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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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‘Remember 7.10.23’: In Israel, Hostage Square bears few remnants of a national crisis – but trauma lingers
(JTA) — TEL AVIV – In the days following the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks, the families of the hostages held in Gaza turned the plaza next to the Tel Aviv Museum of Art into what became known as Hostage Square.
Filled with “Bring Them Home” signs and hostage posters, yellow ribbons and yellow balloons, the square hosted demonstrations and press conferences.
It was here that the families created a replica of a Hamas tunnel and established the Empty Shabbat Table, a haunting art installation to remind visitors – and especially the Israeli government – that their loved ones still languished in Gaza. And it was here, two years later, that the families and thousands of other Israelis gathered to watch the last of the living hostages return to Israel.
Three years after the attack on Simchat Torah, there are few remnants of the hostage families’ encampment: the tunnel replica, a few yellow ribbons and a sign bearing the words “Remember 7.10.23.” During the days leading up to the third anniversary, some paid respects to the few hostage families who set up a sukkah on the square, but the plaza was nearly empty.
By all outward appearances, Israelis have moved on.
Yet beneath the surface, many are still grappling with the trauma of Oct. 7 and the multifront war the attack triggered.
In a Channel 12 TV poll in June, 74% of respondents said they fear that terrorists will carry out another large-scale attack, and 66% said they want the Oct. 7 attack to be investigated by a state commission of inquiry.
Last month, in an Israel Democracy Institute survey, 68% of Jewish Israelis and 32% of Arab Israelis said the Oct. 7 attack is a “central factor” in deciding which party to vote for, behind security and the high cost of living.
In the café at the edge of Hostage Square, Isaac Badra, a 33-year-old realtor, recalled how he and his wife opened their home to their upstairs neighbors because the Badras live on the “safer” ground floor and their Tel Aviv building has no bomb shelter. The trauma persists, he said.
He vividly remembered the air-raid sirens, reserve soldiers rushing to base on Simchat Torah and the frantic phone calls with his wife’s family near the Gaza border as Hamas attacked Sderot, where they live.
“My wife’s mother said she saw terrorists in the street, but I couldn’t grasp what she was saying,” he recalled. When he turned on the TV, he realized the scale of the attack. “I locked all of our doors and our windows and prayed.”
Three years later, Badra said, “When I hear noises outside, I jump. When Arab construction workers shout out to each other, I jump. And now I doubt whether my friends abroad really have our back.”
Roni Shoval, a defense industry worker from northern Israel not far from the Lebanon border, said the trauma of the past three years “is still inside me.” He called the attacks “a modern Holocaust for Israel.”
Even three years later, “I’m not ready to visit Nova,” he said, referring to the memorial at the site of the music festival where Hamas murdered 378 people and abducted dozens more. “Look, I’m getting goosebumps now just talking about it.”
Shoval, 54, is still doing IDF reserve duty, years beyond the maximum age because the IDF needs his expertise. He doesn’t want the same for his children.
“My son will be drafted soon,” he said. “Back in the day, I served in Gaza and Lebanon. I don’t want him sent to Gaza and Lebanon.”
At a nearby table, 24-year-old Yael Meyer sat with classmates from Tel Aviv University. The attack the previous day aboard a flydubai flight bound for Tel Aviv, they said, only reinforced the trauma of Oct. 7 and the war that followed.
“I’m always aware that there could be another terror attack. But I always had the sense that the security services would protect us.” Since Oct. 7, that trust in the government is gone, she said.
Her friend Talia Zecler, also 24, said she felt “helpless” after the attack. “I was angry at my country. Entire families were killed or kidnapped,” she added. “It feels like we’re living in an endless war.”
Her heart races when the sound of a passing motorcycle resembles an air-raid siren. But at the same time, she still marvels at the bravery and solidarity of ordinary Israelis in the months after the attack.
“People became more connected after Oct. 7. They volunteered everywhere, including at Hostage Square,” she said. “There was a sense of unity, that we’re in this together, and we saw it on the flydubai flight.
“This is the Israeli spirit.”
Sitting in the café with her parents, S., a 19-year-old IDF soldier, said the trauma she experienced on Oct. 7 at her home in Jerusalem “is minuscule” compared to the experience of those whose families were directly harmed by the attacks on the Gaza border and, later, attacks by Hezbollah, Iran and the Houthis.
“Sure, when I hear a plane flying in the sky, I think, will there be another war with Iran? I immediately go there,” said S., whose name could not be published due to military protocol.
But as the country prepares to vote for the next government on Oct. 27, she plans to channel her hopes and dreams in the voting booth.
“The most important things for me right now are to have a national investigation of what happened on Oct. 7 and to repair our relations not only with our immediate neighbors but everywhere. We don’t live in a vacuum,” she said.
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Antisemitic flyers turn up in Ontario neighborhood where a man charged at a synagogue two weeks ago
(JTA) — Police in the Ontario town where a gunman charged the Sons of Jacob synagogue on Yom Kippur are investigating antisemitic flyers distributed around the synagogue’s neighborhood..
In an Oct. 1 press release, Belleville, Ontario, police encouraged those with tips or video evidence to contact police.
“We recognize that incidents such as this can cause concern within our community,” the police said. “Hate has no place in Belleville, and the Belleville Police Service remains in contact with community leaders and are taking proactive steps to support the safety and well-being of residents.”
Police have not identified the distributor of the flyers, and no arrests have been made.
The Canadian Jewish News published photos of the flyers, which included antisemitic conspiracy theories, such as “every single aspect of the Covid agenda is Jewish” and “every single aspect of abortion is Jewish.”
Coming so soon after the attack, the flyers rattled Sons of Jacob congregant Sari Watson, 40. “It’s so incredibly concerning to see this sort of antisemitic rhetoric surface, less than two weeks after the shooting,” said Watson, who skipped attending services the night of the shooting because she was wary of the increase in antisemitic violence in Canada. “This is a sign that this sort of hatred has infiltrated the public consciousness here.”
Belleville police chief Murray Rodd has confirmed the Sept. 20 attack was deliberate.
“This was an exclusive threat to our Jewish community,” he said soon after the attack. “There is no indication there was a threat to any other population or segment of our community, and it was a hate-motivated crime.”
According to police and Ontario’s Special Investigations Unit, the shooter, identified as 29-year-old Sean Ward of nearby Quinte West, Ontario, opened fire on Const. Jeff Smith, who was stationed outside the synagogue as security. Smith, who was seriously wounded, returned fire, and another officer who arrived at the scene also fired at Ward. Ward later died of his injuries. Smith remains hospitalized.
A GoFundMe site dedicated to Smith’s recovery has raised nearly $1 million on behalf of the Canadian Jewish community.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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From ‘false flag’ to ‘Bibiwood’: flydubai attack spawns conspiracy theories
(JTA) — JERUSALEM – A young girl steps out of the bathroom on a flight and glimpses a bloody scene unfolding in the cockpit: the co-pilot is attacking the pilot with an axe. She screams for help.
A handful of unarmed passengers, still tanned from their vacations in Thailand, rushes by her, successfully grabbing the control wheel as the plane plunges 17,000 feet. They also manage to save the life of the bloodied pilot.
It sounds like the climactic scene from a high-stakes action movie, yet by now most people know that this is what happened last week on a Tel Aviv-bound flydubai jet.
Or did it happen? It is so fantastical that maybe it is just a fabricated story or an event staged by Israel’s Mossad? That is what millions of people on social media seem to be suggesting in online posts.
Even after nonstop media interviews with the hero pilot or with the ordinary passengers who took control of the plane, conspiracy theories about the attempted hijacking are swirling. Some mockingly insist the event never happened. Others say it was a false flag operation. And many of the comments invoke deep-rooted antisemitic tropes.
Some accuse Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of staging the incident for political survival or to divert attention from the war in Gaza. Others say it was an attempt by Israel to play the victim or garner global sympathy.
“Brought to you by Bibiwood Productions,” wrote one person commenting on a CNN report posted on Facebook.
“Just stop already,” wrote another person beneath CBS’s clip of interviews with the men who fought the rogue co-pilot posted to Instagram. “It’s seriously embarrassing at this point. We didn’t believe it when the news broke; we didn’t believe it the first time you aired this interview. Reposting clips will not convince anyone with half a brain.”
“Bulls–t,” wrote another person.
Monitoring online responses as the attempted hijacking was unfolding last Wednesday, the Combat Antisemitism Movement’s Antisemitism Research Center found that the first conspiracy theories were posted just 67 minutes after the plane sent its first distress signal.
Within five hours, the ARC documented 1,000 hostile posts, and after 12 hours, 2,963 posts. The posts generated at least 30,000 likes and more than 3 million views.
“The fact is that internet companies have promoted a much more open free-speech policy these days, especially on Instagram and X,” said Sacha Roytman, CAM’s Chief Executive Officer, adding that it’s not just the posts that are problematic but also the comments they generate.
“They [the social media platforms] don’t control information anymore; they don’t want to control it,” he said.
Roytman added that another factor is that agitators – likely from Russia or Qatar – have learned how to build an effective bot network to spread misinformation. When the first post appeared after only 67 minutes, he said, “we knew it was not a human posting because no one cares to go online and start posting [that fast].”
“They were activated extremely fast and set up the stage to create an environment that’s toxic enough for other users to be inspired to find the stories they need to build their own claims,” Roytman said.
Amit Cohen, a research fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies and an expert in cyberattacks and digital fraud, said that during such events, “there is often a gap between what the public wants to know and the amount of verified information available at that moment.
“That is exactly the kind of environment in which rumors and conspiracy theories can develop very quickly,” she said. “In this case, claims appeared online within a short period of time suggesting that the event did not happen as reported, that the videos were fake, or that the incident was staged or a false flag.
“Posts like these are not necessarily the original source of the conspiracy theory,” she said, “but they can function as ignition points.”
Cohen said it was important to distinguish between those who “deliberately create disinformation and those who spread it.”
“Someone may share misleading content simply because it fits what they already believe, because it provokes a strong emotional reaction, or even because it seems interesting or ‘worth looking into,’” she said. “They do not need to know where the message originated, and they certainly do not need to be part of any coordinated campaign.”
Gal Yavetz, a senior lecturer of Artificial Intelligence at Bar-Ilan University, said the flydubai story was so incredible, it left many people “looking for answers.”
“Inevitably, some people will accept more natural explanations, and others, who are more extreme, will go and blame the Jews for it,” Yavetz said, pointing out that similar conspiracy theories arose over the summer when thousands of Moroccan nationals flooded Spain’s North African enclave of Ceuta in July.
“Every time there is something that we can’t really understand, that we can’t really explain, we blame the usual suspects — the Jews, the Jews who control the world, the Jews who are the natural scapegoat,” he said, adding that since the Oct. 7, 2023, deadly Hamas raids in Israel, conspiracy theories have become commonplace and all it takes is for a handful of people to start questioning the veracity of the events.
Posts by Egyptian-born, LA-based political satirist Bassem Youssef, known for his controversial comments about Israel and Jews, are a good example. In a series of videos, he mocks the flydubai event and raises suspicions about what really happened.
In one clip posted on X and viewed 130,000 times, Youssef, whose career was supercharged in 2012 when he was boosted by Jewish comedian Jon Stewart, even terms it a “Hollywood production,” drawing on what critics say are familiar antisemitic conspiracy tropes about Jewish control of Hollywood and, by extension, the world.
“I wish it was chatbots, but the truth of the matter is that social media is a breeding ground for this kind of discourse,” said Yavetz, who specializes in social media, political communication and the spread of misinformation and disinformation online.
“They are definitely helping to spread and to reshare most of this misinformation and disinformation, but we know from previous studies that it is really just a negligible number compared to just regular people who are going to the more extreme sides and just taking their own outrageous opinions to social media just because it is now so easy to do so,” he said.
“You don’t really need to do much; you just need to make sure that you can stand behind your claims, and all of a sudden an outrageous post will have 1,000 likes, then 10,000 likes, and these comments are just circulating again and again, going from Facebook to WhatsApp to Messenger and back to Twitter with screenshots and back to Instagram… It’s a flood that you can’t really stop by taking out an umbrella,” Yavetz said.
INSS’s Cohen, who is also a national security expert with the Dvorah Forum, a group that promotes women’s voices in foreign policy, said that “conspiracy theories are not new, but the digital environment has changed their speed, scale, and the ability to obscure where a message originally came from.”
She explained that “in the past, there were more intermediaries between the person producing information and a large audience. Today, a single account can post a claim and reach very large audiences within a very short time.”
And, Cohen added, AI has made the problem worse.
“Mainly because it has dramatically reduced the time, cost, and skill required to create convincing content,” she said.
It has also made it harder for people to believe what appears on their screens.
“The problem is no longer only that AI can create fake content that looks real. It also makes it easier to dismiss real content by claiming that it is fake,” said Cohen. “Once the public knows that convincing images, audio, and video can be artificially generated, the existence of visual evidence no longer necessarily ends the debate.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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