people have been injured, and 26,314 arrests have been recorded.
Iranian officials have put the death toll at 5,000 while some reports indicate the figure could be much higher. The Sunday Times, for example, obtained a new report from doctors on the ground, which states that at least 16,500 protesters have died and 330,000 have been injured.
Last week, Trump urged Iranians to keep protesting their government, vowing “help” was coming as the regime continued its brutal crackdown on the nationwide demonstrations.
Over the last few weeks, Trump has repeatedly warned that he will intervene against the Iranian regime if security forces continue killing protesters. He also announced that any country doing business with Iran would face a new 25 percent tariff on exports to the US.
In Europe, Germany, Britain, France, and Italy have all summoned Iranian ambassadors in protest over the regime’s crackdown. British Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper condemned what she described as the “brutal killing” of protesters.
Meanwhile, the European Union on Tuesday announced plans to tighten restrictions on exporting drone and missile technology to Iran, following the regime’s deadly efforts to crush the protests.
“Europe stands in full solidarity with the brave women and men of Iran who are risking their lives to demand freedom for themselves and future generations,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen wrote in a post on X.
However, Israeli officials and other observers have lambasted EU for so far refusing to designate the IRGC as a terrorist organization.