As Rosh Hashanah began Wednesday night in Squirrel Hill, a heavily Jewish neighborhood in Pittsburgh, Rabbi Daniel Fellman took to the pulpit at Temple Sinai and said, “Our American Jewish community is in despair.” “They are shouting,” he lamented.
“Those who seek the highest office in this country can utter vile, vulgar, hateful words day in and day out,” he told the congregation. No name was needed.
He then moved on to the rise of anti-Semitism on the pro-Palestinian left and the two assaults on Jewish students at the University of Pittsburgh within the last month. “Students have been misguided from pursuing true freedom on behalf of those who are being harmed, and are now uttering words that once seemed abhorrent and outrageous. Yes,” Rabbi Felman said.
It has been a year since Hamas terrorists in Gaza stormed into Israel, slaughtering an estimated 1,200 people, most of them Jewish civilians at their homes and music festivals, and taking hundreds hostage. Israel’s tit-for-tat war has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza, spread to Lebanon, and triggered a barrage of Iranian missiles aimed at Israel.
It also continues to cause persistent anguish for Jewish communities across the country, with them feeling divided, suspicious, and betrayed, both internally and externally.
“I’m worried,” Bob Bernstein, 70, said Friday night as he strolled down Murray Street with his wife. “And it’s increasing,” his wife Ellie, also 70, agreed, “but we can’t live in fear.”
The intensity of the political season in Pennsylvania, which now spans the High Holy Days, has only exacerbated these fears. Jewish voters in this battleground state are being courted by leaders of both political parties and repulsed by those within each party. Of them.
With more than 434,000 members, Pennsylvania’s Jewish community is larger and stronger than those in six other battleground states. Approximately 50,000 Jews live in Greater Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh is the city that helped launch the Reform Judaism movement in 1885 with the Pittsburgh Platform, a document that cemented an indelible progressive stamp on much of American Judaism.
Pittsburgh and the Squirrel Hill area also bear the scars of the 2018 Tree of Life massacre. In the massacre, anti-Semites stormed a synagogue on the morning of October 27, killing 11 worshipers and marking the largest shedding of Jewish blood in American history. .
Former President Donald Trump cited American Jewish liberalism, including the Torah’s command to “pursue justice, righteousness” and the commandment to “show compassion for the immigrant, for you were strangers.” They often seem unable to understand some of their most deeply rooted traditions. land of egypt. ”
Trump has regularly railed about the need for Jews to submit to “head searches” if they vote for Democrats, claiming he is the protector of Jews, and most recently saying that if he loses, Jews will have to undergo a “head check.” suggested that it was because of
But one year after the October 7 attacks, Jewish progressivism is being tested. Anti-Zionist activists took to the streets, calling for the destruction of Israel and the “globalization” of the intifada, the Palestinians’ violent struggle against Israeli occupation, sometimes turning to uncontroversial anti-Semitism.
Police say a group of men saw a Jewish student at the University of Pittsburgh leave a bar wearing a Star of David necklace in the early hours of September 27, began yelling insults about Israel and assaulted him. . This is the second assault on a Jewish student at Pitt in less than a month.
These violent episodes conflict with the distrust many Jews feel toward the former president, who in 2022 dined with rapper Kanye West, who has repeatedly made anti-Semitic comments, and neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes. This is fueling suspicions about the leftists.
“At a time when many of us are feeling uneasy about world events and anti-Semitism in America and around the world, the challenge is that many of us feel unwelcome from either end of the political spectrum. It’s what people feel,” Rabbi Seth Adelson said. Congregation Beth Shalom, a conservative synagogue in Squirrel Hill.
For Rabbi Adelson, anxiety is personal. His son, a soldier in the Israeli army, was called up shortly after the October 7 attack. Last week, two days before the Jewish New Year, his son was recalled to active duty as Israel ramped up military operations in Lebanon.
Trump is appealing directly to Jewish voters like Rabbi Adelson. One of his latest ads tones, “Hamas will see Harris’ anti-Israel statements and use it as a green light to continue killing Israelis.”
And for some Jews, when Mr. Trump says that Israel “will cease to exist” within a few years if he loses the election, his apocalyptic vision sounds infuriatingly plausible. After all, they say, Israel is threatened by Iranian ballistic missiles, Hezbollah rockets, Hamas terrorists, and the prospect that Iran could develop nuclear weapons, and yet the left believes Israel is They are debating how far they should be allowed to go to protect their own countries, and how much the United States should support them.
“I would have thought that after October 7th, everyone would have known what this was,” said a rabbi of the Chabad Lubavitcher movement who stopped on a Squirrel Hill sidewalk Friday night to blow a shofar. Levi Mondshein said. The Jewish New Year celebrations are coming to an end and the Sabbath has begun. “Instead, we have people making vague statements,” he said, adding, referring to Democrats who have failed to confront those who criticize Israel candidly enough.
Harris made her own overtures to Jewish voters. She resisted pressure from Arab-American and Muslim groups to give pro-Palestinian activists a speaking slot at the Democratic convention, despite devoting time to the parents of American hostages held by Hamas. I refused. (That hostage, Hersh Goldberg Pollin, was later killed in Gaza.)
She also frequently sends her husband, Doug Emhoff, who is Jewish, to Pennsylvania. On Friday night, as more religious Jews attended Shabbat services, Mr. Emhoff joined musicians Jason Isbell and Michael Stipe at a voting rally in Pittsburgh’s student-dominated Oakland neighborhood. .
Still, Jewish dissatisfaction with the left is not limited to Orthodox Jews, nor is it limited to Pittsburgh. At the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in New York, Rabbi Amiel Hirsch did not mention the suffering of Palestinians in his sermon, but said elite liberals had deserted their Jewish allies over the past year. He intensified his criticism.
“October. Seven cases were simple moral cases. A baby in a crib and her grandparents, who could barely walk, were brutally murdered inside their home,” he said, his voice rising. “What will it take for those who consider themselves paragons of social justice to speak up for Jews, if not Jews, at least in defense of the core values of the Western Enlightenment?” Is that so?”
It was a similar, albeit more eloquent, framework to Trump’s rebuke of Jews who promised to act as protectors but failed to support them.
But in Squirrel Hill, where the Harris Waltz Yard sign is filled with banners reading “Stand with Israel” and “Black Lives Matter,” many Jewish voters said it wasn’t hard to see through Trump’s rhetoric. .
On Friday night, Judy Bernstein, 70, who had come to Pittsburgh from suburban Robinson Township for Shabbat services, was asked by a friend from out of state why Pennsylvania’s Jews were so confused by Deputy Kamala Harris. I remember being asked if I wouldn’t vote for the president. She said she texted back angrily saying, “That’s what we are!”
Rabbi Ferman of Temple Sinai’s willingness to share his political views is a testament to his Reform congregation’s political views. He said in an interview that Trump’s recent comments – complaining about Jewish support for Harris and suggesting it would be Jewish people’s fault if he lost – meant that Harris stood up to the opposition. He said it frightened people far more than any other concept. – Her party has Israeli elements. She praised Harris’ husband Emhoff’s proud and undisputed Reform Jewish identity.
He pointed to continued expressions of anti-Semitism among Trump’s right-wing allies. He noted that on Thursday, Georgia Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene wrote on social media, “Yes, they can control the weather,” without specifying who “they” were. did. This is a comment that some have linked to Greene’s 2018 proposal. Beam, controlled by a powerful Jewish banker, may be the cause of the wildfires. The same day, another Republican, Rep. Tim Burchett of Tennessee, appeared on Fox News and denounced Jewish philanthropist and Democratic donor George Soros as “the worst money changer.”
Given these sentiments, Rabbi Felman said he has more faith in the Democratic Party, which has faced off against the party’s left-wing extremists, than the Republican Party, which has absorbed much of the far-right into the party’s mainstream.
Rabbi Felman said of Harris, “The vice president knows that deep down.” “I think she’s working hard to keep the coalition together, and coalition governments and coalition politics are a mess, but I’m not worried that she’s not speaking out against the far left. I mean, the far left. It’s a problem, but I think it’s being addressed.”
