Mourning at a crossroad

On October 27th, 2018, a white nationalist murdered 11 Jews the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh.

They were Rose Mallinger, 97; husband and wife Sylvan Simon, 86, and Bernice Simon, 84; Joyce Fineberg, 75; Irving Younger, 69; brothers Cecil Rosenthal, 59, and David Rosenthal, 54; Melvin Wax, 87; Daniel Stein, 71; Richard Gottfried, 65; and Jerry Rabinowitz, 66.

May their memory be a blessing.

That morning, I woke up to a weird phone call from my mom. She needed to know if I was okay, where I was, if I was in Squirrel Hill, if I knew anyone in Squirrel Hill, if I go to Squirrel Hill often, if I’d ever gone to services there, and if everyone I know is okay. As I answered “no” to every question but the last, and as I awoke, I realized my mom had been terrified.

Honestly, at first I was confused. I didn’t understand what was happening, or how horrific it was. It didn’t sink in until my Jewish friends were all texting each other to check in to affirm we were safe, and a few friends didn’t check in right away.

When I heard on the news that the murderer had yelled “all Jews must die” as he walked in, I started to understand.

I thought back to August 11th, 2017 when I was watching news flashes and live streams of Nazis marching through Charlottesville, VA. I read how many of them had organized online, so I started reading through 4chan and 8chan, anonymous forums that have become a home on the internet for increasingly horrible white nationalist memes and discussion which are often dismissed as though it’s just an online problem. On these forums as Nazis marched through Charlottesville carrying torches and chanting “Jews will not replace us”, people were celebrating and happy. They were threatening more violence against Jews.

But this time, it wasn’t far away. This wasn’t somewhere else. This wasn’t another community under attack. This was my city and my community. I was terrified, and I couldn’t feel it. I was mourning, and I couldn’t cry. I was shocked, and I was not surprised.

I didn’t cry until October 30th. I was marching through the streets of Squirrel Hill with hundreds if not thousands of people singing “Olam chesed yibaneh / We will build this world with love”, and I realized then it was the first time since the 27th that I’d felt safe.

The largest mass shooting of Jews in American history did not happen in a vacuum. This violence is part of a larger pattern of white nationalism.

The congregations at the Tree of Life were targeted because they hosted an event with the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society that was welcoming to refugees. That morning, Robert Bowers posted on Gab, which is like Twitter but only for white nationalists, “HIAS likes to bring invaders that kill our people. I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I’m going in.”

Throughout history, Jews have been less safe when immigrant communities and other marginalized peoples are less safe, and this is true today too.

Robert Bowers is an antisemite, and his shooting was monstrously antisemitic. It was not only an attack on the Jewish community. And I don’t mean that in a broad “we are all Tree of Life” sense. I mean that in a very real way. Robert Bowers saw his murders as a way of hurting immigrants, and of protecting white supremacy.

Police said after they arrested Bowers that he said “he wanted all Jews to die” and that “[Jews] were committing genocide to his people.”

In case you don’t keep up with the latest strains of white nationalist theories, Bowers believed an increasingly popular idea in the type of “alt-right” (i.e. white nationalist) circles the GOP has been increasingly winking at, enabling, excusing, empowering, inciting, funding and recruiting for.

The very twisted theory of “white genocide” Bowers talked about it as follows: white people are supreme, and better than non-white people. White people are under attack by marginalized communities, such as people of color, queer and trans people, immigrants, Jews, and Muslims. White people are losing to them, and at risk of being wiped out by them. To be clear though, that sense of being “under attack” white nationalists feel is simply the slightest encroachment on their inordinate privilege and power as a white person.

White nationalists see marginalized communities taking steps toward a modicum of equality as an attack on them. They define their existence through their superiority exerted through violence and government, and thus when they see a possibility of people dismantling racist, xenophobic, ableist, homophobic systems of oppression, they see that loss of superiority as “white genocide”.

But if white people are fundamentally supreme, how are they losing to people inferior to them? The answer, they say, is the betrayal of the Jew. They distrust (white) Jews for their ability to “pass” as white. By passing as white, the white nationalist says, Jews are able to control the media, help “invaders”, and allow for everything the white nationalist fears. This idea is not new, but simply the latest iteration of a long, long cycle of antisemitism.

I want to be clear that my framing of the above is their view and not mine. Aside from being built on a system of ridiculously dumb, horrific, inconsistent, and dangerous ideas, this theory both completely discounts the existence of Jews of Color and suggests that white Jews are not actually white. But as a white Jew who grew up with all the benefits of whiteness in America, I can assure you I am in fact white, and also Jewish. This idea Jews cannot be white stems from the damaging narrative that the only people that matter are those from particular forms of European descent.

You may wonder why I think a theory as despicable as that is worthy of discussion on a day of mourning, why I would write this at all.

The answer is simple: I believe in mourning like hell for the dead, and fighting like hell for the living. I believe if the memory of those who were killed truly is to be a blessing, we must learn from their memory and fight the wretched ideas that that robbed them from their families and their lives.

This act of terror came only weeks after the lynching of a young Black man in Ferguson, and days after the murders of two Black community members in Kentucky by another white nationalist. It came amidst massive attacks on the rights of the trans community by the Trump administration. It was directly incited by the President’s fearmongering describing a caravan of immigrants as invaders.

My heart goes out to the families, friends, and neighbors who lost their loved ones. To the survivors who were injured, and survived. To those who were there and lived and live with those terrible memories. To my friends who lost people they love. To my friends who’ve had their memories of their childhood congregations and B’nai Mitzvahs destroyed by memories of this trauma. These are pains I hope I never am forced to understand.

And my heart goes out to my Jewish community here and around the country. Like many of my Jewish friends, I was raised with the subtle effects of generational trauma and the lessons of a people who escaped a genocide. The attacks in my city awoke a fear and trauma in me that felt like it had rested dormant in my bones from the day I was born, only to awake and arrest my body with a seeping dread and instinctual protectiveness for my community.

But we cannot only fight antisemitism. Robert Bowers wasn’t simply seeking to kill Jews. He was seeking to kill Jews for helping immigrants he saw as a threat to his supremacy as a white person. Robert Bowers is a white nationalist, who is part of a white nationalist movement, who believes in a white nationalist ideology.

That ideology is a threat to Jews. It is also a threat to immigrants, Black people, LGBTQ people, disabled people, Muslims, indigenous peoples, and other marginalized communities. It denies our existence. It’s a threat to everyone. At the same time as we have seen the worst rise in antisemitic attacks in decades, we have also seen a horrific rise in attacks on other marginalized communities. Meanwhile, other communities have faced the brunt of white supremacist violence continuously throughout those decades where antisemitic attacks waned.

But the decades of relative safety for many Jews in that time did not protect us from the rising tide of antisemitism that has arisen through right-wing fearmongering and as part of a backlash against popular movements to dismantle white supremacist systems of oppression. If we truly want to say a horrific attack like the mass shooting at the Tree of Life can never happen again, we cannot only fight for the safety of Jews. We must unite for safety for all.

We must name, denounce, and fight back against white nationalism.

The only way through this is by building safety in our communities by standing and acting in solidarity with those most marginalized. We must continue to show up for ourselves and each other. Our safety will only come through solidarity.

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out —
Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out —
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out —
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me — and there was no one left to speak for me.

— Martin Niemöller

I remember the pain of being angry when I realized the people killed at the Tree of Life synagogue would get a wave of support and mourning that Antwon Rose II never got, even though he was murdered in this city just months before.

On June 19, 2018, a white police officer shot an unarmed Black seventeen-year-old running away from him three times in the back.

Antwon died a terrible death at the hands of a man who vowed to “protect and serve”. And yet, Antwon’s murderer, Michael Rosfeld, was acquitted of all charges. Antwon’s death did not receive national headlines, and the protests the followed Rosfeld’s acquittal were met with arrests and legal restrictions on the city’s right to protest. Where was the city’s compassion towards Antwon and his family? Where was the country’s sense of urgency and desire to change?

Even in these horrible moments of terror and fear, my white skin protects me as I walk down the street. But Antwon’s black skin did not protect him, and his city officials turned their backs as his family mourned.

There was no mass public declaration that we were stronger than hate then.

Within hours of the attack, Naftali Bennett was on a plane to Pittsburgh. If you don’t know him, he’s served as Israel’s Minister of Education from 2015 to 2019, and as the Minister of Diaspora Affairs from 2013 to 2019. As the Minister of Diaspora Affairs, he claims to speak for all Jews all over the world, and seeks to get more of us to move to Israel.

And when he got to Pittsburgh, Naftali Bennett was welcomed with open arms into mourning spaces in the Jewish community.

Naftali Bennett is a racist, xenophobic, homophobic, Islamophobic bigot. He has worked to oppose gay marriage in Israel, and he even tried to suppress a book about an Israeli Jew falling in love with a Muslim. He openly refers to refugees in Israel from Eritrea and Sudan as “a plague of illegal infiltrators among us”. He also once said “There is a wave of crime and rape… the real cause is those fighting to help the infiltrators.” And he even boasted “I have killed a lot of Arabs in my life and there is no problem with that.”

I can’t help but read those statements and think about how eerily similar they are to words posted by Robert Bowers in the days and months leading up to the attack at Tree of Life, or to the xenophobic fearmongering from Trump we’ve gotten all too familiar with.

At any point during his political career of hateful rhetoric, Bennett has had the option to make a different choice. To welcome the stranger, as the Torah commands us to do. To advocate for an inclusive and loving society in which safety and peace are a given, and not a far off dream. Instead, he has chosen a different path, much like the virulent strain of nationalism here that seeks safety and privilege and power for one people through the demonization of another group of people, dehumanizes them, says they are causing our problems, and says people helping them are traitors.

Naftali Bennett is emblematic of one possible response we can have to our fear and pain. Our response to antisemitic attacks can be to say antisemitism is constant and will always be there, and thus you should move to Israel to live with your own people in order to be safe. And then once there, you will need to protect yourself from others not like you in order to be safe.

It makes me worried about how our community will respond to our fear and mourning in the months and years to come when so many welcomed and felt comforted by a man who built his career on denouncing the very values people at the Tree of Life synagogue were attacked for having.

As I mourn, I continuously think about the choices the Jewish community — and indeed everyone — has.

We can simply declare ourselves stronger than hate and be done with it while refusing to engage, fight, destroy, or even understand the root of the hate that attacked us.

The Jewish community can seek safety and our safety alone. We can fight antisemitism, and stand up to white nationalism only when its antisemitic violence rears its head. We can find a hollow and meaningless feeling of fighting antisemitism by fighting Muslims and people of color who would stand for us but also stand for Palestinians. We can ignore the trappings of white supremacist violence when it comes at the hands of the government, because it is not yet time to turn a cry of “never again” to “it is happening again” until our lives are being taken by the government or our families murdered by police with impunity or our families are being put in camps.

The Jewish community can choose to seek our safety alone.

We can even embrace the idea that another group of people is the obstacle to our safety. That if we can just get those people out of here, then we’ll be safe. If we can just get rid of them we’ll be safe. We can choose to seek our safety at the expense of another people’s.

Except those aren’t choices all of us have… Those aren’t choices many of my friends have, and those might not be choices you have. Those aren’t choices queer and trans Jews can make. Those aren’t choices Jews of Color can make. Those aren’t choices Jews whose rights and very existence arethreatened by white supremacy for reasons other than their Jewishness can make.

So the Jewish community can choose safety for some Jews. Or, we can choose a different path.

We can choose to commit ourselves to a vision of safety that truly holds, sees, and values you and all of those around you, by committing to stand up for each other. By deciding that we will take care of each other.

This is the safety I felt at a vigil my Jewish community through IfNotNow and a broad coalition of allies organized, as we sat in the streets of Squirrel Hill for hours singing, eating, caring for each other, in mourning and resistance.

This path may be a harder one to take, but the just path often is. We cannot merely dig at the root of hate. We must also plant seeds for a more beautiful world.

And if in our sadness and mourning we can commit to being not only for ourselves but also commit to solidarity with all marginalized communities, then truly, the memory of those killed at the Tree of Life on October 27, 2018 will be an incredible blessing upon us all for generations to come.

On October 27th, 2018, a white nationalist murdered 11 Jews the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh.

They were Rose Mallinger, 97; husband and wife Sylvan Simon, 86, and Bernice Simon, 84; Joyce Fineberg, 75; Irving Younger, 69; brothers Cecil Rosenthal, 59, and David Rosenthal, 54; Melvin Wax, 87; Daniel Stein, 71; Richard Gottfried, 65; and Jerry Rabinowitz, 66.

May their memory be a blessing.