Steven Singer knows the synagogue and community where an anti-Semitic zealot slaughtered innocent worshippers.
It’s a community that welcomes diversity.
He writes:
I know this community.
I am an extended part of it.
And that’s something of which I am proud.
Just walk along Murray Avenue and you’ll see Indian, Italian, Jewish, African, Chinese – every nationality imaginable – offering the fruits of their culture for friendly commerce.
You’ll see Hasidic Jews in dark hats and flowing tzitzit walking next to women in colorful saris next to trans and lesbians, kids with every color skin playing together in harmony.
Whenever I want a good corned beef sandwich or a quality lox and bagel, I go there. Whenever I want a spicy curry or the freshest sushi or an authentic macaroon, that’s the place. If I want to hear a string quartet or a lecture from a visiting dignitary or even if I want to swim in a public pool, membership to the Jewish Community Center is open to all.
It’s like a few blocks of cosmopolitan life tucked away in a city more known for segregation. We have many ethnic neighborhoods but few where one culture flows so easily into another.
Heck. Even the Tree of Life Synagogue, itself, doesn’t serve one congregation. It serves three who all had services going on at different parts of the building this morning.
There’s just something very special about this place.
It’s where you can go to be yourself – in fact, you’re encouraged to be who you are and not conform to any particular norm. Yet in doing so, you’re somehow demonstrating unity.
A hater arrived to kill.
President Trump says we shouldn’t blame lax gun laws. President Trump says the synagogue should have had armed guards.
Is this the new normal?
Singer thinks Squirrel Hill should be our new normal.
I wish America was more like Squirrel Hill and not the other way around.
If this community’s normal was our national ideal, think of the country we would be living in!
Vote. Vote out the NRA puppets who want to arm everyone and turn our nation into an armed camp, filled with haters.
Vote.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Thank you for sharing that.
In another city, I know that kind of synagogue community as well. You capture the feeling and essence of it beautifully. A Temple open to all. A haven and safe haven in a diverse city. Innocent and vulnerable because of it’s being who we are. How absolutely tragic for familes and friends – and invasive and threatening to all.
What is disgusting (how many times a week can we write that) – that within hours of the shooting the President doesn’t even bother with the robotic “thoughts and prayers.”
Now he goes directly to the defensive and making it all about him – – “don’t blame me” “it’s not about guns” “no comment about diverse communities” “you should fix it with more guns and guards” – and soon he’ll blame Obama and the Free Press.
And – he’ll have to dance because I am sure his “base” doesn’t have too many synagogues in their neck of the woods.
Just like after the bombs, it was all about him – and “that bomb thing” taking him out of the spotlight..
And, some well respected, distinguished Republicans have tarnished their legacies with their support and silence. And every gop candidate is just a clone of the same.
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Trump is frustrated because he wants to get his base riled up about the “caravan,” and the synagogue massacre distracted attention from him and his fight to keep immigrants out. Someone wrote things for him to say but his true feelings jump out when he speaks without a TelePrompTer or tweets. Can’t be the guns. Everyone needs guns. Don’t blame him. I blame him for legitimizing hatred and violence. This is the man who offered to pay legal fees for anyone who punched a protestor at his rallies. This man congratulated a congressman who body slammed a reporter. This man promotes and condones violence and hatred.
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Right on, Diane.
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Terrible, terrible news about the victims in Pittsburgh, yet another outrage, painful….Trump’s inflammatory crallies and tweets invite increasing violence, inciting his solid base of around 40% which has a large oragnized and armed right-wing fringe. Trump’s oratory dehumanizes, ridicules, and threatens the same targets–Democrats, the media, feminists, critics, immigrants. Creates conditions for lone wolves and fringe groups to act out. He’s unfortunately charismatic, tall, boisterous, braggadocio, signature orange hair, wealthy but foul mouthed and trashy as if he’s like average joes and janes. He appears at the end of a 40-year shift to the right in the two major political parties as well as in industry and foundations. Reagan, Bush, and Bush were effective stalking horses for something worse down the road. Very impt now to grieve for the dead and injured but comfort each other to calm fears. What matters now is consolidation of the large and growing opposition, cadre development of more leaders, community organizing to get the resistant majority in motion, strong and clear alternative rhetoric and politics.
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Ira,
Thank you for the clear analysis.
Trump’s election strategy is to appeal to hatred of the Other.
Hatred breeds hatred.
His defenders were certain that the pipe bombs were a hoax devised by Democrats to draw attention away from the caravan.
The synagogue killer was certain that Jews were financing the caravan.
The fever swamps of the alt-right, which breed Neo-Nazis and white nationalists are fed by Trump’s hateful rhetoric. Even after the FBI captured the bomb maker and saw that his van was covered with Trump-Pence-MAGA decals, Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh and other luminaries of the right continued to insist that the bombs were a Democratic hoax.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2018/10/27/ann-coulter-didnt-ditch-conspiracy-theories-after-bombers-arrest-most-false-flaggers-didnt/?utm_term=.12300e6b506d
Trump proclaimed himself a “nationalist.” That was a wink and a nod to his friends in the white nationalist clan.
His hatred for people of color, immigrants, Hispanics, Muslims, has morphed into a generalized hatred of everyone who is not WASP like him.
Historians in the not distant future will see Trump as part of a deeply embedded nativist, fascist tradition. We can see it now.
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Yes, exactly right, Trump provokes violence but pretends innocence, very dangerous for a charismatic unstable leader like him to behave like that to mass audiences, most of whom will not kill anyone but a large fringe of which is armed and over the edge. We must keep moving ahead like the excellent conf just completed by NPE, many events like this will make a difference in the long run but will be punctuated by terrible scenes like yesterday.
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Well stated, Ira, but I would like to highlight the only slight thing and add one more. I think we make a mistake the we concede that our Dear Leader is “unfortunately charismatic.” He is anything but. It’s been quite some time since I’ve done it, but please try to listen to one of his “speeches” in its entirety, preferably with a transcript, which only amplifies the ignorance of the words. I heard about how charismatic David Duke was until I saw him live a number of times and realized what an utter buffoon he was. I’ve actually sat down and listened to entire Hitler speeches and they too, are mostly incoherent drivel. There certainly was nothing charismatic about Joe McCarthy, as Bob and Ray proved so well with their character Commissioner Carstairs. So, why is the word charisma so often associated with them?
Because the audience is preprogrammed to love what they will hear, regardless of what is said or if it makes sense. It’s substance doesn’t matter. It’s only the seemingly lucid sound bite that will be edited for television. It’s the recitation of certain words and phrases that they’ve come to cheer and deem “charismatic.” A related appeal is that the public figures will openly say what many of them do not have the guts to say in public. The fact that they now have more license to do so gets transposed to the speaker as “charisma.” There is literally no there in this words. It’s a reactionary call-and-response exercise. (I experienced the opposite of this at a Jesse Jackson speech in 1988. The clips in the evening news made him seem like a wild man. Being there live from beginning to end, it was an extremely logical sermon that built up to a logical, emotional conclusion.)
When we concede incorrectly that he is charismatic, it feeds into the “savior” or “specialness” his cult members feel for him. It may not matter, but we should rightly point out its utter incoherence much like the children who point out to the adults that the emperor has no clothes.
Also, what the Kochs, et al, have done to turn hate into a political commodity is innovative in its own perverse way. I would argue that they have separated the components of hate in much the same way a chemist can break down the the constituent parts of a compound. They’ve isolated political messages, micro targeted if you will, under the categories of envy, jealousy, greed, desperation, etc. In my view, their political “brilliance” has been to focus on resentment of the other, the ones I feel are “below” me. It’s an “I don’t care if others do better, I just don’t want THEM to do better than me. I may still be held down, but I’m going to do all I can to make sure THEY don’t get ahead of me. In some cases, like Americans for Prosperity just to take one obvious example, they create institutional drivers for these malignant ideas.
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“Because the audience is preprogrammed to love what they will hear…” Mistaking “charisma” for “blind fanaticism”
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Charisma doesn’t depend on intelligent oratory, or even pre-programmed sound bites for chanting. Mitt Romney could deliver one of Obama’s or Trump’s speeches word for word, and he would still come off as a condescending, insincere stiff.
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Yes, Greg. Yes yes yes. Thank you!!!!
I remember reading, years ago, a piece by the English historian Toynbee about how Hitler was some sort of evil genius. I insisted that our editorial director remove it from the textbook she had put it in. No, Hitler was no genius. His own generals, after having gotten a good look at him up close, wanted him killed. He was a thug. His writing was confused and rambling and often incoherent and pretty much unreadable. His thinking, deranged, psychotic. His speeches, the same. His crazed ranting struck a chord with desperate, ignorant people. I had the same experience you did, btw, hearing Reverend Jackson speak. Clear, logical, beautifully written and delivered.
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Well, I overstated that. But certainly, there was much concern among the Nazis themselves about the sanity and sense of the Adolf Hitler. There were various attempts on his life, and there was the attempted negotiation of a peace carried out by Rudolf Hess. I have tried, a couple times, to read Mein Kampf to attempt to understand what makes such a monster. It’s unreadable. Long-winded, rambling, incoherent. Interestingly, fascist dictators a generally pretty terrible writers.
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What you write often reflects how you think.
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yes yes yes
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GregB, very sharp analysis, agree with most, thank you for the thoughtful response. As I see it, charisma circulates from Trump’s performances, the immense crowds continually attending his non-stop campaign rallies, his extreme utterances picked up as memes and chants, “Lock her up!”, “Build the Wall!”, “Drain the Swamp!”, which indicate he is driving the mob in front of him to stand behind him. Many, many people despise and dislike these performances and are repulsed by Trump, but charisma is not a universal magnet so he is a charismatic figure to the 40% of the electorate which is the base to whom he throws red meat. Jesse Jackson also has charisma and is also despised by a wide swath of the electorate, so much so that Bill Clinton played to that side of the electorate one election season by publicly breaking with Jesse for a while. So, I think charisma can be evil, ugly, destructive, and repulsive at the same time that it can mobilize a mass who do not see it that way.
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He is indeed charismatic in the same way that Hitler was charismatic. He was a magnet for his devotees. They hung on his every word. They followed his orders, blindly. Forgive the reference, but I believe it to be accurate.
To watch his rallies is a sickening experience if you are not one of his admirers. To watch his followers lavish him with admiration and adoration is a horrifying experience. If he asked them to jump over a cliff, they would.
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Your comment, Ira, is extraordinarily moving and eloquent, as usual. Thank you!
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OMG, we’re back to – the Jews ? If ever there was a moment when Trump-voters start second-guessing themselves, this is when they should throw in the towel.
Look at the onion this fear-mongering polarizing divider has been peeling back in the mere two years since he was a presidential candidate: first it was the recent fear that Muslims et al brown folk were challenging our Christian/ Western ways & stealing our jobs– then back to mid-20thC fears that socialists/ communists threatened our capitalism– then early-20thC fears that women’s vote/ voice threatens male culture/ steals their jobs– then late-19thC fears of immigrants doing same– then mid-19thC fears that freed slaves will do same– & now the sudden jump back to that staple of Middle Ages conspiracy-theory which perseveres among the most ignorant: it’s Jews threatening our culture & stealing our wealth.
Honest to god I never thought I’d see the day. But it gives great credence to “Yes, it can happen again.” And all Americans must meet this event w/ “Never again.”
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“Is this the new normal?” you ask.
Yes!
WE ALL KNOW THAT, IF YOU REPEAT something often — it becomes truth.
Repeat it endlessly — and it becomes the NORM!
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I am Jewish…and
I am feeling so shocked and sad for the congregation of the “Tree of Life Synagogue”…
They were celebrating a newborn boy’s bris…on the Sabbath…
I pray that we stop this “hate”…I pray that love and acceptance for our diversity will prevail…Perhaps this most evil event will provide us a more determined path for change…Voting for better representation and gun control ; And more resources available for mental health…starting at an elementary level….
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When Will We Ever Learn?
The only countries with permissive gun legislation are Albania, Austria, Chad, Republic of Congo, Honduras, Micronesia, Namibia, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, Senegal, Tanzania, the United States, Yemen and Zambia. “Permissive,” here, means that licenses for small firearms are granted on an at-will basis to ordinary citizens.
EVERY OTHER COUNTRY IN THE WORLD (there are 195 of them) has seen the wisdom of restricting access to dangerous weapons so that insane people can’t easily get their hands on them.
The US has 6 times the number of firearm deaths per capita as does Canada and 16 times as many as does Germany.
The US has 4.4 percent of the world’s population and half of the world’s guns.
There have been 1,600 mass shootings in the US since Sandy Hook.
On average, there is about 1 mass shooting PER DAY in the United States.
The more guns a state has, the more homicides and gun-related suicides it has. This is a very strong correlation.
For every criminal killed with a gun in self-defense, 34 innocent people are killed a gun.
Police officers are 3 times as likely to be killed in the line of duty in states with permissive gun laws as in less permissive states.
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I look at a video of one of Trumpf’s rallies–at the vehemence, the gesticulating, the chanting, the hate-filled sloganeering about a new nationalism and the dangers posed by immigrants–and am queasily reminded of certain films by Leni Riefenstahl.
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Yes, Trump performs in the style of fascist predecessors. About gun control–it is an issue on which opposition candidates can gain some traction now, but mostly or only in blue states. The great dilemma of this moment is that presidential and senatorial elections are disproportionately fought out or decided in “swing states”–perhaps 12-15 states where the blue-red divide is very close. The other 35 states are solidly in one bag or the other, afterthoughts, though this does not apply to elections for the House where population size counts but where gerrymandering undermines that democratic possibilitly.
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Exactly. But these people, Ira, are fighting a losing battle. The US will NOT, in the future, be a majority white, majority right-wing country, however much they pack the courts and gerrymander districts. We are undergoing a phase transition. We are a kettle on the fire just before it start boiling. Trumpf is the death rattle of the old order. Everything, soon, will change.
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well said, Bob. Trump is the last gasp of a dying order. We must learn to live together and treat one another with respect and kindness. Especially the children. They are our future. They are the America that will be. They are from every race and religion and background. They are us.
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So beautifully said, Diane! YES YES YES!!!
Trumpf and his Repugnicans are mad Cuchulain with his sword drawn on the waves of the sea. Soon, it will engulf them.
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This is my community–I live in Squirrel Hill. My husband and I were out walking yesterday morning when we saw SWAT teams and dozens of police gathering several blocks from our home. We had no idea what was going on, and it wasn’t until we reached our destination that we heard the heartbreaking news about our beloved neighborhood. We are not Jewish but belong to the JCC and the people at Tree of Life are our friends and neighbors. Last night, thousands of us gathered in Squirrel Hill for a vigil that was planned and conducted by HIGH SCHOOL students at Alderdice High School in Squirrel Hill. Though this was a terribly sad occasion, I was heartened by these brave and thoughtful teenagers who brought us all together to grieve and console each other. Their message was one of love and strength; I was so proud of this upcoming generation and how they are determined to face adversity and not back down. So much is at stake!
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Thank you for this report and the focus on high school students as the instigators of the ingathering for an evening. .
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