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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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A new musical wonders: What happened to solidarity with English Jews?
The Battle of Cable Street, a 1936 street scuffle off an obscure stretch of road in London’s East End, holds a totemic importance to the Jews of England, and, given how few they are in number, a correspondingly small significance in the larger British imagination.
The musical Cable Street, dramatizing that showdown between Jewish and Irish East Enders against Oswald Mosley’s fascist blackshirts, arrives Off-Broadway from London amid a spate of headlines about the safety of English Jews and a subsequent minimization of their fears. Only now, the political alignment of those defending or hectoring Jews has recalibrated from the days the play examines.
In his rhetoric and tactics, the anti-Islam “activist” Tommy Robinson, who antagonizes Muslim neighborhoods and marched through Central London in his “Unite the Kingdom” rallies, would appear to be the heir apparent to a Mosley, with the exception that he presents himself as a friend of the Jews. (Most Jews in the U.K. won’t have him; the Israeli far-right welcomed him to the Jewish state last October.)
On the left, the multicultural coalition has found a cause in Palestinian rights, which they march for like clockwork. Jews, who in the U.K. make up about .5% of the population but a whole 29% of recorded religious hate crimes, don’t count in their social justice calculus, comedian David Baddiel has argued. Evidence is mounting in that direction.
Police have surrendered to community leaders pushing to cancel an Israeli soccer club match, fabricating evidence with A.I. post facto to make it seem like the Israel fans will be the violent faction. A Panorama documentary from last month makes an earnest case for Jewish anxiety, but aired only after the BBC was made to review their standards over stories on Gaza following the network running a documentary that failed to disclose its narrator was the son of a Hamas minister. (This to my mind is nowhere near as egregious as the channel’s reluctance some years before to back down from blaming Orthodox children for their own abuse by mistranslating a word of Hebrew into an anti-Arab slur.)
Jews being gunned down outside shuls on Yom Kippur or stabbed in the streets – as they were just last week, two days before I saw this musical — don’t mobilize the masses. They do get the odd pundit condemning the violence, only to then to whatabout with the humanitarian disaster in Gaza or blame Jewish institutions’ efforts to conflate Jews and Israel, as if only when uncoupled will their targeting be truly horrendous.
British Jews are so much a rounding error they could hardly sway a council election. That fact scarcely moves the needle on the old libels of governmental control, as Labour responds to violence with crack downs on pro-Palestinian protests.
The development of Cable Street goes back years before the current bloodletting, yet it has hit on a rhyme in history.
The story provides a framing device of a present-day walking tour before jumping back in time to follow three youths and their families: Irish immigrant Mairead (Lizzy-Rose Essin-Kelly), who dreams of a writer’s life during her day job rolling bagels; Sammy Scheinberg (a dynamic Isaac Gryn), who wants to be a boxer against the wishes of his shmata business father; and Ron (Barney Wilkinson) a recent Lancashire transplant, underemployed, with hair the color of threshed wheat, ripe for recruitment by a band of populist nativists.
The show finds hope in an unlikely coalition of Irish dockworkers, Jews and Communists rallying to stop a police-escorted British Union of Fascists (BUF) march through London’s Jewish Quarter. The parable is so near to today’s headlines that it can make one’s head spin, and, in the particular case of a Jew, scan for allies. Better luck in New York, with the Brits Off Broadway festival, than across the pond, where this may be taken as a more general parable, with Jews as allegorical victims standing in for other marginalized groups. To read into the story the excesses of today’s protests, and what the authorities allow under the pretext of free speech, would surely be sacrilege, depending on which marchers it’s applied to and where your loyalties lie.
The music by Tim Gilvin has shades of what I’ll call Hebraic Hamilton (“Dream of making the dough, making the bread, baking the challah,” Sammy spits bars over a backbeat). There’s an Irish jig and a ballad that sounds like Coldplay, and “Only Words,” an elegiac plea from a Jewish father to his hothead son. (Jez Unwin plays the Scheinberg patriarch, a modern-day descendant and the leader of the Stepney BUF.) A ragtime number of chattering broadsheets sellers feeds us intermittent exposition.
The introduction of the BUF imagines them as a ‘90s boy band, making fun before they prove their menace. It works better downtown, when the Nazis in another British import, Operation Mincemeat, do their K-Pop number, as that show is an all-out farce.
Better by far is the play’s treatment of Jewish scenes, scripted by book writer Alex Kanefsky with deft direction by Adam Lenson. We hear a hamotzi, see a synagogue (with an implied women’s balcony) and hear a refrain of Sholem Aleichem and Sim Shalom integrated into musically layered sequences.
The indefatigable cast of 13 plays countless characters, switching allegiances from Mosleyites to Jews at the donning of an armband. This can lead to odd stage imagery, as when musician-actor Max Alexander-Taylor is togged up like a blackshirt while riffing on an electric guitar. (The rest of the band is on a top level, shielded in by the corrugated metal and chainlink of Yoav Segal’s set design.)
But there are moments of sublime stage work, après Les Miz, as the story’s action rises and the street mounts a defense with slogans borrowed from Spanish Republicans. The play, in its chilling wisdom, doesn’t stop at this high point. It allows room for what followed: The BUF’s membership only grew after the battle. Regrouping, they retaliated with a pogrom against the Jews. This time, no one showed up to defend them.
The cringey lyric of the battle song — “we’re not like the others, we won’t let you demonize our sisters and brothers” — is replaced with a more sober conclusion from Sammy’s sister in the wreckage of the attack.
After noting how “the rich blame the poor, the poor blame the rich and everybody hates the Jews,” Rosa Scheinberg (Romona Lewis-Malley) laments that “when the common enemy’s defeated, old wounds flare up, and old mistakes get repeated.” Solidarity was but a brief and shining moment.
As a concession to hope, the show doesn’t end there, but it very well might.
The musical Cable Street plays at 59E59 in New York through May 24. Tickets and more information can be found here.
The post A new musical wonders: What happened to solidarity with English Jews? appeared first on The Forward.
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Progress Without Power: The Limits of the Lebanon Ceasefire
Smoke rises following explosions in southern Lebanon, near the Israel-Lebanon border, as seen from northern Israel, April 27, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Shir Torem
Last month’s announcement by President Donald Trump of a temporary extension to the Lebanon–Israel ceasefire, amidst ambassador-level Israeli-Lebanese talks in Washington, was greeted, in some quarters, with cautious optimism.
This is understandable.
Lebanon and Israel have been in a technical state of war for decades, with even basic engagement once unthinkable.
What’s more, rhetoric emerging from the Lebanese government of President Joseph Aoun — including unprecedented criticisms of Hezbollah, the heavily armed Iranian terrorist proxy which has dominated Lebanon for decades — provides even more reasons for optimism.
But that optimism collided almost immediately with reality. Soon after the extension was announced, Israeli troops came under attack from a Hezbollah drone strike, leaving six wounded and 19-year-old Sgt. Idan Fooks dead — the third Israeli soldier killed since the ceasefire began in early April.
Israel responded, as it was entitled to under the terms of the ceasefire agreement, with targeted strikes on Hezbollah positions and infrastructure. Retaliatory attacks have since continued.
These events expose the limits of the ceasefire.
The intentions may be honorable, and hopes may be real. But hope is not a strategy. And the situation in Lebanon is such that any positive hopes for an end to the violence cannot be fulfilled while an armed Hezbollah remains a decisive power in Lebanon.
Hezbollah has long operated as a state within a state — exercising power far beyond Lebanon’s elected government. Any agreement struck with Beirut is therefore inherently constrained, because the Lebanese government does not control much of its own territory, and does not currently have the ability to make Hezbollah stop firing at Israel, much less disarm. Indeed, Hezbollah openly says it will not be bound by any deal the Lebanese government makes with Israel.
This reality was laid bare in March, when Lebanon expelled the Iranian ambassador — only for him to simply refuse to leave.
To its credit, for the first time in years, Lebanon has shown signs of recognizing the problem, and trying to actually do something about it. For example, Lebanon has moved to end Hezbollah’s control over Beirut’s airport, taken steps against unauthorized weapons, and President Joseph Aoun has even accused Hezbollah of treason.
Meanwhile, Israeli forces continue to uncover Hezbollah weapons stockpiles — including in children’s rooms and underground bunkers within populated areas in southern Lebanon, which the Lebanese army claimed to have cleared of Hezbollah military bases and activity last year. All of this is in direct violation of the 2006 United Nations Security Council Resolution 1701, which calls for Hezbollah’s disarmament, as well as the ceasefire agreement that ended the Israel-Hezbollah war in 2024, in which Beirut promised to finally fulfill its obligation under 1701.
This is why the current ceasefire does not fully address the real sources of violence and instability, even as too many in the international community continue to confuse ceasefires with peace.
Reports indicate that Hamas is using the ceasefire in Gaza to rebuild capabilities and consolidate control there. Hezbollah has followed a similar pattern. So even if periods of calm emerge, they are unlikely to last long.
There is no question that Iran and its proxies have been weakened by the last two and a half years of war. But ideological regimes do not measure success in conventional terms. They do not concede defeat. And they do not abandon their objectives.
This is why the persistent focus by parts of the international community on ceasefires and “de-escalation” — with the demands directed mainly at Israel — risks overlooking the central challenge.
French President Emmanuel Macron continues to push for de-escalation, urging Israel to withdraw from Lebanese territory and calling for Hezbollah to cease its attacks. He also says Hezbollah must ultimately be disarmed by the Lebanese themselves.
Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong echoes similar concerns, condemning Hezbollah’s attacks on Israel and calling for an immediate cessation. At the same time, she has condemned in the “strongest terms” Israeli strikes on Lebanon, without fully acknowledging that they have been targeted against Hezbollah infrastructure and operatives. She mentions in passing that Hezbollah should be disarmed.
Yet both leaders failed to address just how Hezbollah can be disarmed — which is the central question. Statements that Hezbollah “should” be disarmed are nothing but empty words.
When dealing with absolutist religious ideologies, diplomacy is not necessarily a strength. It can become a vulnerability — exploited by those who understand that the Western aversion to conflict can itself be weaponized.
The Israel-Lebanon talks are signs of progress. But progress without power is terribly fragile. And as long as Hezbollah remains armed and entrenched, hope is a dangerous strategy.
Justin Amler is a policy analyst at the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC).
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Israel Must Stop Handing Victories to Its Critics
A general view shows the plenum at the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, in Jerusalem, May 29, 2019. Photo: Reuters / Ronen Zvulun.
Are some of Israel’s own decisions undermining its future?
No one who cares about Israel wants to ask that question. No one who understands Jewish history, regional reality, or the relentless threats Israel faces wants to even entertain it. Yet concern is growing among many who support Israel deeply and sincerely. They are not questioning Israel’s right to exist — but they are questioning if Israel’s actions are harming the Jewish State in the long run.
Let me be clear from the start: Israel has every right to exist. Israel has every right to defend its citizens. Israel has every right to confront terrorism and prevent those who openly seek its destruction from succeeding. In a region where genocidal rhetoric is still common, self defense is not optional. It is essential.
But rights alone do not guarantee wisdom. A nation can be morally justified and strategically misguided at the same time.
Recent events surrounding attempts to breach the Gaza maritime blockade offer a telling example. Many of the activists involved are not neutral humanitarians. Some seek spectacle more than solutions. They understand that confrontation with Israel generates headlines and outrage, and that images travel quickly across the world. Provocation is often the point.
Yet Israel too often responds in ways that hand these provocateurs exactly what they want.
Stopping a vessel at sea may secure an immediate tactical objective. But if the result is another cycle of global accusations, another flood of hostile coverage, and another round of diplomatic damage, then a narrow operational success becomes a strategic failure.
Israel frequently wins the immediate encounter while losing the larger narrative.
That problem extends well beyond maritime incidents.
Many people around the world defend Israel in increasingly hostile environments. Diaspora Jews face intimidation on campuses and in public life. Christian allies speak out despite social pressure. Non-Jewish advocates challenge lies, distortions, and double standards at personal cost. They write, donate, organize, and absorb abuse.
Too many feel taken for granted.
Allies matter. Gratitude matters. Communication matters. Nations under pressure cannot afford to neglect those who stand with them. Support should not be treated as automatic or endless. It must be nurtured.
Another issue that troubles even committed supporters is the use of administrative detention and other extraordinary emergency powers. Israel undeniably faces real security threats. Some dangers cannot be handled through ordinary methods alone. But emergency measures that become routine create a moral and political burden.
When people are held for long periods without normal judicial processes, Israel’s critics seize on every case. More importantly, genuine friends of Israel become uneasy. They ask whether a state founded as a refuge for a persecuted people is drifting from the democratic principles it was meant to embody.
There is also a message for ordinary citizens in Israel — especially those on the far right.
Israel is judged by a harsher standard than most nations. That reality is unfair, often hypocritical, and sometimes openly antisemitic. But it is reality nonetheless. Every act of racist violence, every attack on innocent civilians, every mosque vandalized, every tree burned, every mob chanting hatred, every soldier filmed humiliating noncombatants without cause becomes a global symbol.
One reckless act by one person can damage an entire nation.
Israel does not have the luxury of indiscipline. It is not a quiet country insulated by geography and history. It carries the security of millions of Jews. It carries the memory of exile and extermination. It carries the burden of proving that Jewish sovereignty can be both strong and just.
That requires more than military power. It requires discipline, humility, gratitude, legal integrity, and strategic patience.
Israel’s enemies would love nothing more than to see the Jewish State become isolated, angry, careless, and morally confused. Their greatest victory would not come on the battlefield. It would come if Israel helped destroy its own legitimacy.
The answer, then, is not despair. It is course correction.
Think carefully before reacting. Think strategically before escalating. Think morally before normalizing emergency measures. Think politically before alienating allies.
Israel was built through courage, sacrifice, and vision. It should not be weakened by avoidable mistakes.
The gravest danger to Israel may not come only from those who seek to destroy it from without. It may also come from forgetting how to preserve itself from within.
Sabine Sterk is the CEO of Time To Stand Up For Israel.