Pittsburgh Shooter Hated

What the Pittsburgh Shooter Hated: Squirrel Hill Values

I grew up in the Jewish community near Tree of Life synagogue. I know firsthand that we're stronger than hate.

By ROBERT WHELAN

The British satirist Jonathan Swift is often credited with the most-cited aphorism about the power of rumors: “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”

On Saturday morning, I woke up to the unimaginable news that a terror attack had struck the Jewish community in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh, where I grew up. Over the years, I’ve attended many services at Tree of Life, including the bar and bat mitzvot of high school friends.

Now, a gunman had reportedly killed 11 people at the synagogue and wounded six others, shouting anti-Semitic slogans as he was taken away by police.

As a journalist based in Mexico, I’m used to covering violence and tragedy. But this was a shock. This was home. Tree of Life is a pillar of Pittsburgh’s Jewish community, and its unassuming gray stone and stained-glass structure sits in the heart of Squirrel Hill on Wilkins Avenue, one of the main arteries that connects the neighborhood to the universities and shopping districts bordering downtown.

After calling around to ensure that my family and friends were accounted for, and after the initial wave of horror and sadness washed over me, it soon became clear what had happened: A vicious lie had traveled the world, from the Middle East to Europe to Latin America, and had landed with deadly finality in my hometown.

That lie, of course, is the ugly libel that Jews are coordinating a genocidal war against “white” culture by paying for hundreds of thousands of immigrants to storm the borders of the United States and the nations of central Europe.

Robert Bowers, the 46-year-old from the southern suburbs of Pittsburgh who is accused of storming into Tree of Life as Sabbath worship services began and murdering congregants with an assault rifle, was unequivocal about his views on Jews.

On Gab, the social media platform of choice for the alt-right, he wrote that “Jews are the children of Satan” and ranted about the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, a 140-year-old nonprofit that was founded to help victims of 19th-century anti-Jewish pogroms in Russia emigrate to the U.S. Today, the group provides assistance for migrants from all over the world, Jewish and not, including those from Latin America, torn by criminal violence, and Syria, torn by war.

The caravans of Central American migrants making their way through Mexico toward the U.S. border had caught Bowers’ attention in recent weeks. He reposted claims on Gab that the caravans were “hostile invaders” and that Jewish organizations were paying for the caravans and providing trucks to transport immigrants.

In most of the U.S., Bowers’ hateful views are seen as fringe conspiracy theories. But all over the world, from Syria to Hungary to Honduras to Mexico to Florida, anti-Semitic libels related to a global plan by Jews to corrupt the white race and otherwise dominate world culture are gaining traction.

This month alone George Soros, the billionaire Jewish philanthropist and Holocaust survivor, has been accused of funding the migrant caravans on social media, in TV newscasts and by mainstream elected officials.

There is no evidence to date—none—that Soros is funding the Central American migrant caravans. As my colleagues and I have reported, most of the thousands of migrants crossing Mexico right now are dirt poor. To survive the nearly 3,000-mile journey north to the U.S. border, they rely on their own limited means, as well as donations from local church groups and the residents of the towns they pass through on the rough migrant trail.

I have traveled to the Central American countries where these migrants come from, and reported on the violence and abject poverty they are trying to escape. I’ve written for my newspaper, the Wall Street Journal, about migrants from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador who were apprehended in Texas, steps from the Mexican border, after crossing the Rio Grande on a raft in search of a better life.

I’ve interviewed migrants who have settled in the northern Mexican city of Saltillo, grateful to be able to work even low-paying factory jobs in peace instead of facing daily extortion and death threats from the street gangs that have overrun much of their home countries.

Not one of them was well-funded or provisioned for their journey, and every single one of them cited safety, a better job or reuniting with family as the principle reason for trying to enter the United States. None of them talked about changing U.S. culture or invading the country at the bidding of the Jews.

But even dignifying the libel of the Jewish immigration conspiracy theory with an answer feels wrong and offensive to me. Engaging with anti-Semitic rumors as though they are legitimate points of view is like buying an airline ticket for a lie—the more reasonable people who mention it, the faster it travels the world.

On Sunday, while I was still processing the brutal attack that tore apart my community, I called an old college professor of mine, David Nirenberg, to help me better understand how the Tree of Life attack could have happened.

Professor Nirenberg, who now serves as dean of the University of Chicago’s Divinity School, is a historian and one of the world’s foremost experts on anti-Semitism. He described what he calls the “classic form of anti-Judaism”: The idea that shadowy Jewish agents are working from within a society to corrupt it and manipulate its leaders.

White supremacists, he told me, cannot brook the notion that a minority group (Blacks, Latinos, Muslims, to name a few of these bigots’ favorite targets) is receiving special treatment from society (via affirmative action education policies, for example, or by gaining asylum status).

In the anti-Semite’s warped worldview, these inferior groups could never have achieved favored status on their own merits, and must have help from within the system, and that means from the Jews, a group they see as duplicitous manipulators who are pretending to be white.

What’s different today, and much more disturbing, is that this view seems to have moved much closer to the mainstream than it has been since World War II. And the Soros obsession is dangerous because it legitimizes the views of accused violent criminals like Bowers.

“Now, just as in the mid-1920s, mainstream figures are willing to flirt with these anti-Semitic memes and adopt these really fringe viewpoints in exchange for some sort of electoral advantage,” Nirenberg said. “That is what really has given these ideas resonance. In the past, you’d rarely find people willing to say these things on TV or in public, but that all changed because of moments like Charlottesville,” he said, referring to last year’s deadly “Unite the Right” rally of white supremacists in Virginia.

“It empowers these people in an entirely new way,” Nirenberg explained.

The horrors of Saturday’s shooting are all the more disturbing for being in my backyard. My sister held a baby-naming ceremony for her first daughter in the Tree of Life sanctuary a few years ago, before moving away from Pittsburgh for her medical residency. I shudder to think what might have happened if she were still a member there today.

If a conspiracy theory about the role of Jewish groups in immigration is the lie, then what is the truth that got stuck lacing up its boots on Saturday morning while Bowers was allegedly killing worshippers at Tree of Life?

The truth is that communities are stronger, and people become better, when they are exposed to people who are different, and compelled to learn about them, live alongside them and engage them in dialogue in the hopes of developing an understanding and empathy for them and their ways of life. And to me, that truth is best exemplified by the neighborhood of Squirrel Hill.

You feel this sense every day in Squirrel Hill, a place teeming with first- and second-generation immigrants, a place where families of all backgrounds are welcome, a place that feels inviting and refreshingly unconcerned with the things that make people different: race, wealth or social status. It’s a neighborhood that has taken on the character of its most famous denizen, the late Fred Rogers—who lived just three blocks from the shooting.

As I seek to process my own reactions to the Tree of Life attacks, I’m reminded of my own childhood. I was raised in a dual-religious household in Squirrel Hill, about a mile and a half from the synagogue.

My mother, an Ashkenazi Jew with roots in Russia, Germany and Lithuania, was raised on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and since the 1980s has been a member of the reform Jewish congregation of Temple Sinai, about a mile from Tree of Life.

My father, on the other hand, is an Episcopalian from Baltimore with Scots-Irish and Irish Catholic ancestors. Shortly after accepting a position as a political science professor at the University of Pittsburgh in the 1980s, he joined the Episcopal Church of the Redeemer, a few blocks down Forbes Avenue from my mom’s synagogue.

Inside our household, my siblings and I were taught both traditions. We hosted a Passover Seder each spring and decorated a Christmas tree in the living room each winter. Shortly after I celebrated my bar mitzvah at Temple Sinai in 1997, I joined the church choir at Redeemer, singing bass alongside my father each Sunday for four years of high school.

But outside our house, the communities were wonderfully stitched together as well. Rabbi James Gibson of Temple Sinai would often be found in the pews at our church during Easter; our rector would often attend Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur services at Temple Sinai and incorporated Hebrew prayers into her Sunday Eucharist service. We would occasionally see both of them volunteering at the monthly men’s shelter dinners organized by East End Cooperative Ministries, an interfaith group.

Years after high school, a college course on the Old Testament reignited my interest in Judaism, and I stopped telling people I was “half-Jewish.” When I married a Jewish woman, we decided to raise our family according to Jewish traditions, and now I identify as Jewish. But Squirrel Hill, and the open-armed pluralism that defines it, has undoubtedly shaped my religious identity and who I am as a husband, a father and a person.

At Taylor Allderdice High School at the southern end of Squirrel Hill, I sat in classrooms with students who were of white, black, Indian, Korean, Chinese, Jewish and Christian heritage. They were the children of Russian refuseniks who lived in settlement housing at the foot of Murray Avenue and the kids of wealthy doctors and documentary filmmakers who lived in rambling Tudor houses on Beechwood Boulevard and the leafy lanes north of Forbes Avenue.

We all cheered the Dragons, our championship high school soccer team, together during the City League playoffs, drank beer in Frick Park on Friday nights (sorry, Mom), and ate cheesesteaks at Uncle Sam’s Subs after school. The most bitter ideological differences were between those who bought delicious, Neopolitan-style pizza from Mineo’s on Murray Avenue and those who preferred Aiello’s, the (inferior!) slice shop up the street.

How does something so horrible happen to a community this strong? If it can happen here, a place where the truth guides people to be good to one another and ideas are shared and debated, rather than weaponized, can’t it happen anywhere?

On Sunday, I also called Rabbi Gibson, who stood on the bima with me the first time I read Torah at Temple Sinai, and asked him to help me sort through these questions.

He reminded me that Bowers, the alleged gunman, was obviously not from our community, and did not share our values. Rabbi Gibson pointed out that just a few miles away from where I grew up is a totally different place, culturally, politically and ethnically: The Southern Poverty Law Center has ranked Pennsylvania as the U.S. state with the fourth-highest number of hate groups, many in the southwestern part of the commonwealth, where Pittsburgh sits.

“For me, Squirrel Hill values are not just live and let live, but that people who are different have something really interesting to bring to the conversation,” he said. “We’re interested in each other.”

Squirrel Hill values. Maybe that’s why a white supremacist would choose to gun down people in a house of worship—maybe that’s what bigots hate about places like my old neighborhood.

Rabbi Gibson noted reports from Sunday afternoon that Pittsburgh’s tiny Muslim community had raised more than $70,000 in 24 hours to help pay funeral costs for the murdered Jews at Tree of Life. He assured me that life would go on.

“I don’t think the fundamental calculus of Jewish life in the neighborhood has changed as a result of this terrible thing, but it was a terrible thing,” Rabbi Gibson said. “If we become armed camps in our own synagogues, it will defeat our very purpose to exist.”