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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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Hiroshima, the 10th Plague, and the Strength to Take Decisive Action Against Evil
509th Composite Group aircraft immediately before their bombing mission of Hiroshima. Photo: Wikipedia
In the late 1980s, when I was a student at Ner Yisrael Yeshiva in Baltimore, I had a close friend who took night classes at Johns Hopkins University. One evening, he came back visibly shaken. That night’s guest speaker had been Paul Tibbets, the pilot who flew the Enola Gay and dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
My friend told me that Tibbets spoke calmly and deliberately, with the controlled precision of a career military officer. He made no attempt to dramatize what he had done, nor did he flinch from its consequences. Dropping the bomb, he said, was the correct military decision, adding bluntly, “I would do it again.”
His point was straightforward: the atomic bomb ended the war quickly and spared the world a catastrophic invasion of Japan that could have cost hundreds of thousands of American lives and untold numbers of Japanese lives as well.
Tibbets did not deny the human suffering the bomb caused, but he rejected the idea that this suffering made the mission wrong. He expressed no regret about carrying it out. In his view, it saved lives precisely because it brought the war to an immediate end.
At the time, I filed it away as an unusual but interesting historical tidbit. This week, as I walked through the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, the memory of hearing about Tibbets’ talk at Johns Hopkins came roaring back.
The museum is harrowing in ways that are hard to describe. Photographs of survivors, their burned skin hanging from their bodies. Metal objects fused together or melted almost beyond recognition by the heat of the blast. A hauntingly scorched child’s tricycle. A watch frozen at the exact moment the bomb detonated. Photos of victims bearing massive keloid growths years after the war, their bodies grotesquely reshaped by the long reach of that terrible day.
The suffering is overwhelming, graphic, and impossible to ignore. Tens of thousands were killed instantly. Tens of thousands more died from horrific burns in the days that followed, while others from radiation sickness and cancer years later. Most were civilians.
And yet, what struck me almost as powerfully as the horror of what was there was what wasn’t there. There is almost no context. No mention of Japan’s stubborn refusal to surrender. No discussion of the horrific war crimes committed by the Japanese across Asia. No reference to Pearl Harbor, the deadly attack on America launched by Japan in December 1941 without a declaration of war.
In fact, the Americans barely appear at all. It almost feels as if the bomb descended from the heavens – an act of cosmic cruelty, unconnected to history, agency, or responsibility.
To be clear: none of this diminishes the suffering. Nothing could. But the absence of context matters. Because without it, war becomes a morality play with only one role assigned – that of the victim – and no serious questions are asked about how wars actually end, or how they begin in the first place.
And that question is unavoidable in the 21st century: how do we reconcile our horror at the impact of war with the reality that wars sometimes must be ended decisively – because not ending them can be the worse of two evils?
Public attitudes toward the atomic bombings of Japan reveal just how uneasy we have become with that question. In 1945, immediately after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a Gallup poll found that 85 percent of Americans approved of the decision, with only a small minority disapproving.
By 1990, approval had fallen to 53 percent – but it largely held steady through the early 2000s. A 2015 survey by the Pew Research Center found a clear majority of Americans still saying the bombings were justified.
But over the past decade, something has shifted. A Pew study published last August, marking the 80th anniversary of Hiroshima, shows a public deeply conflicted. Only 35 percent now say the bombings were justified. A full third are unsure. Nearly 70 percent believe nuclear weapons have made the world less safe.
To be fair, that discomfort is understandable. It is also historically naïve.
It is no coincidence that I found myself wrestling with this question in the same week we read Parshat Bo – the Torah portion that confronts this moral dilemma head-on.
The 10th plague to strike ancient Egypt, Makat Bechorot, is unlike anything that comes before it. Until that point, Egypt has endured economic collapse, environmental devastation, disease, and widespread suffering. Pharaoh has been warned, pleaded with, negotiated with. None of it works. He absorbs each blow and refuses to consider surrender.
And then, in a single night – in one devastating, irreversible moment – the war ends. Every firstborn son in Egypt dies. There is not a single home untouched by the plague. Pharaoh summons Moses in panic – he himself is a firstborn and fears for his own life – and in the dead of night the terms of redemption are agreed. By morning, the Israelites are on their way out of Egypt, free and unchallenged.
The Ramban makes an essential point that is often missed: the final plague was not merely punitive. It was decisive. The earlier plagues failed precisely because they were survivable. Pharaoh could absorb the damage, regroup, and convince himself that he could endure one more blow.
The death of the firstborn changed all that. The shock of this final plague was so absolute that Pharaoh could no longer entertain defiance.
Ramban is clear and unsentimental: gradualism is not merciful – it is ineffective. As long as Pharaoh believed Egypt could stagger on, Israel would remain enslaved. Ending the conflict required an act so overwhelming that the very idea of continued resistance collapsed.
The Maharal of Prague goes even further. He explains that Egypt was not merely an enemy nation – it was a corrupt moral system built on dehumanization and cruelty. Incremental punishment could never undo it. Only a shock powerful enough to reorder reality itself could break Egypt’s grip on history and end its cruelty. The 10th plague was not about vengeance. It was about ending Egypt’s capacity to perpetuate evil.
Seen through that lens, Hiroshima looks different – not less tragic, but more intelligible. By the summer of 1945, Japan had lost its navy, its air force, and much of its urban infrastructure. Still, it refused to surrender.
US military planners warned that a ground invasion would lead to catastrophic casualties on both sides, with civilians trapped in the middle for months or even years. The atomic bomb ended the war almost immediately. Like Makat Bechorot, it was horrifying – and precisely for that reason, it worked.
This is not an argument for cruelty. It is an argument against moral theater – against pretending that drawn-out wars fought “humanely” are somehow kinder simply because their brutality is dispersed over time and geography. There is a difference between loving peace and being unwilling to confront the cost of ending war.
The Torah never asks us to celebrate Egyptian suffering. On the contrary, our Seder night rituals deliberately acknowledge it. But the Torah also refuses to sanitize redemption. Freedom did not come through endless diplomacy or moral posturing. It came through decisive, devastating force – after every other avenue had failed.
Standing in Hiroshima, surrounded by reminders of the unimaginable pain caused by the atomic bomb, I felt the full weight of that tension. But on reflection, Paul Tibbets understood something we in the 21st century have grown uncomfortable admitting: grief and justification can coexist. Mourning and moral clarity are not opposites.
Parshat Bo teaches us that sometimes, when evil refuses to let go, we are forced into terrible choices – not because we want to make them, but because there is no other way forward. It is a lesson worth remembering in an age that fears consequences more than it fears the endurance of evil.
The author is a rabbi in Beverly Hills, California.
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Iran: IAEA Must Clarify Stance on June Attacks Before Inspecting Bombed Sites
Mohammad Eslami, head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI), speaks at the opening of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) General Conference at the agency’s headquarters in Vienna, Austria, Sept. 15, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Lisa Leutner
The UN nuclear watchdog must clarify its stance on US and Israeli attacks on Iran‘s nuclear sites last June before inspectors are allowed to visit those facilities, Iranian media on Friday quoted the country’s atomic chief as saying.
Mohammad Eslami said the inspections so far had been limited to undamaged sites and he criticized the watchdog for letting Israeli and US pressure influence its actions.
Eslami made his comments in response to the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Rafael Grossi, who said on Tuesday that the standoff over inspections “cannot go on forever.”
Grossi has not explicitly condemned or criticized the attacks nor has he formally outlined a protocol for inspecting the damaged facilities.
Access to sites that were attacked needs “a specific protocol,” Eslami said, adding: “When a military strike occurs and there are environmental risks, it must be defined and a guideline must be designed.”
“The agency has to clarify its position regarding the military attacks on the nuclear facilities that have been registered by the agency and are under its supervision so we can understand what role they play,” state TV quoted Eslami as having told reporters in Tehran on Thursday.
He said Tehran had submitted a statement at the IAEA‘s General Conference last September demanding that attacks on nuclear sites be prohibited. But it was not placed on the agenda and was ignored, he said.
“It is unrealistic, unprofessional, and unfair that, because of pressure from Israel and the US, he [Grossi] is putting pressure on us,” Eslami said.
Grossi told Reuters on Tuesday that the IAEA had inspected all 13 declared nuclear facilities in Iran that were not targeted last June but had been unable to inspect any of the three key sites that were bombed – Natanz, Fordow, and Isfahan.
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Syrian Kurds Hand Over New Prison to Govt Troops as Truce Deadline Looms
Syrian security forces stand guard outside al-Aqtan prison, where some Islamic State detainees are held, in Raqqa, Syria, Jan. 23, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Karam al-Masri
Syria’s government took over a prison in the north on Friday after the negotiated exit of Kurdish fighters from the facility in what a senior official said was a positive sign that a truce between the two forces could hold.
Government troops have seized swathes of northern and eastern territory in the last two weeks from the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces in a rapid turn of events that has consolidated President Ahmed al-Sharaa’s rule.
Sharaa’s forces were amassing around a last cluster of Kurdish-held cities in the northeast earlier this week when he abruptly announced a ceasefire, giving the SDF until Saturday night to come up with a plan to integrate with Syria’s army.
The deadline is aimed at pushing through a sweeping deal agreed on Jan. 18 that would see the semi-autonomous institutions run by Kurdish forces in the northeast over the last decade join the central state, something the SDF had resisted over the last year.
The agreement also stipulates that the government would take control of a string of SDF-run prisons and detention camps holding fighters and civilians linked to Islamic State, the ultra-conservative Sunni Islamist group that the SDF fought for years with US backing.
This week, one prison and one detention camp fell to the government after chaotic withdrawals by the SDF, in which some IS-linked individuals briefly escaped. Seeking to avoid a security breach, the government negotiated the pull-out of Kurdish fighters from the al-Aqtan prison in the northern province of Raqqa overnight.
A senior Syrian government official told Reuters on Friday the negotiations over al-Aqtan gave hope that Saturday’s deadline would yield a political solution instead of renewed fighting.
However, he said the government had not yet received a response from the SDF on its integration plan or its candidate for deputy defense minister, a post for which Sharaa had asked the SDF to nominate someone.
MILITARY PREPARATIONS UNDERWAY IN CASE TALKS FAIL
SDF sources said on Friday the deadline for their response could be extended, but the Syrian official said there was no discussion of an extension at this time.
Despite hope for a negotiated resolution, both sides have ramped up military preparations.
Syrian military officials say they are readying forces for a fight and Reuters reporters have seen army vehicles and buses of fighters arriving near the Kurdish-held city of Hasakeh, where Kurdish forces have also reinforced positions.
Senior officials from primary mediator the United States and France, which has also been coordinating ceasefire talks, have urged Sharaa not to send his troops into remaining Kurdish-held areas, diplomatic sources told Reuters.
“We are calling on the Syrian authorities to assume their full responsibility in protecting all civilians, including Kurdish civilians,” French foreign ministry spokesperson Pascal Confavreux said.
The US, which long backed the SDF but now sees Sharaa as its primary partner in Syria, has been helping transfer detained IS fighters from Syria to Iraq.
The SDF withdrew on Tuesday from al-Hol, which along with another camp, Roj, houses 28,000 civilians, mainly women and children who fled Islamic State’s strongholds as the group’s self-proclaimed caliphate collapsed. They include Syrians, Iraqis and 8,500 nationals of other countries.
The UN refugee agency UNHCR was able to access al-Hol camp on Friday with Syrian government officials and established contact with some camp residents, said deputy UN spokesperson Farhan Haq.
“Essential supplies have also resumed. Trucks carrying bread entered the camp today, facilitated by UNHCR following a three-day interruption caused by the volatile security situation inside the camp. In addition, water trucking services organized by UNICEF … were delivered yesterday, helping to partially restore access to basic services for the camp population,” Haq said.
The rapid loss of territory by the SDF in recent days is the most dramatic shift in Syria’s control map since Sharaa’s forces toppled longtime ruler Bashar al-Assad in late 2024.
Sharaa vowed to rule for all Syrians but minorities, including Kurds in the northeast, Druze in the south and Alawites in the west, remain deeply distrustful of him.
In a bid to improve ties, Sharaa issued a decree on Jan. 16 that designates Kurdish as a national language alongside Arabic.