Being old(er) doesn’t come with a whole lot of perks, but three are well worth mentioning: senior discounts, long memories and the authority to rebut an antagonist with the words, “That’s not what happened. I know, because I was there.”
I was born in 1939, a number that sounds surreal even to me, and AI says I’ve witnessed a broader swath of human history than has 98 percent of the current population of the globe.
I remember events pretty vividly, especially the milestones achieved in my lifetime by robust political movements—anti-Vietnam war, pro-civil rights, anti-environmental degradation, pro-women’s rights—in which I participated up close and personal. A cofounder of Ms. magazine, I was in the thick of the struggle for gender equality, covering the movement and giving talks around the country. And I’ve been contributing columns about both the personal and the political to Moment for 34 years, more than 40 percent of my adult life.
“I was born under FDR, and I’m determined not to die under DJT.”
Good recall, a boon to writers, almost compensates for the depredations of aging and the anguish of watching one’s friends or loved ones sicken or die. On the other hand, the warehousing of wisdom and experience can chill the spirit when the scenes one conjures with the greatest clarity are from those stretches of history that began with an arc bending toward justice but made a sharp turn into disappointment and despair.
Moment’s 50th anniversary got me thinking about the ways this double-edged phenomenon has played out in the areas I’ve followed most closely over the last half century—women, Jews and Israel. All three categories chalked up encouraging progress early on, but (unlike this magazine) have flagged or been felled over time.
Start with women. Fifty years ago, America had zero female senators or Supreme Court justices. Between 1973 and 1975, the percentage of female math professors, tiny to begin with, actually went down. In 1975, a woman couldn’t undergo a C-section without her husband’s approval and had only a year prior been granted the right to own a credit card in her own name or take out a loan without her husband’s signature. A teacher could be fired when she got pregnant. Classified ads specified “Help Wanted Male,” or “Help Wanted Female,” and people who applied for the “wrong” job were unceremoniously shown the door.
Thanks to the birth control pill, Roe v. Wade and successful legal challenges to sex stereotyping and gender discrimination, in the last 50 years women by the millions have entered domains previously accessible only or mostly to men, proving themselves capable of not just thriving but excelling in every field.
Jews, too, have had 50 years of advances: the ever-increasing acceptance and accomplishments of Cohens, Katzes and Greenbergs in American institutions and workplaces; the decline in (overt) expressions of antisemitism; the proliferation of Jewish studies programs in universities; and the notable success of Jews in pop culture, comedy, music, science, medicine, politics and publishing.
Beyond those secular gains are the transformations and enhancements of Judaism itself. All denominations, including Orthodoxy, are, to some degree, the beneficiaries of the Jewish feminist movement’s targeted struggle for gender equality in ritual, God-language, worship, clergy ordination and leadership roles in synagogue life and Jewish communal organizations. Today few congregants would remark at the sight of a woman rabbi, cantor, synagogue president, baal koreh (Torah reader) and bat mitzvah girl on the bimah at the same time.
And yet mainstream America has seen a remarkable about-face lately on both women’s equality and “the Jews.” To name just a few shocking developments, the Supreme Court repealed Roe, JD Vance dissed “childless cat ladies”; Donald Trump scrubbed women’s photos and achievements from government websites, and incels (involuntary celibates) claimed women who deny men sex are committing “reverse rape.” Today, “tradwives” venerate domestic goddesses as if half the human race is supposed to find total fulfillment in housecleaning, cooking three meals a day and taking care of kids. In Trumpworld, women’s real-life issues are off the agenda and gender violence is unmentionable.
And we Jews? We’ve gone from feeling safe and secure to adjusting to a new norm of simmering hostility and words and acts that were once unimaginable. Reports of antisemitic violence have become ordinary news. Supposedly respectable public figures thrust Nazi salutes into the air. Synagogues and JCCs have had to erect concrete barriers and hire armed guards. Bomb threats put kids in lockdown in their Hebrew school classrooms and send panicked wedding guests running out of catering halls. And now, Trump is weaponizing the scourge of antisemitism to justify punishing universities he doesn’t like, even if the loss of funds shutters potentially life-saving research.
Meanwhile, Jew vs. Jew rancor has exploded. Abandoning our rich tradition of commonality, solidarity and respectful ideological disputation (see Hillel/Shammai, Heschel/Soloveitchik, Hannah Arendt/Gershom Scholem), we’re opting instead for demonization of those with opposing views. Just in May, ultra-right-wing militants committed incidents of unprecedented, pogrom-caliber violence in Brooklyn, NY, and in Ra’anana, Israel, in both cases against people they perceived as sympathetic to Palestinians.
It’s not all dark. Feminist advances have held firm in Jewish life, and Jewish women are enjoying the fruits. You can’t tell a reasonable Jew to unsee the dazzling intellectual contributions of our best women Talmud scholars or order a congregation to unhear a sermon by an inspiring female rabbi. And pity the synagogue ritual committee that tries to rule women unfit to be counted in a minyan or called to the Torah for an aliyah on the morning of her child’s bar or bat mitzvah.
And what about Israel? After the tumult of previous decades—the Holocaust, the founding of Israel, the dramatic rise of American Jews’ pride in Israel after the Six-Day War in 1967, the trauma of the Yom Kippur War six years later—hope for peace was rekindled by the signing of the 1993 Oslo Accords between Israel and the PLO. I was on the White House lawn that day (in my capacity as president of Americans for Peace Now) to witness the astonishing handshake between former arch-enemies Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat. A year later I witnessed the signing of the Israel-Jordan peace treaty in the Arava Desert. When balloons in the colors of both countries were released into the sky, mingling in a buoyant tableau of harmony, I remember thinking, “Peace at last! And it only took 46 years.” How wrong I was.
Moment readers need no reminder of the horrors of October 7, or the outrages committed before and since by the IDF under orders from the racist, theocratic, corrupt, Jewish supremacist government of Netanyahu et al. What readers under 50 may need to hear from someone like me—whose Zionism was forged at the age of nine on the euphoric night in May 1948 when Jews danced in the street to celebrate the UN vote that recognized the Jewish state—is that there once was a time when celebrating Israel was an uncomplicated joy.
Lately, progress on the three issues that shaped my life has been systematically attacked or rolled back by an unholy procession of male supremacists, antisemites, evangelical Christians, Project 2025 brainiacs, conservative media distortions and internecine struggles among purists inside both the Jewish and the feminist communities. But I refuse to let the arc of disappointment defeat my aspirations for Israeli-Palestinian peace or my fervor for Jewish amity and feminist solidarity. When the backlash and backsliding test my resolve and deplete my energy, I try to tap into my memory of tried-and-true organizing strategies and draw inspiration from long-ago seasons of witnessing and working for change.
For instance, around 1975, I joined a group of about 40 women who marched into The New York Times, sat ourselves down in the office of the Sunday editor and wouldn’t leave until he promised that the Sunday Book Review would assign more book reviews to women and publish more reviews of books by women—which, in fact, it did. The power of a sit-in has not lost its punch. Instead of distancing themselves from veterans of prior political movements, today’s activists must resist intergenerational estrangement and draw strength from those of us who improved women’s lives demand by demand, march by march, law by law, more than 50 years ago. And who today refuse to surrender their—our—voices or power to those who would erase our herstory and destroy what we built.
As for Jews, we need to make common cause with everyone willing to fight not just antisemitism but all the other hatreds—and with every member of the tribe who refuses to join in the gladiator sport of defaming anyone who disagrees with them.
Our community should better support beleaguered, demoralized liberal Zionists who’ve watched Israel flourish and flounder and, though critical of her shortcomings, have stood by her and stayed connected to her better angels. And we ourselves must be brave enough to testify truthfully to the pain of having spent all these years watching our own country support Israel, the homeland of our hearts, even as her own increasingly extremist leaders make her a pariah on the world stage.
William Wordsworth said poetry is “emotion recollected in tranquility.” I wish I could say the same about political recollections, but tranquility will have to wait. I was born under FDR, and I’m determined not to die under DJT. For now, I’m still in the fight, struggling with the contradictions of history and channeling the energy of the little nine-year-old who danced in the streets in 1948—and who, 76 years later, is ashamed to admit her revulsion at the actions of the Jewish state and her fear that Jewish pride and peoplehood may be too irreparably riven to survive another 50 years.
Letty Cottin Pogrebin is the author of 12 books, most recently Shanda: A Memoir of Shame and Secrecy.