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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.
—
The post Letty Cottin Pogrebin wants Jews to own up to the corrosive power of shame appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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A Hanukkah Guide for the Perplexed
Members of Turkey’s Jewish community and visitors gather around a Hanukkah menorah during a celebration of the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah at Neve Shalom Synagogue in Istanbul, Turkey, Dec. 19, 2017. Photo: Reuters / Murad Sezer.
Ahead of this year’s celebration of Hanukkah, here are eight important facts about the holiday:
1. Hanukkah is the only Jewish holiday that commemorates an ancient national liberation struggle in the Land of Israel, unlike Passover, Sukkot/Tabernacles, and Shavuot/Pentecost, which commemorate the liberation from slavery in Egypt to independence in the land of Israel, and unlike Purim, which commemorates liberation from a Persian attempt to annihilate the Jewish people of Persia.
2. According to an NBC news report on December 13, 2022, “An ancient treasure trove of silver coins dating back 2,200 years, found in a desert cave in Israel, could add crucial new evidence to support a story of Jewish rebellion …. The 15 silver coins were hidden [during] the Maccabean revolt from 167-160 B.C., when Jewish warriors rebelled against the Seleucid [Syrian] Empire….”
3. In 1777, Hanukkah candles were lit by a Jewish soldier, during the Valley Forge encampment, the turning point of the Revolutionary War. Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and a player in the ratification of the US Constitution, wrote: “What shining examples of patriotism do we behold in Joshua, Samuel, the Maccabees and the illustrious princes and prophets among the Jews…”
4. According to Israel’s Founding Father, David Ben-Gurion: Hanukkah commemorates “the struggle of the Maccabees, which was one of the most dramatic clashes of civilizations in human history, not merely a political-military struggle against foreign oppression. … Unlike many peoples, the meager Jewish people did not assimilate. The Jewish people prevailed, won, sustained and enhanced their independence and unique civilization. … It was the spirit of the people, rather than the establishment, which enabled the Hasmoneans to overcome one of the most magnificent spiritual, political and military challenges in Jewish history…” (Uniqueness and Destiny, pp 20-22)
5. When ordered by Emperor Antiochus IV Epiphanes of the Seleucid region to end the Jewish “occupation” of Jerusalem, Jaffa, Gaza, Gezer, and Akron, Shimon the Maccabee responded: “We have not occupied a foreign land. … We have liberated the land of our forefathers from foreign occupation (Book of Maccabees A: 15:33).”
Hanukkah highlights the centrality of the Land of Israel in the formation of Judaism and the Jewish people. The mountain ridges of Judea and Southern Samaria (the West Bank) — the cradle of Jewish history, religion, culture and language — were the platform for the Maccabean military battles.
6. Hanukkah’s historical context is narrated in the Four Books of the Maccabees, The Scroll of Antiochus, and The Wars of the Jews.
In 323 BCE, following the death of Alexander the Great (Alexander III, who held Judaism in high esteem), the Greek Empire was split into three independent and rival mini-empires: Greece, Seleucid/Syria, and Ptolemaic/Egypt.
In 175 BCE, the Seleucid/Syrian Emperor Antiochus (IV) Epiphanes claimed the Land of Israel. He suspected that the Jews were allies of his Ptolemaic/Egyptian enemy. The Seleucid emperor was known for eccentric behavior, hence his name, Epiphanes, which means “divine manifestation.” He aimed to exterminate Judaism and convert Jews to Hellenism. In 169 BCE, he devastated Jerusalem, attempting to decimate the Jewish population, and outlaw the practice of Judaism.
In 166/7 BCE, a Jewish rebellion was led by the non-establishment Hasmonean (Maccabee) family from the rural town of Modi’in, half-way between Jerusalem and the Mediterranean. The rebellion was led by the head of the family and his five sons, Yochanan, Judah, Shimon, Yonatan, and Eleazar, who fought the Seleucid occupier and restored Jewish independence. The Hasmonean dynasty was replete with external and internal wars and lasted until 37 BCE, when Herod the Great (a proxy of Rome) defeated Antigonus II Mattathias.
7. As was prophesized by the Prophet Hagai in 520 BCE, the re-inauguration of the Temple took place on the 25th day of the Jewish month of Kislev, which is the month of miracles, such as the post-flood appearance of Noah’s rainbow, the completion of the construction of the Holy Ark by Moses, the laying of the foundations of the Second Temple by Nehemiah, etc. The 25th Hebrew word in Genesis is “light,” and the 25th stop during the Exodus was Hashmona (the same Hebrew spelling as Hasmonean-Maccabees).
8. Hanukkah highlights the defeat of darkness, forgetfulness, disbelief, and pessimism, and the victory of light, commemoration, faith, defiance of odds, can-do mentality, and optimism. The first day of Hanukkah is celebrated when daylight hours are equal to darkness hours — and when moonlight is hardly noticed — ushering in brighter days.
The author is a commentator and former Israeli ambassador.
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Report on ‘Journalist Deaths’ in Gaza Raises Alarming Questions About Transparency
Palestinian Hamas terrorists stand guard at a site as Hamas says it continues to search for the bodies of deceased hostages, in Beit Lahiya in the northern Gaza Strip, Dec. 3, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Stringer
This past week, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) released its annual round-up of journalists killed worldwide, declaring 2025 a “deadly year for journalists” driven by “hatred and impunity.”
Across global conflict zones, RSF recorded 67 journalists killed between December 1, 2024, and December 1, 2025. According to their tally, 29 of those deaths occurred in Gaza — an eye-catching 43 percent of all journalists killed “because of their profession.”
But RSF’s framing omits a crucial fact: in Gaza, many so-called “journalists” are not solely media workers at all, but documented members of terrorist organizations who operate under the guise of reporting.
Reporters Without Borders (@RSF_inter) says Israel “portrays journalists as terrorists” while describing Hamas operatives as “reporters.”
Hard to misrepresent men documented as being on Hamas’ payroll. pic.twitter.com/frITiG34hU
— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) December 9, 2025
Urban warfare is inherently chaotic, and tragically, civilians — including journalists covering the fighting — can sometimes be caught in the crossfire.
Despite this reality, Israel has consistently worked to minimize civilian harm and does not intentionally target journalists or anyone else without a lawful military purpose. But when an individual is found to be operating as part of a terrorist organization and actively participating in hostilities, they are no longer considered a civilian under the laws of armed conflict.
Over the course of the war, it has become increasingly clear that Hamas has woven its propaganda strategy directly into the media sphere. Some of the “journalists” cited by advocacy groups were, in fact, dual-role operatives.
Hossam Shabat served as a sniper in Hamas’ Beit Hanoun Battalion. Anas Al-Sharif worked for Al Jazeera while simultaneously being employed by Hamas in the East Jabaliya Battalion. Yet both appear on RSF’s list of journalists “killed in the line of duty” during the Israel–Gaza war.
Their actual line of duty was not journalism, but active service within a terrorist organization.
It is highly likely that Al-Sharif and Shabat are counted in RSF’s annual tally of journalists killed. But this cannot be independently confirmed because RSF does not actually identify by name all of those it reports to have been killed. For an organization that claims to defend access to “free and reliable information,” the lack of basic transparency in its own reporting is a striking contradiction.
Even so, major news outlets rushed to amplify the headline, asserting that Israel is responsible for nearly half of all journalist deaths worldwide. The framing spoke volumes.
Haaretz led with Israel’s “attack in Gaza” as the explanation for journalists killed — recasting a defensive war launched after a brutal terror attack as an unprovoked Israeli offensive. The Irish Times and France24 likewise pushed the RSF roundup, while omitting the inconvenient fact that many of the individuals counted were terrorists masquerading as journalists.
A comparison with the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is revealing. CPJ, an organization with a similar mandate, publishes a continuously updated list of journalists killed in Gaza. Of the 209 individuals on their list, 83 have been identified as members of, or employed by, outlets linked to designated terrorist organizations.
Graph based on CPJ data from 2023-2025.
Of the 83 on the CPJ list, 56 are confirmed to be affiliated with Hamas, 21 with Islamic Jihad, and another 6 have ties to other terrorist organizations such as Hezbollah or Fatah.
Graph based on CPJ data from 2023-2025.
Thus, even though RSF has declined to publish a list of names, the available data from organizations that do offer transparency tells a very different story. CPJ’s publicly accessible information shows that many individuals labeled as “journalists” in Gaza also had direct ties to terrorist organizations. Likewise, a study by the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center examined 266 Gazan journalists killed during the war and found that 60 percent were operatives or had documented affiliations with terrorist groups. This directly contradicts the narrative advanced by RSF’s annual round-up.
RSF surely understood that releasing a report without sufficient underlying data to support its implicit claim that Israel is intentionally targeting journalists, is a journalistic failure in itself. By publishing the round-up without verifiable evidence, RSF created a vacuum — one that media outlets quickly filled by framing Israel as the primary aggressor while erasing the role of terrorist organizations entirely.
If organizations devoted to protecting journalistic integrity expect others to uphold standards, they must meet those standards themselves. When transparency disappears, facts blur, and an anti-Israel narrative fills the void.
The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.
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A Lesson From Joseph and His Brothers: Don’t Dismiss the Visionary in Your Midst
A Torah scroll. Photo: RabbiSacks.org.
In a letter dated November 1861, General George B. McClellan — newly appointed by President Abraham Lincoln as commander of the Union Army — wrote to his wife Mary Ellen that “Mr. Lincoln is nothing more than a well-meaning baboon.”
McClellan’s undisguised disdain echoed a broader sentiment among the political and military elite, who badly misjudged Lincoln’s capacity to lead the United States in a moment of national crisis. In the years that followed, history would vindicate Lincoln as America’s greatest commander-in-chief — while McClellan’s own legacy was overshadowed by the very man he had once so casually disparaged.
McClellan was hardly the first person to look down on someone far greater than himself, and he certainly wasn’t the last. Take Ignaz Semmelweis, for example, the brilliant Hungarian physician whose simple, lifesaving idea should have made him a medical hero.
In the 1840s, Semmelweiss researched the high incidence of women dying after childbirth in hospitals and concluded that it was caused by doctors moving straight from autopsies to maternity wards, thereby infecting mothers. A staggering one in every six mothers died due to this practice.
There was a simple solution, Semmelweis said: doctors needed to wash their hands so that ‘cadaverous particles’ — the term germs had not yet been invented — would be removed. But the response to his suggestion was not gratitude but outrage. One senior Viennese physician dismissed Semmelweis’s handwashing solution as “the outpourings of a disturbed mind.”
The hostility to Semmelweis grew, and it essentially ended his career, the man poised to save countless lives was literally ridiculed into obscurity. He was eventually committed to an insane asylum, where he died at the age of 47. Only decades later did the medical world finally admit that the “disturbed mind” had been right all along.
Semmelweis was not the only doctor ridiculed for seeing the truth too clearly. During the 1854 cholera outbreak in London, Dr. John Snow proposed an idea that all his colleagues considered utterly laughable: he argued that cholera wasn’t caused by “bad air” or mysterious atmospheric vapors, but by contaminated water. Today we don’t question this fact — but in mid-19th-century London, it was considered scientific heresy.
Snow wasn’t put off easily. He painstakingly mapped cholera cases, eventually traced the outbreak to the Broad Street water pump, and persuaded local officials to remove its handle so no one could pump water there. The deaths plummeted almost immediately, but the medical establishment still refused to take him seriously.
The president of the General Board of Health dismissed Snow’s work as “mere hypothesis,” and another critic sneered that his theory “cannot be entertained in any scientific discussion.” Snow, like Semmelweis, was treated as an irritant rather than a visionary. Only years later, long after his early death at 45, did the world recognize that the man they had waved away as a crank had actually solved one of the great medical mysteries of all time.
This pattern of condescension was not limited to the medical world. In the 1840s, Ada Lovelace — daughter of the poet Lord Byron and one of the most extraordinary minds of her generation — became fascinated by Charles Babbage’s proposed “analytical engine,” a mechanical device most people viewed as little more than an elaborate calculator.
But Lovelace saw something far more revolutionary. In a set of notes that she appended to her translation of an Italian science paper, she suggested that this machine, if built according to her specifications, would be able to manipulate symbols, compose music, and even generate original ideas — concepts that today form the backbone of modern computing and, more recently, AI.
But her vision was far too radical for her contemporaries. One prominent engineer dismissed her ideas as “the wild fancies of a young woman,” and others insisted Lovelace simply did not understand the limits of machinery. Lovelace, like Semmelweis and Snow, was written off as someone who thought too strangely, too imaginatively, too far beyond the accepted boundaries.
A century later, computer scientists rediscovered her work and suddenly realized that her “wild fancies” were, in fact, the earliest blueprint for the digital age. The woman whose insights were rudely dismissed in her lifetime became known as the world’s first computer programmer.
The dismissal of great people by their peers was not a phenomenon limited to the 19th century. History is replete with such examples, going all the way back to the Bible itself, with the most famous case appearing in Parshat Vayeishev.
Long before Lincoln was dismissed by McClellan, long before Semmelweis was mocked as delusional, long before John Snow was waved away as a crank, and long before Ada Lovelace was written off as an over-imaginative dreamer, Joseph’s brothers concluded that he was an overblown egotist punching way above his weight. They saw his confidence and heard his dreams, and immediately decided he was an arrogant narcissist obsessed with visions of grandeur.
What they never paused to consider was that perhaps these dreams were not fantasies at all, but glimpses of a destiny that he alone could perceive. Their prejudices and preconceived notions of their little brother blinded them to the remarkable qualities standing right in front of them: Joseph’s intuition, his emotional intelligence, his spiritual imagination, his innate leadership — all of which would emerge in the concluding chapters of Genesis.
Convinced they were dealing with an insufferable younger sibling who needed to be put in his place, they misread the situation entirely. In their rush to dismiss him, they failed to recognize that he was, in fact, the person who would one day save them all.
Malbim offers a psychologically astute insight that applies equally to all the examples throughout history: people interpret ambiguous information through the filter of their existing emotions. Because the brothers already viewed Joseph with suspicion, they didn’t read his dreams as neutral messages but as hostile declarations.
Their own jealousy and insecurity shaped what they thought the dreams meant — and, by extension, who they believed Joseph was. Malbim points out that had they not been so entangled in their biases, they might have seen the dreams in an entirely different light.
Which brings us to the most unsettling question of all. If Lincoln could be written off as a “well-meaning baboon,” if Semmelweis could be mocked into madness, if John Snow could be dismissed as a crank, and if Ada Lovelace could be waved away as a fanciful young woman, how many other potential Josephs has history quietly buried?
How many brilliant minds, original thinkers, and visionary spirits were crushed before their gifts could ever see daylight, not because they lacked greatness, but because those around them lacked the imagination to recognize it?
Joseph survived his brothers’ attempts to dismiss him and ultimately rose to fulfill his destiny. But his story stands as a warning: when we assume we already know someone’s limits, we may be blinding ourselves to the greatness standing right in front of us. And the tragedy is not only what we fail to see — it’s what the world loses when a future savior is silenced before he ever has a chance to begin.
So here’s a challenge for us all: This week, champion a quiet contrarian in your own circle. Seek out someone with unconventional ideas, and nurture them. Who knows, you might just uncover the next great thinker whose insights can change the world. Let us learn from the past and ensure that no potential Joseph is buried under the weight of our doubts.
The author is a rabbi in Beverly Hills, California.