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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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How Billy Wilder and B&H Dairy birthed ‘The Only Living Pickpocket in New York’
Noah Segan’s crime thriller The Only Living Pickpocket in New York has drawn comparisons to NYC auteurs Spike Lee, Elaine May and John Cassavettes. While the writer-director is far from anxious about these influences, he notes another, less obvious touchpoint: a Billy Wilder comedy.
“There’s a line in The Apartment, where the very kindly Jewish neighbor doctor says to Jack Lemmon’s character, after he’s been through all of this meshugas with his apartment,” Segan, wearing a shirt that reads “I [Image of a heart-shaped pretzel] New York,” said in a Zoom interview.
The neighbor advises Lemmon’s befuddled, hyper-gentile character to “be a mensch.” In explaining what it means, he says, “just be a person.”
In Pickpocket, Harry Lehman (John Turturro), the titular gentleman thief, calls his neighbor across the hall a mensch for looking out for his wife. Her response: “I’m just being a person.”
While the film, about what happens when an old-school filcher accidentally lifts a high-tech MacGuffin, has its share of grit and cynicism for an increasingly impersonal, online world, its open-hearted menschlikeit shines through.
I spoke with Segan about the film, his sophomore feature after his 2022 Jewish vampire romp Blood Relatives, about Yiddish, B&H Dairy and whether Turturro is the GOAT of non-Jewish actors playing Jews. The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
How did you arrive at this idea of an ode or elegy to a Luddite New Yorker?
I looked in the mirror. (Laughs) I’m sort of a Luddite New Yorker — at heart. But a realist, I guess.
It started with a character. It started with Harry. You go, “OK, what is he going through? How is he functioning? What are his challenges?” And then you go, “Oh man, this guy is New York. And this can happen in New York. And I’m from New York.” You’re looking for patterns, you’re looking for the thing that works for you — but is it a chicken and the egg? Is it New York? Is it Harry? Are they the same thing? But once you get those two aspects, the rest of it can blossom naturally.
Your embodiment of New York is an old Jewish guy.
The embodiment of me is an old Jewish guy! (He fishes out a chai necklace from under his collar.) I got my little chai. Represent for the Forward.
In your previous film, Blood Relatives, you were a Jewish vampire. You said in an interview you were thinking about the fear of “otherness.” I’m wondering if there’s something in that choice of making Harry Jewish. Someone with community, but kind of on the margins. Obviously, in New York we don’t think of ourselves as being marginal, but maybe it’s indicating a change.
I think for the first film, part of the conversation was how to discuss otherness through both a realistic lens: that of a Jew, and through a cinematic lens, that of a vampire. The more you think about things like blood libel, the more you think about things like how Jews were murdered, all of that colors that dynamic. In Pickpocket, it’s a little bit different because Harry isn’t really an “other” he is one of. Not just because there are lots of Jews in New York, but there’s lots of everybody in New York!
I think that New York is often unified less based on religious and racial lines, much more so on socioeconomic lines, which of course is something this movie talks about.
Part of the texture there is Yiddish as a kind of lingua franca. We have Giancarlo Esposito and Lori Tan Chinn — older, non-Jewish characters. They all use it. I know we all say “schlep,” but I teach kids at City College, they don’t all know the word “mensch.” Is that a disappearing part of New York for you, in the same way Harry is recognizing his obsolescence?
To me, it’s not a disappearing part because I run into it all the time, and I think most New Yorkers know a little bit of Yiddish, just like most New Yorkers know a little bit of Spanish and that’s how you get by.
You’ve spoken of the Jewish-Italian handshake, a principle in casting that lets Robert DeNiro play Ace Rothstein and James Caan play Sonny Corleone. I have long maintained that John Turturro is probably the greatest living non-Jewish portrayer of Jews.
I think the idea with John is that he embodies New York to such a degree, that he truly does get to do any version of a New York character. This is a guy who just is New York, and so if you let him be a New York-coded character, it is what it is. It is whatever it needs to be. That man knows more about Philip Roth than anybody I’ve ever met, which makes me feel like that makes him definitely an honorary Jew.
Harry’s doorpost has a mezuzah and he goes to visit his daughter and there’s a wreath on the door. I was wondering about that bit of set dressing.
The mezuzah on the door — it’s like painted over. The idea that it had been there a long time was really important to me. That this is a matter of fact of one’s life. There is probably a question of how much Harry’s culture and religion influenced his daughter, who he left at a young age, and her choices to identify or not with that. Obviously, who knows who she married and how they practice. There are Jews who feel jolly and put a wreath on their door, so there’s no rule about that. But I do think that it is safe to say that there were historic, cultural, ethnic identifying aspects that Harry did not pass on. And that is part of the tragedy, of course, of leaving one’s family.
Did you shoot the film before the death of the MetroCard, and do you think Harry would have been able to figure out OMNY? I feel like the transition from tokens might have been difficult for him.
The transition from tokens was definitely difficult for him. We still had MetroCards when we shot the movie. I think it was a combo. But he doesn’t have a phone to tap! So what’s he gonna do? He’s gonna get an OMNY card and load it up? I mean, I guess that’s sort of like having a MetroCard.
The other day my phone died, so I just used my credit card. So you could do that in theory.
I don’t know if Harry has a credit card.
He deals in cash.
I think what he’s doing is he’s just waiting for somebody to open the emergency door for him. And then he passes them a couple bucks.
How do you think he would feel about Mamdani and the Knicks championship?
I don’t know if Harry votes. I think he likes to stay off the rolls. The more off-the-grid he could be, the better. But I do think that he would be very pleased about the Knicks. I don’t know if he’d be as pleased as John is. But I think he would be very pleased about the Knicks.
We feel that the days of Harry and his analog life are numbered, but there’s also a glimmer of hope when we see him mentoring a younger guy in the old ways of the five-finger discount.
All hope is never lost, especially in New York. New York is a hopeful place. Because it is sarcastic and cynical and has a sense of humor and it’s very fast. People think that that somehow makes it not an optimistic or hopeful place. But no. New Yorkers are the most resilient people on earth — that’s why the all the Jews move here!
Any there other Jewish tidbits that you’re not going to get a chance to to speak about with the general press?
You picked up on B&H right?
I don’t know if I did!
The first scene with Harry, he’s having his matzo brei at B&H.
Oh! I wasn’t thinking of B&H Dairy. I was thinking of B&H Photo.
There used to be a whole cottage industry of these places that that showed up at the turn of the century called B&H, and people go, “Well, why is it called B&H.” It’s Baruch Hashem. It wasn’t anybody’s name. It was just like, ‘Well, I guess thank God we opened up a store.’
(Author’s Note: Regrettably, in the case of the dairy establishment, this tidbit, while widely believed, appears to be apocryphal; the founders of B&H, who catered to Yiddish actors on Second Ave. were named Abie Bergson and Jack Heller and gave their initials to the enterprise.)
B&H is such a great example of New York because it is still kosher. It is still signed off on by a rabbi. The rabbi puts the stamp on it. Remains kosher. It is run by a Catholic Polish lady, her Muslim-Egyptian husband, and the head chef is Mexican. And if you buy the T-shirt, the T-shirt says “Challah por favor.”
It is a great New York, multi-ethnic, multicultural institution, and I’m very proud that we got to shoot there.
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A synagogue and Jewish-owned shops damaged in French riots
(JTA) — PARIS – Jewish-owned shops in Marseille were set ablaze and a synagogue in Paris was vandalized as part of widespread property damage caused by riots across France Saturday and Sunday, according to the Jewish Community Protection Service.
It is too early to assess the full extent of the riots protesting the rising cost of living and the damage they’ve caused, but various elements in the media have described them as civil unrest and chaos.
From Lille in the north to Marseille in the south and in the major cities in between, media estimate that nearly 800,000 people took to the streets and some 2,000 shops were vandalized or looted. Public buildings were set on fire, and hundreds of people or more were injured, including 150 police officers, with thousands arrested.
The riots followed a student uprising that blocked entrances to high schools across the country in recent weeks. Palestinian flags and keffiyas have been a recurring motif in most of the violent protests, acts of vandalism and looting.
But according to SPCJ, known as the Service de Protection de la Communaute Juive in French, there was no evidence that Jewish institutions or businesses were deliberately targeted.
Vandals broke into the Ohalei Yaakov synagogue in Paris’ 19th district overnight between Saturday and Sunday. On Sunday morning, members of the Jewish community discovered that their temporary place of worship had been broken into. The permanent synagogue building is currently undergoing renovations.
Inside the sanctuary, prayer books, tefillin, and various objects — taken from boxes and cupboards — were found scattered on the floor. The rabbi’s office was also searched. Despite the mess, the Torah scrolls appeared to be unharmed.
According to a member of the synagogue committee, the incident primarily points to an attempted theft. The suspects may have been looking for money, but nothing was believed to be missing.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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How much will Trump’s endorsement help Netanyahu?
(JTA) — JERUSALEM – Within minutes of President Donald Trump endorsing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a post on Truth Social Sunday, Netanyahu’s campaign team had released a 30-second clip showing all the times Trump has lavished praise on the Israeli leader over the past few years.
With polls showing that Netanyahu and his governing coalition are slipping in their struggle to retain power in the upcoming Oct. 27 election and lag behind the opposition bloc, an endorsement from the president of the United States is a powerful statement.
But is it enough to tip the scales?
“I don’t think it will change anything,” said Ilana Shpaizman, a senior lecturer in the Department of Political Studies at Bar-Ilan University.
Of course, she said, “Netanyahu will say this is the proof that I’m a leader and all that, and I can speak to Trump … But so what? His followers already know that and they believe in him. They don’t need the endorsement.”
Those who oppose him, Shpaizman continued, “know that Trump forced him (Netanyahu) to accept the ceasefire in Gaza and accept the hostage deal, and that Trump runs the show around Iran. So they also don’t need the endorsement either,” Shpaizman said.
Some pundits speaking on Israeli news outlets criticized Trump for “interfering” in Israel’s election, while others put it down to the fact that Trump does not want America to return to fighting Iran alone if Netanyahu, who is hawkish on Iran, is replaced by someone less willing to act militarily. If Netanyahu loses, that is a scenario that could play out.
“This is the first time ever that the president, at least publicly, endorses a candidate in Israel’s election,” Bushinsky, a political commentator and former adviser to Netanyahu, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Bushinsky said he remembered Netanyahu complaining about U.S. intervention in previous elections in 1999 and 2001, when presidents less enamored of him were in office. He even pushed for an initiative that would block foreign funding for election campaigns.
Now, Bushinsky said, “I guess he is not complaining,” adding that the endorsement serves Netanyahu in two ways.
First, it signals that Trump thinks that Netanyahu is the most suitable guy for the job. Second, it puts Netanyahu’s election campaign back on track, refocusing attention on an issue where Netanyahu is strong – Iran.
“It lets him say ‘I can now finish a job, and I can finish a job with Trump,’ and ‘without Trump or without me, the job will not be finished,’” said Bushinsky.
He said that in the last few days, the political debate had pivoted to other issues such as Ashkenazim vs Sephardim, the draft law and the contentious efforts by the outgoing government to overhaul the judiciary.
“This [endorsement] is the ultimate campaign boost for Netanyahu,” Bushinsky said.
But that boost might not be enough.
Most of the polls taken in recent days show the opposition bloc led by former IDF chief Gadi Eisenkot pulling ahead of Netanyahu’s ruling coalition, but give neither bloc enough seats to gain the necessary 61 of 120 seats in Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, to form the next government.
“I think this might give Netanyahu one more seat, one more mandate, but not more than that,” said Bushinsky.
Prof. Tamar Hermann, director of the Israel Democracy Institute’s Viterbi Center for Public Opinion and Policy Research, said that the timing of Trump’s support for Netanyahu in this election race had come both “too late and too early.”
“It’s too late because people have already decided electoral preferences. They may shift within each bloc, but will not move between the blocs because of this,” she said. “And it’s too early because there are nine days to go to the elections, and we can already see other American leaders spilling some cold water over what he said, even on the Republican side of the aisle.”
This criticism, Hermann continued, will be transmitted to Israeli voters, and they will see that Trump is facing a huge battle in the upcoming midterm elections.
“The image of President Trump has deteriorated significantly since April 26, when he started the negotiations with Iran,” she said, pointing to one of the IDI’s recent public opinion surveys that found the president’s popularity had plummeted after he stopped the war with Iran without totally removing the threats against the State of Israel.
According to that poll, the Israeli public’s confidence in Trump as someone dedicated to Israel’s security fell from around 70% to just 42%.
“In my view, the endorsement will not make a big change,” Hermann added. “It will just strengthen Netanyahu’s political supporters, who will see it as a sign that he is still the internationally known figure that even the president of the United States is endorsing.”
She concluded, “The meaning of endorsement in Israel is totally different than in the United States … we are not that used to this kind of move, and it will not make people change their minds.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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