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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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This David Schwimmer sweater ad is playing on ‘Friends’ nostalgia. So why are commenters talking about Israel?
David Schwimmer, who played Ross on Friends, is tapping into some late ’90s and early 2000s nostalgia as the star in an ad this week marketing his “dream sweater” for Quince, a clothing and home goods store.
In the ad, Schwimmer, who is Jewish, sketches the perfect red sweater in a notebook while he sits in Central Park and then begins to see it on everyone: a man riding an electric scooter, an angry taxi driver who almost runs into him, a beautiful woman riding in the back of the taxi, even a dog.
The gag is a reference to the Friends episode “The One with the Red Sweater,” where Ross’ on-again-off-again girlfriend Rachel is pregnant and has not told the father, whose identity is a mystery to the group; Joey, Monica and Phoebe know that the father left a red sweater at the apartment, so when Ross stops by and is relieved to find his sweater, they figure out he’s the dad-to-be.
“I’ve been looking for this for like a month,” he says, just after making a reference to the Yiddish-named snack, Mashuga Nuts.
The episode and the ad are apolitical. So why then are some people planning to cancel their Quince orders and boycott the company?
Schwimmer, many of the commenters on the ad are saying, is a Zionist.
“I don’t approve of you featuring a Zio in your ad,” one Instagram user commented. “Please do better.”
Schwimmer on Israel, antisemitism
Schwimmer has been outspoken about antisemitism since long before the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel and the ensuing war in Gaza. Over the course of his career, he’s spoken at multiple Anti-Defamation League events and called for other people to stand against hate, routinely saying, “Silence is complicity.”
The actor appears to have never explicitly identified as a Zionist, and his statements have focused more on galvanizing support for Jews and Israelis — rather than on the Jewish state. But this is of little importance to his critics.
His relationship with the ADL, a staunchly pro-Israel organization, is damning enough for some. Schwimmer also starred in an Israeli commercial for Meitav, an investment management company. The move puts him at odds with the growing Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign, which stands against any financial relationship with Israel or Israeli companies.
After Oct. 7, Schwimmer put out a statement calling the Hamas attack an “atrocity” and a “genocide,” adding that any attempt to justify what happened is “indefensible and antisemitic.” In the same statement, he also touched on Palestinian suffering:
“One can condemn Hamas and still object to the Israeli government’s policies regarding the occupation (as many Israelis do), still believe in the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination, and still mourn the loss of Palestinian civilians and the current destruction of their homes, schools, hospitals and places of worship.”
He’s also been vocal about sexual violence that occurred on Oct. 7, sharing the controversial New York Times piece headlined “Screams Without Words,” that investigated allegations of sexual assault committed by Hamas during the attack. Critics of the piece have questioned the validity of the reporting and argued that one of its reporters is biased toward Israel. The Times has stood by the piece.
Additionally, Schwimmer has criticized universities’ responses to pro-Palestinian protests on campuses that he said have veered into antisemitism.
Schwimmer spoke at a 2025 ADL summit about the backlash he’s gotten for his advocacy, noting that while he’s been “attacked” and “abandoned,” he’s found deep meaning in speaking out and has no plans to stop. He concluded his speech calling on fellow celebrities to do the same.
“You don’t have to say anything political,” Schwimmer said. “No one is asking you to solve the conflict in the Middle East. Just say that you stand with your Jewish friends, colleagues and neighbors against hatred and discrimination.”
The controversy isn’t bothering Quince.
“We’ve seen more than 8 million views across our social channels in the first 48 hours, alongside international press coverage and recognition from the marketing community for the creative,” said Dakota Isaacs, head of brand strategy and narrative, in an email to the Forward. “It’s been especially rewarding to see fans connect with the humor and nostalgia while discovering Quince.”
The post This David Schwimmer sweater ad is playing on ‘Friends’ nostalgia. So why are commenters talking about Israel? appeared first on The Forward.
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Why I urged my parents to avoid the counterprotest in Philadelphia
Parents usually tell their children whether they can go out, but last week, on a phone call with my parents, our roles reversed, and I urged them not to join a Philadelphia food crawl with their friends. The event was organized in response to a bicycle rally calling for the boycott of six restaurants, all Jewish-owned, to “show these zionist business owners that we see them for the disgusting humans they are.”
The counterprotest intended to show solidarity with these businesses by patronizing and protecting them on the day of the protest, given the hostile framing of the boycott against the restaurants and their Jewish owners. However, I was concerned that it would be co-opted by pro-Israel partisans, who not only would instrumentalize it for their own agenda — one which, in my view, is actively detrimental to the fight against antisemitism — but would also stoke chaos and violence. It’s a film that’s played out time and again, including when I was an undergraduate at UCLA: A call is put out that Jews are under attack, counterprotesters mobilize in response, and anger quickly morphs into belligerence, hostility, and violence.
Fortunately, it appears that no one was seriously hurt during Sunday’s bike rally and counterprotest. As I had feared, though, some demonstrators became aggressive as verbal confrontations and scuffles broke out across Rittenhouse Square. While it’s likely that some of the pro-Israel demonstrators were there for the sole purpose of displaying that they are not “Jews with trembling knees,” others ostensibly were there because, as the names of two of the organizations behind it would suggest, they want to StopAntisemitism and EndJewHatred.
If those were the goals, the demonstration was an unmitigated disaster. And much of the discourse surrounding the boycott laid the groundwork for failure.
To many Jews, it may seem self-evident that the boycott was illegitimate and antisemitic. For the protesters, though, there seems to be a genuine inability to understand how it could be. They also seem unable or unwilling to condemn antisemitism.
Anger at the protesters is understandable, but if the goal is to stop antisemitism and end Jew hatred, it is important to address the root of the problem, which starts with understanding why the protesters might have such a profound misunderstanding of antisemitism.
For several decades, following the Six-Day War of 1967 and the Cold War period, pro-Israelism has been a core, essential feature of hegemonic anti-antisemitism advocacy. Groups like the ADL have made the phenomenon of so-called “new antisemitism” – a term that explains hostility toward Israel by claiming that the nation is maligned out of bigotry, as the proverbial Jew among the nations – a central focus of their work, especially in times of increased Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Though this is hardly “new,” the stakes and intensity of attacks against the “new antisemitism” have been raised in a post–Oct. 7, post–destruction of Gaza reality. In effect, this approach has been successful in as much as it has led to a public perception that the fight against antisemitism and the fight in defense of Israel are the same fight, and cannot be separated.
As a result, when anti-Zionist, pro-Palestinian activists are accused of antisemitism or expected to condemn it, they view it as purely cynical — an attempt to delegitimize their movement rather than a true objection to how they have treated or spoken about Jews. This very refusal to condemn antisemitism is often read as itself antisemitic by many Jews. This “acrimonious circle,” as philosopher Brian Klug described it 13 years ago, could go on forever.
As the acrimonious circle spins and spins, there are a few options that groups fighting antisemitism can consider:
- They can continue pushing pro-Palestinian activists to see both condemning antisemitism and supporting Israel as intertwined moral duties.
- They can insist on that interconnection, but tell pro-Palestinian activists to choose combatting antisemitism no matter what their beliefs about Israel are.
- They can accept that pro-Palestinian activists will rarely condemn antisemitism at their own initiative, and deploy tactics of intimidation, bullying, harassment, and/or violence against them.
- They can accept that pro-Palestinian activists will rarely condemn antisemitism at their own initiative, and present condemning antisemitism as a human-rights oriented stance, in line with standing up for all marginalized people, including Palestinians.
The first option is the one that organizations like the ADL have often chosen. In its statement about the bike rally and boycott, the group said that criticism of Israeli government policies are acceptable, but discrimination is not. Criticisms that the ADL considers ipso facto discriminatory, however, include claims that Israel has committed the crimes of genocide and apartheid. As a result, activists lend the ADL and groups like it no credibility and will dismiss any of their condemnations out of hand.
The third option is what the protest on Sunday became. Any Philadelphian can tell you that a brawl in the middle of Rittenhouse Square during an Eagles game is far from unusual. But the fighting in this instance broke out because of the boycott — one side driven by a fervor that they needed to defend Jews facing an existential threat from anti-Zionists, the other driven by a fervor that they needed to bring justice to a city ravaged by what protesters believe are business-owning war criminals.
The second option is a sensible demand from a moral perspective. However, it is not a strategic one. The hard truth is that for many, though certainly not all, pro-Palestinian activists, the cause comes before all else, including standing up against antisemitism.
Therefore, the only way forward for Jews is the fourth option: to frame the fight against antisemitism as a fight for the rights of all people. This is not a perfect solution — no solution could be. There will always be some unwilling to oppose antisemitism no matter what tactic is deployed. However, it will make plain that there is no contradiction between condemning antisemitism and supporting Palestinian rights, that in fact the task is to support human rights universally and to condemn all who violate these rights. That necessarily includes standing against Israeli war crimes and its regime of inequality, and that includes condemning those who hold Jews as Jews complicit for Israel’s actions and condemning those who harass, intimidate, and scrutinize Jewish business owners for their presumed political stances.
My parents, fortunately, decided to remove themselves from the chaos of this day and went to support the targeted businesses as regular patrons on other days throughout the week. I was pleased to see that our rabbi, who leads one of the largest synagogues in Center City, made a point of trying to de-escalate tensions and confrontations from within the Philadelphia Jewish community, as well as highlighting the strength and vibrancy of Philly’s Jewish life on its own terms.
These are important, positive things we can do in the short term. That said, if we want long-term change to come from the pro-Palestinian movement – and I think this moment requires it – anti-antisemitism groups that cannot meet the moment must step aside and make room for those that are capable and prepared to frame the fight against antisemitism as a fight for, not against, fairness, justice, and equality for all.
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Israel approves $31.5 million plan to strengthen Jewish education in North America
(JTA) — JERUSALEM – Israel’s government has approved a NIS 100 million ($31.5 million) plan, initiated by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, to strengthen Jewish education in North America, a statement from his office said Wednesday.
Based on a partnership and joint investment with North American Jewish communities, the goal of the plan is to strengthen Jewish identity and ties to Israel among the next generation of Diaspora Jews in the United States.
The approval of the plan, which was developed with representatives of the Jewish Federations of North America (JFNA), follows a government decision made in June.
It comes a day after Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, was sworn in and two weeks after a national election left Netanyahu facing a battle to stay in power as his rival, Gadi Eisenkot, received the mandate to form the next government.
It also comes amid signs of growing disaffection among Diaspora Jews, particularly younger generations, toward Israel and the Netanyahu-led government. Recent polls suggest that support for Israel among Diaspora Jews, especially in response to its policies in Gaza and on matters of democracy, is slipping.
A February survey of American Jews by the Jewish Federations of North America found that only one-third of American Jews aged 18-34 identify as Zionist, even as nearly nine in 10 say they support Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state.
A separate Pew poll in May examining American views of Israel found that Jewish attitudes have shifted since 2024. The survey found that 83% of Jews view the Israeli people favorably, down from 89% in 2024, while 47% view the Israeli government favorably, compared with 54% in 2024.
“The plan we approved today, in partnership with Jewish communities in North America, is an investment in the future generation of Diaspora Jews. Together, we will strengthen Jewish identity, deepen the connection to Israel and ensure that our heritage and values are passed proudly from generation to generation,” Netanyahu said in the statement.
“The future of the Jewish people depends on our ability to ensure that future generations know their heritage, connect to their Jewish identity and maintain their deep ties to the State of Israel,” he said, adding that Israel would not “stand idly by in the face of challenges,” such as antisemitism.
Under the framework of the plan, which will focus on increasing the number of students enrolled in Jewish educational frameworks, the Israeli government allocation will be matched 50% with funding from Jewish Federations and other non-governmental sources.
JFNA said in a statement that it welcomed the Israeli cabinet’s decision to invest in Jewish education across the U.S. and Canada, calling it an “unprecedented partnership between the Government of Israel and North American Jewish communities to strengthen Jewish identity and ensure a vibrant future for the Jewish people.”
“We are proud to launch this historic partnership with the Government of Israel to expand access and grow enrollment in Jewish day schools across North America,” said Gary Torgow, chair of the Board of Jewish Federations of North America.
Eric D. Fingerhut, JFNA’s president and CEO, said the partnership “reflected the shared commitment of Israel and North American Jewry to strengthening Jewish identity and expanding educational opportunities for more families.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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