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As trial begins in Tree of Life massacre, Pittsburgh’s Jews struggle with what to reveal and what to conceal
PITTSBURGH (JTA) — On Friday afternoon, Squirrel Hill was suffused with spring breezes and pink dogwoods, and alive with the movement that typifies the coming of Shabbat.
Toddlers scrambled up the jungle gym in the JCC playground, while the chatter in cafes was about a looming storm that could soak the walk to synagogue on Saturday. Murray Avenue Kosher was emptying out of challahs.
Barely present, at least on the surface, was any indication that Monday morning would hold a turning point in the community’s greatest trauma. That’s when jury selection was to begin in the trial of the man accused of shattering Shabbat on Oct. 27, 2018, with gunfire. His massacre of 11 worshipers, in a synagogue building a 10-minute stroll from the downtown of this leafy, heavily Jewish neighborhood, was the deadliest-ever attack on U.S. Jews.
But behind the scenes, there are clear signs that the trial’s proximity is being felt. Maggie Feinstein, the director of the 10/27 Healing Partnership, which provides post-traumatic therapy for the community, said that as the trial nears, requests for treatment have spiked.
“The trauma cues that for a while bothered us right after the shooting — for some people it might be ambulances, for other people it might be media, for some people it might be the sound of multiple police cars — you get to a place where they don’t bother you as much,” she said. “But the increased media attention and the increased awareness of this upcoming trial for a number of people is bringing back for them that maybe they didn’t do their own healing the first time around.”
A Starbucks in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh is decorated with a memorial for the victims of the 2018 massacre at the city’s Tree of Life synagogue, April 21, 2023. (Ron Kampeas)
There were three congregations in the building: Tree of Life and New Light, both affiliated with the Conservative movement, and Dor Hadash, which is Reconstructionist.
The 11 victims were brothers Cecil and David Rosenthal, couple Bernice and Sylvan Simon, Rose Malinger, Joyce Fienberg, Richard Gottfried, Jerry Rabinowitz, Daniel Stein, Melvin Wax and Irving Younger. Seven were from Tree of Life, three were from New Light and one was from Dor Hadash.
For their families, their friends, their congregations and their broader Jewish community, the legacy of the massacre is a deep-seated longing for control, a longing to never have to think again of the gunman and of the anguish he left in his wake, while grappling with tender memories of the dead, of the decades spent in celebration and in prayer in the building.
Who narrates this story, the gunman or his victims? That struggle now looms as the alleged gunman goes to trial. The community is wrestling with questions such as where and whether to put the bullet-riddled artifacts, whether to worship at the site, whether to even speak of the massacre and how and whether the gunman lives or dies.
”We believe strongly that this antisemitic attack should not stop people from practicing and being Jewish,” Feinsten said. “For a lot of people, that’s an active choice that they have to work at. It doesn’t come easily after feeling unsafe in that environment to then work to find safety in it. But a lot of people have chosen to do that.”
On Friday, Feinstein was organizing support services for families who would, if they so choose, be sequestered in a separate room in the court where they could view the trial. (Family members may also ask to be seated in the courtroom.) She assigned six therapists to be present with the families.
Compounding the revisited trauma of the event, the families are divided over whether the gunman, should he be convicted, deserves the death penalty. The accused has a lawyer, Judy Clarke, known as “the attorney for the damned” for her determination to keep her clients from execution.
What’s clear is that the Jews of Squirrel Hill are taking the trial on with their characteristic spirit of collaboration. The community has hired public relations specialists to handle media inquiries ahead of the trial, in part to safeguard locals from being pressed to answer questions that could harm them or shatter the sense of unity. Congregants reached by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency dutifully deferred to the list of approved contacts on a list distributed by a PR agency.
On Friday afternoon, signs of unity that flooded the city in the immediate aftermath of the shooting were still visible. In a tobacconist’s window a sign with the slogan “No place for hate/Stronger than hate,” which had proliferated throughout the neighborhood after the attack, remained propped up next to a flag and an ad for the lottery. A Starbucks had on its window white paint drawings depicting “love,” “kindness” and “hope” in English and in Hebrew, alongside symbols: the Star of David, a heart and a dove.
A tobacconist window includes a poster of the “No Place for Hate” slogan that proliferated after the Tree of Life Massacre in 2018, in Pittsburgh, April 21, 2023. (Ron Kampeas)
Representatives of the community talk about “doing Jewish” as a means of coping, including redoubling the very activities — allying with the city’s Black minority and advocating for immigration, refugees and gun control — that fueled the rage of the alleged attacker.
The attacker allegedly was driven in part by the partnership between Dor Hadash and HIAS, the Jewish refugee aid group, and the congregation’s sponsorship of refugee families.
“We have, if anything, doubled down on our commitment to immigrants and refugees,” said Dana Kellerman, the chair of the communications committee at Dor Hadash. “We are currently coming up on the end of our first year working with a new resettlement program to resettle a Congolese immigrant family in Pittsburgh, and we have every intention of when the year commitment is up of working with a second family.”
Kellerman said the shooting had “honestly become part of the background of our existence at this point.” In keeping with her congregation’s rules aimed at protecting their community, Kellerman declined to talk about the day of the massacre, the death penalty or about details of the trial. But she was open about the ways in which her congregation has leaned into the values it has long held, and that the gunman so reviled.
“We have become louder and more public about practicing our Judaism,” she said. Now, she said, the congregation incorporates advocacy for refugees into its service, with liturgical readings on immigration.
There are other changes. “We even have hats now! We have baseball caps!” Kellerman said with a smile, unearthing a photo of herself in a white cap with “Dor Hadash” and a stylized Magen David in blue, standing alongside gun control advocates.
“Previously we all would have shown up as our individual selves, and now we show up in our Dor Hadash baseball caps,” she said. “Mine kept blowing off.”
Steve Cohen, the co-president of New Light, said the congregation’s relationship with Black churches in the city has reached new intensity since the massacre. The congregation’s rabbi and congregants who know Hebrew partner with the churches to analyze sacred texts in the original.
“We would bring our Tanachs [Hebrew Bibles], and the Christian congregation would bring their Bible and then we would talk about the Proverbs and go through it, not just what the intention of the author was, but how different ways the same words can be translated in order to imply different things,” he said. “And so we went through the whole Book of Proverbs with the Rodman Street Baptist Church, and this past winter, we did the selected Psalms with the faith and Destiny Church on the north side.”
The interior of the new sanctuary of the New Light congregation, four and half years after a gunman massacred three of its congregants, in Pittsburgh, April 21, 2023. (Ron Kampeas)
New Light took its cue from survivors of the 2015 attack on the Emanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in which a white supremacist murdered nine Black worshipers, Cohen said. Leaders of New Light traveled to the church and heard from its elders that it was not enough to tend to the traumatized individuals, but to the community; they emphasized outreach, bringing congregants back in.
“That’s a lot of the reason why we have an outpouring of members who never attended shul now attending shul,” he said.
Feinstein, too, said she had an intensification of religious and ritual observance among her clients: more frequent attendance at Shabbat services, forming a daily minyan, finding a study partner for daily Talmud study.
Kellerman said the community has become closer; she sees it in congregants who linger. “It shows up in things like people showing up for Friday night services, and hanging out to chat or getting on a little early to chat,” she said.
A rendition of architect Daniel Libeskind’s plans for the interior of the new Tree of Life synagogue. (Tree of Life)
In the days leading up to the trial, the community bid farewell to the most salient relic of that painful day: the hulking synagogue building on the corner of Wilkins and Shady that has stood empty since then. All three congregations have decamped to nearby synagogues, leaving behind the chain-link fence draped with paintings from children across the country wishing for strength.
“Nobody has been meeting in the synagogue since the day of the shooting,” said Carole Zawatsky, the Tree of Life CEO who is overseeing the plans to replace the building. The only people to have been inside at all, she said, were survivors and “special friends” — donors to the rebuilding and politicians.
Zawatsky said it is wrenching to even contemplate returning for some. “You can walk through the building and see where the gunman was destructive,” she said. “You can see where the gunman was apprehended, where the gunman opened fire. It’s devastating to witness.”
But some intend to: Tree of Life lost seven congregants but plans on returning once the building is rebuilt as a museum and education center focused on the dangers of extremism.
On Sunday, the Tree of Life congregation had an outdoor ceremony to say “L’hitraot,” Hebrew for “until we meet again,” to the building as it has existed up to now.
“We are grateful to God for the thousands of blessings that have passed through these doors,” Rabbi Jeffrey Myers, the rabbi who sheltered congregants and alerted police, said at the ceremony. “We cannot, we must not, permit one day … to define us, nor outweigh all the good.”
The new center is being designed by Daniel Libeskind, the architect who designed the master plan for the World Trade Center site reconstruction in New York and the Jewish Museum in Berlin.
But Dor Hadash and New Light decided their moves were permanent in part because families of their victims swore never to return to the building.
New Light is now ensconced in what once was a secondary chapel at the Beth Shalom synagogue, as if it has been there for decades: Plaques honoring past donors and presidents adorn the walls of the sanctuary. The only signs of the massacre are the 1,000 paper cranes Pittsburgh’s Japanese community gave the congregation, reflecting a Japanese tradition that folding cranes will make a wish come true. They hang at the entrance to the sanctuary, unexplained by any plaque. There is a stained glass monument to the three victims at the cemetery where they are buried.
Even with Tree of Life’s commitment to return, many questions remain about what that will look like. The congregation has yet to decide what objects will stay in the sanctuary, what will stay in storage and what will be part of a separate exhibit, Zawatsky said.
“The first work that’s had to be done for the synagogue is ‘What are the things that need to be saved and go into storage during construction?’” she said.
In some ways, she indicated, the work of rebuilding could bear some resemblance to the balancing act that the community will have to navigate during the alleged shooter’s trial.
“We are thinking deeply about how you exhibit some of these materials,” Zaslavsky said, “in ways that are both teachable moments and don’t retraumatize.”
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A new grocer is moving into Squirrel Hill. Its rival says the deal isn’t kosher.
PITTSBURGH — Mister Rogers was from Squirrel Hill, and it was here that he built a career on a small, perhaps radical idea: that showing up for your neighbor, day after day, is its own kind of moral work.
It is a strange thing, then, that the neighborhood that made him famous — the same one that gathered in 2018 after the deadliest antisemitic attack in American history — is now consumed by a fight over what neighborliness is worth when there’s money, and a family’s retirement, on the line.
For three decades, one grocery store has anchored Squirrel Hill’s kosher life. Soon it will have new company: a rival supermarket opening just blocks away. The family that runs the original store says the new store was built in part on their own private financial records, shared in confidence during a sale that fell through. The newcomer, for its part, says it has “acted properly” throughout.
The dispute is now headed to a rabbinical tribunal, where both sides will make their case.
This is a very Squirrel Hill kind of story, intimate enough that it’s hard to separate the business from the relationships underneath it. It’s also part of something bigger: the fight reflects a broader shift already underway in kosher retail, where small, single-location grocers are increasingly competing not just with each other but with regional chains and delivery networks that didn’t used to reach a market this size.
‘Cheek by jowl’
By midafternoon on a recent Thursday, Murray Avenue Kosher is deep into its weekly pre-Shabbat rush — cashiers ringing up customers as fast as they can, stockers racing to keep pace with what’s flying off the shelves. Behind the deli counter, a line of people wait while workers slice cold cuts and pack containers of whitefish and kugel.
On the front door hangs a sign reading “Israel — We Stand With You,” put up after the Hamas attack on Oct. 7, 2023. A few feet away, on a window, is a Steelers poster — a small reminder that this is a Jewish community that is also, unmistakably, a Pittsburgh one.
For Ellie Feibus, 39, who lives within walking distance, the store is less an occasional stop than a daily habit: coffee some mornings on her way to work at a synagogue preschool, lunch, dinner in the evening, a Thursday wine tasting. She often has her dog, Anschel — a blind, toothless, 12-year-old pug — with her. She greets people by name, wishing “Good Shabbos” to those she passes and “Hi, honey” to several others.
When Feibus got COVID during the pandemic, she called Aryeh Markovic, who runs the store with his parents, Saul and Beth. He personally delivered groceries to her doorstep. Without being asked, he added a container of chicken soup.
It’s that kind of care, she said, that would be hardest to replicate in a new store: “the part that’s going to be missing.”
Step outside and you’re in the heart of Squirrel Hill, home to a large swath of Pittsburgh’s roughly 50,000 Jews, three day schools and about a dozen synagogues across the denominational spectrum — a community that has been here, largely intact, for generations.
“In Squirrel Hill, everybody lives cheek by jowl,” said Mark Oppenheimer, who wrote a book chronicling how the neighborhood held together after the 2018 Tree of Life synagogue shooting. “Even the more liberal and Reform Jews will power-walk with the Orthodox on their lunch hour. In a lot of cities there’d be real distance between those worlds. Here, there isn’t.”
The neighborhood’s epicenter is the corner of Murray and Forbes avenues, adjacent to the Jewish Community Center, and the same intersection where the community gathered for a vigil the Saturday night after the shooting.
That corner was, until recently, home to a Rite Aid. But after the financially strapped drugstore chain declared bankruptcy in 2025, the building became available to lease.
Deal or no deal
Yitzchok Glassner, a transplant to Pittsburgh, wanted to get into the kosher supermarket business. The timing seemed fortuitous. Saul and Beth Markovic bought Murray Avenue Kosher in 1996; their son Aryeh joined as a partner in 2021. By last year, Saul and Beth were ready to retire — just as Glassner came looking for a store to buy.
In June 2025, Glassner expressed interest in Murray Avenue Kosher, and the two sides signed a non-disclosure agreement. Over the course of several weeks, the Markovic family handed over the store’s tax returns and profit-and-loss statements.
Glassner wanted to put his supermarket — with the name Murray’s Market — in the former Rite Aid building. Doing so meant winning approval from a bankruptcy judge working with Rite Aid, who needed proof the new venture could pay the rent. The Markovics allege that without their permission or knowledge, Glassner submitted their financial records along with a declaration stating that Murray’s Market was, in Glassner’s words, “acquiring Murray Avenue Kosher.” No such acquisition existed.
The Markovics say that they had yet to reach a deal with Glassner when he told the court he was acquiring Murray Avenue Kosher. They also claim that Glassner broke the non-disclosure agreement by sharing their private financial information, which is now in the public record as part of a filing in the Rite Aid bankruptcy case.
“Nobody is going to buy the business now if there’s a competing store opening 200 feet down the block,” said Shaya Markovic, Aryeh’s brother. “Had we known he intended to use the documents to open a competing store, my parents would never have given them.”
Talks between the Markovics and Glassner broke down.
Brandywine Communities, the owner and landlord of the former Rite Aid building, announced in August that Murray’s Market was granted the lease. Renovations are expected to begin in the coming months with a planned opening in 2027.
Whether it gets there without further complications is an open question. The underlying fight — over whether Glassner owes the Markovics anything and what should be done if he does — is now headed to the Beth Din of America, a rabbinical high court.
A different kind of court
Few outside the Orthodox Jewish world have ever heard of the Beth Din of America, let alone know that a fight like this one could end up decided there, by a panel of rabbis rather than a judge or jury.
Murray Avenue Kosher’s Markovic said what he wants is straightforward: financial compensation from Glassner for damages he believes were caused to his business.
Glassner struck a different note: “In the interest of peace, we attempted to reach an understanding with another establishment, but sadly, those efforts were unsuccessful,” read a statement he sent to the Forward. “Nevertheless, throughout the process, we have acted properly, and we remain confident that all matters will be settled amicably.”
The Beth Din of America functions much like private arbitration in the secular world. Both sides have to agree to bring a dispute there, and once they do, the ruling is binding. A losing party can’t simply refile the same case in civil court and abide by that ruling instead.
Cases like this one are typically decided by a panel of three rabbinic judges. The Beth Din of America, modeled after the rabbinical courts in ancient times, maintains a roster of rabbis it works with, each with different specialties — one might have more experience with family law, another with contracts and business disputes. Some of the rabbis are lawyers themselves.
The arbitration can take place at the Beth Din of America’s Manhattan offices, or any other location that the parties and the Beth Din agree to, with follow-up sessions sometimes held over Zoom.
Sources who have previously worked with the Beth Din of America expect a case like this to be litigated in the coming weeks — with perhaps a slight delay due to Yom Kippur and Sukkot. A written ruling can take additional weeks to finalize.
Rabbi Yitzi Genack of the Vaad Harabonim of Pittsburgh, which certifies kosher establishments in the city, did not respond to multiple requests for an interview. A spokesperson for Brandywine Communities, the landlord and owner of the former Rite Aid building, declined a request for an interview.
A street with history
The new Murray’s Market is not facing off only against one other kosher option.
Directly across the street from Murray Avenue Kosher, the local Giant Eagle — a large regional supermarket chain — runs its own in-house kosher bakery and stocks a decent selection of kosher meat: cold cuts, chicken, beef, steak and brisket. There was already competition, in other words, long before Glassner decided to open a new store.
“For over a century, many important kosher establishments have served Pittsburgh’s diverse Jewish community, including Adler’s Delicatessen and Grocery, Kosher Mart, Murray Avenue Kosher, and Prime Kosher,” read a statement from Glassner. “For many years, these establishments — often operating side by side — contributed greatly to the Jewish community.”
In the 1940s, Murray Avenue supported at least 10 kosher butchers, a handful of kosher poultry stores, two fish stores, six bakeries and 14 grocery stores, according to Eric Lidji, director of the Rauh Jewish History Program & Archives at the Heinz History Center. Rabbi Bernard Poupko, who led Congregation Shaare Torah in Squirrel Hill from 1942 to 1996, once called the street the yidisher gas, the Jewish street, even as the businesses lining it kept changing hands.
Adler’s Delicatessen is a case study in how the markets have changed. Founded in the late 1910s, it became a Murray Avenue fixture — until the Adler family sold it, in 1974, to U-Se Chu, a Korean immigrant. Under Chu’s ownership, the deli kept its kosher-style menu and its Jewish character for decades, before the family retired and sold it in 1997.
On Murray Avenue, in other words, a kosher institution outliving — or even changing hands entirely from — its founding family is not a new story.
A larger trend
Kosher shopping in Squirrel Hill does not even require a storefront anymore. Evergreen, a kosher supermarket chain with locations in New York and New Jersey, makes bulk kosher deliveries to eight cities across the Midwest as well as to Pittsburgh — part of a broader pattern of national and regional players reaching smaller Jewish communities that, until recently, only had access to whatever their local grocer carried.
Customers have noticed. Feibus, a devoted Murray Avenue Kosher shopper, said some of Pittsburgh’s newer transplants from the northeast have grown used to bigger, more polished kosher chains like Seasons and want the same thing locally. The Grove, a South Florida-based kosher supermarket chain, has added locations in Ohio and Michigan in recent years. Many Costco and Trader Joe’s locations across the country stock kosher chicken and other products for Jewish customers.
This fight is bigger than one grocer and one new competitor. Mom-and-pop kosher stores no longer have these smaller Jewish communities to themselves.
Not everyone in the neighborhood sees a second kosher store as a threat. Ronna Harris Askin, 78, a longtime Squirrel Hill resident, said she plans to shop at both.
“Competition is always good,” she said. She’s fond of Murray Avenue Kosher — it “mostly meets my needs,” she said — but doesn’t think one store should have to carry the whole neighborhood. “It’s good for the economy to have two places. It makes everybody be on their toes to do a good job.”
Harris Askin has seen the alternative firsthand. Her daughter and son-in-law live in Toco Hills, a heavily Jewish Atlanta neighborhood, where both Kroger and Publix stock kosher meat and other products alongside two dedicated kosher markets — evidence, to her, that a bigger Jewish community can support more kosher retail without strain.
What comes next
Markovic isn’t waiting around to find out what the Beth Din of America decides.
He’s already working on what comes next at Murray Avenue Kosher. In the coming months, he plans to move the deli counter to a new space in the store and expand its offerings to include restaurant menu items like chicken sandwiches and hamburgers. He’ll be adding tables for seating. He has also hired a chef to make fresh sushi daily.
A year ago, Markovic was contemplating getting out of the business. Now he is doing the opposite: pouring money into the same store he nearly sold, betting that the surest answer to a rival two blocks away isn’t a rabbinical court, but a better rotisserie chicken.
“It’s imperative to get it done quickly,” Markovic said. One of his brothers is flying in to help him push through the vendor calls and the small decisions that used to take him weeks to get to. “I have ninety-seven phone calls in between everything I want to do,” he said, and laughed, a little wearily, before picking up to answer another one.
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Israeli army weighs legal action against NAZA film makers amid calls to revoke their citizenship
(JTA) — The Israeli army chief of staff on Monday ordered the military to examine possible legal action over “NAZA,” a documentary alleging that Israeli forces knowingly killed large numbers of civilians in Gaza.
The 80-minute documentary by Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, won the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival on Saturday, two days after its premiere there drew a 25-minute standing ovation. In Israel, it drew widespread condemnation from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, senior military officials, former hostages and other public figures.
Eyal Zamir requested that Military Advocate General Maj. Gen. Itai Ofir “examine security aspects and possible involvement in relation to the leak of classified materials used in the production of the film” as well as advance “possible legal actions regarding the film and those involved in it.”
Zamir also convened senior IDF officials, including the deputy chief of staff, the military advocate general, the air force commander and the commander of the elite 8200 military intelligence unit to address what the army says are the film’s distortions.
In a statement announcing the meeting, Zamir denounced the film’s allegations as “blood libels,” a “deliberate distortion of reality” and “false and grave accusations” against Israeli soldiers and commanders.
The film “adopts narratives of Israel-haters, defames our soldiers and commanders, and seeks to present the IDF as deliberately acting unlawfully,” he said.
“This is a dangerous attempt to deprive us of the legitimacy to defend ourselves against the worst of our enemies, and in the process, to put IDF soldiers and commanders in real danger,” Zamir added.
The IDF said in a separate statement that it “categorically rejects” the film’s allegations and questioned the credibility of its anonymous sources. It said some claims about national and military strategy were “clearly beyond the knowledge of junior-level soldiers” and that intelligence personnel cited in the film “by definition would not have been involved” in some of the situations described. It also rejected what it called the film’s portrayal of unintended civilian deaths from lawful strikes as deliberate killing or part of a “genocide.”
The Hamas-run Gaza health ministry says that over 70,000 people have been killed in the war launched by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, with deadly raids inside Israel. The army does not dispute the number, but says that a substantial portion of the dead are fighters. Gaza’s health ministry does not distinguish between fighters and civilians.
The military also disputed NAZA’s depiction of artificial intelligence in targeting, saying such decisions are made “by human personnel only.” It said anticipated civilian harm is weighed against the expected military advantage before a strike is approved and that attacks are not carried out when that harm would be disproportionate.
The IDF added that it had only seen excerpts and a trailer, and asked the filmmakers for a full screening before responding comprehensively.
Israeli government agencies, including the Foreign Ministry, also met Monday to coordinate a response to the film and sent Israeli diplomats abroad talking points rebutting its allegations. The talking points accused NAZA of turning “the truth on its head” and serving as a “disguise for Hamas propaganda,” according to a foreign ministry document cited by Ynet.
Netanyahu also condemned the film on Monday, calling it “shocking” in a video posted to X.
“We’re fighting worldwide antisemitic incitement, but when it comes from within us, it’s intolerable,” he said.
Culture Minister Miki Zohar went further, asking the Interior Ministry and Population and Immigration Authority to examine whether Abraham and Szor’s conduct could justify revoking their Israeli citizenship. Zohar accused the filmmakers of harming Israel abroad and said officials should examine whether the way material for the film was obtained or published could amount to treason or assisting the enemy during wartime.
Released hostage Eliya Cohen, who was held in Gaza for 505 days, also attacked the filmmakers, accusing them of spreading lies about soldiers who fought to bring him home and of endangering Israelis and Jews abroad. Cohen urged the public to hang posters with photos of the filmmakers so that “when they walk down the street they will feel ashamed.”
“People should spit on them,” he said. “The blood of our friends, the blood of Diaspora Jews, is on their hands.”
Abraham defended the film in a tense interview Monday with veteran Channel 13 journalist Raviv Drucker, who pressed him on how the filmmakers verified the accounts of the 24 anonymous soldiers.
“I have to tell you that as a journalist, I don’t think I would have aired this,” Drucker told Abraham, arguing there was “no supporting evidence” publicly available to independently confirm the claims.
“We don’t have their names, we don’t have their units,” Drucker said. “We don’t have the dates of the events, places, or who was hit. We basically have nothing to hold on to, to refute or confirm these very serious testimonies.”
Abraham said editors at The Guardian, which produced the film, had access to the underlying material. “The identities of the people were verified, the cases they discussed were verified,” he said.
He also accused Israeli television of failing to seriously investigate civilian casualties and rules of engagement in Gaza during the war. “NAZA” is the Hebrew acronym for “collateral damage.”
More than 700 Israeli film professionals signed a petition backing Abraham and Szor, accusing officials of waging an “unprecedented campaign of incitement and vitriol” against the filmmakers that they said came close to legitimizing of violence. Signatories included Ari Folman, Hagai Levi, Shlomi Elkabetz, Shira Geffen and Nir Bergman.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Macklemore got canceled. Kanye is playing sold-out shows. What’s the difference?
Moments after Seattle rapper Macklemore led fans in New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium in a call to “Free Palestine” that ended his opening spot on a national tour, another notorious rapper, despite years of toxic, antisemitic behavior, played to a sold-out crowd in Chicago’s Soldier Field for the second night in a row: the artist formerly known as Kanye West.
On Monday, Macklemore paid the price for that Sept. 4 show where he accused Israel of genocide and apartheid while opening for English singer and songwriter Ed Sheeran. That gig ended when Robert Kraft, owner of Boston’s Gillette Stadium, said Macklemore was not welcome there for Sheeran’s two scheduled shows.
The shutout went beyond Gillette. With 10 more shows left on the tour, eight including Macklemore as the opening act, Kraft rallied other stadium owners to bar him too. Macklemore was removed.
“The venue’s and promoter’s decision was final,” Sheeran wrote on Instagram. “Macklemore coming off tour was the promoter’s decision. It was not mine. I have spent this week trying to build bridges, to find a solution and unfortunately, was unable to do so.”
On Tuesday, Sheeran’s three other opening acts and his back-up band withdrew in solidarity.
On that list of stadiums that barred Macklemore was AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, where tickets to see Ye in November went on sale last week. But there was no mention of canceling that show.
Neither Soldier Field nor AT&T Stadium responded to the Forward’s inquiries about why Ye was still welcome there despite his escalating antisemitism over the years.
In 2025, his antisemitic conduct hit a fever pitch when he ran a Super Bowl ad directing viewers to an online store that briefly sold a $20 T-shirt emblazoned with a black swastika. He also released a music video on X titled “HEIL HITLER (HOOLIGAN VERSION),” featuring the lyric “So I became a Nazi, I’m the villain,” which surpassed one million views. He was banned by Twitch after appearing in a livestream giving a Nazi salute and shouting “Heil Hitler.”
So is hating Jews more acceptable than hating Israel?
Not exactly, said Ari Ingel, executive director of The Creative Community for Peace, a nonprofit dedicated to fighting antisemitism in the entertainment industry. Macklemore has shown no signs of remorse or intention to understand why his actions were harmful.
Meanwhile, Ye has paid a hefty price for his antisemitic rants over the years, losing lucrative deals with Adidas, Gap, Balenciaga and Universal Music Group. And while some still question Ye’s sincerity and he has more work to do, he did apologize, Ingel said.
“Kanye is still being held accountable for his statements,” Ingel told the Forward. “He’s not working with the biggest promoters in the industry … We have not let go of all the harm he has caused yet, but his team has put him on a better path.”
Though Ye has performed in some European shows, his headline act at this summer’s Wireless Fest in London was canceled after the U.K. denied him a visa to travel to the country. Concerts in Italy, Russia and Poland also got nixed.
Here in the U.S., his promoter has only been able to book select stadiums for this 2026 tour, including the New Orleans Superdome, San Antonio Alamodome, and two shows at Soldier Field in his hometown of Chicago.
In San Antonio, Mayor Gina Maria Ortiz Jones unsuccessfully tried to prevent Ye’s July 4 show in the city-owned stadium. But backlash against pulling the plug was too intense and the show was allowed to go on. U.S. Sen. Rick Scott also sought to cancel Ye’s June shows at Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, another publicly-owned venue scheduled to host Sheeran on Nov. 7.
Ye’s shows have featured the spectacle that he is known for – the artist performing on top of a gigantic spinning globe in the center of the stadium with billows of fog, laser light shows, fireworks and surprise guest appearances. His setlist covers the span of his career, minus the song “Heil Hitler.”
Macklemore, by contrast, commandeered what was supposed to be a family-friendly show to deliver a not-so-family-friendly, even hostile, message, Ingel said. He didn’t just speak briefly about the plight of Palestinians, which would have been within his right to do. While singing “Hind’s Hall,” his tribute to pro-Palestinian protesters who occupied a building at Columbia University, he projected images of war and encampments on giant screens and led the crowd in a call and response, creating an atmosphere where Jewish fans felt threatened.
“Ye, despite the previous statements, is not doing that at his shows,” Ingel said. “He’s not whipping up the crowd into a frenzy of antisemitic hatred.” If he did, his tour would undoubtedly come to a screeching halt.
“Stadiums are not going to allow their venues to turn into forums for hate,” Ingel said. “This is about bringing people together.”
And so far, ironically, that’s what Ye’s shows try to do by sticking to the music. Unfortunately, Ingel said, Macklemore did not.
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