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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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The Hebrew word “stav” didn’t always mean the fall season
יעדעס יאָר אין נאָוועמבער, ווען עס קומט דער האַרבסט און מע האַלט נאָך אין סאַמע זומער (מיט אַ וואָך צוריק בין איך נאָך געגאַנגען אין אַ העמד מיט קורצע אַרבל), זאָגן די סקעפּטיקערס אַז דאָ אין ישׂראל זײַנען אייגנטלעך פֿאַראַן נאָר צוויי סעזאָנען: אַ לאַנגער זומער און אַ קורצער ווינטער. די ציניקערס זאָגן נאָך אַז די צוויי סעזאָנען הייסן אין דער אמתן „דער הייסער סעזאָן“ און „דער ווייניקער הייסער“ – און עס איז נישט אין גאַנצן איבערגעטריבן.
דער תּנ״ך למשל, וואָס האָט גוט געקענט די נאַטור פֿון ארץ-ישׂראל, האָט קיינמאָל נישט געשריבן וועגן די פֿיר סעזאָנען — זומער, האַרבסט, ווינטער און פֿרילינג. אַפֿילו אינעם וואָרט „סתּיו“ (האַרבסט), וואָס ווערט דערמאָנט אין שיר השירים ב, יא: „כי הנה הסתו עבר“, מיינט מען נישט דעם האַרבסט, נאָר דווקא דעם ווינטער. אויך די משנה, וואָס באַשרײַבט די פֿיר „תּקופֿות“ פֿון יאָר (מסכת ראש השנה א, א: „בארבעה פרקים העולם נידון“), דערמאָנט מען נישט אונדזערע באַקאַנטע סעזאָנען.
ערשט אין דער נײַער העברעיִשער ליטעראַטור הייבט מען אָן שרײַבן וועגן דעם „סתּיו“ מיטן טײַטש האַרבסט. דער העברעיִשער שרײַבער אליהו מרדכי ווערבעל (1880-1806) פֿון גאַליציע האָט אין זײַן בוך „לימודי הטבע“ באַניצט דאָס וואָרט „סתּיו“ ווי „האַרבסט“, אפֿשר צוליב דעם וואָס דער ווינטער האָט שוין געהאַט אַ נאָמען: חורף. דאָס איז אַ פּנים געפֿעלן די נײַע העברעיִשע שרײַבערס, וואָס האָבן אַ סך געשריבן וועגן דעם אייראָפּעיִשן פּייזאַזש. האָבן זיי אַדאָפּטירט דעם נעאָלאָגיזם און געשריבן למשל וועגן „נוּגֵה סְתָו אוֹ עַז חֹרֶף“ (אַ טרויעריקער האַרבסט אָדער אַ שטאַרקער ווינטער – ח. נ. ביאַליק); „עברו ימי החג ושמי הסתיו רבצו על הארץ“ (עס זײַנען פֿאַרגאַנגען די יום-טובֿדיקע טעג און אַ האַרבסטיקער הימל איז געלעגן איבערן לאַנד – ש.י. עגנון).
הײַנט צו טאָג איז דער טערמין „סתּיו“ אַזוי באַקאַנט, אַז מען האָט שוין פֿאַרגעסן אַז טויזנטער יאָרן האָט לשון-קודש זיך באַגאַנגען אָן אים. דאָס וואָרט „סתּיו“ איז נאַטירלעך אַפֿילו פֿאַר קליינע קינדער, און אַ סימן דערפֿון זײַנען די צייכענונגען וואָס מײַנע טײַערע פּלימעניקעס האָבן מיר לעצטנס געוויזן פֿונעם קינדער-גאָרטן: שיינע ברוינע ביימער, באַדעקט מיט האַרבסטיקע בלעטער.
דווקא צוויי ווערטער וועלכע האָבן אַ סך צו טאָן מיטן האַרבסט זײַנען פֿאַראַן אויף עבֿרית, אָבער אויף די אייראָפּשיע שפּראַכן (און ייִדיש בתּוכם) — נישט. די ווערטער זײַנען „יורה“, דער ערשטער רעגן וואָס קומט נאָך אַ לאַנגן, טרוקענעם זומער, און „שלכת“ – אַ בלעטער־אָפּפֿאַל, די פֿאַלנדיקע בלעטער פֿון בוים אין האַרבסט. „ונתתי מטר ארצכם בעתו יורה ומלקוש“ (דברים יא, יד: „װעל איך געבן דעם רעגן פֿון אײַער לאַנד אין זײַן צײַט, פֿרירעגן און שפּעטרעגן“ – יהואשס איבערזעצונג). יאָ, מיר האָבן ווייניק רעגן דאָ אין לאַנד, אָבער אַ סך ווערטער דערפֿאַר: גשם, מטר, מבול, זרזיף, טפטוף, רביבים, יורה, מלקוש אאז”וו.
דאָס צווייטע וואָרט, „שלכת“, ווערט דערמאָנט אין ישעיהו ו, יג: „כאלה וכאלון אשר בשלכת“ („װי אַ טערעבינט און װי אַן אײכנבױם, װאָס נאָר זײער שטאַם בלײַבט װען בלעטער פֿאַלן“). „שלכת“ איז אָן קיין שום ספֿק פֿון די שענסטע ווערטער אין עבֿרית. אין אַמעריקע און אין אייראָפּע זײַנען פֿאַראַן פֿאַלנדיקע בלעטער, און איר האָט שיינע לידער ווי Les Feuilles Mortes („האַרבסטבלעטער“( פֿון זשאַק פּרעווער. אָבער מיר, ישׂראלים, האָבן אַ באַזונדער פֿײַערלעך וואָרט דערפֿאַר — „שלכת“, און איר קאָנט אונדז נאָר מקנא זײַן. די ווערטער „יורה“ און „שלכת“ זײַנען געוואָרן אַ מין „מאַדלען-קיכל“, מיט אַ סגולה צו דערוועקן פֿאַרבאָרגענע טעמים און זכרונות.
דאָס האָבן גוט פֿאַרשטאַנען די ייִדישע שרײַבערס וואָס זײַנען אַהין געקומען, און געזוכט נײַע ווערטער פֿאַר די נאַטור-פֿענאָמענען אין ישׂראל. די אַמעריקאַנער דיכטערין רחל פֿישמאַן, וואָס האָט זיך באַזעצט אין קיבוץ בית-אלפֿא, נאָענט צו דער נאַטור, האָט זייער שיין געשריבן ווערן דעם יורה: „שמאָלע פּלײצעס / האָט דער יורה. / און דאָך / שמײכלען אים אַלע נאָך. / די מענער קלאַפּן אים פֿרײַנדלעך. / אױף זײַן דינעם רוקן / קינדער לױפֿן / װילן אָנרירן זײַן גרױ העמד. / ער גיט אײן בליק / מיט זײַנע פֿײַכטע אױגן / און גײט װײַטער“ („זון איבער אַלץ“, זײַט 47).
איז זײַט מיר מוחל, סקעפּטיקערס און ציניקערס: דער האַרבסט עקזיסטירט דאָ דווקא יאָ, און נאָך ווי! עס הייבט זיך אָן מיט די ערשטע טעג ווען מע בעט „ותּן טל ומטר לבֿרכה“ און עס דויערט ביז אַרום חנוכּה, ווען עס ווערט שוין עפּעס ווינטערדיק. פֿאַרשטייט זיך, עס איז נישט דער פּרעכטיקער האַרבסט פֿון צפֿון-אַמעריקע, מיט די וווּנדערלעכע פֿאַרבן; און נישט „דער גאָלדענער האַרבסט“ פֿון מזרח-אייראָפּע, וואָס מען האָט אַזוי שיין באַזונגען אין דער ייִדישער ליטעראַטור.
מיר באַנוגענען זיך מיט אַ ביסל: דאָ און דאָרטן, דער עיקר אין די בערג, לעבן ירושלים צי אינעם גליל, קאָן מען זען אַ בוים אין שלכת. יעדעס יאָר נעם איך פֿון דאָס נײַ אַ פֿאָטאָ פֿון אַ קאַרשן-בוים אין ירושלים, ווען זײַנע בלעטער ווערן סוף-כּל-סוף גאָלד; און אויפֿן וועג צווישן תּל-אָבֿיבֿ און ירושלים באַמערק איך די האַרבסטיקע ביימער. ביסלעכווײַז אין חודש חשוון אָדער כּסלו קומט צו גאַסט אַ וואָלקנדל אָדער רעגנדל, און דער עיקר: עס ווערט אַ ביסל קילער – אַ מחיה. עס איז אַ סך פֿריילעכער ווי דער פֿרילינג, ווײַל דאָ אין לאַנד הייבט זיך אָן גרינען אין סאַמע ווינטער, און אַרום פּסח זײַנען ס׳רובֿ בלומען אויף יענער וועלט, ווײַל עס קומען די באַרימטע „חמסינען“, די הייסע ווינטן פֿון מדבר.
אמת, מען קאָן אויך נישט לייקענען אַז מיטן האַרבסט קומען הײַנט אויך מעלאַנכאָלישע טענער. דעם 7טן אָקטאָבער דערוועקט בײַ אונדז די פֿרישע זכרונות פֿון דעם טראַגישן שׂמחת-תּורה 2023 און די בלוטיקע יאָרן וואָס זײַנען געקומען נאָך אים, און דאָס האַרץ ווערט פֿאַרקלעמט. דער נײַער יאָרצײַט פֿאַראייניקט זיך מיט אַן אַלטן: דאָס יאָר האָבן מיר דעם 4סטן נאָוועמבער אָפּגעמערקט 30 יאָר זינט מען האָט דערמאָרדעט דעם פּרעמיער-מיניסטער יצחק רבין. נאָך אַ סך יאָרן האָט מען באַנײַט די יערלעכע מאַניפֿעסטאַציע אין כּיכּר רבין (רבין-פּלאַץ), וואָס מע האָט אויפֿגעהערט טאָן מיט צוואַנציק יאָר צוריק. אָבער צוליב דעם וואָס די מאַניפֿעסטאַציע איז הײַיאָר פֿאָרגעקומען אַ קורצע צײַט נאָך דעם פֿײַער-אָפּשטעל אין עזה, זענען די געפֿילן געווען געמישטע: פֿון איין זײַט — פֿול מיט טרויער, צער און זאָרג; פֿון דער צווייטער —אַ פֿריש ווינטל פֿון האָפֿענונג, האַרבסטיקע גרוסן פֿון ערגעץ-וווּ.
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Jewish conservatives are looking to JD Vance to draw a line against the antisemitic right. He hasn’t delivered.
(JTA) — Ben Shapiro, Bari Weiss and Dan Senor were mostly in lockstep as they condemned antisemitism on the right during an event for Jewish conservatives on Sunday night.
But despite their shared concern about Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes, they were divided on how to think about Vice President JD Vance, who hasn’t publicly disavowed either the influential podcast host or the white supremacist he recently interviewed.
“I’m worried, but I’m not alarmed,” said Senor, a columnist and host of the podcast “Call Me Back,” about the groundswell of antisemitic expressions on the right.
“You’re not alarmed?” interjected Weiss, the newly named editor-in-chief of CBS News.
“I’m not alarmed because I am struck that every leader that is under pressure from this online mob is still standing strong,” said Senor, who pointed out that President Donald Trump has been steadfastly pro-Israel. “Who has fallen? No one has fallen.”
Weiss pressed the issue, singling out Vance: “But what does it mean that the vice president of the United States had Tucker Carlson on his show, when he had hosted Charlie Kirk’s show?”
The question, referring to Vance’s tribute to the slain leader of Turning Point USA, drew applause from many of the more than 1,000 attendees at the 2025 Jewish Leadership Conference, held in Manhattan and organized by the conservative Tikvah Fund.
The exchange aired a growing debate within the Republican party and the right as a whole. Stoked by Carlson’s friendly sit-down with Fuentes, and Carlson’s own harsh criticisms of Israel, it has led to calls within the party that its leaders disavow the antisemites in its midst. Influential Jewish conservatives, who see Republicans as a much more reliable friend to Israel than the Democrats, are eyeing key figures like Vance as counterweights to the right’s increasingly isolationist and emboldened antisemitic forces.
But so far Vance — a likely 2028 presidential candidate — has not delivered any rebuke to Carlson, Fuentes and the growing antisemitic “groyper” movement on the right. Instead, he has drawn concern over what his critics say is a weak response: He did not push back on skeptical questions about Israel, including one laced with an antisemitic conspiracy theory, at a Turning Point USA event at Ole Miss. He also downplayed the significance of the text messages shared among Young Republicans, which included jokes about gas chambers, racist slurs and praise of Hitler. Vance dismissed the invective as “jokes” and said that critics should “grow up.”
Vance’s failure to call out what others see as troubling isolationism and blatant antisemitism has become a talking point at Jewish gatherings.
Scott Jennings, a conservative political commentator for CNN, spoke about the U.S.-Israel relationship at the Jewish Federations of North America’s General Assembly in Washington on Sunday. Jennings did not name Vance, but alluded to him as a presidential candidate in 2028. “Hopefully the people who run to replace this administration understand the benefit of this, that it’s a good thing and not something to be ashamed of,” he said, referring to support of Israel.
Meanwhile, donors at the Republican Jewish Coalition’s annual summit in Las Vegas two weeks ago were not shy about their views on Vance.
“In 2028 you can bet, if he’s the nominee, I won’t vote for him,” said Ed Wenger, who called Vance “Tucker Central.”
The vice president, Wenger said, “sounds like he tolerates religions” other than Christianity, rather than embracing them. “Well, I don’t need Vance to tolerate Judaism or me.”
Valerie Greenfeld’s thoughts on Vance in 2028 were quick and straight to the point. “Marco Rubio for president,” said Greenfeld, an author attending the RJC summit.
Jewish activist Shabbos Kestenbaum, who spoke during the RJC’s summit, criticized Vance’s response to the conspiracy-laced question at the Turning Point USA event.
“When you have a vice president who is unable to condemn the obvious antisemitic, conspiratorial, victim-blaming mentality of young people, that is incredibly concerning,” Kestenbaum said in an interview. “And I am very concerned about JD Vance’s inevitable run for the presidency. This is not someone who I have seen has been able to show the moral clarity that a leader needs.”
Ari Fleischer, an RJC board member and former White House press secretary, did not criticize Vance, but said about the vice president’s response to antisemitism within the party, “This is going to be one of those issues that’s going to define his future.”
“The number of candidates who emerge to run for president will be significant on the Republican side, and that’s going to begin in earnest in about one year,” Fleischer said. “And I think JD’s going to have to earn it like everybody else, and be very curious to see what he has to say.”
While Vance hasn’t weighed in on the Carlson-Fuentes controversy, he did defend Carlson’s son, Buckley, in an X post on Saturday. An X user had asserted that Tucker Carlson’s brother “idolizes Nick Fuentes” and asked whether Buckley, who serves as an aide to the vice president, is “also a vile bigot.”
“Every time I see a public attack on Buckley it’s a complete lie,” Vance wrote, later adding that “*everyone* who I’ve seen attack Buckley with lies is a scumbag.” His tweets did not mention Fuentes.
Saul Sadka, a pro-Israel influencer with nearly 65,000 followers on X, recently called out Vance’s exchange about Buckley Carlson and his failure to condemn his father. The vice president has “decided that trying to impress the schoolyard bullies by performatively picking on Jews is the way to become popular as the new kid in school,” wrote Sadka.
Vance’s boss also ignored the Carlson-Fuentes tensions for weeks, only to brush aside concerns about Carlson, who joined him on the campaign trail last year. “You can’t tell him who to interview,” Trump said on Sunday. “If he wants to interview Nick Fuentes, I don’t know much about him, but if he wants to do it, get the word out. People have to decide.”
And while Trump hosted Fuentes and rapper Kanye West for a dinner at Mar-a-Lago in 2022 (Trump later claimed he didn’t know who Fuentes was), some still see him as a bulwark against the anti-Israel and antisemitic waves represented by the groypers.
Kestenbaum said he is “so proud to support President Trump,” but is concerned about the power vacuum that will be created once his second term ends.
“I’m just concerned that when President Trump reaches his term limit, and when there is an open Republican primary, that we will see the nefarious far-right actors that President Trump has so clearly kept at bay, and has made clear have no room in the Republican Party — I’m concerned that they will be let in,” Kestenbaum said.
At Sunday’s Tikvah conference, Shapiro, the conservative political commentator and founder of the Daily Wire, cautioned against dismissing the threat of figures like Fuentes — whom he called a “basement dweller” — and the far-right influencer Andrew Tate, and their influence on younger, more online generations.
“They haven’t aged into the voting population yet,” Shapiro said about their audiences. “And so I think one of the things that we have to be very careful of is trying to write that off as not a problem.”
Weiss concurred, saying, “It’s a great lesson of the left over the past 15 years that everything was downstream of online culture.”
Senor, responding to Weiss, agreed that Vance should say more about the rising tides. “I am patiently waiting for the vice president to come out, like a number of other leaders have come out in recent weeks,” he said. Sens. Ted Cruz and Mitch McConnell both criticized the Heritage Foundation for standing by Carlson.
Jonathan Silver, the moderator and Tikvah’s chief programming officer, cut in at that point, saying there’s “comfort to be had in the fact that elected leaders have acted in such a patriotic, American way,” before shifting the conversation more specifically to asking why Fuentes appeals to young people.
Many attending the Tikvah event seemed also to be waiting for a strong statement from Vance condemning Fuentes and Carlson.
“I’m willing to be patient — but only so patient,” said Neil Cooper, referring back to Senor’s comment that he’s “patiently waiting” for Vance to comment on Carlson.
Luke Moon, a leader of a Christian Zionist non-profit, expressed concern about an emerging “neo-isolationist” wing of Republicans who oppose supporting Israel.
Moon said he’s even noticed a recent shift in how Vance has posted about Israel on social media.
“JD went to Israel a couple weeks ago, and they didn’t post pictures of him at the [Western] Wall,” Moon said. “Now I appreciate that as a Christian he should go to the Holy Sepulchre. But he had also previously gone to the Wall.”
Others did not take issue with Vance, saying they believed the threat at hand was being blown out of proportion.
“That’s just a small little group of people. Only people involved in journalism take that stuff serious,” said Edward Shapiro, a retired professor who has moved from New Jersey to Florida.
He added, “They’re such fringe characters.”
As for Weiss, who was named to head CBS News after four years at the helm of the consistently pro-Israel Free Press, she said she hoped to use her new position to counter the voices like the ones at the center of Sunday’s discussion.
“The choices that it feels like we have sometimes — which is [the progressive streamer] Hasan Piker and Tucker Carlson, or Nick Fuentes and Andrew Tate, the kind of people who are rising in the podcast charts — those don’t actually represent our values,” Weiss said. “And I don’t think that they represent the values or the worldview of the vast majority of Americans.”
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In Israel, she’s a national heroine — Americans are starting to understand why
Crash of the Heavens: The Remarkable Story of Hannah Senesh and the Only Military Mission to Rescue Europe’s Jews During World War II
By Douglas Century
Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster, 432 pages, $30
In Israel, Hannah Senesh, the 23-year-old poet and paratrooper who died trying to save Hungarian Jews during the Holocaust, is a national heroine. Her verses are memorized by schoolchildren and encoded in prayerbooks, her kibbutz home is a memorial, and Israeli streets and settlements bear her name.
In the United States, recognition of Senesh’s achievements has come more slowly. Roberta Grossman’s 2008 documentary, Blessed is the Match: The Life and Death of Hannah Senesh, told her story with archival footage, interviews and dramatic recreations. In 2010-11, New York’s Museum of Jewish Heritage hosted an exhibition, Fire in My Heart: The Story of Hannah Senesh.
Now, when the notion of Israeli military heroism seems particularly contested, Senesh has surfaced again. This fall, the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene revived David Schechter’s play with music, Hannah Senesh, a collaboration with Lori Wilner that originated in the 1980s. And a major new biography, Douglas Century’s Crash of the Heavens, excavates the brilliant young woman — frustrated, lonely, headstrong, determined — long encrusted in myth.
Century’s powerful book, whose title derives from a Senesh poem, depicts both a unique 1944 Jewish rescue mission and its historical context: the chaotic final months of World War II, when Europe’s remaining Jews were both targeted victims and bargaining chips.
An emigrant from fascist Hungary to British Mandatory Palestine, Senesh was one of a cohort of Jewish volunteers — 37, including two other women — chosen to infiltrate the inferno of Central and Eastern Europe that other Jews were desperate to escape. Trained by the elite fighters of the Palmach, as well as the Royal Air Force and British Intelligence, they had a dual mission: to locate and evacuate downed Allied airmen and escaped prisoners of war, and to save Jews. For the latter, it was almost too late, though the paratroopers did ultimately rescue an unknown number of Jews.
While Senesh is the focus, Century’s cinematic narrative alights periodically on several of her colleagues. Among the most notable was Enzo Sereni, an Italian Jewish intellectual, “a remarkable man with prodigious appetites,” who died in Dachau. The Romanian-born Surika Braverman, phobic about heights, was unable to parachute. But she did fly into Yugoslavia, link up with Tito’s partisans, and later establish the Women’s Corps of the Israel Defense Forces. Yoel Palgi, the lone survivor of the three paratroopers who infiltrated Hungary, became a key source of information about Senesh’s ordeals.
Her story, told here with great intimacy and detail, is riveting. Those who knew her underline her uniqueness, including a courage that ultimately impressed even her captors.
Born Anna Szenes in 1921 Budapest, she was the daughter of a celebrated Hungarian Jewish playwright and journalist who died of heart failure at 33. At 13, Senesh started a diary. In 1938, the Hungarian Parliament passed a law restricting Jewish participation in the economy, and her country’s growing antisemitism transformed the teenager into a Zionist.
Accepted to an agricultural school in Palestine, Senesh made aliyah in 1939. She graduated with expertise in poultry farming, but was assigned to the laundry of Kibbutz Sdot Yam (Fields of the Sea), near Caesaria. The location inspired one of her most famous poems, but the daily routine was mind-numbing. She longed to return to Budapest to inspire Jewish resistance and help her mother escape.
As luck would have it, her kibbutz connected her to a fellow Hungarian refugee involved in organizing a secret rescue mission. “I see the hand of destiny in this,” she wrote at the time. “I’m totally self-confident, ready for anything,” she later added.
The mission was delayed, in Century’s telling, by mutual distrust between the British military and the Jewish leadership in Palestine. But Senesh finally was able to train as both a paratrooper and wireless radio operator. She chose the code name Hagar, for the second wife of the Biblical Abraham, “the slave girl who’s redeemed, who speaks directly to the Lord, who is told that she must return home.” Before leaving for Europe, she was able to see her brother, Gyuri, and give him a poignant letter in which she wrote: “Will you sense that I had no choice, that I had to do this?”
After parachuting into Yugoslavia, Senesh joined Tito’s partisans. But within days, the Germans had marched into Hungary, complicating her mission. She crossed the border anyway, and was quickly captured by Hungarian gendarmes — likely because of a betrayal, or more than one, Century suggests.
He graphically describes the vicious beatings and torture she endured, and her stoic silence. One of her fellow paratroopers had declined to give her a cyanide pill, so an easy death was impossible. Her suicide attempts failed. Believing her mother had left Budapest, she finally offered her real name. That led to a heartbreaking reunion between a bruised and battered Hannah and her anxious mother, Katherine. Both spent time in a Gestapo prison, where they had occasional contact.
Katherine eventually was released, and her daughter experienced a mild reprieve: She was able to teach her fellow inmates Hebrew, distribute hand-made dolls as gifts, and counsel a pregnant Jewish prisoner on an escape route. Then came a trial for treason and espionage. In her defense, Senesh eloquently denied betraying Hungary and chastised her judges for allying with Nazism. As Soviet and Romanian troops descended on Budapest, she was abruptly informed of her conviction and an immediate death sentence, with no chance of appeal.
Integral to her legend is that the youthful Senesh went defiantly to her execution by firing squad, declining to beg for a pardon and refusing even a blindfold. She left behind a trove of diaries, letters and simple, emotionally direct poems — a dazzling literary as well as moral legacy.
One poem, from a period of torture and solitary confinement, concludes: “I gambled on what mattered most,/The dice were cast. I lost.” Another famous verse emphasizes redemption, declaring, “Blessed is the match consumed in kindling flame.” Century’s biography — which also recounts Senesh’s prodigious cultural afterlife — is a stirring testament to both her undeniable gifts and tragic fate.
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