Local Pittsburgh Scholars Respond to the Tree of Life Shooting
EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION: LIVING IN PITTSBURG IN THE AFTERMATH OF THE TREE OF LIFE SHOOTINGS – Heath Cabot
The shooting that took place on October 27, 2018 in Pittsburgh, at the Tree of Life Synagogue, (home to three congregations), leaving eleven people dead, was the largest anti-Semitic attack in U.S. history. The attack, like most unspeakable events, was almost immediately coopted into larger debates unfolding on national and global scales and diverse political agendas…
RESPONSE TO THE TREE OF LIFE SHOOTING – Jay D. Aronson 
Since Columbine, Americans have grown unsettlingly accustomed to mass shootings. We know what to expect from politicians, the media, and gun-control and gun rights advocates. More recently, especially since the Sandy Hook and Parkland school shootings, we have seen activists—mothers and students in particular—trying to break through the predictability to create lasting political change…
ON THE POLITICS OF REFLECTION – Michael Goodhart
On the afternoon of 30 October 2018 I left my office—late—to attend what had been described to me as a “rally” or a “protest” to coincide with President Trump’s visit to Pittsburgh in connection with the terrorist attack on the Tree of Life Synagogue carried out three days earlier. I was furious that he was coming…
ON NOT TEACHING FAST ENOUGH, FAR ENOUGH – Lara Putnam 
This summer I was asked by the United Steelworkers to give a talk on Central American migration to union leaders gathered from across the country for ongoing education in Pittsburgh. As the family separation crisis at the border engineered by the Trump administration intensified the topic became ever more timely…
Editorial Introduction: On Horizontal Alliances, History and the Bonds of Community – Michal Rose Friedman
Since we published our first installment of “Speaking Justice to Power: Pittsburgh Scholars respond to the Tree of Life Shooting,” national and global events have served as painful reminders that the forces which led a man to walk into a Pittsburgh synagogue on October 27th, 2018 during a Shabbat service and murder 11 Jewish individuals with precision and cold blooded cruelty, have been amplified. In fact, they are louder than ever…
The Historian’s Craft: Thoughts on Reading and Making History in the Wake of Tree of Life – Avigail Oren
I experienced the events and aftermath of the Tree of Life shooting as a historian just as much as I did as a Jew and a resident of Pittsburgh. My expertise is in postwar American Jewish history, and I wrote a dissertation about pluralism in urban Jewish Community Centers in the 1960s and 1970s. My archival research made me painfully aware of the ways in which white-identified Jews avoided conversations about their growing racial privilege and ignored their role in upholding white supremacy, even as they reliably voted Democrat and championed policies protecting minority rights…
When Scholars are Political, Human, and Shattered – Rachel Kranson
As both a professor of Jewish history and a local organizer with Bend the Arc: Jewish Action, I had long felt myself well-positioned as a politically-engaged scholar. Before October 27th, I never had cause to doubt that my scholarship would always complement my quiet activism, seamlessly and without conflict. As a historian, I would meticulously create books and articles that revealed Jews to be, above all, deeply human. And as an activist…
Memorializing the Memorial to the Tree of Life Shooting – Laurie Zittrain Eisenberg
Tree of Life synagogue has been my family’s shul for three generations and I am currently a Board member. I went to Hebrew school, celebrated holidays and was married there. As a teen driver, I was in a car accident at the Wilkins and Shady intersection in front of the synagogue and called my father from the phone in the Tree of Life office. I hadn’t seen the other car coming, just as surely as I hadn’t foreseen the massacre of horrific, historic proportions that occurred there on October 27, 2018. Like many others…
Association for Political and Legal Anthropology 