October 27 marked the third anniversary of the synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh’s Squirrel Hill neighborhood, the deadliest anti-Semitic attack in American history. The occasion was accompanied by the publication of a thorough account of the massacre and its aftermath, written by the journalist Mark Oppenheimer. In his review, Jonathan Sarna praises this “detailed and well written” book for correcting many widespread misconceptions about the shooting, as well for delving into the nature of the Squirrel Hill Jewish community. But Sarna also points to some failings:
Oppenheimer . . . loves unorthodox characters. For instance, . . . Oppenheimer . . . portrays Keshira haLev Fife (née Sarah Gross), who bills herself as a kohenet [i.e., a female member of the priestly caste]. “She is a Jew of color, she can sing, she calls herself a priestess, she’s smart, she holds a crowd,” he gushes. . . . By contrast, the critical if less colorful work performed in the wake of the tragedy by the Jewish Federation director Jeffrey Finkelstein, Rabbi Aaron Bisno of Temple Rodef Shalom, and many of the community’s Orthodox and Chabad rabbis largely goes unrecognized here.
Oppenheimer exclaims that Squirrel Hill is unique, “the oldest, most stable, most internally diverse Jewish neighborhood in the United States.” That is an exaggeration: the Jewish community of Brookline, Massachusetts, is about the same age and no less diverse; the Jewish community of Lower Manhattan is much older. Nor is Squirrel Hill truly stable. Where once it was home to over half of the city’s Jews, today . . . that number is 30 percent. By contrast, 44 percent of the community’s Jews have moved out to the suburbs.
The membership of Tree of Life Synagogue, [where the shooting took place], as a result, plummeted from 850 families in 1995 to fewer than 250 in 2017. . . . Were it not for the Orthodox Jews, who continue to live within walking distance of their synagogues, the Squirrel Hill Jewish community would have shrunk much further. Even the Orthodox, however, have begun moving. . . . The stability that Oppenheimer posits is largely illusory.
Similarly illusory is his assertion . . . that Pittsburgh is “perhaps the least anti-Semitic city in the country.” Regular readers of the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle know better. On March 1, 2000, for example, a Pittsburgh gunman named Ronald Taylor shot and killed three people in nearby Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania. Anti-white and anti-Semitic writings were found in his home. . . .
Read more on Jewish Review of Books: https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/american-jewry/11584/from-pittsburgh-to-the-holocaust/