Letty Cottin Pogrebin

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Letty Cottin Pogrebin was raised in a family where arguing was a tradition. They argued about Zionism, labor, Halacha [Jewish law], and the Rosenberg case. Her father put it succinctly when he said, “I yell, therefore I am.” Born in 1939, she spent her childhood in Queens, New York, growing up in a family was steeped in Jewish tradition . Her father, a lawyer, Talmudic scholar and Hebrew teacher, taught Letty as a child and she remembers with pleasure the long hours she sat with him studying Talmud.

Her mother, a designer, came from a poor family where the women “didn't have the honor of a Jewish education.” Letty was educated at the Yeshiva of Central Queens, the Jamaica Jewish Center Hebrew High School and Brandeis University. She received her B.A. degree in English and American Literature in 1959 and married Bertrand Pogrebin, a lawyer in 1963. She is the mother of a son and twin daughters, and is now a proud grandmother.

Her relationship to Judaism took a major turn when she was in her teens. In 1955, when she was 15, her mother died. Gathered in their home after the funeral, her father counted the men in the room and found nine, one less the necessary quorum for a minyan. Letty pleaded with her father to count her as one of the minyan so she could say Kaddish for her mother. He said it was forbidden and called the synagogue for the tenth man. The experience radicalized her. Her patriarchal father, who was the central authority figure in her life, also drove and smoked on the Sabbath. She couldn't accept the difference between a man's place and a woman's place in the tradition. Orthodox Jews believe that the male and female roles are not unequal, but rather are complementary. Her father had taught her to speak her mind, and she did. She turned her back on Judaism for 15 years, returning just before the time when the first woman rabbi was ordained in the U.S. and she felt that women had gained their rightful place.

Pogrebin began her career in 1960 working for the book publisher, Bernard Geis Associates, where she advanced to the position of Director of Publicity, Advertising and Subsidiary Rights and later Vice President. In 1970 her first book, How to Make it in a Man's World, was published. The next year, at the forefront of the women's movement, she was part of the team that developed Ms. Magazine and became its founding editor. A MS. staff member, she still continues to write articles for other magazines, including The Ladies Home Journal and The Working Woman, focusing on issues of feminism, women and employment, child rearing, and the role of women in politics.

In her next book, Getting Yours: How to Make the System Work for the Working Woman (1975), she discussed child care centers for working women, women and union membership, maternity rights, the Equal Rights Amendment and sexism in religion. In 1980 she turned her attention to non-sexist child-rearing with her book, In Growing Up Free: Raising Your Child in the 80s.

In the 1970s , Pogrebin and her family summered at a beach colony on Fire Island off Long Island. One September a small group of Jewish vacationers decided to hold their own services for Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. They gathered all the necessities - books, prayer shawls, a Sefer Torah and an Ark-but there was no one to lead the services. Pogrebin volunteered for the job. She knew the service well, knew the prayers and the ritual melodies. She became the Chazzan (Cantor) and continued for 13 years. She had always loved the music, the rituals and the chanting. Now, as a woman, she not only “counted” as a member of the minyan, she could lead the services from the bimah, the raised platform in a synagogue where the scriptures are read. The experience led her to return to the practice of Judaism.

During the early1970s many of Pogrebin's important issues came together: the women's movement, her Jewishness, political activism, career and writing. She says that for her, feminism and causes for justice “just plugged in to the Talmud.” She recognized that “when you raise a woman, you educate her children.” Her writing has always been open and honest about her own life experiences, and focused on the stages she had passed through. Her female readers identify easily as they go through their own stages. Out of her nine published books, the critically acclaimed Deborah, Golda and Me: Being Female and Jewish in America, (1991) has become the voice for Jewish feminism. Pogrebin opened a door for women who were uncomfortable with their Jewish identities. She writes about patriarchal religious traditions, anti-Semitism, Black Feminists and Jewish Feminists, and Israeli women and Palestinian women. Explaining the title, she says, “Deborah represents my spiritual life; Golda, my political life; and 'Me' is a sort of synthesis.”

In the late 1990s, Pogrebin challenged herself to write a work of fiction. Three Daughters (2002) tells the story of three women, all daughters of a rabbi whose lives take them on different courses. She explores their relationship to one another and to the worlds they have chosen to occupy, questioning how much of our accumulated ethnic experience we carry within ourselves and how it expresses itself in our lives. She is currently at work on a second novel, speaking for the first time through the voice of a male. Again, her subject is socio-political, with the protagonist, a son of Holocaust survivors, falling in love with a militant Black woman.

As a Jew and a feminist, Pogrebin regards her political life as important as her writing. In 1971 she helped found the National Women's Political Caucus to promote legislative gains for women. When the women representatives at the 1975 United Nations Conference on Women passed a platform declaring “Zionism is Racism,” she wrote articles challenging anti-Israel prejudice and anti-Semitism in the women' movement. She spoke out about peace in the Middle East as president of Americans for Peace Now.

She was a founder of Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, an organization that advocates proper moral behavior, no matter who it is for. The group believes that there must be a Jewish voice for justice for those who are unable to articulate group outrages themselves. “This is my kind of Judaism,” states Pogrebin, “to stand up for all peoples, not just Jews.” She recently helped found Brit Tzedik for Shalom, a group working for a reasonable peace between Israel and the Palestinian people.

Pogrebin also assisted in the creation or shaping of MAZON: A Jewish Response to Hunger, the New Israel Fund, the American Jewish Congress Commission on Women's Equality, and the civil rights movement in Israel.

Appearances on CUNY TV

Jewish Women in America

One to One

Women to Women