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In an unusual alliance, Jewish media and striking journalists are uniting to cover the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting trial
PITTSBURGH (JTA) — How many times should an alleged synagogue shooter’s name be mentioned in a news story about his trial, now beginning after more than four years?
For the Pittsburgh Union Press last month, the answer was seven. For the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle, it was an uneasy five, in a departure from its usual answer of zero — a number chosen out of deference to a community devastated by the shooting.
The slight difference was the only discrepancy between one set of stories published by the two news organizations covering the trial of Robert Bowers, accused of murdering 11 Jews in their synagogue here in 2018.
The anomaly offers a window into an unusual partnership between the two publications — the city’s Jewish paper and the news site established by striking staffers for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette — born in February when it became clear that the trial would last months.
Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle editor Toby Tabachnick was dreading the trial coverage, with a staff of just three on the editorial side: herself and two reporters, David Rullo and Adam Reinherz.
“I started getting really nervous. Like, how are we going to do this?” Tabachnick said on the eve of the trial, speaking at the federal courthouse where jury selection would soon begin. “Our regular reporters could have been here. But it would have been extremely taxing, difficult and emotional for us, because we’re so ingrained in the community too.”
Plus, she added, “In addition to this trial, which is going to be every day for three months, we’re covering the synagogues, events and the holidays, the lectures, we still have a regular community newspaper to put out.”
Tabachnick knew Andrew “Goldy” Goldstein, one of the Post-Gazette’s team that picked up a Pulitzer for their coverage of the massacre, from his time as a Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle intern. She also knew he was on strike and wondered whether he could use the extra freelance opportunity.
Instead, Goldstein immediately offered up a better idea: Join with the Pittsburgh Union Progress, the strike paper, in a joint reporting project, organized in part through the Pittsburgh Media Partnership, an incubator for local journalism. (The Jewish Telegraphic Agency is raising funds for the coverage.)
Working together just made sense, Goldstein said. The Chronicle was deeply resourced and credible in the Jewish community, and the Progress had on board Torsten Ove, a local legend.
From left to right, Bob Batz of the Pittsburgh Union Progress, Toby Tabachnick of the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle and Andrew Goldstein of the Progress pose in the Joseph Weis Jr. Courthouse in Pittsburgh, April 21, 2023. (Ron Kampeas)
“We have the all-star federal courts reporter in Torsten and we have a lot of really great journalists who love Pittsburgh, love this community, and we’ll do our best to cover it,” Goldstein said, noting that the Chronicle would also have access to the Progress’s photographers. “But the Chronicle brings something different entirely to the table, which is, they’re so deeply sourced in the Pittsburgh Jewish community, and they have such an interest in this trial in particular.”
Newsroom collaborations have become more frequent in recent years as publications realize they can expand their impact and audience by working together. But while there are a growing number of relationships between local and national publications and between daily and investigative outlets, ties between mainstream newsrooms and community or ethnic media are less common.
S. Mitra Kalita, the founder and director of URL Media, a network of Black and Brown community news outlets that share content and revenue, said the value in such partnerships was not just in delivering relief as media staffs shrink, but also in sensitizing mainstream media to minority sensibilities.
“Talking about who [the ethnic media outlet is] serving and why we’re doing it this way — the spirit of real collaboration is a bit of that give and take,” she said. “We make mainstream media way better because it starts to infuse mainstream media with aspects of community and thus redefine the mainstream.”
The residual trauma of the massacre in the Pittsburgh collaboration made it all the more important for the mainstream reporters to be sensitive to the nuances that the Jewish media was bringing, she said.
“Especially a story like this one, which was such an attack on a community — a community that was singled out for their sheer existence, the strategy cannot be ‘let’s just work in parallel,” Kalita said. “It’s not going to work. It has to be kind of a cross-pollination and a real collaboration.”
That’s exactly what is happening, according to the reporters and editors involved in the project, with communication easy between each publication’s editor and expertise flowing in both directions.
Ove a denizen of the Joseph F. Weis Jr. Courthouse for so long that he can tell stories about a sizable stretch of the portraits of judges that line its corridor walls; he may be the only court reporter to seek an interview with a judge after his death, to ask him why he was haunting the place. (The judge never showed, but his widow was less than surprised to hear that he was still working.)
He led a passel of Chronicle and Progress staffers through the warren-like courthouse on the Friday before the trial, handily impressing them with his intimacy with the building — he knew the provenance of the paintings in each courtroom — and its staff. Soo Song, the assistant U.S. attorney who is leading the prosecution team, smiled and nodded as she passed.
Torsten Ove, left, of the Pittsburgh Union Progress and Adam Reinherz of the PIttsburgh Jewish Chronicle confer on the first day of jury selection for the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre trial, April 24, 2023. (Toby Tabachnick)
Ove showed the reporters how to access court records for free, and while they stood around him at one of the computer terminals, the teams’ different emphases emerged: Ove predicted that jury selection, which started last week and is expected to last as long as three weeks, would not be a news generator, because in his experience, it rarely has been.
Reinherz and Tabachnick, attuned to reporting on faith communities, were not so sure: Reinherz wondered whether believing Catholics, who reject the death penalty, would be eliminated, and Tabachnick wondered whether defense attorneys would seek to keep Jews off the jury — and how they would go about doing that.
Reinherz ended up covering the first day of jury selection. “Local and national reporters decided the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle should have one seat during the initial session of day one,” Reinherz explained in a story that appeared on both news sites. He noted that the first member of the public to enter the courtroom was Daniel Leger, one of two survivors of the attack.
Working together across platforms was odd, said Bob Batz Jr., the Progress’s interim editor, but he could get used to it.
“This is uncharted territory for someone like me, and I’ve been doing this for a long time, and we don’t, you know, we don’t collaborate,” he said.
“We compete!” Tabachnick interjected.
“What we’re doing is not common, and it’s not going to be easy,” Batz said. “Surely, we’re going to tick each other off about something or somebody is going to put the wrong word in or there’s a million things that can go wrong, but the breaking of ground where you’re actually working together, it just makes sense in so many ways on this story. We’re really trying to serve the community.”
Tabachnick said she saw added value in keeping journalists she admired in the limelight while they are on strike. Journalists at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette went on strike back in October over wages and working conditions, in a crescendo of mounting tensions between the paper’s longtime owners and the staff that contributed to a newsroom exodus even in 2018, when the paper won a Pulitzer for its synagogue shooting coverage. The strike is now one of the longest in journalism history, and the staffers contributing to the Pittsburgh Union Progress are doing so despite earning well below than their regular salaries.
“I feel good about getting their names, their publication’s name out,” Tabachnick said.
Each story is running in essentially identical form on both publications’ websites, with a line crediting their collaboration. Tabachnick and Batz had a brief and friendly email exchange before each clicked “publish” on their story about debate among victims’ families about the appropriateness of the death penalty.
The Chronicle is minimizing appearances of the name of the accused killer, out of sensitivity to readers who may want to see their community members centered rather than their aggressor. Some researchers and law enforcement officials have also called on journalists not to print mass shooters’ names and photographs, citing evidence that doing so may contribute to their glorification and even copycat crimes.
Batz says he totally gets the Chronicle’s thinking, despite making a different choice in his newsroom.
“We’re still feeling our way, we’re still figuring this out,” Batz said. “They don’t name the defendant in their story, and they haven’t. And our guy Torsten who’s an all-star courts reporter, he’s going to use the guy’s name. And then in real time going back and forth on email and text we came up with his solution and that story was on both websites in minutes and it was really kind of cool.”
Tabachnick picked up the account of the previous night’s collaboration as if she’d been working across a desk from Batz for decades instead of online since February.
“The solution was that I realized that with the trial starting, it really didn’t make sense not to use his name at all anymore that we really needed to as a news organization,” she said. “But that didn’t mean we had to overuse his name. And I’m not saying Torsten overused his name. He used it as much as he needed to use it in terms of style, but I took out a few of them and replaced it with ‘the defendant’ and we were all happy.”
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The post In an unusual alliance, Jewish media and striking journalists are uniting to cover the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting trial appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Anti-Israel Activist Cameron Kasky Drops US Congressional Bid in New York
Cameron Kasky, former US congressional candidate in New York’s 12th district. Photo: Screenshot
Cameron Kasky, a prominent Gen Z political activist and Parkland school shooting survivor, has withdrawn from the Democratic primary race to succeed US Rep. Jerry Nadler in New York’s 12th Congressional District, saying he plans to focus instead on human rights in the West Bank.
Kasky, 25, announced his decision on Tuesday in a social media post, ending a short-lived congressional bid that had drawn attention for its sharp criticism of Israel and its appeal to younger progressive voters. He said recent travel to the West Bank had influenced his decision to step away from electoral politics for now.
“Thank you to everyone who supported our human rights-centered campaign for New York’s 12th Congressional District,” Kasky posted on X.
“It’s the honor of my life to be walking out of this race with the chance to do what must be done,” he continued, adding that he intends to focus on documenting and opposing what he described as “settler violence” in the West Bank.
His exit marks the latest shake-up in the already crowded Democratic primary to represent one of Manhattan’s most reliably blue districts, which spans parts of the Upper East Side, Upper West Side, and Midtown. Nadler, who has represented the district for decades, announced his retirement last year, triggering a wide-open contest.
Kasky, who is Jewish and rose to national prominence as a co-founder of the March for Our Lives movement after surviving the 2018 Parkland shooting, entered the race late last year with a platform centered on gun reform, progressive domestic policies, and a call to halt US military aid to Israel. He had repeatedly accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza, a position that set him apart from much of the Democratic establishment in New York.
Kasky has also accused Israeli leaders of advancing the war in Gaza in service of the “Greater Israel” agenda — a fallacious conspiracy theory which claims that Israel seeks to expand its borders into the Sinai Peninsula, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Iraq.
Such views drew praise from some younger activists but also criticism from pro-Israel groups and Democratic leaders in the district, where support for the Jewish state has historically been strong.
During his short-lived campaign Kasky notably vowed to vote against all aid to Israel, including aid to furnish the Iron Dome missile interception system.
With Kasky’s departure, the field remains packed with well-known figures, including New York State Assembly members Micah Lasher and Alex Bores, journalist and former cable news anchor Jami Floyd, and Jack Schlossberg, the grandson of former President John F. Kennedy. Conservative lawyer George Conway, a longtime critic of US President Donald Trump, is also running as a Democrat.
Political analysts have said Kasky was unlikely to emerge as a frontrunner in a district dominated by older, highly engaged voters, but his candidacy reflected broader generational and ideological tensions within the Democratic Party, particularly over US policy toward Israel.
His withdrawal removes one of the race’s most outspoken critics of Israeli government policy, potentially narrowing the ideological range of the debate as the primary campaign accelerates.
The Democratic primary is scheduled for June, with the winner heavily favored to hold the seat in November.
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UK Home Secretary Says She ‘Lost Confidence’ in Police Chief Following Ban on Maccabi Tel Aviv Soccer Fans
British Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood speaks on stage at Britain’s Labour Party’s annual conference in Liverpool, Britain, Sept. 29, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Hannah McKay
British Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood told Parliament on Wednesday that she has lost confidence in the chief constable of the West Midlands Police (WMP) and will push for a new law that will give her power to fire him, after it was revealed that intelligence used by the police force to justify a ban against fans of the Israeli soccer team Maccabi Tel Aviv was “exaggerated or simply untrue.”
Mahmood’s comments came on the same day that her office announced new plans to give the home secretary the power to fire “failing chief constables.”
Speaking to UK lawmakers, Mahmood said that WMP Chief Constable Craig Guildford “no longer has my confidence” and that he should have ensured “more professional and thorough work was done” by police before the ban was implemented late last year. She claimed it has been over 20 years since a home secretary has made such comments about a chief constable.
West Midlands Police had a “failure in leadership” which “harmed the reputation and eroded public confidence in West Midlands police and policing more broadly” across the country, the UK’s home secretary explained in front of the House of Commons.
Maccabi supporters were banned from attending a soccer game at Villa Park in Birmingham on Nov. 6 last year, a decision made by Birmingham City Council in October following advice from a safety advisory group which acted on a recommendation by West Midlands Police. Traveling Israeli fans were banned from the soccer game between Maccabi and Aston Villa due to “public safety concerns.”
“I do believe all of us in this country need to be able to trust the police when they come forward and they say they have risk assessed an upcoming event; they have come to a professional judgment as to whether an event can take place safety or not,” Mahmood said. “We all need to be able to trust that they have gone about making that risk assessment in a way that is robust, consistent, in line with the law, and just plain old truthful. That is not what’s happened in this case … It’s why I set out what I said about losing confidence in the chief constable.”
Mahmood does not have the power to fire a chief constable because of law changes implemented in 2011. Guildford would have to be dismissed by Simon Foster, the West Midlands Police and crime commissioner. However, Mahmood’s office announced on Wednesday she will push new legislation that will once again restore power to the home secretary to “force the retirement, resignation, or suspension of chief constables on performance grounds.”
Mahmood said she came to the conclusion about Guildford after receiving a “damning” and “devastating” report by His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire and Rescue Services, Sir Andy Cook, that “catalogues failures that did not just affect traveling fans” but also “let down our entire Jewish community in West Midlands and across the country.”
Cook’s report provides evidence that WMP only sought evidence to support what Mahmood called the police force’s “desired position” to ban Maccabi fans. The report also elaborates on a series of “misleading” public statements made by the police force, including Guildford, and “misinformation” promoted by the police. Cook’s report showed police “overstated the threat posed by Maccabi fans while understating the risk that was posed to the Israeli fans if they traveled to the area,” according to Mahmood.
“What is clear from this report [is] that on an issue of huge significance to the Jewish community in this country and to us all, we have witnessed a failure of leadership that has harmed the reputation and eroded public confidence in West Midlands police and policing more broadly,” the home secretary said.
When the ban against Maccabi supporters was first announced in October, Mahmood and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer were among those who voiced concerns about the decision and said Israeli soccer fans should be allowed to attend the game.
Mahmood said police forces across the country should learn a “lesson” from the mistakes of WMP. Police around the UK should remember “they are called to their profession to serve truth and the law, to police our streets without fear or favor, and that community trust and cohesion depends upon them doing that above all else,” she said.
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Deborah Lipstadt has second thoughts about tying Jackson synagogue arsonist to ‘Globalize the Intifada’
(JTA) — As news broke over the weekend of an arson attack that heavily damaged the only synagogue in Jackson, Mississippi, a few prominent individuals connected the culprit to pro-Palestinian activism.
“This is a major tragedy. But it’s more than that,” Deborah Lipstadt, formerly the State Department’s special envoy to combat antisemitism, wrote on the social network X. “It’s an arson attack and another step in the globalization of the intifada.”
Later, upon learning that the arsonist appeared to have been motivated by a strain of antisemitism associated with the far right, not the pro-Palestinian movement, she walked back her comments — to a degree. But Lipstadt’s initial comments about the arsonist’s motives reflect a larger sense of disorientation among diaspora Jews as they face increased levels of antisemitism from across the spectrum of left-wing, right-wing and Islamist extremism.
Jewish activists and communities have been engaged in fierce debate over which corner poses the greatest threat, and reports of new incidents are often met with immediate speculation over the attacker’s motivations. Lipstadt, an Emory University professor who had served in the State Department under President Biden, has herself criticized the politicization of antisemitism charges. “When you only see it on the other side of the political transom,” she told the Los Angeles Times in 2024, “I have to ask: Are you interested in fighting antisemitism, or was your main objective to beat up on your enemies?”
“Globalize the Intifada” is a term commonly used in left-wing, pro-Palestinian protests. Most of the perpetrators of the large-scale antisemitic attacks in the diaspora since the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attacks in Israel — including in Washington, D.C.; Boulder, Colorado; Bondi Beach, Australia; and the arson attack on Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s home — have made their pro-Palestinian and/or Islamist affiliations public.
But when the identity of the Jackson arsonist was revealed and the suspect appeared in court, his comments and social media presence betrayed no obvious link to the pro-Palestinian movement.
Instead the suspect, 19-year-old Catholic school graduate Stephen Spencer Pittman, used language —including “synagogue of Satan” and “Jesus Christ is Lord” — popular among leading figures of the online far right who peddle antisemitism, including Nick Fuentes and Candace Owens. (“Synagogue of Satan” also has deeper roots; it was popularized by Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan.)
An Instagram account appearing to be Pittman’s also contains references to a “Christian diet” and a clip from “Drawn Together,” an adult animated series, referencing an antisemitic “Jew crow.” (One of the show’s creators is Jewish.) Neither Pittman’s public statements in court, nor his Instagram account, referred to pro-Palestinian activism.
In hindsight, was Lipstadt right to preemptively link the fire to “globalize the intifada”?
“It may have been inopportune of me to say that,” she told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency about her invocation of the phrase.
Lipstadt insisted, “I was not saying this was a leftist attack. Clearly it’s not.” Nor did she “mean to suggest that this was an Islamist attack.”
She offered that the phrase, which uses the Arabic word associated with the violent Palestinian uprisings of the late 1980s and early 2000s, could be interpreted as hatred toward Jews coming from all sides.
“If ‘globalize the intifada’ means ‘attack Jews everywhere,’ then it certainly fits,” she said. “So it depends on how you want to interpret the sentence.”
Lipstadt wasn’t the only prominent figure linking the arsonist to “globalize the intifada” and other pro-Palestinian phrases before his identity was revealed.
“It began with BDS. Some said, it’s just words,” Marc Edelman, a Jewish law professor at the City University of New York, wrote on X over the weekend.
He continued, “CUNY Law speech: ‘globalize the intifada.’ Still, just words? Recent pro-Hamas chants. Words again? And now the violence in Pittsburgh, Washington D.C., Sydney, Jackson, Mississippi and more. As the Left used to say, words matter!”
Even a pro-Palestinian politician condemned the arson while also addressing recent hard-line pro-Palestinian activism in her own city.
“Mississippi’s oldest and largest synagogue, and two of their Torah scrolls, were burned yesterday on Shabbat in a horrific antisemitic attack—days after protestors chanted ‘We support Hamas’, here in NYC,” Shahana Hanif, a New York City council member from Brooklyn who won re-election in a race that pivoted largely on Israel, wrote on X.
She was referencing recent pro-Hamas protesters outside synagogues in New York, who have been denounced by progressives who are critical of Israel including Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Hanif added, “These chants are antisemitic and deeply harmful. You can oppose land sales in the West Bank without supporting violence against Jews. Yesterday’s arson in Mississippi is a stark reminder of the consequences of hate.”
She attracted some criticism from the pro-Palestinian movement for her statement — including from the group that organized the pro-Hamas New York synagogue protests, which took offense at the comparison.
“Linking chants at a Palestine protest that support a resistance movement of occupied people to the klan bombing of a synagogue is absolutely irresponsible and disgusting,” PAL-Awda NY/NJ, a radical group, wrote to Hanif.
In the group’s Telegram channel viewed by JTA, PAL-Awda added, “We see you, politicians who claim to support Palestine but then follow the hasbara playbook to link people resisting colonial oppression with white supremacists bombing synagogues in Mississippi.” “Hasbara” is a Hebrew term used to describe Israeli public relations efforts.
Pro-Israel groups, meanwhile, claimed hypocrisy, with some sharing a screenshot of Hanif previously retweeting a pro-Palestinian activist’s post that included the phrase “Globalize the Intifada.” JTA was unable to verify the post.
Unlike Lipstadt, Edelman, the CUNY law professor, told JTA he stands by his initial assessment of the arson.
“Nothing changes the fact that the actions taken in Washington, D.C. and Sydney, Australia, coalesced with an extreme left anti-Israel position,” he said, referring to the mass shootings at the Capital Jewish Museum and Bondi Beach — the former by a declared pro-Palestinian activist, the latter by declared Islamists. (Edelman noted that he recently undertook a Fulbright scholarship in Australia.)
Edelman added, “It is also not surprising that far-right rhetoric, much as it has for generations in this country, has also led to increased violence against minority groups including Jewish Americans.”
But there’s a key difference between the two sides, in Edelman’s eyes.
“The big distinction here, and I say this as a member of the Democratic Party, is that the left has historically been better than this,” he said. “And now, perhaps, they are not.”
For Lipstadt, the incident has largely taught her that Jews shouldn’t spend time trying to determine which kinds of antisemitic attacks, whether from the left or right, are worse.
“It’s all horrible,” she said. “Much of it is lethal. It’s toxic and it’s dangerous.”
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