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“Squirrel Hill” Shows Violence Against Jews Can Happen Anywhere

“Squirrel Hill: The Tree of Life Synagogue Shooting and the Soul of a Neighborhood” by Mark Oppenheimer (Knopf) is a rich and important effort to write that day into history by showing us in vivid detail what the Jewish community endured and survived on that day. 
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November 24, 2021

Mass murder in America is such a commonplace that attack on a synagogue in Pittsburgh, which happened only three years ago, is not much talked about nowadays.  “Squirrel Hill: The Tree of Life Synagogue Shooting and the Soul of a Neighborhood” by Mark Oppenheimer (Knopf) is a rich and important effort to write that day into history by showing us in vivid detail what the Jewish community endured and survived on that day. 

Oppenheimer, the former religion columnist of the New York Times, directs the Journalism Initiative at Yale University and serves as a cohost of Tablet’s “Unorthodox” podcast. He brings the urgency and accuracy of superior journalism to his work, but he is also a gifted storyteller with open eyes and a big heart. What’s more, the author has family roots in Squirrel Hill, and he is able to affirm from personal experience that “[t]he gunman at the Tree of Life perpetrated the greatest anti-Semitic attack in American history surely did not know that he was attacking the oldest, most stable, most internally diverse Jewish neighborhood in the United States.”

Oppenheimer has an eye for the telling detail. He pauses to observe that a Dunkin’ Donuts shop — “famous for having kosher certification, so that observant Jews could eat its Munchkins and drink its Coolattas” — is located not far from the Tree of Life synagogue. Thus does he remind us that America has long been perceived as a safe and welcoming place for Jews.  On October 27, 2018, 2018, we were reminded we can become the targets of an active shooter.

He also shows us the diversity and harmony of the Jewish community in the Pittsburgh neighborhood called Squirrel Hill.  “[T]he Tree of Life synagogue building actually housed three congregations: its own…; Dor Hadash, a lay-led community that was part of the liberal Reconstructionist movement; and the small, aging New Light Congregation.” The gun-man who entered the building, he points out, “could have hit people from any of the three synagogues.”

Oppenheimer is careful to refer to Robert Bower as “the alleged shooter” because, more than three years after the shootings, he has not yet been put on trial. Bowers arrived with his assault rifle and handguns shortly before 10:00 a.m., and the first shot “sounded like a coatrack falling to the ground,” but eleven men and women inside the synagogue were killed and two were wounded.  Four police officers who responded to the 911 call were also injured. And the author knows enough about the comings and goings at a synagogue on a Shabbat morning to offer a shattering insight about the Jewish victims.

“[W]ho is in synagogue at ten to ten on a normal Saturday morning, when it’s not a holiday, when there’s no wedding or bat mitzvah or bris?” he muses. “It’s a mix of the most committed Jews and the Jews with no place else to go, the widowed or disabled or simply lonely, who wake up early and can’t wait to see other people.” And he declares: “That’s who came early. That’s who got shot.”

Then, too, Oppenheimer emphasizes that the Squirrel Hill community and the wider world, regardless of faith, rallied to remember the victims and support the survivors. Famously, a man named Greg Zanis, who put up wooden crosses at the scenes of shootings, affixed Stars of David to the crosses he planted in the ground outside the Tree of Life synagogue.  At the point where the stars and crosses were connected, mourners began to deposit stones in imitation of the Jewish tradition of leaving stones at gravesites.  Some two thousand stones were eventually left by visitors to the Tree of Life synagogue, Donald Trump among them.

The Trump visit, not surprisingly, turned out to be more of a provocation than a comfort. When he left the site, his fleet of official vehicles approached a large group of demonstrators who were protesting against gun violence by tearing small places of black paper in the tradition of kriah, the rendering of a mourner’s garment. “The intrusion of Trump’s black motorcade, snaking through Squirrel Hill, a phalanx of police and quasi-military and Secret Service with their black sunglasses, their weapons and their little earpieces — it didn’t look the way America should,” writes Oppenheimer. Jacob Bloom, one of the demonstrators, sat down in the path of the motorcade and ended up in a paddy wagon. “I didn’t feel like I could sit on the sidelines,” said Bloom.

We are left to ponder whether the dead and wounded at the Tree of Life were victims of gun violence who happened to be Jews, or Jews who were victimized by an anti-Semite because they were Jews.

Oppenheimer asks the hardest questions about the meaning of the Tree of Life shootings. “For the Orthodox, the Tree of Life attack, as horrible as it had been, was part of the river of Jewish history, which is periodically fed by Jewish blood,” he writes.  By contrast, he points out that “[f]or most Americans, Jews and Gentiles, the story of Jews in America is one of high incomes, higher learning, and liberation from oppression.”  So we are left to ponder whether the dead and wounded at the Tree of Life were victims of gun violence who happened to be Jews, or Jews who were victimized by an anti-Semite because they were Jews.

On the day of the shooting, as Oppenheimer tells us, a woman named Tammy Hepps walked with two friends to a corner outside the police barricades to read from a book of Psalms as a gesture of comfort and commemoration. “The table of contents were grouped by themes: the right Psalms for peace, for the Jewish people, for divine guidance, for help in troublesome times, and so forth,” he writes. “None of them seemed right – there was no category for this.”  And he quotes Hepps’s own musing: “What do you even call this thing? ‘Psalm on the Massacre of Your Community?’”

The irony, of course, is that Psalms have been recited across the millennia by Jews seeking solace for some atrocity that they have endured. And it defies both logic and experience to deny that the Squirrel Hill shootings are linked to the acts of violence that have afflicted the Jewish people throughout our history, both recent and ancient. The lesson of Oppenheimer’s book is that, contrary to our comfortable assumptions, it can happen here.


Jonathan Kirsch, author and publishing attorney, is the book editor of the Jewish Journal.

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