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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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CAIR Connecticut urges Greenwich schools to stop using Eisner Camp over Israel ties
(JTA) — GREAT BARRINGTON, Mass. – Greenwich Public Schools in Connecticut said it would proceed with a planned fall trip for sixth graders at a Jewish camp in Massachusetts as planned this week, despite pressure from a Muslim advocacy organization over the camp’s Israeli symbols and Israel-related programming.
CAIR Connecticut, the state chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, objected to the trip, saying that programming at Eisner Camp in Great Barrington “incorporates connections to Israel,” the chapter’s board chair Farhan Memon wrote in a letter to Greenwich Superintendent of Schools Toni Jones dated Oct. 13.
The four-day Greenwich Schools field trip was organized by the Outdoor Classroom project, which works with seven locations in New England, including Eisner. Four of the camps are affiliated with Christian organizations, and two have no religious affiliation. With its clients, Outdoor Classroom coordinates nature-related learning programs for kids.
Memon wrote that some parents in Greenwich had viewed a video and photos of previous school events at Eisner and “identified Israeli flags and yellow ribbons prominently displayed in spaces used during school visits.”
“At the very least, spaces used by Greenwich students on any school trip should be free of national and political displays,” Memon wrote.
Eisner director Paul Isserles said in a statement shared with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency: “We welcome Outdoor Classroom to use our camp facilities. Throughout the year many outside organizations rent our facilities for various programs. URJ Eisner Camp is proud to have an Israeli flag displayed for our camp programs.”
When it comes to visiting groups, “Frankly, we are not regularly asked to do anything to remove those symbols or to cover them,” said Union for Reform Judaism president Rabbi Rick Jacobs in a telephone interview with JTA. “Because to be honest, we wouldn’t.”
Answering Memon’s letter on Oct. 14, Jones wrote in an email that her school district “acknowledges that individuals and families have vastly different views regarding global events” and that it intends to “provide an inclusive and safe educational environment for all Greenwich Public School students, including when they are on field trips under our care.”
She added that she had “made it clear to a few families that we will not take a political or religious stand.” JTA has seen both the CAIR letter and the email response.
CAIR Connecticut did not respond to JTA’s query.
CAIR’s national website says the organization promotes interfaith dialogue and “condemns all acts of violence against civilians by any individual, group or state.”
The Reform movement founded the 600-acre camp in 1958 as the Joseph Eisner Camp Institute for Living Judaism. It is located in the Berkshire Hills south of the town center of Great Barrington.
It is one of more than a dozen of the movement’s overnight camps in the North America. Many of those camps are rented throughout the year by groups that have nothing to do with Judaism, URJ’s Rabbi Jacobs said. “If a group rents the camp, they come up with their own agenda,” he said.
He added, “There are flags and other symbols of Judaism and of Israel in our camps, and we’re proud of that.”
Some parents had raised concerns about the venue as early as March. CAIR urged the district to stop using the camp in the Oct. 14 letter.
Removing decorations from the camp would not be enough, he said, noting that parents were upset after seeing promotional material about Eisner bringing Jewish campers to visit Israeli army bases under the Gadna, an Israeli military youth program.
A July 2019 post on Eisner Camp’s website says a group of participants in its Israel trip chose Gadna, stayed at an army base, practiced drills and learned to shoot at a target.
“URJ Eisner Camp participants who go to Israel have not participated in Gadna since 2023,” camp director Isserles said in a statement provided to JTA. “Our Israel programming at camp and in Israel is focused on Jewish identity, community, education, and connection to Israel.”
What CAIR is saying is that “A Jewish institution can be an unfit place for public-school children because it is visibly Jewish and identifies openly with Israel,” wrote blogger and Eisner alumnus Rabbi Jeff Salkin in his “Unfiltered” Substack on Oct. 19.
“A Jewish institution should not have to hide its Jewish identity to count as a fit place for other people’s children. You would not ask a church camp to remove a cross, or a Muslim camp to take down a crescent. A standard that demands such hiding makes Jewish identity itself the problem,” Salkin wrote.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post CAIR Connecticut urges Greenwich schools to stop using Eisner Camp over Israel ties appeared first on The Forward.
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Who are the first time voters who could sway Israel’s election?
(JTA) — JERUSALEM — On Oct. 27, Yael Chernyvsky, 18, from Ramat Hasharon in central Israel, plans to cast her ballot for the first time.
“I’m voting so we can change the future of this country,” the teen told Jewish Telegraphic Agency earlier this month. She was entering a Tel Aviv auditorium where some of Israel’s top politicians were about to address more than 1,000 first-time voters, including many in pre-military programs.
Chernyvsky, who is studying in an army preparation program in the Negev, blames the current right-wing government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for the country’s problems.
So she said she will vote for one of the opposition parties in the “change bloc,” which seeks to oust Netanyahu, who has been in office since 2009 except for a brief period in 2021-2022.
Chernyvsky had not decided which party she will vote for, but she said it will “probably” be either the Democrats led by Yair Golan or Yashar led by Gadi Eisenkot.
“We’ve basically had the same government for 20 years, and I genuinely think it’s corrupt. Why has this war been going on for three years? Why did it take two years to return the hostages? Why does the government give so much money to Haredi Jews who don’t work and don’t serve in the army?”
Chernyvsky is one of the estimated 640,000 Israelis aged 18 to 22 eligible to vote in Tuesday’s election, according to the Israel Democracy Institute (IDI). Comprising nearly 10% of the electorate, their votes could determine as many as 12 seats in the 120-member Knesset.
“Israel is a young country with a high birth rate,” said Tammy Hoffman, head of the education policy program at the IDI, which co-sponsored the young voter event with the Yigal Allon Center. “If their turnout is high, as our research suggests, first-time voters will make a difference.”
In May, Hoffman and her colleagues surveyed potential young first-time Jewish and Arab voters about their attitudes and political engagement. Across Israel’s population groups, 80% to 95% said they would “definitely” or be likely to vote. Secular Jewish youth expressed the highest level of certainty regarding participation, while 87% of Arabs said they intend to vote.
It’s a higher percentage than in the U.S., where the youth turnout in the 2024 presidential election was only 47%, according to the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement.
More than four-fifths of respondents to the IDI survey described the opportunity to vote as either “fairly meaningful” or “very meaningful,” with particularly strong responses among traditional and religious Jewish youth.
A separate poll of 18-year-old to 22-year-old potential first-time voters for the Ynet and Yedioth Ahronoth news outlets also revealed high motivation: 67% of respondents said they were certain they would vote, while another 19% thought they would.
In both polls, national security and the cost of living were top priorities for both Jews and Arabs. Hoffman wasn’t surprised.
“For the past several years, they’ve lived in an unstable environment during their adolescence. They were in junior high during COVID, they witnessed the judicial reform protests, and of course Oct. 7. They are worried about their future.”
While the Hamas attack affected every Israeli, the fact that so many first-time voters are either serving in the Israel Defense Forces or will do so in the near future could influence how they vote.
Jewish Israeli voters of all ages have moved rightward politically over the past couple of decades, Hoffman noted.
“But military service doesn’t necessarily lead you to a nationalist stance,” Hoffman emphasized. “It can do the opposite: It can bring up questions about the war and its goals.”
Arab Israelis, meanwhile, haven’t shifted rightward, but they are more eager to vote in this election than previous elections, reflecting their growing engagement in Israeli society, Hoffman said.
In a Sept. 23 N12 poll, 74% of young people described their political views as right-wing or center-right, while 23% identified as left-wing or center-left. If the election were held at the time the poll was taken, 16% of respondents would vote for Eisenkot’s Yashar party and 14% would vote for Netanyahu’s Likud party.
Despite the assumption that the majority of Jewish youth will vote for right-wing and far-right parties, Hoffman said, mock elections at high schools around the country show a different picture.
She said the majority of students voted for Eisenkot’s Yashar party and Beyachad, led by former prime ministers Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid from the opposition Change bloc, and “some for Netanyahu’s [right-wing] Likud, but not a lot for [Itamar] Ben-Gvir,” who heads a far-right party.
Omer Gross from Jerusalem, who graduated from high school in June and is now in an army-prep program in the Golan, plans to vote for the Religious Zionist party led by far-right politicians Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and Moshe Feiglin.
“I don’t really agree with what Smotrich has been doing in Gaza,” he said, referring to Smotrich’s objective to reestablish the uprooted Jewish settlements in Gaza and incentivize Palestinian emigration from the strip, “but I support what he does in the territories” – the West Bank. “We need a strong, secure Israel.”
Tomer Shiloh from Herziliyah, who attends the same Golan Heights program as his friend Omer, has different plans.
“I’m voting for the ‘Change’ bloc, for Gadi Eisenkot or Naftali Bennett,” the 18-year-old said.
If it were up to Shiloh, the next government would require Haredi, or ultra-Orthodox, young men to serve in the IDF, as he will do next year. He wants the next government to lower Israel’s high cost of living.
“I want the people who run this country to have good values and to do what’s best for the country and not for themselves,” the teen said.
Sgt. M is a 22-year-old office worker doing his first stint of reserve duty following the conclusion of his mandatory army service. He says ensuring that all Israelis serve the country either in the IDF or through National Service is at the top of his election priority list. But he will be voting for the left-of-center Democrats party mostly for economic reasons.
“Did you know that most university students have to work while they study to pay for tuition, books, food and housing?” the reservist, who requested anonymity due to IDF regulations, said as he traveled home by train from his army base. “I wanted to start studying right after finishing the army, but between the cost and reserve duty, that’s impossible,” he said.
Speaking from his home in the northern Israeli city of Shef-Amra, Khalel Alaa Sabeh, 18, said he plans to vote for an Arab party that will prioritize addressing resource gaps in the Arab community.
“I want to see more money allocated to the Arab community,” he said, noting that historically, Arab municipalities have received less government funding than Jewish municipalities. “But most of all, I want our families to be safe. There’s a lot of crime in the Arab sector and the Netanyahu government isn’t doing enough to stop it.”
Sabeh, who plans to start university next year, said he is urging his friends to show up to vote on Oct. 27.
“I want to see change in this country, and if Netanyahu wins we’ll have four more bad years.” Yet whatever the outcome on Election Day, he said, “I won’t leave the country. This is my land, this is my home.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Who are the first time voters who could sway Israel’s election? appeared first on The Forward.
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Israel’s global image is deteriorating. Why isn’t it a bigger issue in the election?
(JTA) — JERUSALEM – Over the past few months, Israeli media has been full of reports of Israeli holidaymakers in Europe, Asia and the Americas being harassed or physically attacked after being identified as Israeli.
In July, a group of Israeli tourists visiting Montenegro were reportedly confronted by a man and a woman, apparently locals, who asked, “Taking a break from genocide?” and told them to stay in Israel. In Greece, an Israeli woman said a restaurant refused to serve her after she told an employee she was from Israel.
In Thailand, a mother and daughter were allegedly beaten after they told a man they were from Israel, according to the mother’s account.. And in the U.S., an Israeli couple checking into a hotel in California were asked if they were “baby killers.”
These reports come as Israel’s image around the world has fallen to historic lows. A Pew poll conducted between February and May this year found that across 36 countries, a median of 67% of adults held an unfavorable view of Israel.
On the diplomatic front, hostility is also growing. Israel’s ongoing military action in Gaza has been termed “disproportionate” by a growing number of world leaders, and unchecked violence by Israeli settlers in the West Bank – as well as Israeli government policy there – has prompted some countries, including some considered allies, to pull back or even impose sanctions.
Despite this hostility the issue of Israel’s diplomacy, its image worldwide and who is to blame for its deterioration is barely factoring into the fast-approaching election on Oct. 27.
Yaakov Katz, a senior fellow at the Jewish People Policy Institute, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that there have been complaints about Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government not being effective at explaining Israel’s policies or actions to international audiences. Nevertheless, most Israelis see this as a problem beyond their control, he added.
“There is the argument that Netanyahu makes, which is that no matter what we do, the whole world’s against us, and no matter what we say, it’s antisemitism,” said Katz, co-author of “While Israel Slept: How Hamas Surprised the Most Powerful Military in the Middle East.” “People accept that argument, and to a large extent, they don’t push back on it. Why? Because part of it is true, right?”
Katz pointed out that many Israelis believe the sharp rise in antisemitism worldwide would keep happening regardless of what Israel does.
“In other words, Israelis believe that even if the number killed in Gaza was not 70,000 but 10,000, you still would have genocide claims; it makes no difference,” he said, adding that the average Israeli does not fully understand that declining support, particularly in the U.S., could eventually have “existential consequences for the country.”
“Most people here don’t think that far ahead,” Katz said. Instead, they take comfort in news such as President Donald Trump’s endorsement of Netanyahu, he added.
Ofir Dayan, a senior fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University, said, however, that Israelis are painfully aware of what is happening abroad and are concerned about it. But she said there are other, more pressing issues in a country that has been grappling with more than three years of war.
“When people talk about the elections and what the Netanyahu government did right or wrong, they definitely look at this issue, and it is something they care about,” Dayan said.
However, she continued, most are unlikely to vote for a party or a candidate based on their position on this issue because it is just not a priority.
“Israeli voters are very much one-issue voters, and the issue in this election is security,” Dayan said. “We’re not remote enough from Oct. 7 for people to completely shift their vote and vote based on this idea.”
In addition to security and the questions surrounding the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led terror attack, Peter Lerner, the former Israel Defense Forces spokesman for the international press, told JTA that the “issue of Israel’s international standing is secondary to two things: Netanyahu or not Netanyahu, and the left vs. the right.”
“Obviously, each one of those comes with its own package of Oct. 7-related issues and the question of who is most suited to deal with the threats that are around us,” he said, adding, “you just don’t see very many talking about it and when they do talk about it, it is secondary to everything else.”
Of the dozen or so parties expected to win seats in Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, only a few have referred to Israel’s negative global image or suggested ways to improve public diplomacy.
The B’Yachad Party, headed by former prime ministers Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid, is one of those discussing it as part of a plan to repair ties between Israel and world Jewry. Under this plan, the party hopes to elevate the importance of Diaspora Jewry, allowing a non-voting observer in Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, to focus on such issues.
Amcha Yisrael, a new right-wing party led by former IDF Brig. Gen. Ofer Winter, has two candidates on its list who are prominent public diplomacy activists – Yoseph Haddad and Fleur Hassan-Nahoum. Haddad has said multiple times that he would like to be Israel’s next minister for public diplomacy.
Journalist Eylon Levy, a former spokesman for the Israeli government, told JTA’s “Waiting for 61” podcast that public diplomacy, or hasbara as Israelis refer to it, “is not a goal in itself” for most of the candidates.
He said the discussion was more about “who can manage relations with the world so that we can achieve our national interests.”
Within that framework, Levy pointed out, there is a range of opinions. On the far right, the approach of the Otzma Yehudit Party, led by Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir, is to make Israel look tough and “screw the woolly-hearted soft liberals if they don’t like it.”
On the left, “the position may be equally detached from reality,” Levy said.
“There is a belief on the left that if Israel starts behaving like a normal country and doesn’t have ministers who say aggressive nonsense, then Israel’s relations will snap back to normal,” he said. “I think there may be a denial there of how much public opinion has shifted against Israel and how much the expectations of policymakers have shifted as well.”
While Levy said he did not believe there would be a massive change in perceptions if a new government were elected on Oct. 27, he did believe it would be given a grace period, at least by Israel’s less-than-friendly allies.
“The question is whether an alternative government would suddenly magically boost Israel’s international standing; I don’t think it will,” he said. “But I do think a more moderate government will buy Israel some goodwill, definitely among those who say, in theory, we support Israel.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Israel’s global image is deteriorating. Why isn’t it a bigger issue in the election? appeared first on The Forward.
