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Letty Cottin Pogrebin wants Jews to own up to the corrosive power of shame
(JTA) — When a lawyer for Donald Trump asked E. Jean Carroll why she didn’t scream while allegedly being raped by Donald Trump, I thought of Letty Cottin Pogrebin. In her latest book, “Shanda: A Memoir of Shame and Secrecy,” she writes about being assaulted by a famous poet — and how the shadow of shame kept women like her silent about attacks on their own bodies.
That incident in 1962, she writes, was “fifty-eight years before the #MeToo movement provided the sisterhood and solidarity that made survivors of abuse and rape feel safe enough to tell their stories.”
Now 83, Pogrebin could have coasted with a memoir celebrating her six decades as a leading feminist: She co-founded Ms. magazine, its Foundation for Women and the National Women’s Political Caucus. She served as president of Americans for Peace Now and in 1982 blew the whistle on antisemitism in the feminist movement.
Instead, “Shanda” is about her immigrant Jewish family and the secrets they carried through their lives. First marriages that were kept hidden. An unacknowledged half-sister. Money problems and domestic abuse. An uncle banished for sharing family dirt in public.
“My mania around secrecy and shame was sparked in 1951 by the discovery that my parents had concealed from me the truth about their personal histories, and every member of my large extended family, on both sides, was in on it,” writes Pogrebin, now 83. “Their need to avoid scandal was so compelling that, once identified, it provided the lens through which I could see my family with fresh eyes, spotlight their fears, and, in so doing, illuminate my own.”
“Shanda” (the Yiddish word describes the kind of behavior that brings shame on an entire family or even a people) is also a portrait of immigrant New York Jews in the 20th century. As her father and mother father move up in the world and leave their Yiddish-speaking, Old World families behind for new lives in the Bronx and Queens, they stand in for a generation of Jews and new Americans “bent on saving face and determined to be, if not exemplary, at least impeccably respectable.”
Pogrebin and I spoke last week ahead of the Eight Over Eighty Gala on May 31, where she will be honored with a group that includes another Jewish feminist icon, the writer Erica Jong, and musician Eve Queler, who founded her own ensemble, the Opera Orchestra of New York, when she wasn’t being given chances to conduct in the male-dominated world of classical music. The gala is a fundraiser for the New Jewish Home, a healthcare nonprofit serving older New Yorkers.
Pogrebin and I spoke about shame and how it plays out in public and private, from rape accusations against a former president to her regrets over how she wrote about her own abortions to how the Bible justifies family trickery.
Our conversation was edited for length and clarity.
I found your book very moving because my parents’ generation, who like your family were middle-class Jews who grew up or lived in the New York metropolitan area, are also all gone now. Your book brought back to me that world of aunts and uncles and cousins, and kids like us who couldn’t imagine what kinds of secrets and traumas our parents and relatives were hiding. But you went back and asked all the questions that many of us are afraid to ask.
I can’t tell you how good writing it has been. I feel as though I have no weight on my back. And people who have read it gained such comfort from the normalization that happens when you read that others have been through what you’ve been through. And my family secrets are so varied — just one right after the other. The chameleon-like behavior of that generation — they became who they wanted to be through pretense or actual accomplishment.
In my mother’s case, pretense led the way. She went and got a studio photo that made it look like she graduated from high school when she didn’t. In the eighth grade, she went up to her uncle’s house in the north Bronx and had her dates pick her up there because of the shanda of where she lived on the Lower East Side with nine people in three rooms. She had to imagine herself the child of her uncle, who didn’t have an accent or had an accent but at least spoke English.
You describe yours as “an immigrant family torn between loyalty to their own kind and longing for American acceptance.”
There was the feeling that, “If only we could measure up, we would be real Americans.” My mother was a sewing machine operator who became a designer and figured out what American women wore when she came from rags and cardboard shoes, in steerage. So I admire them. As much as I was discomforted by the lies, I ended up having compassion for them.
It’s also a story of thwarted women, and all that lost potential of a generation in which few could contemplate a college degree or a career outside the home. Your mother worked for a time as a junior designer for Hattie Carnegie, a sort of Donna Karan of her day, but abandoned that after she met your dad and became, as you write, “Mrs. Jack Cottin.”
The powerlessness of women was complicated in the 1950s by the demands of the masculine Jewish ideal. So having a wife who didn’t work was proof that you were a man who could provide. As a result women sacrificed their own aspirations and passions. She protected her husband’s image by not pursuing her life outside the home. In a way my feminism is a positive, like a photograph, to the negative of my mother’s 1950s womanhood.
“I’m not an optimist. I call myself a ‘cockeyed strategist,” said Pogrebin, who has a home on the Upper West Side. (Mike Lovett)
You write that you “think of shame and secrecy as quintessentially Jewish issues.” What were the Jewish pressures that inspired your parents to tell so many stories that weren’t true?
Think about what we did. We hid behind our names. We changed our names. We sloughed off our accents. My mother learned to make My*T*Fine pudding instead of gefilte fish. Shame and secrecy have always been intrinsically Jewish to me, because of the “sha!” factor: At every supper party, there would be the moment when somebody would say, “Sha! We don’t talk about that!” So even though we talked about what felt like everything, there were things that couldn’t be touched: illness, the C-word [cancer]. If you wanted to make a shidduch [wedding match] with another family in the insular communities in which Jews lived, you couldn’t let it be known that there was cancer in the family, or mental illness.
While I was writing this memoir, I realized that the [Torah portion] I’m listening to one Shabbat morning is all about hiding. It is Jacob finding out that he didn’t marry Rachel, after all, but married somebody he didn’t love. All of the hiding that I took for granted in the Bible stories and I was raised on like mother’s milk was formative. They justified pretense, and they justified trickery. Rebecca lied to her husband and presented her younger son Jacob for the blessing because God told her, because it was for the greater good of the future the Jewish people.
I think Jews felt that same sort of way when it came to surviving. So we can get rid of our names. We wouldn’t have survived, whether we were hiding in a forest or behind a cabinet, a name or a passport, or [pushed into hiding] with [forced] conversions. Hiding was survival.
I was reading your book just as the E. Jean Carroll verdict came down, holding Donald Trump liable for sexually assaulting her during an encounter in the mid-’90s. You write how in 1962, when you were working as a book publicist, the hard-drinking Irish poet Brendan Behan (who died in 1964) tried to rape you in a hotel room and you didn’t report it. Like Carroll, you didn’t think that it was something that could be reported because the cost was too high.
Certainly in that era powerful men could get away with horrible behavior because of shanda reasons.
Carroll said in her court testimony, “It was shameful to go to the police.”
You know that it happened to so many others and nobody paid the price. The man’s reputation was intact and we kept our jobs because we sacrificed our dignity and our truth. I was in a career, and I really was supporting myself. I couldn’t afford to lose my job. I would have been pilloried for having gone to his hotel room, and nobody was there when he picked up an ashtray and threatened to break the window of the Chelsea Hotel unless I went up there with him.The cards were stacked against me.
In “Shanda,” you write about another kind of shame: The shame you now feel decades later about how you described the incident in your first book. You regret “how blithely I transformed an aggravated assault by a powerful man into a ‘sticky sexual encounter.’”
I wrote about the incident in such offhand terms, and wonder why. I wrote, basically, “Okay, girls, you’re gonna have to put up with this, but you’re gonna have to find your own magical sentence like I had with Behan” to get him to stop.
You write that you said, “You can’t do this to me! I’m a nice Jewish girl!” And that got him to back off.
Really painful.
I think that’s a powerful aspect of your book — how you look back at the ways you let down the movement or your family or friends and now regret. In 1991 you wrote a New York Times essay about an illegal abortion you had as a college senior in 1958, but not the second one you had only a few months later. While you were urging women to tell their stories of abortion, you note how a different shame kept you from telling the whole truth.
Jewish girls could be, you know, plain or ordinary, but they had to be smart, and I had been stupid. I could out myself as one of the many millions of women who had an abortion but not as a Jewish girl who made the same mistake [of getting pregnant] twice.
The book was written before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. In the book you write powerfully about the shame, danger and loneliness among women when abortion was illegal, and now, after 50 years, it is happening again. Having been very much part of the generation of activists that saw Roe become the law of the land, how have you processed its demise?
Since the 1970s, we thought everything was happening in this proper linear way. We got legislation passed, we had litigation and we won, and we saw the percentage of women’s participation in the workplace all across professions and trades and everything else rise and rise. And then Ronald Reagan was elected and then there was the Moral Majority and then it was the Hyde Amendment [barring the use of federal funds to pay for abortion]. I was sideswiped because I think I was naive enough to imagine that once we articulated what feminism was driving at and why women’s rights were important, and how the economic reality of families and discrimination against women weren’t just women’s issues, people would internalize it and understand it and justice would be done.
In the case of Roe, we could not imagine that rights could ever be taken away. We didn’t do something that we should have done, which is to have outed ourselves in a big way. It’s not enough that abortion was legal. We allowed it to remain stigmatized. We allowed the right wing to create their own valence around it. That negated solidarity. If we had talked about abortion as healthcare, if we had had our stories published and created organizations around remembering what it was like and people telling their stories about when abortion was illegal and dangerous…. Instead we allowed the religious right to prioritize [fetal] cells over a woman’s life. We just were not truthful with each other, so we didn’t create solidarity.
Are you heartened by the backlash against restrictive new laws in red states or optimistic that the next wave of activism can reclaim the right to abortion?
I’m not an optimist. I call myself a “cockeyed strategist.” If you look at my long resume, it is all about organizing: Ms. magazine, feminist organizations, women’s foundations, Black-Jewish dialogues, Torah study groups and Palestinian-Jewish dialogues.
Number one, we have to own the data and reframe the narrative. We have to open channels for discussion for women who have either had one or know someone who has had one, even in religious Catholic families. The state-by-state strategy was really slow, but Ruth Bader Ginsburg wanted that. She almost didn’t get on the court because she didn’t like the nationwide, right-to-privacy strategy of Roe but instead wanted it won state by state, which would have required campaigns of acceptance and consciousness-raising.
So, the irony is she hasn’t lived to see that we’re going to have to do it her way.
You share a lot of family secrets in this book. Is this a book that you waited to write until, I’ll try to put this gently, most of the people had died?
I started this book when I was 78 years old, and there’s always a connection to my major birthdays. And turning 80 – you experience that number and it is so weird. It doesn’t describe me and it probably won’t describe you. I thought, this could well be my last book, so I needed to be completely transparent, put it all out there.
My mother and father and aunts and uncles were gone, but I have 24 cousins altogether. I went to my cousins, and told them I am going to write about the secret of your parents: It’s my uncle, but it’s your father. It’s your family story even though it’s my family, but it’s yours first. And every cousin, uniformly, said, “Are you kidding? You don’t even know the half of it,” and they’d tell me the whole story. I guess people want the truth out in the end.
Is that an aspect of getting older?
I think it’s a promise of liberation, which is what I have found. It’s this experience of being free from anything that I’ve hid. I don’t have to hide. Years ago, on our 35th wedding anniversary, we took our whole family to the Tenement Museum because we wanted them to see how far we’ve come in two generations.
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The Nazis would have embraced these elite Germans — nevertheless, they resisted
The Traitors Circle : The True Story of a Secret Resistance Network in Nazi Germany—and the Spy Who Betrayed Them
By Jonathan Freedland
Harper, 480 pages, $26
Sometimes resistance is just mindfully walking around the streets of Berlin with shopping bags in both hands so that you have a reason not to give the Heil Hitler salute. As Jonathan Freedland told the audience at a live taping of John Heileman’s Impolitic podcast, that was the practice of Countess Lagi von Ballestrem — one of the two countesses in the “Traitors Circle” that gives his new book its title. Though members of the circle were involved in more significant opposition to the Nazi regime, this small, practical, personal act of defiance sings to us at our own moment of mounting authoritarianism.
Following on from his 2022 book, The Escape Artist, which traced the story of the first and only Jewish prisoners to escape from Auschwitz through their pre-War lives, capture and imprisonment, flight and depressingly unsuccessful attempts to convince Jewish and wartime governments to take action, Freedland turns his attention to a tea party. At roughly the same time as the events of his other book, these upper-class non-Jews in Berlin met regularly for companionship, dissent and mild subversion. It’s an entirely different form of resistance from Rudolf Vrba’s heroic escape, but one that speaks more directly to our time.
Freedland and his researcher Jonathan Cummings, were tipped off to the existence of this previously little-known coterie of “traitors” by the transcript of a speech from Heinrich Himmler to high-ranking Nazis in August 1944. He was referring to these regular anti-Nazi social gatherings hosted by widow of the late German Imperial Foreign Minister Wilhelm Solf. Just after Operation Valkyrie’s attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler had failed. Himmler — head of the SS, architect of the Shoah, and Hitler’s number two — reassured attendees that the SS was in full control and had also foiled a “traitors circle” from the “reactionary cabal” who were “prattling over tea” at the home of the Widow Solf.
As its subtitle suggests, The Traitors’ Circle tells the story of a small group of German men and women — aristocrats, army officers, diplomats, teachers — who saw what their government had become and decided to fight it from within. From the countesses like von Bellestrem and Maria von Maltzan, to wealthy mandarins like Arthur Zarden, to protestant nobility like Elisabeth von Thadden, they were German insiders, not romantic rebels or racially suspect. They, mostly, came from the right families, wore the right uniforms, spoke with the right accents, and moved in the right circles. Yet, even a decade into the Nazi takeover of Germany, they resisted.
In a breathless prose that he developed in his side hustle as thriller writer Sam Bourne, Freedland dashes through the histories and stories of the seven or eight main characters. The cadence can sometimes be a little repetitive and annoying, but for the most part, it shuttles through the nearly 400 pages of the story in entertaining, if horrifying, fashion. As is the case with the The Escape Artist, though, the events are entirely true. The hardback stretches to more than 450 pages because, to reinforce its facticity, it contains 30 character summaries, maps, more than 45 pages of endnotes and almost the same number of pages listing sources.
The book mainly centers on the time between the Solf-group celebrating Anza von Thadden’s birthday and surviving interrogation at Ravensbrück concentration camp. In sections, though, it extends well before that time to establish the backstories of the resisters, their betrayer, and some of the Nazi elite that prosecuted them. These backstories are crucial to understand not only what they did – hide Jews, sabotage the army, encourage army intelligence to desert – but what gave them the perspective and the moral compass to stand up against a state that would have happily embraced them.
Freedland has noted that, though 3 million Germans were arrested and imprisoned for their anti-Nazi activities, they represent only 5% of the German population. Even before the Nazis had fully consolidated their power over the country, the vast preponderance of people and corporations went along with the vicious lies that legitimized the Reich. Education, empathy, experience of other countries and cultures, true patriotism unfounded in personality cults, and a religious moral upbringing are some of the traits that impelled them to oppose the inhumanity of the regime.
Sadly, corporations like BMW, Porsche, and IG Farben were also deeply complicit in the Nazi takeover. Indeed, Freedland notes that Siemens drew slave labor from the prison population at Ravensbrück, where the Solf-group was held. During the Nazi era, corporations willingly took money and economic control in exchange for loyalty.
Today, corporations are massive but equally tractable. Advances in technology mean that their control of capital and information dwarfs even the great corporations of the past like the East India Trading Company or U.S. Steel. Furthermore, economic logic dictates that they must maximize profit so, especially when faced with egregious retaliation from an ideologically-driven regulatory power, they toe the line. Indeed, corporations throughout modern history have mostly acted as a lever of ideological power not as a bulwark.
From Pharaonic atrocities in antiquity, through capitalist colonial processes like the African Slave Trade to the murder of millions in the Russian and Chinese Revolutions, humans have been cruel and inhuman to other humans for millennia. As Kafka and Orwell recognized, though, the truly frightening potential of the 20th century – being realized in the 21st — is when the networks and system of the modern state are mobilized to identify, delegitimize, isolate and destroy individuals or groups it designates as undesirable.
Every act of resistance teaches the system what it cannot understand. That’s as true of dissenting Germans in 1943 as it is of whistleblowers and protesters today. Freedland’s conspirators exposed the blind spots of totalitarian logic: that obedience cannot erase morality, that even the most efficient machine depends on the fragile cooperation of individuals.
Their story reads as both a historical thriller and a moral syllabus. Resistance is not a fixed ideology; it’s a form of literacy. You learn how to read the shapes of power and to write between its lines.
In his theoretical discussion of the concept of “resistance” in “Resistances to Psychoanalysis,” Jacques Derrida talks about the emotional pull of the term. He begins nostalgically, thinking about the resonance of the French Resistance “blowing up trains, tanks, and headquarters between 1940 and 1945,” but spends the rest of the book backing away from that macro, material definition. For his part, Freedland shows that resistance is not simply heroic, even violent, self-assertion but rather can be deliberate, pre-planned or responsive, acts of mindfulness. It teaches us to see how ordinary habits — bureaucratic procedures, polite greetings, professional codes — become instruments of control, and how they can also be reclaimed as tools of subversion.
Indeed, in a world of misinformation overload where so many of the platforms that feed us our news and opinions are corrupt — by state interests (TikTok), laissez faire enrichment (Meta), or billionaire racism (X/Twitter) — copious, accessible notes and references are Freedland’s full shopping bags. Presenting the truth is sadly a mark of resistance in a decade marked by lies, propaganda, and deliberate attempts to rewrite the historical record.
The post The Nazis would have embraced these elite Germans — nevertheless, they resisted appeared first on The Forward.
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Marjorie Taylor Greene is feuding with Donald Trump. Could she win over Jewish Democrats?
(JTA) — As the U.S. House prepared this week to take a pivotal vote to force the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files, one leading Jewish Democrat had words of praise for a prominent MAGA diehard who helped make the vote possible.
“This is a party that’s got room for Marjorie Taylor Greene, if she wants to come over,” Rep. Jamie Raskin told a group of Florida Democrats on Monday. “We got room for anybody who wants to stand up for the Constitution and for the Bill of Rights today.”
Raskin wasn’t the only influential Jewish Democrat to have recently offered praise for Greene, the far-right Georgia congresswoman with a history of conspiratorial remarks about Jews, Israel and antisemitism.
Last month California Sen. Adam Schiff, who had called Greene part of the “lunatic fringe” when she first entered Congress in 2021, released a short video titled “I agree with… MTG?” The issue they agreed on, Schiff said, was rising healthcare costs, which Jewish Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer also said Greene was “absolutely right” about. Such Democratic praise came as a growing number of Jewish Republicans, including Florida Rep. Randy Fine, have taken the opposite tack and more forcefully denounced Greene as an antisemite.
Such praise for Greene from unexpected corners comes as she is generating positive press for her recent public break with President Donald Trump, which helped spur all but one Republican to ultimately vote on Tuesday to release the Epstein files.
Trump formally withdrew his support for Greene last week, calling her a “RINO,” or Republican in name only, and saying he is willing to support a primary challenge against her.
In recent days Greene, amid her escalating split from the president she once fervently supported, has made the media rounds. She told CNN she was “committed to ending the toxic politics” and told Bill Maher that “I didn’t even know the Rothschilds were Jewish” when she made a now-infamous 2018 Facebook post blaming California wildfires on a space laser she said was funded by the Jewish banking family. Joy Behar of “The View,” like Raskin, urged her to become a Democrat, to wild audience applause.
Yet some Jewish groups are still urging caution when it comes to dealing with the onetime QAnon adherent.
“Marjorie Taylor Greene’s repudiation of Donald Trump – whether on the Epstein files or healthcare subsidies – isn’t something Democrats had on our 2025 bingo card. Her separation from MAGA, however, doesn’t erase her years of political extremism and dangerous lies about Jewish Americans,” Hailie Soifer, head of the Jewish Democratic Council for America, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in a statement.
Soifer continued, “If Marjorie Taylor Greene wants to truly distinguish herself from the toxic and divisive politics of Donald Trump, she needs to take meaningful action to repudiate the antisemitic conspiracy theories that she’s previously espoused.”
The head of Democratic Majority for Israel, a pro-Israel group focused on shoring up the left side of the aisle, also expressed hesitation about Greene’s transformation.
“Marjorie Taylor Greene’s sudden and supposed change of heart regarding President Trump does not erase her long record of antisemitic rhetoric, her affinity for spreading dangerous conspiracy theories and her clear anti-Israel actions, which have continued through yesterday,” the group’s CEO, Brian Romick, told JTA in a statement on Tuesday. “She is a key part of the troubling trend and embrace of antisemitism coursing through the GOP.”
Romick specifically pointed out the congresswoman’s record on Israel.
“Greene has consistently voted and spoken out against providing critical support and resources for Israel to defend itself,” Romick said. “There should be no room for antisemitism, her dangerous views on Israel, or reckless conspiracy theories in either political party.”
The discussion around Greene has renewed speculation about the political future for an outspoken member of Congress who still believes disproven theories that the 2020 election was stolen and is the rare Republican to publicly accuse Israel of genocide in Gaza.
The Anti-Defamation League had, in years past, been one of the Jewish groups most loudly sounding the alarm on Greene. A spokesperson for the ADL declined to comment on Greene for this story.
In 2021, as Greene was being stripped of committee assignments over her promulgation of conspiracy theories, including antisemitic ones, ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said that Greene “literally is breaking new ground in antisemitism, stringing together so many crazy ideas it’s hard to keep track.” The following year he also called her remarks comparing then-President Joe Biden to Hitler “disgraceful”.
On her rehabilitation tour, Greene has made no effort to signal any change in her thinking on Israel or antisemitism. Even the issue that Greene has taken up as her main breaking point with Trump — Epstein — has in her hands become fodder for more conspiracy theories about Israel.
“It really makes you wonder what is in those files and who and what country is putting so much pressure on him?” Greene wrote about Trump on X last week as she pushed for the Epstein files release. She attached a screenshot of a donations page from the pro-Israel lobbying giant AIPAC.
When asked about the tweet later on CNN, Greene was even more explicit about what she was saying.
“We saw Jeffrey Epstein with ties to Ehud Barak,” she said, referring to documented links between the sex trafficker and the former Israeli prime minister, who visited Epstein’s townhouse on multiple occasions. “We saw him making business deals with them. Also, business deals that involved the Israeli government and seems to have led into their intel agencies. And I think the right question to ask is, was Jeffrey Epstein working for Israel?”
Greene again asserted that Trump was acting on behalf of a foreign power during a press conference with Epstein survivors Tuesday morning, before the House vote.
“He called me a traitor for standing with these women and refusing to take my name off the discharge petition,” Greene said about Trump while flanked by survivors. “Let me tell you what a traitor is. A traitor is an American who serves foreign countries and themselves.”
Greene also isn’t trying to bury her past association with Nick Fuentes, the antisemitic podcaster whose recent interview with Tucker Carlson has spurred broader fears about his “groyper” movement’s hold on the GOP.
In the same CNN interview with Jewish anchor Dana Bash, Greene declined to condemn Carlson’s decision to interview Fuentes. “I don’t believe in canceling people,” Greene said, also reminding viewers that she herself had spoken at a Fuentes-organized conference in 2022.
Greene is close with Carlson, appearing on his show the week before Fuentes and backing recent insinuations promoted by Carlson and Candace Owens that Israel may have played a role in the murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. And she has offered some Israel-centric conspiracy theories of her own.
In May Greene suggested that the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence services, may have played a role in John F. Kennedy’s assassination. And in an August interview with conservative personality Megyn Kelly, Greene further stated, “Israel is the only country I know of that has some sort of incredible influence and control over nearly every single one of my colleagues. And I don’t know how to explain it.”
Greene has also advanced talking points circulated by far-right Christians. Last year she opposed a House bill to define antisemitism on the grounds that it “could convict Christians of antisemitism for believing the Gospel that says Jesus was handed over to Herod to be crucified by the Jews.”
At least one Democratic lawmaker embracing Greene publicly says he is still treading carefully.
In a statement to JTA, Raskin — whose remarks in Florida seemingly welcoming Greene were met with some boos — outlined more specifically what he would need to see from her in order to bring her into the fold.
“Before I would welcome Rep. Greene or any other leaders who might flee from Trump’s autocratic personality cult,” he told JTA, “I would of course want to see them repudiate all the forms of authoritarianism, antisemitism, racism, transphobia and bigotry that they have promoted as Republicans and that have become so intertwined with the MAGA Republican brand under Trump.”
Raskin added, “I have real hope that a whole lot of my colleagues will continue to evolve away from the dangerous and divisive swamps of MAGA politics.”
The post Marjorie Taylor Greene is feuding with Donald Trump. Could she win over Jewish Democrats? appeared first on The Forward.
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Cameron Kasky, Jewish Parkland shooting survivor, is running for Congress on platform to ‘stop funding genocide’
(JTA) — Cameron Kasky, the 25-year-old Jewish activist and school shooting survivor, has entered the race to represent one of the United States’ most Jewish congressional districts — on a platform that includes stopping Israel’s “genocide” in Gaza.
“We need leaders who aren’t going to coddle their billionaire donors, who won’t support a genocide and who aren’t going to settle for flaccid incrementalism,” Kasky said in the launch video posted on Tuesday for his campaign to represent New York City’s 12th Congressional District.
The video’s caption includes the three main points of his campaign: “Medicare for all. Stop funding genocide. Abolish ICE.”
While Kasky’s anti-Trump positions are likely to go over well with the district’s largely liberal populace, his stance that Israel is committing a genocide — and the apparent centrality of that stance to his campaign — could be an issue for constituents. The district includes the Upper West and East Sides of Manhattan, where many voters sided with the pro-Israel Andrew Cuomo over Zohran Mamdani in the city’s recent mayoral election, as well as Midtown Manhattan.
Kasky’s messaging may, however, speak more to young voters in the district. A New York Times/Siena poll from September found that 66% of New York City voters ages 18 to 29 found that Mamdani, an anti-Zionist, “best addressed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict” among the mayoral candidates.
A democratic socialist, Kasky was a vocal supporter of Mamdani throughout the mayoral election — and an aggressive critic of fellow Democrats who objected to the mayoral candidate’s anti-Israel stances.
“‘Vote blue no matter who unless it’s a Muslim who criticizes Israel’s extremist far right nationalist government’ is not ‘vote blue no matter who,’” he wrote in one tweet.
In another, he wrote that Democrats who refused to endorse him after the primary should “go get a consulting gig and stop disrespecting your own voter base.”
Kasky had teased entering the crowded race for months, ever since Rep. Jerry Nadler, Congress’ most senior Jewish member, announced he would not be running for reelection.
In that time, Kasky has also weighed in on the viability of Micah Lasher, the Jewish state Assembly member and former Nadler aide who launched his own campaign for the seat earlier in the fall.
Lasher is unable to “fight fascism” because of his “genocide denial and free speech attacks on students,” Kasky wrote, with a screenshot of a Lasher tweet from Oct. 28, 2023, that criticized what Lasher called the “awful use of the word ‘genocide’ by some westerners to describe Israel’s actions.” (As the war in Gaza neared its two-year mark this summer, a poll found that half of Americans believed Israel had committed genocide, a claim that Israel and the United States both reject.)
Kasky also reposted a poll according to which Brad Lander, Mamdani’s most prominent Jewish ally, would beat the moderate congressman Dan Goldman, who is Jewish and withheld an endorsement due to “some of the rhetoric coming from Mamdani.”
“Needless to say, I am looking forward to working with Brad Lander,” Kasky wrote.
Kasky is the co-host of the “For You Podcast” with Tim Miller, which attempts to “break down the politics of the TikTok generation,” for The Bulwark, a center-right, anti-Trump media company.
One of Kasky’s podcast guests over the summer is now his opponent: Jack Schlossberg.
Schlossberg, who is the grandson of President John F. Kennedy and has said he is “at least 100% half Jewish,” announced his own candidacy for the 12th Congressional District last week.
Kasky remarked on their podcast that many women in his life have crushes on Schlossberg — and Schlossberg replied that the two men have a similar appeal.
“I always say, when you go unhinged politics Jew, it’s hard to go back,” Kasky said.
Kasky was thrust into the national spotlight as a survivor of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida, in 2018. Together with other survivors, he led a march in Washington and spurred a national movement that is seen as crucial to the 2022 passage of the most significant federal gun control legislation in decades.
Kasky, a junior at the time of the shooting, is credited with having selecting the name and hashtag #NeverAgain — which has long been linked to Holocaust commemoration — for the student-led gun control campaign. (Another co-founder of Never Again MSD is David Hogg, who recently stepped down as the youngest-ever vice chair of the Democratic National Committee.)
Before the shooting, Kasky said he played Motel in a school production of “Fiddler on the Roof.” The quality of his performance was proof, he joked, that he was not a paid actor in the protests, as some conspiracy theorists accused.
Kasky attended Hebrew school growing up, which he referenced when speaking on MSNBC about the “No Kings” protests against Trump.
“This kind of reminded me of my education growing up — when you go to Hebrew school, you learn about fascism a little bit younger than the other kids,” he said. “And you find yourself asking, in the face of authoritarianism, in the face of seeing a genocide happen before the entire world, what would I do? How would I react?”
He moved to New York City to attend Columbia University, where he later dropped out, and lives in the 12th Congressional District that’s been described as a “crown jewel” of New York politics.
Now, Kasky is running on a progressive agenda that emphasizes fighting Trump and stopping U.S. military aid for Israel, referring to the country’s actions in Gaza in no uncertain terms as a “genocide” — a response which he says has been informed in part by his Jewish identity.
“I am always surprised when people ask me why I focus so much on Palestine,” he wrote. “Beyond my Jewish identity making me strongly opposed to genocide, I’m a school shooting survivor-turned-activist. I started my adult life demanding an end to American-made weapons slaughtering children.”
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