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
Three years after Oct. 7, survey says Jewish engagement has reached an elevated ‘new normal’
(JTA) — Levels of engagement in Jewish life have risen overall, establishing a “new normal” three years after the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks, according to a survey released Thursday by the Jewish Federations of North America.
Thirty-eight percent of Jewish respondents surveyed by the federation umbrella group in May and June said they had increased their Jewish engagement in some way in the last three years, an increase of 7 percentage points over rates in 2025 yet down from the 43% rate in March 2024, in the months after the attacks. The survey had a margin of error of 1.8 percent.
JFNA researchers say the results demonstrate that this initial spike in engagement — which the organization dubbed “the Surge” — has had a lasting effect, prompting people to deepen their involvement in Jewish life even three years on.
“I think the fact that people are continuing to engage with community during a difficult time is a good thing, and it’s an opportunity for us to meet people’s needs in this moment,” Mimi Kravetz, JFNA’s chief impact and growth officer, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency ahead of the release of the findings Thursday morning.
The number of “Surgers,” she said, includes Jews who were already engaged but have found ways to become more engaged since the attacks.
Many in the Jewish community feared that Jewish engagement “would continue to decline as we got further out from the events of Oct. 7, and that likely people would return to something like their behavior prior to Oct. 7,” Kravetz said. “That is usually what happens after a major incident.”
JFNA surveyed more than 2,800 Jews by text message in May and June of this year. Follow-up questions were generated by AI, which Kravetz said allowed researchers to ask open-ended questions about respondents’ relationship to Jewish community and quickly sort the answers by category.
This approach unlocked new insights. A top motivator for Jewish engagement was “social or interpersonal” connections in informal settings, such as Shabbat dinners or personal invitations to Jewish events. And in what seems like an encouraging sign for congregational Jewish life, 65% of Jews who “Surged” were turning to synagogues — though Kravetz noted that not every shul’s membership has grown as a result.
The Chabad-Lubavitch movement, whose adherents place a premium on interpersonal connections and often operate in environments lacking in other Jewish communal infrastructure, was the second-most-popular engagement option.
Jews who had increased their levels of engagement were also more likely to voice support for Israel, the findings said. Ninety-three percent of “Surging” Jews said they were “emotionally attached to Israel,” compared to 51% of Jews whose level of engagement did not change. Additionally, 75% of Jews who grew their engagement agreed that “in general, Israel makes me proud to be Jewish,” compared to 36% who did not “Surge.”
Overall, respondents’ most frequently cited barrier to participation in Jewish life was Israeli politics. Large numbers of Jews said they struggled to connect with Jewish community spaces because they felt misaligned on Israel in one direction or another — data that JFNA said it did not quantify because it came out of the open-ended section of the survey.
The most common complaint, Kravetz said, was that Jews were seeking spaces they thought of as “apolitical.”
Kravetz said that many of those Jews, instead of dropping out of Jewish life, indicated they eventually found communities that aligned better with their values.
“These aren’t people who are walking away,” Kravetz said. “These are people who are leaning into Jewish community and are experiencing this tension. And usually, what we see is people are interested in finding Jewish spaces that meet their needs.”
The challenge for Jewish leaders, Kravetz said, is “to make sure that we have and support that diversity of spaces for people, so that they can find the right space that meets their needs.”
But that diversity has limits, as many prominent Jewish leaders — including heads of JFNA — have also urged Jewish communal spaces to reaffirm a commitment to Zionism at a moment when more and more Jews feel divided on Israel. Some Jewish leaders have explicitly called to reject anti- and non-Zionist Jews.
Kravetz doesn’t see those values as contradictory or damaging to the “Surge.” She pointed to another recent JFNA survey, released earlier this year, querying Jews about their relationship to Zionism.
While that survey found that only a third of American Jews identify as Zionist, it also found that 88% of the same population agree with what has historically been a basic tenet of Zionism: that “Israel has the right to exist as a Jewish, Democratic state.”
“I think being supportive of the premise of Zionism, and in how we define Zionism, is very much aligned with engaging the majority of the Jewish community,” she said.
The post Three years after Oct. 7, survey says Jewish engagement has reached an elevated ‘new normal’ appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
On Oct. 7, Mamdani spoke in support of Palestinians. A father from Gaza did it better.
On Wednesday in New York City, on the third anniversary of Oct. 7, two people spoke up for Palestinians. One of them was New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. The other person actually said something helpful.
In a statement from the mayor’s office, Mamdani expressed sorrow at the loss of over 1,100 Israeli lives and Hamas’ “horrific war crimes,” then pivoted to condemn Israel for its war against Hamas in Gaza, accusing Israel of ongoing genocide, war crimes, apartheid and occupation.
Then came the Hallmark-ian ending, “To honor the dead, we must fight for a world in which every person can live with freedom, safety, and dignity.”
It was four paragraphs of blame with a coda of pablum: no vision for a way forward and no idea of how to improve Palestinian lives, much less Israeli ones.
Vision and healing — that is, leadership — came not from the mayor, but from a Palestinian and an Israeli who spoke later that day at a forum uptown.
“It’s my choice to give the children the anger and the pain or to give them a chance” at a future, said Jaser AbuMoussa, a Gazan who suffered unfathomable loss during the recent conflict. “And I will choose the chance every day.”
“Our neighborhood, from Nir Oz to the sea, can be a paradise because of the human factor on both sides of the border, and not because we necessarily love each other,” said Jonathan Dekel-Chen, a member of the ravaged Kibbutz Nir Oz. “You don’t have to agree on everything to get there.”
AbuMoussa and Dekel-Chen appeared on stage together at the 92nd Street Y, speaking across chasms of grief. From the West Coast, I tuned into a livestream of the event, because if Israelis and Palestinians want a secure and just future, it starts not with pain-inducing pronouncements like Mamdani’s, but with painful conversations like this one.
On Oct. 15, 2023, an Israeli airstrike hit AbuMoussa’s home in Khan Younis in Gaza, killing his wife and two of his children, as well as a nephew, sister-in-law and a cousin. A second airstrike killed his mother, sister, uncle, aunt, a niece and a nephew. AbuMoussa, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, managed to evacuate with his two surviving children to the United Arab Emirates, where they underwent lifesaving surgeries.
“She was an architect,” he said of his wife, Heba. “She was a novelist. She was a poet, and above all, she was a wife and a mother.”
Hamas terrorists took Dekel-Chen’s son Sagui into Gaza, where he was held for 498 days before his release. Terrorists killed 47 out of 420 kibbutz members and took 76 people hostage, including the Bibas family.
Hamas and Islamic Jihad gunmen “rampaged for nine hours through the kibbutz, destroying everything in their path,” said Dekel-Chen, a historian at Hebrew University and visiting professor at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, which co-sponsored the event. He said he is only alive because he and his wife were on a work trip to the United States at the time.
So many arguments over Oct. 7 turn into comparative victimhood — Mamdani’s statement was an example of that, making sure to emphasize Palestinian loss.
But the Palestinian at the 92nd Street Y didn’t do that.
“To me, suffering is like an absolute value, and we are not here for a competition,” AbuMoussa said.
While on the same day in the same city, the mayor’s statement used the words “genocide,” “apartheid” and “war crimes,” the Gazan father who lost his wife and two of his four children used none of those words.
Both men made it clear that the pain and anger of Oct. 7 and the years that followed are ever-present, a fact of life. But so is the choice of how to channel that anger.
“I will not point it at people,” said AbuMoussa. “I will not point it at Jonathan because he is an Israeli. But I will point it at policies, at leaders, at systems that were invented to kill people.”
While he held Israel responsible for helping to create the catastrophe in Gaza — he pointed out that Israeli attacks have killed 1,400 Palestinians since the ceasefire — AbuMoussa — again, in contrast to Mamdani — excoriated Hamas. The group corrupted Gaza’s political, economic, social and above all religious life. It cast itself as the only legitimate interpretation of Islam, though AbuMoussa said Oct. 7 itself contravened Islamic law.
Hamas never treated protecting civilians as its job, AbuMoussa said, pointing out that Oct. 7 mastermind Yahya Sinwar’s family went into the tunnels while ordinary Gazans were left out, unprepared.
The Westerners who took to the streets and college campuses in support of resistance hurt Palestinians more than helped them, AbuMoussa said, because they blur Palestinians together with Hamas and the Iranian axis.
These were the very people Mamdani seemed to be pandering to in his statement — who turn Gaza, in AbuMoussa’s words, “into a flag or a pin.”
Dekel-Chen said his harshest critics are often Diaspora Jews who fail to separate what’s good for Israel from the government of Israel.
Because they spent no time trading accusations and blame, both men had plenty of time to discuss their vision for a better future.
Gazans aren’t leaving, despite the Israeli far right’s fantasies, and Israelis aren’t leaving, despite the Islamists’ fantasies, Dekel-Chen said.
It’s the simplest truth, but it carries extra weight when an Israeli Jew who lives a mile from Gaza says it: there are roughly seven million Jews and seven million Arabs between the river and the sea, and no one is going anywhere.
AbuMoussa said he is open to a confederation between Israelis and Palestinians, two states or “whatever.” But Oct. 7 proved the folly of believing the status quo, or just managing the conflict, will bring stability.
The way forward for now, both men said, is to push leaders to carry out the 20-point plan President Donald Trump put forward to help Gaza recover. They agreed that Washington still has the most leverage.
If Gazans had some sort of hope, AbuMoussa said, “I don’t think they will choose Hamas ever.”
Dekel-Chen said the insistence that Hamas fully disarm before any rebuilding “hurts us all.”
“Nothing positive will happen on our side of the border,” Dekel-Chen said, until most Gazans have hope in a post-Hamas future.
That is ultimately why both men decided to speak together — because they recognize what continuing the hatred costs.
“It’s the only way that I know how to honor those that I grieve, and the loss of life on both sides,” Dekel-Chen said.
It was a message, and a conversation that I wish Mamdani had heard in person. Instead, he spent the evening in Union Square, where anti-Israel protesters booed him for appearing with a group called Israelis for Peace.
To his credit, he showed up. But the same constituency the mayor seemed to court that morning turned on him that night, for standing beside actual Israelis calling for peace.
AbuMoussa and Dekel-Chen could have told him: You can stoke division or you can build a future. Choose the future.
The post On Oct. 7, Mamdani spoke in support of Palestinians. A father from Gaza did it better. appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Israel is the one thing both Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidates agree on
(JTA) — Democratic Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and GOP opponent Stacy Garrity faced off on Wednesday in a heated gubernatorial debate, clashing over most policy issues — with the notable exception of Israel.
“I want to recognize the anniversary of the Hamas attacks, where 1,200 innocent people were killed, including 49 Americans,” said Garrity, referring to the third anniversary of Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel.
“I want to remember the lives that were stolen, the families that were changed forever, and the Americans that didn’t make it home,” she added.
While Garrity, Pennsylvania’s state treasurer, has the endorsement of President Donald Trump, Shapiro has a 25 percentage point lead in a poll released Wednesday. Both candidates won their primaries uncontested in May, and both have been outspoken against antisemitism.
Shapiro, who himself is Jewish, likewise recognized “the third anniversary of the October 7 massacre” at the debate. He recalled how “Hamas, a terrorist organization, broke into Israel and murdered 1,200 innocents, took over 250 hostage, including many Americans.”
“This is a moment where my heart stands with the people of Israel,” he said. “My heart stands with the Jewish community, who I know are grieving as a result of this.”
“This is a moment where we need to stand together against terrorism, against hate and against antisemitism,” the governor added.
Although the candidates shared similar perspectives on Israel during Wednesday’s debate, they clashed on numerous other topics, including the death penalty, voter identification, taxes and tariffs.
Asked by the debate moderator about the plunging support for Israel in the Democratic Party, Shapiro replied that he has “been very, very consistent” in both his “love of Israel” and his disagreements with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Shapiro then noted that Israelis will head to the polls in just a few weeks to choose their next leader. He expressed hope that they would not elect Netanyahu, whom he said “has led Israel down a very dangerous and isolated path.”
“I want America to have a strong relationship with Israel and with the Israeli government,” Shapiro added. “That’s not possible right now with the Netanyahu government in charge.”
Shapiro, one of the most prominent Jewish Democrats nationwide, was among the final candidates considered by Kamala Harris in her vice-presidential search in the 2024 election. He is also seen as a possible 2028 presidential hopeful.
But Shapiro has also faced the challenges posed by increasing antisemitism in America. During Harris’s search, for example, a website and social media feed labeled him “No Genocide Josh” over his support for Israel.
In April 2025, an arsonist set fire to Shapiro’s house just hours after his family had conducted a Passover seder. In 2018, while Shapiro was serving as Pennsylvania’s attorney general, a terrorist killed 11 people and injured six others at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh..
Garrity, meanwhile, has more than tripled Pennsylvania’s investment in Israel bonds in her current role. She invested $20 million after the Oct. 7 attack and another $35 million in July 2025.
The post Israel is the one thing both Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidates agree on appeared first on The Forward.
