Uncategorized
Letty Cottin Pogrebin wants Jews to own up to the corrosive power of shame
(JTA) — When a lawyer for Donald Trump asked E. Jean Carroll why she didn’t scream while allegedly being raped by Donald Trump, I thought of Letty Cottin Pogrebin. In her latest book, “Shanda: A Memoir of Shame and Secrecy,” she writes about being assaulted by a famous poet — and how the shadow of shame kept women like her silent about attacks on their own bodies.
That incident in 1962, she writes, was “fifty-eight years before the #MeToo movement provided the sisterhood and solidarity that made survivors of abuse and rape feel safe enough to tell their stories.”
Now 83, Pogrebin could have coasted with a memoir celebrating her six decades as a leading feminist: She co-founded Ms. magazine, its Foundation for Women and the National Women’s Political Caucus. She served as president of Americans for Peace Now and in 1982 blew the whistle on antisemitism in the feminist movement.
Instead, “Shanda” is about her immigrant Jewish family and the secrets they carried through their lives. First marriages that were kept hidden. An unacknowledged half-sister. Money problems and domestic abuse. An uncle banished for sharing family dirt in public.
“My mania around secrecy and shame was sparked in 1951 by the discovery that my parents had concealed from me the truth about their personal histories, and every member of my large extended family, on both sides, was in on it,” writes Pogrebin, now 83. “Their need to avoid scandal was so compelling that, once identified, it provided the lens through which I could see my family with fresh eyes, spotlight their fears, and, in so doing, illuminate my own.”
“Shanda” (the Yiddish word describes the kind of behavior that brings shame on an entire family or even a people) is also a portrait of immigrant New York Jews in the 20th century. As her father and mother father move up in the world and leave their Yiddish-speaking, Old World families behind for new lives in the Bronx and Queens, they stand in for a generation of Jews and new Americans “bent on saving face and determined to be, if not exemplary, at least impeccably respectable.”
Pogrebin and I spoke last week ahead of the Eight Over Eighty Gala on May 31, where she will be honored with a group that includes another Jewish feminist icon, the writer Erica Jong, and musician Eve Queler, who founded her own ensemble, the Opera Orchestra of New York, when she wasn’t being given chances to conduct in the male-dominated world of classical music. The gala is a fundraiser for the New Jewish Home, a healthcare nonprofit serving older New Yorkers.
Pogrebin and I spoke about shame and how it plays out in public and private, from rape accusations against a former president to her regrets over how she wrote about her own abortions to how the Bible justifies family trickery.
Our conversation was edited for length and clarity.
I found your book very moving because my parents’ generation, who like your family were middle-class Jews who grew up or lived in the New York metropolitan area, are also all gone now. Your book brought back to me that world of aunts and uncles and cousins, and kids like us who couldn’t imagine what kinds of secrets and traumas our parents and relatives were hiding. But you went back and asked all the questions that many of us are afraid to ask.
I can’t tell you how good writing it has been. I feel as though I have no weight on my back. And people who have read it gained such comfort from the normalization that happens when you read that others have been through what you’ve been through. And my family secrets are so varied — just one right after the other. The chameleon-like behavior of that generation — they became who they wanted to be through pretense or actual accomplishment.
In my mother’s case, pretense led the way. She went and got a studio photo that made it look like she graduated from high school when she didn’t. In the eighth grade, she went up to her uncle’s house in the north Bronx and had her dates pick her up there because of the shanda of where she lived on the Lower East Side with nine people in three rooms. She had to imagine herself the child of her uncle, who didn’t have an accent or had an accent but at least spoke English.
You describe yours as “an immigrant family torn between loyalty to their own kind and longing for American acceptance.”
There was the feeling that, “If only we could measure up, we would be real Americans.” My mother was a sewing machine operator who became a designer and figured out what American women wore when she came from rags and cardboard shoes, in steerage. So I admire them. As much as I was discomforted by the lies, I ended up having compassion for them.
It’s also a story of thwarted women, and all that lost potential of a generation in which few could contemplate a college degree or a career outside the home. Your mother worked for a time as a junior designer for Hattie Carnegie, a sort of Donna Karan of her day, but abandoned that after she met your dad and became, as you write, “Mrs. Jack Cottin.”
The powerlessness of women was complicated in the 1950s by the demands of the masculine Jewish ideal. So having a wife who didn’t work was proof that you were a man who could provide. As a result women sacrificed their own aspirations and passions. She protected her husband’s image by not pursuing her life outside the home. In a way my feminism is a positive, like a photograph, to the negative of my mother’s 1950s womanhood.
“I’m not an optimist. I call myself a ‘cockeyed strategist,” said Pogrebin, who has a home on the Upper West Side. (Mike Lovett)
You write that you “think of shame and secrecy as quintessentially Jewish issues.” What were the Jewish pressures that inspired your parents to tell so many stories that weren’t true?
Think about what we did. We hid behind our names. We changed our names. We sloughed off our accents. My mother learned to make My*T*Fine pudding instead of gefilte fish. Shame and secrecy have always been intrinsically Jewish to me, because of the “sha!” factor: At every supper party, there would be the moment when somebody would say, “Sha! We don’t talk about that!” So even though we talked about what felt like everything, there were things that couldn’t be touched: illness, the C-word [cancer]. If you wanted to make a shidduch [wedding match] with another family in the insular communities in which Jews lived, you couldn’t let it be known that there was cancer in the family, or mental illness.
While I was writing this memoir, I realized that the [Torah portion] I’m listening to one Shabbat morning is all about hiding. It is Jacob finding out that he didn’t marry Rachel, after all, but married somebody he didn’t love. All of the hiding that I took for granted in the Bible stories and I was raised on like mother’s milk was formative. They justified pretense, and they justified trickery. Rebecca lied to her husband and presented her younger son Jacob for the blessing because God told her, because it was for the greater good of the future the Jewish people.
I think Jews felt that same sort of way when it came to surviving. So we can get rid of our names. We wouldn’t have survived, whether we were hiding in a forest or behind a cabinet, a name or a passport, or [pushed into hiding] with [forced] conversions. Hiding was survival.
I was reading your book just as the E. Jean Carroll verdict came down, holding Donald Trump liable for sexually assaulting her during an encounter in the mid-’90s. You write how in 1962, when you were working as a book publicist, the hard-drinking Irish poet Brendan Behan (who died in 1964) tried to rape you in a hotel room and you didn’t report it. Like Carroll, you didn’t think that it was something that could be reported because the cost was too high.
Certainly in that era powerful men could get away with horrible behavior because of shanda reasons.
Carroll said in her court testimony, “It was shameful to go to the police.”
You know that it happened to so many others and nobody paid the price. The man’s reputation was intact and we kept our jobs because we sacrificed our dignity and our truth. I was in a career, and I really was supporting myself. I couldn’t afford to lose my job. I would have been pilloried for having gone to his hotel room, and nobody was there when he picked up an ashtray and threatened to break the window of the Chelsea Hotel unless I went up there with him.The cards were stacked against me.
In “Shanda,” you write about another kind of shame: The shame you now feel decades later about how you described the incident in your first book. You regret “how blithely I transformed an aggravated assault by a powerful man into a ‘sticky sexual encounter.’”
I wrote about the incident in such offhand terms, and wonder why. I wrote, basically, “Okay, girls, you’re gonna have to put up with this, but you’re gonna have to find your own magical sentence like I had with Behan” to get him to stop.
You write that you said, “You can’t do this to me! I’m a nice Jewish girl!” And that got him to back off.
Really painful.
I think that’s a powerful aspect of your book — how you look back at the ways you let down the movement or your family or friends and now regret. In 1991 you wrote a New York Times essay about an illegal abortion you had as a college senior in 1958, but not the second one you had only a few months later. While you were urging women to tell their stories of abortion, you note how a different shame kept you from telling the whole truth.
Jewish girls could be, you know, plain or ordinary, but they had to be smart, and I had been stupid. I could out myself as one of the many millions of women who had an abortion but not as a Jewish girl who made the same mistake [of getting pregnant] twice.
The book was written before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. In the book you write powerfully about the shame, danger and loneliness among women when abortion was illegal, and now, after 50 years, it is happening again. Having been very much part of the generation of activists that saw Roe become the law of the land, how have you processed its demise?
Since the 1970s, we thought everything was happening in this proper linear way. We got legislation passed, we had litigation and we won, and we saw the percentage of women’s participation in the workplace all across professions and trades and everything else rise and rise. And then Ronald Reagan was elected and then there was the Moral Majority and then it was the Hyde Amendment [barring the use of federal funds to pay for abortion]. I was sideswiped because I think I was naive enough to imagine that once we articulated what feminism was driving at and why women’s rights were important, and how the economic reality of families and discrimination against women weren’t just women’s issues, people would internalize it and understand it and justice would be done.
In the case of Roe, we could not imagine that rights could ever be taken away. We didn’t do something that we should have done, which is to have outed ourselves in a big way. It’s not enough that abortion was legal. We allowed it to remain stigmatized. We allowed the right wing to create their own valence around it. That negated solidarity. If we had talked about abortion as healthcare, if we had had our stories published and created organizations around remembering what it was like and people telling their stories about when abortion was illegal and dangerous…. Instead we allowed the religious right to prioritize [fetal] cells over a woman’s life. We just were not truthful with each other, so we didn’t create solidarity.
Are you heartened by the backlash against restrictive new laws in red states or optimistic that the next wave of activism can reclaim the right to abortion?
I’m not an optimist. I call myself a “cockeyed strategist.” If you look at my long resume, it is all about organizing: Ms. magazine, feminist organizations, women’s foundations, Black-Jewish dialogues, Torah study groups and Palestinian-Jewish dialogues.
Number one, we have to own the data and reframe the narrative. We have to open channels for discussion for women who have either had one or know someone who has had one, even in religious Catholic families. The state-by-state strategy was really slow, but Ruth Bader Ginsburg wanted that. She almost didn’t get on the court because she didn’t like the nationwide, right-to-privacy strategy of Roe but instead wanted it won state by state, which would have required campaigns of acceptance and consciousness-raising.
So, the irony is she hasn’t lived to see that we’re going to have to do it her way.
You share a lot of family secrets in this book. Is this a book that you waited to write until, I’ll try to put this gently, most of the people had died?
I started this book when I was 78 years old, and there’s always a connection to my major birthdays. And turning 80 – you experience that number and it is so weird. It doesn’t describe me and it probably won’t describe you. I thought, this could well be my last book, so I needed to be completely transparent, put it all out there.
My mother and father and aunts and uncles were gone, but I have 24 cousins altogether. I went to my cousins, and told them I am going to write about the secret of your parents: It’s my uncle, but it’s your father. It’s your family story even though it’s my family, but it’s yours first. And every cousin, uniformly, said, “Are you kidding? You don’t even know the half of it,” and they’d tell me the whole story. I guess people want the truth out in the end.
Is that an aspect of getting older?
I think it’s a promise of liberation, which is what I have found. It’s this experience of being free from anything that I’ve hid. I don’t have to hide. Years ago, on our 35th wedding anniversary, we took our whole family to the Tenement Museum because we wanted them to see how far we’ve come in two generations.
—
The post Letty Cottin Pogrebin wants Jews to own up to the corrosive power of shame appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
My hopes for the rabbi who envisions my defeat — and for a better Jewish future
Dear Rabbi Cosgrove,
Thank you for your letter this week. Although you envision my electoral defeat two years from now, I recognize that it comes from a place of genuine concern, for me and for our shared future.
While your letter imagines my political fate, I think it’s really the future of the Jewish community that’s at stake. I know you care about the safety and thriving of Jews in New York City and beyond — so do I. We just have different ideas about how best to achieve it.
Two thousand years ago, Hillel prescribed us a challenge, in two questions: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I am for myself only, what am I?”
You believe that I am falling short on the first of Hillel’s questions. In our tradition of tokhecha, of accountability, I’ll sit with your criticism and take it seriously. I fight fiercely to keep our people safe, here in New York City, across the United States, and in Israel. I urged Mayor Zohran Mamdani to keep Jessica Tisch as NYPD Commissioner; to discourage the use of phrases like “globalize the intifada”; and to increase funding to combat antisemitism and other forms of hate. I’m pleased he’s done those things, and I’ll keep pushing for more.
I believe in the vision of a Jewish and democratic Israel, as imagined in its Declaration of Independence. I just don’t believe there can be democracy with occupation, or that Israel’s present actions in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon are consistent with that vision. On Election Night, I spoke about Israelis who provide protective presence in the West Bank, putting their lives on the line to help protect Palestinian neighbors from settler terrorism, as heroes whose courage I hope to emulate. And I pleaded with people not to use “Zionist” as a slur.
But even if I were an anti-Zionist, I would still be deeply within Jewish tradition and values.
My son is named after Marek Edelman, a leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and a Bundist (Jewish democratic socialist) who was not a Zionist. Albert Einstein and Judah Magnes, a leading American rabbi who moved to Israel in 1922, both worried presciently about the dangers of sovereignty in a “Jewish state” and preferred to imagine a bi-national one. Many Jews are rediscovering those traditions, and concluding that they fit better with the Jewish values they learned in Hebrew school.
Your efforts to define them, and me, outside the Jewish community, are dangerously short-sighted. Jews are not made safer by proscribing a particular vision of Israel as the price of full belonging, or by insisting on unconditional support for Israel while it commits human rights violations against Palestinians.
Like the Israeli human rights group B’tselem, Israeli-American historian and eminent Holocaust scholar Omer Bartov, and the Lemkin Institute — the legacy of the Polish Jew and Holocaust survivor who developed the term — I believe with great sadness that Israel’s destruction of Gaza meets the definition of genocide. But whether one uses the term or not, surely we can agree that the scale of Palestinian death and suffering should trouble every Jew. Our obligation is not to ignore it, or explain it away, but to reckon with it — and to change it.
You recently urged candidates for office seeking the Jewish community’s support to march in the Israel Day Parade. But if representing Jewish New Yorkers requires marching alongside Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who has called for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, perhaps we should ask whether we’ve confused loyalty with moral leadership.
I believe that we need more attention to Hillel’s second question. Our tradition asks us never to become indifferent to the suffering of children. I cannot reconcile Israel’s killing of thousands of Palestinian children with the Judaism that shaped me — most deeply, with the idea that every one of them was created b’tzelem Elohim, in the image of God, just like my kids.
The future you imagine presumes that the greatest danger facing Jewish life is that Jews will leave Zionism. But it seems to me the real danger is that young Jews will conclude there is no room for them inside Jewish institutions unless they silence their conscience. A community cannot thrive if the choices it offers the next generation are hypocrisy or excommunication.
At the end of your letter, you welcome me “back,” presumably to a position of always defending Israel against its critics, insisting that Zionism is an essential part of every Jewish identity and refusing to be in political coalition with people who disagree.
I’d like to invite you forward, to a belief in shared safety, where we don’t compromise on anyone’s humanity.
Or, at least, I’d like to invite us together to attempt a more productive conversation, to continue a debate that Jews have been having for at least 2,600 years. You recently called for Jews “to avoid the reductive and destructive tactic of labeling people with whom we disagree either as self-hating Jews or colonialist aggressors.” Let’s model that together.
Our differing points of view represent a longstanding debate amongst our people about the best way to achieve safety and flourishing, for ourselves and our neighbors. There’s room to keep that debate going — through conversation and dialogue, not through exclusion and shaming.
The door is open, rabbi. Welcome forward.
The post My hopes for the rabbi who envisions my defeat — and for a better Jewish future appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
After 4 years and a stubborn leak, a landmark mikveh is finally whole again
Unveiled in the suburbs of Boston more than two decades ago, the Jewish ritual bathhouse known as Mayyim Hayyim offers an intimate space for people of all genders to mark life’s transitions. The facility’s pair of pools beckoned thousands from miles around, effectively reinventing the ancient Jewish practice of mikveh immersion for the modern era.
Then one of the tubs sprung a leak that took more than an ordinary plumber to fix. Now, more than four years later, the mikveh itself has had a rebirth, with the reopening of the immersion pool on the building’s left side, restoring a source of strength in suburban Boston that has become a pillar of American Jewish life.
“It felt like we were cut off from a really important part of our space and our connectedness,” said Sarah Quiat, a mikveh guide at Mayyim Hayyim who has been guiding immersions for seven years. “Being able to give the immersee the option of the left pool in and of itself feels like a core part of how Mayyim Hayyim approaches mikveh. To be able to offer and facilitate the immersion that a person is looking for comes down even to the details of which pool is calling to you.”
Tucked into a butter-yellow, 19th-Century New-England-style home in Newton, Mass., Mayyim Hayyim, Hebrew for “living waters,” grew out of a vision developed by author Anita Diamant and collaborators affectionately known as the “Mikveh Mamas.”
The founders grounded Mayyim Hayyim in a desire to enrich ancient ritual with contemporary life and make it accessible to Jews of all identities and types of observance.
Since ancient times, traditional Judaism has called for married women to immerse themselves in a mikveh after their menstrual period or childbirth before resuming sexual relations with their husbands. In the 1970s, as the Jewish feminist movement began picking up speed, thought leaders including Diamant looked beyond the patriarchal origins of mikveh and sought to reimagine and reclaim it.
“We, as a Jewish community, had to do better,” Diamant said in an interview. “We needed a mikveh where everyone who entered felt welcomed and valued.”
Today, Mayyim Hayyim offers a wide range of non-traditional immersion ceremonies — including for gender transition milestones, survivors of domestic violence or abuse, or individuals recovering from long-term illness — in addition to more conventional ceremonies for occasions like b’nei mitzvahs, the High Holy Days, and conversions.
The pool’s restoration was made possible by a joint gift last year from Mikhveh Mama, Paula Brody, and her husband, Merrill Hassenfeld.
For their 20th wedding anniversary in 2004, the couple immersed in the waters on the house’s left-hand side.
But in February 2022, that pool sprung a leak, and the water level began declining at a rate of more than one inch per day. A leak of such magnitude rendered the pool not Kosher by halachic standards, forcing the organization to close the pool until further notice.
Contractors began work to diagnose the source of the leak. Then came another setback — the particularly frigid Boston winter of 2023. Burst pipes caused a major flood in the building. Now other repairs to the building had to be prioritized.
Brody and Hassenfeld had not been aware that the mikveh where they marked their 20 years of marriage was out of commission. Together, they donated the money to finance the restoration ahead of their 42nd anniversary on June 24.
Since then, members of an adult B’Mitzvah class from a local temple have sought the waters of the mikveh and, during Pride Month in June, Mayyim Hayyim and Keshet, an advocacy group for LGBTQ+ Jews, hosted an evening of affirming immersions for the queer community.
“It was always envisioned with the two pools,” Brody recalled. “When I realized that it had been dysfunctional, we really wanted to help.”
“It enables Mayyim Hayyim to be whole again,” she added.
Mia Peloquin traveled from Connecticut to immerse themself at Mayyim Hayyim last year to mark their conversion. In August, they will return with their friend who converted a year earlier. The pair will celebrate their conversion anniversaries together.
“I was actually surprised that the left pool was open,” Peloquin said. “We thought we would have to go in one after another, which would extend our trip in Massachusetts a bit longer, but finding out that the left pool was open was very exciting for us because we get to immerse at the same time.”
During the closure, the organization has been guiding immersions solely using the pool on the right side of the building. Even with one operational pool, more than 900 people visit Mayyim Hayyim for roughly 1,600 immersions annually, many hailing from the surrounding Boston area, while others plan international travel to experience the one-of-a-kind space.
In addition to increasing the organization’s capacity for immersions, having both pools back to full functionality allows for expanded partnerships with Jewish institutions.
Beginning in 2023, then-Brandeis student and Hillel Tfilah Coordinator Zac Gondelman saw the power of ritual immersion and identified a critical education gap on the subject among his peers.
“Reform Jews came into Brandeis feeling like there was a world of Jewish ritual and practice that they had never heard of or accessed or lived in,” he said. “And so, I thought there was no better way to bridge those things than to bring a whole bunch of college kids to the mikveh.”
Despite Mayyim Hayyim’s decreased capacity at the time, Gondelman helped organize an annual trip for Brandeis students each year ahead of the High Holidays. With the second pool now open, more students can participate.
Harvard Hillel recently organized a trip to the mikveh for graduating seniors to mark the completion of college.
Engaging with the community through the mikveh has long been central to Diamant’s founding vision for the space. In doing so, Mayyim Hayyim has helped the ritual expand and grow, and even interact with other ancient practices. In 2024, the North Shore Hevra, a Boston-based community of Jews seeking to revive Jewish death and burial rituals called tahara, began working with Mayyim Hayyim to offer mikveh immersions for its tahara leaders.
Linda Goodspeed, cofounder of North Shore Hevra, said a shared passion for breathing contemporary life into ancient practice helped forge a relationship between the two organizations. Now, tahara volunteers can receive a newly created immersion blessing before the High Holidays, one adapted ancient practice to prepare for another.
“They were really our mentors,” Goodspeed added.
That mentorship extends far beyond Boston. Through the Rising Tide Open Waters Mikveh Network, 39 facilities in the U.S. and an additional nine internationally draw on Mayyim Hayyim’s extensive training resources to prepare their guides to serve the local community and foster mikvehs around the world.
Rabbi Miriam Berger, founder of Wellspring, another pluralistic mikveh in the network located in London, England, considers Mayyim Hayyim to be “the mothership.”
“Judaism gifted us mikveh,” she said. “Mayyim Hayyim gifted it back to us.”
The post After 4 years and a stubborn leak, a landmark mikveh is finally whole again appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
‘There’s nothing I can say to her’: Boulder attack survivors have words on antisemitism for Congressional nominee Melat Kiros
For Natalya Reznik and Ed Victor, Tuesday’s primary victory of Melat Kiros, now a Democratic congressional nominee for much of Denver, cut deep and took them back to the horrific first day in June 2025 when they attended an 18-minute protest walk to call for the release of hostages taken from Israel into Gaza on Oct. 7.
That day, Reznik, 54, and her husband carried posters of hostages Lior Rudaeff and Yair Yaakov whose bodies were later returned. As always, the mostly Jewish group of 28 walked quietly, letting their signs do the talking.
“Since 10/7 I was devastated. I expected people everywhere, not just in America, to take to the streets to put pressure on Hamas to release the hostages,” said Reznik who came to the U.S. 30 years ago from St. Petersburg, Russia “I was so naive — I really thought this was so horrific that it just couldn’t go unnoticed. But what I saw was the opposite — people took to the streets to protest Israel.”
Reznik didn’t hear a man shouting “Free Palestine” — others did — before she noticed her feet getting hot. She looked down to find much of her lower body on fire, likely from a Molotov cocktail. She rolled over on the grass to put them out. Another woman, Karen Diamond, was engulfed in flames.
Dressed up as a gardener so as not to be noticed in the park outside the Boulder County Courthouse, the attacker, Mohamed Soliman, 46, later told prosecutors he had researched “Zionist” events in the area.
But when a news anchor ahead of the primary asked Kiros whether the attack had been antisemitic, the former lawyer turned doctoral candidate drew a distinction between anti-Zionism and antisemitism. She tried to make the case that no one could presume Soliman’s motive.
“I don’t know what was in the heart of the perpetrator,” Kiros told a local Colorado station last month. “All I know is that he attacked innocent people because of what they might have believed. And I don’t even know what the people that were at that protest believed, too. In fact most of them were probably just there to ask that the people who were kidnapped on Oct. 7 be returned to their families.”
That logic found little purchase with Ed Victor, a resident of Louisville, Colorado, who had also been at the Boulder courthouse that day.
“You don’t have to look at his heart,” Victor said. “You can look at his actions.”
Soliman pleaded guilty to more than 100 felony charges in state court but not guilty to hate crime charges. He was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
The success of Kiros, 29, a Democratic Socialist of America in her first run for public office, echoed the victories of DSA-backed candidates Darializa Chevalier and Claire Valdez in New York, who similarly drew a line between antisemitism and anti-Zionism. Like those candidates, Kiros has advocated for one state with equal rights for Israelis and Palestinians.
Reznik does not live in the deep-blue district Kiros will be favored to win in November, which represents the largest Jewish community in Colorado. But she said Kiros’ victory was the result of a callousness toward Jewish people that now defines the attitude of the general public.
“It’s an uncomfortable feeling,” said Reznik, a Russian Jewish immigrant. “This is not the country I came to 30 years ago. I no longer feel that people in Congress even hold the same values that I do.”
Reznik’s burns from the attack that day covered 40% of her legs and left arm. She spent one week in intensive care and another in the hospital recovering from surgery. It was in the ICU that she first encountered people online trying to downplay the attack as anti-Zionist rather than antisemitic – a discourse that seemed to legitimize violence against Jews and continued to unfold in the hours and days after the firebombing.
“They’re encouraging people who are antisemites, who are simply scum, to feel as political activists,” Reznik said. “They speak the language of the murderers.”
Kiros’ equivocating comments ahead of Tuesday’s primary divided Denver Jews, with one rabbi who described herself as a “liberal Jew” writing in the Denver Post that Kiros’ candidacy “scared her.” Another Jewish writer defended Kiros, arguing that the candidate’s criticism is directed at the Israeli government and military, not the Jewish people.
In an interview on CNN the day after her primary win, Kiros tried to allay fears, adding that the “conflation of the actions of the state of Israel and the Jewish people … is putting them at greater risk.”
“My commitment is to protecting the sanctity of human life and dignity and that includes combating the hate and the rising antisemitism that we are seeing,” she said.
But for the survivors of that day’s attack who heard Kiros’ equivocation ahead of the primary, it was hard not to feel fear – and fury. Reznik saw Kiros’ refusal to call the attack antisemitic as the height of hypocrisy.
“There’s nothing I can say to her,” she said, “because I know she’s one of the people who’s not listening.”
The post ‘There’s nothing I can say to her’: Boulder attack survivors have words on antisemitism for Congressional nominee Melat Kiros appeared first on The Forward.
