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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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Indiana University removed its Jewish studies director. His replacement has ignited a firestorm over Israel.
You won’t find professor Mark Roseman on the frontlines of any campus protests or posting his unfiltered political thoughts on social media. His current project, a four-volume history of the Holocaust published by Cambridge University, is unlikely to generate controversy.
Which is why many of his colleagues were baffled when Indiana University’s chancellor broke precedent this summer to remove Roseman as director of the school’s prestigious Jewish studies program and replace him with a junior colleague known as one of Israel’s fiercest defenders on campus.
“If I could have designed a person to be in charge of Jewish studies in a moment like this — it’s fraught, Jews are divided on Israel and antisemitism, everyone has a lot of deeply held feelings — I could barely imagine a better person than Mark,” said Sarah Imhoff, chair of Indiana’s religious studies department.
Roseman’s removal has taken on special significance at a time when universities are under intense pressure to appease both conservative politicians worried about liberal bias and Jewish groups enraged over mounting hostility toward Israel on campus with academics who study Jews and Judaism often caught in the crosshairs.
“Jewish studies is at the precipice of a cliff in America,” said Shaul Magid, a professor of Jewish studies at Harvard. “It’s being hijacked by a particular political agenda and somebody has to get ahold of the wheel.”
Indiana replaced Roseman with Günther Jikeli, associate director of the school’s small but influential Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism, and a voice in the growing field of antisemitism studies. That new field has become a magnet for donors concerned that existing Jewish and Israel studies programs have not done enough to counter campus antisemitism.
New York University announced a “seven-figure donation” to create a center to study and combat antisemitism shortly after the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks two years ago, and other schools including the University of Michigan and Brandeis University have since launched similar programs.
“The goal is to keep institutions and departments like his free of harmful ideology.”
Allon FriedmanPresident of the Jewish American Affairs Committee of Indiana
At Indiana, both supporters and detractors of Jikeli, a German academic whose work has focused on Muslim antisemitism in Europe, believe he is acting as an enforcer of what should legitimately be considered as “Jewish studies.”
After becoming interim director of the Jewish studies program in August, he stripped travel funding from an anti-Zionist graduate student in the program and barred her from using a Zoom avatar that said “Free Palestine,” prompting outcry from some student leaders. That concern only intensified after Jikeli, who is not Jewish, declined to say whether he would allow the department to support any research that was critical of Zionism.
“It’s not a question of academic freedom,” Jikeli told student leaders in a meeting with the humanities dean, according to an audio recording obtained by the Forward. “The question is about what is Jewish studies sponsoring?”
The university itself has remained silent on both Roseman’s removal and Jikeli’s installation as departmental head, and did not respond to multiple questions about why the change was made or to requests for interviews with the officials responsible.
Faculty input is usually weighted heavily when selecting department chairs and program directors. Rick Van Kooten, the humanities dean, acknowledged during a faculty meeting that Imhoff, the chair of the religious studies department, had received more nominations to replace Roseman than Jikeli. Imhoff said Van Kooten claimed that she could not serve as interim director because she was already chair of the religious studies department. Van Kooten did not respond to a request for comment but Imhoff said this is not a university policy.
(Jewish studies is a “program” at IU, meaning its faculty report to home departments like religious studies or English.)
The leadership transition rankled many faculty members, who speculated that it had been sparked by donors who believed that the program was too tolerant of research hostile toward Israel, or was the result of pressure from political leaders — both federal and state — to address campus antisemitism related to protests against Israel.
If outside pressure did cause Jikeli’s installation, that isn’t necessarily a bad thing, argued Allon Friedman, a professor of medicine at Indiana University’s Indianapolis campus and the leader of a Jewish advocacy group in the state.
“The goal is to keep institutions and departments like his free of harmful ideology,” Friedman said, speaking in his capacity as president of the Jewish American Affairs Committee of Indiana. “He’s trying to make his department serious again.”
The contested rise of antisemitism studies
Jikeli’s emergence from the small field of antisemitism studies to lead one of the country’s most prominent Jewish studies programs tracks a larger trend in higher education. In the aftermath of the Second Intifada, amid concerns over the climate around Israel on college campuses, Jewish donors turned from a focus on Jewish studies — which has historically had an extremely broad mandate — to create the discipline of Israel studies. But funding for that field has been imperiled by the gap between what many of these philanthropists hoped to create — faculty who could serve as a bulwark against anti-Zionism — and the critical analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that they often delivered.
Centers devoted to antisemitism studies, a relatively new discipline often focused on contemporary issues related to anti-Zionism, began to fill that gap with a more concrete mandate to thwart Israel’s critics, who many Jews, though certainly not all, believe are fostering an antisemitic environment on campus and beyond.
Alvin Rosenfeld (no relation), who founded the Jewish studies program at Indiana in 1972, helped pioneer this new response to Israel’s critics. He created the Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism in 2009 with a focus on radical Islam and left-wing hostility toward Israel; Jikeli came to the school in 2019 to serve as associate director of the institute.
“The hostility that calls itself anti-Zionism is not a dispassionate affair at all, and since Oct. 7 it has become really very fiercely, fiercely antisemitic,” Rosenfeld said in an interview. “We’re doing our best to root out its manifestations.”
Other schools have adopted similar approaches since Oct. 7, some of which appear more focused on advocacy than traditional academic study. At Emory University, Deborah Lipstadt, the Holocaust scholar and former State Department antisemitism envoy, is preparing to launch an institute that she said “will be focused on policy.” It will continue her efforts to promote the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, which classifies most anti-Zionism as a form of discrimination.
At the University of Washington, a new “faculty initiative” called Bridges for Change is meant to fight antisemitism. It is being run by Janet Baseman, a public health professor at the school who previously chaired its antisemitism task force. The only Jewish studies professor on that committee had stepped down before it issued its final report out of frustration that its conclusions seemed preordained.
Brandeis University, which was the first college to arrest student protesters following Oct. 7 after its then-president labeled them Hamas supporters, launched a President’s Initiative on Antisemitism, while New York University and the University of Michigan have both created more traditional academic centers to study antisemitism.
Rosenfeld has been a fundraising powerhouse at Indiana, first for the Jewish studies program and then for his antisemitism institute. Some faculty members said they believed that donors including Betsy Borns, whose father endowed the Borns Jewish Studies Program at IU, had expressed displeasure with research in the program that was critical of Israel in the months before Roseman was replaced. Borns did not respond to a request for comment.
Roseman, who ran the Jewish studies program at Indiana for eight of the last 12 years before he was forced to step down, said he could not discuss specific conversations with donors but had observed that overall pressure on what professors researched and taught had increased.
“Donors are becoming more demanding of advocacy,” he said. “There used to be a kind of trust in academic freedom and the integrity of academic work, and that’s disappearing.”
Should Jewish studies defend Jews?
After Jikeli’s early actions as interim director — removing Sabina Ali, the graduate student, from a Zoom meeting and revoking her grant funding — sparked questions from faculty and student leaders, two of Jikeli’s European colleagues responded by sending letters of support to Indiana’s administration arguing that anti-Zionist research had no place in Jewish studies.
Olaf Glöckner, a professor at the University of Potsdam, argued that Jewish studies was not “a neutral platform for any and all political positions about Jews.”
Lars Rensmann, who teaches at the University of Passau, wrote that the paper Ali had received the grant to present, which referred to Israel as a “settler-colonial nation-state,” was itself antisemitic because it denied “the citizenship rights of Israeli Jews by defaming them, without any historical foundation, as ‘settler colonialists.’”
“No university can be obliged to fund such propaganda,” wrote Rensmann.
“There are Jews and Jews.”
Alvin RosenfeldDirector of the Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism at Indiana University
Notably, even Jikeli’s strongest defenders at Indiana have shied away from making similar arguments. Rosenfeld signed a petition defending Jikeli’s leadership as interim director. But he rejected the notion that anti-Zionist scholarship, which has a long tradition among Jewish thinkers, was inherently outside the bounds of Jewish studies.
“Anything and everything that touches on the Jewish experience in a serious way is deserving of study,” Rosenfeld said in an interview. “There’s nothing that is off bounds, nothing that we shouldn’t study.” Instead, he argued, the quality of Ali’s research was flawed and therefore undeserving of funding.
Rosenfeld wasn’t concerned that Jikeli, Glöcker and Rensmann — none of whom are Jewish — were seeking to limit what Ali should be allowed to research. Though Ali’s family is both Jewish and Muslim, and she identifies as part of both communities, Rosenfeld doesn’t believe that gives her any more authority than Jikeli to ascertain what belongs in a Jewish studies department.
“I don’t know what ‘identifies as Jewish,’ means,” said Rosenfeld. “You’re a Jew, we’re Jews — we share even the same last name — but there are Jews and Jews.”
On one side of this dividing line are Jews like Rosenfeld himself, he explained, who are, like him, “absolutely convinced” that there was no “Jewish future worthy of the name without the State of Israel.”
And on the other side, Rosenfeld said, are the sizable share of Jews that had supported New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani and all that he seemed to represent — anti-Zionism, or at a minimum the belief that nonsectarian concerns should be prioritized over Jewish solidarity.
Questions over who counts as Jewish
As the government has sought to crack down on antisemitism since Oct. 7, the question of which Jews represent the community — and which deserve protection — has intensified. Well before the tempest began within Jewish studies, this was a live debate at Indiana University, which has the sixth-highest number of undergraduate Jewish students in the country.
Doug Carter, superintendent of the state police, said his officers broke up a tent encampment on campus last year because of speech that was “encouraging the death of the Jewish people globally.”
He dismissed a public radio reporter who told him that Jewish students had been active in the protests, including holding a Passover Seder at the encampment, and that they had not heard antisemitic comments. “That’s not correct,” Carter said. “Go on to the next question because I saw it with my own two eyes.”
And after a student accused him of bias against Israel, Ben Robinson, a history professor who is Jewish, became one of the first faculty members disciplined under a new Indiana law that mandates “intellectual diversity” at state universities. Robinson said the university has opened a new investigation into him based on allegations that he engaged in antisemitism during a lecture about genocide claims against Israel.
“If you’re an anti-Zionist Jew,” Robinson said, “you’re not sufficiently Jewish for the people who are making these decisions.”
None of the 20 people I spoke with for this story understood why Roseman had been removed as director, and I did not hear any criticism of his leadership. But these disciplinary incidents and crackdowns had created a simmering tension by the time Roseman said Jikeli called him to announce that he’d lost the confidence of Indiana’s top leadership and that Jikeli himself had been offered Roseman’s job.
Jikeli said in an email that did not say he would be replacing Roseman. “To be absolutely clear: there was no pre-arrangement, and I was appointed following faculty consultation,” he said.
In addition to his scholarship on antisemitism, Jikeli has made a name as a prominent academic defender of Israel and its supporters on campus. He organized a “Rally Against Hamas Propaganda” at IU last year during the pro-Palestinian encampment, and in an interview a few weeks before he took over the Jewish studies program Jikeli lamented that, “Jewish students are often outnumbered and lack the institutional or financial backing their adversaries enjoy.”
(While Jewish services like Hillel and pro-Israel advocacy organizations have significantly more funding than pro-Palestinian groups, some of Israel’s supporters believe that universities themselves are systematically biased against Jews, and that Iran or Qatar are secretly funding campus demonstrations agaisnt Israel.)
“Many administrators are reluctant to confront faculty or radical groups for fear of backlash,” Jikeli said in the interview. The solution could come “in the form of public scrutiny, funding consequences, or legal obligations.”
Jikeli’s power to address campus antisemitism along these lines is limited as interim director of the Jewish studies program, but he was quick to assert it.
A Zoom expulsion and a grant revoked
Sabina Ali, a fifth-year doctoral student doing a minor in Jewish studies, said in an interview with the Forward that she first crossed paths with Jikeli while participating in the encampment. Ali said she was standing in a protective circle around a group of Muslim students while they prayed when Jikeli approached the group and started photographing them.
“I just asked him, ‘What are you doing?’ and he just started rambling about how Islam is such a sexist religion and why are these men praying without women,” Ali recalled.
Jikeli said in an interview that he often passed the encampment on his way home but did not recall the incident Ali described. “I recall that there were some prayers,” he said. “I don’t think I said that Islam is a sexist religion.”
In a follow-up email, he said: “I did not, and would not, describe Islam as a sexist religion. Islamism, as an ideological movement advocating the application of sharia law, does contain misogynistic elements — but that is a distinct discussion.”
Jikeli first raised concerns last fall that Ali’s profile picture on Zoom — the image that is displayed when a user turns off their camera — was creating a hostile learning environment. The image is a mashup of three distinct items: the Palestinian flag, a drawing of a woman wearing a keffiyeh around her head and the words “free Palestine.”
Roseman, who was director at the time, said he brought Jikeli’s complaint to the university’s student conduct office, which determined it qualified as free speech. “I was simply following guidance from the college,” Roseman said. “Whether some people didn’t like it or not, I didn’t feel like I had much choice.”
Jikeli disagreed. When Ali showed up virtually to a hybrid September workshop this fall to celebrate the release of a new book by Imhoff, the religious studies chair, Jikeli announced to the room that her profile image was creating an unsafe environment.
“A Jewish studies graduate student sitting next to me pointed out that Jikeli might be the only one who was bothered,” Constance Furey, a religious studies professor, wrote in an email to university administrators. “Without further comment or explanation, JIkeli then announced that he had removed the student.”
Twenty of the 24 people present for the workshop then left and reconvened in a new room, where Ali was allowed to participate. But Jikeli defended himself to everyone in the program later that day in an email describing the avatar as “an image of a Palestinian terrorist.”
“Political slogans or provocative images of any kind have no place in our academic settings,” Jikeli wrote.
He followed up directly with Ali, proposing that they meet with a mediator to “clear the air.” She instead asked for a public apology and Jikeli’s resignation as interim director.
A few days later, Jikeli wrote to Ali again, this time to say that he was unilaterally rejecting a travel grant approved by the Jewish studies funding committee for her to present at a national religious studies conference.
Jikeli’s email to Ali did not provide a reason for the unusual move but he told the Forward that it “did not meet our academic standards and falls outside the scope of Jewish Studies.” Those who rushed to his defense focused on the subject of Ali’s research: “Weaponizing Indigeneity: Zionist Public Discourses on Possessing Palestine.”
Blending politics and scholarship
Though Jikeli said in an email that he does not engage in advocacy, he blended political stances with his academic work before becoming interim program director, writing op-eds and giving interviews about opposition to Israel on college campuses.
Bryce Greene, a PhD student at Indiana who was a leader of the protests against the war in Gaza, tried to sign up last year for an undergraduate course Jikeli taught on Israel and social media. But, he said, the professor suggested that the two instead meet for weekly independent study sessions.
Jikeli proposed that Greene would receive credit for the meetings, but they disagreed on how much the independent study would be worth and eventually decided to proceed on an informal basis.
Greene described cordial meetings where they would debate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and send each other readings. But the relationship eventually broke down when Greene accused Jikeli of “Holocaust denial” for rejecting the claim that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza.
Still, Greene was taken aback a few months later when a friend sent him a flyer for a lecture Jikeli was delivering to the Virginia Psychoanalytic Society called “In the Mind of a Pro-Hamas Student,” which the description said was based on “a semester-long dialogue with a pro-Hamas campus activist.”
“It was pretty obvious that he was trying to talk about me,” Greene said. After complaining to the chairs of Jewish studies and German studies, where Jikeli is based, Greene said he believed the talk switched to focus on public social media posts from other college students.
Jikeli told Greene in an email following the event that it was based on discussions with “some other people” during the encampments and shared his presentation slides from the event with the Forward. They do not focus on individual students.
What many people don’t understand is that the use of #Hamas slogans, such as #FromTheRiverToTheSea, #Palestine will be free” is an endorsement of the ongoing #terrorism against all #Israelis and #Jews – as demonstrated by the horrific #massacre of #civilians on #10/7.
— Gunther Jikeli (@GJikeli) October 27, 2023
Jikeli’s willingness to mix his political beliefs about Israel and antisemitism with his academic responsibilities came up again during an October meeting with Rick Van Kooten, the humanities dean, and a group of Jewish studies graduate students concerned about Jikeli’s actions as interim director.
As part of his defense for removing Ali from the Zoom meeting, Jikeli told the group that he had printed out a copy of her Zoom avatar and used it for an assignment in one of his undergraduate courses. He had asked students to respond to a series of questions about the image, including: “Imagine this image displayed constantly on Zoom during hybrid workshops with students and professors. How would its persistent presence affect your focus, comfort, and sense of belonging in that educational space?”
The responses demonstrated that “students feel very uncomfortable in that scenario,” Jikeli said during the meeting, and so he was justified in banning such imagery. He said in an emailed statement that “this was a pedagogical exercise about classroom environment” and “not a personal attack on any individual student.”
When Van Kooten said that he was required to uphold an Indiana state law that mandated freedom of expression for college students, Jikeli warned that individuals he had spoken with around the country might file a federal civil rights complaint against the university if Ali was allowed to display the image.
“I want you to hear this now,” Jikeli told Van Kooten, according to an audio recording of the meeting. “People will consider it a Title VI violation if this is going on — I will not tolerate this.”
Lamentations over a divided program
Van Kooten ultimately ruled that if Jikeli wanted to create a policy about Zoom images for the program he should get it approved by the faculty, and that he would need to provide a specific justification for revoking grants that had been approved by the funding committee.
(Ali’s travel to the religious conference is now being paid for with other university grants.)
But despite the modest stabilizing effect of Van Kooten’s intervention, Daniel Reischer, a leader of the Jewish Studies Graduate Student Association, said that the rapid series of controversies had taken a toll on the program. Some students who had been considering studying at Indiana are reconsidering, he said. After Jikeli declined to say whether he would allow funding for any scholarship that was critical of Zionism, graduate students from around the country are wondering whether their research will be welcome at the annual Jewish studies conference that the association sponsors.
“There’s just a lot of uncertainty and a lot of fear,” Reischer said in an interview.
Jikeli said in an email that he was “firmly committed to free, open, and respectful dialogue.”
“Criticism — including of Zionism — is part of legitimate academic inquiry,” Jikeli wrote. “Defamation and unsubstantiated claims are not.”
“We could have embraced a program that says, ‘You can do your best scholarship here no matter what your politics are’ — but we haven’t been able to do that.”
Sarah ImhoffChair of the Religious Studies Department at Indiana University
Not everyone is critical of Jikeli’s leadership. Joanna Martin, another officer of the graduate student group, said she’s had positive interactions with Jikeli and that he supported bringing a prominent scholar of Nigerian Jewry — the subject of Martin’s doctoral thesis — to campus after becoming program director.
“He’s definitely making some waves,” Martin said. “But I don’t think he’s going to start overruling anything and everything.”
Another graduate student, who did not want to be named mounting a more forceful defense of Jikeli, said that the Jewish studies program has been divided over Israel for years, and many people were determined to oppose Jikeli’s leadership before he had done anything as interim director.
“Gunther came in believing that people were already against him,” the student said, noting that several members of the program had boycotted his welcome dinner.
Jikeli, who told me the school had asked him not to discuss his leadership of the program, has seemed ready to consolidate power and aggressively defend his leadership. In addition to the letters from Nelson, the former AAUP president, and his European colleagues, Jikeli shared a petition with the Forward signed by several dozen Jewish studies professors from the U.S., Europe and Israel defending how he handled the situation with Ali.
Imhoff, the religious studies chair, said that shortly after becoming interim director Jikeli removed her without explanation from serving on the Jewish studies program’s graduate affairs committee and from another committee helping to revise the undergraduate curriculum.
“We did not need to do this to ourselves,” Imhoff said. “We could have embraced a program that says, ‘You can do your best scholarship here no matter what your politics are’ — but we haven’t been able to do that.”
Jikeli said he had not removed Imhoff from any committees but rather that committee membership expires at the end semester.
Rosenfeld, the program’s 87-year-old founder, seemed conflicted when we spoke. He had helped build Indiana into a powerhouse of Jewish studies, helping to launch the careers of scholars across the political spectrum.
He rejected the claim by Friedman, the medical school professor and Jewish activist, that the Jewish studies program had fallen into crisis under previous leadership. He also doesn’t believe that Jikeli was brought in to serve as the “hatchet man” for school officials interested in more overt support for Israel.
But he also understands that the program he created as a junior professor 53 years ago is under duress.
“I would like to see us recover from the bad spell that we’re in right now and reassert ourselves as a leading Jewish studies program with a lot of integrity,” Rosenfeld said.
Jikeli’s term as interim head of Jewish studies is expected to last about a year, at which point the administration will either make him the program’s permanent leader or name a new director.
But regardless of what happens in Bloomington, the growing divide between funders and Jewish scholars — and between scholars and some of their students — is intersecting with unprecedented political pressure on universities in a manner that seems certain to permanently transform the academy.
The post Indiana University removed its Jewish studies director. His replacement has ignited a firestorm over Israel. appeared first on The Forward.
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Groundbreaking analysis of Hitler’s DNA shows no Jewish ancestry — but finds a genetic disorder
(JTA) — Adolf Hitler had a sexual disorder that made it more likely for him to have a micro-penis, according to the first-ever analysis of his DNA. He also did not have the Jewish ancestors that some have claimed he had.
The analysis is being revealed in detail in “Hitler’s DNA: Blueprint of a Dictator,” a new documentary premiering Saturday night in the United Kingdom. The documentary looks at the researchers who decided to tackle the genetic makeup of one of history’s greatest villains, as well as what they learned — and cannot learn — from his DNA.
They found that he had Kallmann syndrome, a genetic disorder characterized by incomplete puberty, according to an exclusive report published Wednesday in the Times of London. They also found that he had genes making him more likely to have autism, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, though they cautioned that the DNA alone is not sufficient to deliver a diagnosis.
Among those quoted in the documentary is the prominent British Jewish psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen (father of actor Sacha). “Behavior is never 100% genetic,” he said in the Times report. “Associating Hitler’s extreme cruelty with people with these diagnoses risks stigmatizing them, especially when the vast majority of people with these diagnoses are neither violent nor cruel, and many are the opposite.”
The analysis, conducted by a team led by a prominent British geneticist, is more definitive on the subject of Hitler’s possible Jewish ancestry. Rumors about such a background were prevalent during Hitler’s rise: In one notable example, in 1933, a newspaper aligned with Austria’s anti-Nazi chancellor challenged German authorities to disprove his Jewish ties.
And the rumors have endured: In 2022, Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, repeated the claim that Hitler had Jewish ancestry. Lavrov was attempting to justify Russia’s stated reason for invading Ukraine — to “denazify” the country — an effort that was complicated by the fact that Ukraine’s president is Jewish. (He also said: “Jewish wise people said already a long time ago that the biggest antisemites are Jewish themselves.”)
But while previous analyses of the DNA of Hitler’s relatives suggested that he may have had some genetic links to groups that he sought to destroy — including Jews — the new analysis, on Hitler’s own DNA, shows only Austrian German ancestry.
The analysis is based on a swatch of fabric stained with blood that a U.S. soldier cut from the couch upon which Hitler shot himself. The researchers were able to confirm without a doubt that the blood came from Hitler by comparing the DNA found in it to DNA previously confirmed to have come from one of his relatives.
The post Groundbreaking analysis of Hitler’s DNA shows no Jewish ancestry — but finds a genetic disorder appeared first on The Forward.
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Ilhan Omar Poses for Photo With Swedish MP Wearing Garment Depicting Erasure of Israel
US Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) speaks at a press conference with activists calling for a ceasefire in Gaza in front of the Capitol in Washington, DC, Dec. 14, 2023. Photo: Annabelle Gordon / CNP/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect
US Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MI) has come under fire after being spotted posing for a photo with Malcolm Jallow, a virulently anti-Israel member of the Swedish parliament.
The picture, which was posted on Jallow’s Instagram page on Sunday, showed the controversial Swedish politician posing alongside Omar and anti-Israel political pundit Medhi Hasan. Jallow draped a stole around his shoulders depicting the complete erasure of the state of Israel and its replacement by a Palestinian state.
“Spending these days with so many inspiring leaders from around the world — including two of the most inspiring and courageous voices of our time, Congresswoman @ilhanmn Omar and international journalist @mehdirhasan — has been like reigniting an inner flame. I feel recharged with energy, hope, and determination,” Jallow wrote on Instagram.
Jallow has an extensive history of attacking Israel and promoting antisemitic conspiracy tropes. For example, he has “liked” a comment on social media that accused Jewish organizations of participating in freemasonry, fueling a false conspiracy theory that claims a secret coalition of Jews and Freemasons is working to control the world.
The Gambian-born lawmaker also lambasted Sweden for its supposed complicitly in a “genocide” in Gaza and stated in another social media post that Europe “betrayed” the Palestinian enclave by “financing the bombs” and “legitimizing the apartheid & the occupation.” He further appeared to threaten Swedish civilians who support Israel, writing, “To every ordinary citizen who waved the flag of the oppressor & laughed while Gaza burned, We will not forget you. We know your names. We save your statements. We screenshot your posts.”
He also seemed to threaten legal action against Swedish citizens who publicly demonstrate support for Israel’s defensive military operations against Hanas.
“And one day, whether in courtrooms of law or the court of history, In this life or the hereafter, you will be held to account,” Jallow posted. “That is not a threat. That is a promise to the people of Gaza.”
“Why is the Swedish government complicit in Israel’s acts of genocide against the Palestinian people?” he added on Instagram.
Jallow has also criticized Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson for taking certain measures to combat antisemitism, arguing that such actions endanger the country’s Muslim population.
“The Swedish Prime Minister’s statement that antisemitism holds a ‘special status’ and is worse than anti-Muslim propaganda is deeply problematic and dangerous. It not only diminishes the severity of hatred against Muslims but also normalizes the growing Islamophobia in Sweden,” Jallow wrote in an official statement last year.
“Ranking hate and prioritizing one group’s suffering over another is not only ignorant and offensive — it undermines our collective struggle against all forms of intolerance and discrimination,” he continued.
Sweden has reported a notable increase in antisemitic incidents since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, prompting alarm within both the Jewish community and governmental bodies.
According to a report released by the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention (BRA) last year, hate crimes motivated by antisemitism in the country surged in the immediate aftermath of the Oct. 7 atrocities, amid the ensuing war in Gaza. The BRA found that police registered 110 complaints between the Hamas invasion and Dec. 31 in 2023, compared to just 24 incidents the prior year.
While Jews constitute a small fraction of Sweden’s population, they have represented a disproportionately high share of religious-hate-crime victims. In 2020, for example, antisemitic incidents made up about 27 percent of all religion-based hate crimes documented by police despite Jews making up only 0.1 percent of the population, according to the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention.
Omar for years has been one of the most vocal critics of Israel in the US Congress, calling on Washington to impose an arms embargo on the Jewish state.