in a long interview with Rebecca Traister<\/a>, a Jewish feminist journalist, in New York magazine. Even well into her own adulthood, the former NBC \u201cToday Show\u201d and \u201cCBS Evening News\u201d anchor did not discuss her mother\u2019s Jewishness.<\/p>\nShe recalls, as an adult, discovering her late mother, Elinor, weeping after some friends made antisemitic remarks, but not explaining that she was wounded because she was Jewish.<\/p>\n
Katie Couric\u2019s first realization that she came from a Jewish background was when she was 10 years old and spotted a menorah in her mother\u2019s brother\u2019s house. The first thing that ran through her head was the song by the Jewish satirist Tom Lehrer: \u201cOh the Protestants hate the Catholics, and the Catholics hate the Protestants\u2026 and everybody hates the Jews.\u201d<\/p>\n
Her mother and her grandparents seemed ambivalent about being Jewish; she discovers a letter from her mother\u2019s father to his daughter urging her to mix with non-Jews. Her mother winces when Couric, as a TV personality, adopts the word \u201cOy.\u201d<\/p>\n
Couric theorizes in her interview with Traister that her mother was seeking to avoid the anti-Semitism she must have encountered growing up, and also to protect the reputation of her father, a newsman and publicist. The family lived in the South, and Couric\u2019s father, who was descended from Confederate soldiers, was obsessed with the Confederacy. Her late husband, Jay Monahan, was also an aficionado of the Confederacy and was proud of Couric\u2019s Confederate roots.<\/p>\n
The book has also earned publicity for its revelation that Couric in 2016 repressed parts of an interview with Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the late Jewish liberal Supreme Court justice. In the interview, Ginsburg spoke derisively of Colin Kaepernick, the NFL quarterback who protested racism in America by taking a knee during the national anthem.<\/p>\n
Couric stated she withheld the justice’s remarks in order “to protect her” image from critics. She has said she now regrets her holding those statements back.<\/p>\n
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