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Is antisemitism always delusional? The Pittsburgh synagogue shooter’s punishment could hinge on the answer.
PITTSBURGH (JTA) — To try to save his client from the death penalty, a lawyer defending the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter spent hours this week pressing a prominent psychiatrist on a question that has occupied many over time: Is hating Jews a manifestation of mental illness?
Robert Bowers was convicted last month of committing the deadliest attack on Jews in U.S. history when he attacked the Tree of Life synagogue on Oct. 27, 2018. His lawyers essentially conceded the charges, choosing instead to focus on trying to save him from the death penalty.
One way to do that would be to persuade jurors that the gunman’s intentions were clouded by mental illness. Such a determination by even a single juror would close the door to execution and bring to an immediate end to a trial that has at times been a vector of American Jewish fear and identity.
The government, on the other hand, is pressing for the death penalty and making the case that Bowers was animated by hate, not delusions, when he attacked the synagogue. In recent days, it called a star witness, Dr. Park Dietz, a forensic psychiatrist who for decades has been a go-to expert witness in marquee trials.
Starting last Thursday, Dietz contended that Bowers is a garden-variety antisemite, and not suffering from schizophrenia, as the defense has argued.
On Tuesday, Michael Burt, one of the defense lawyers, sought to poke holes in Dietz’s argument that Bowers’ murderous antisemitism is consistent with rational — if evil — behavior, and instead sought to depict Bowers’ hatred of Jews as a manifestation of mental illness.
He reminded Dietz that decades ago, the psychiatrist assessed a man who believed plastic surgeons were committing genocide against Aryans by making Aryan and non-Aryan noses indistinguishable.
“You concluded in that case that that client suffered from a delusional disorder and as a result you thought he was insane,” Burt said. “Conspiracy theories and delusions are not exclusive; they can interact?” he asked.
Dietz agreed that conspiracy theories and delusions were not necessarily mutually exclusive, but that there had to be clues that an antisemite was suffering delusions in addition to being susceptible to antisemitic tropes.
“The difference is the presence or absence of a mental illness,” Dietz said. “The uniqueness of the belief system, its idiosyncratic nature, its personal nature are all clues that it springs from the mind … and not the external group.”
Bowers did not suffer those idiosyncratic characteristics, Dietz said. “He had no delusions based on any reasonable definition of delusions,” he said. “There’s a consensus in psychiatry that if one’s weirdo beliefs are shared by a large group, that’s not a delusion.”
Dietz, a forensic psychiatrist at UCLA’s medical school, has evaluated defendants including John Hinckley, who attempted to kill President Ronald Reagan; mass murderer Jeffrey Dahmer; and Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, among many others.
Burt kept Dietz on the stand for the most part of Monday and Tuesday. The defense lawyer veered between lengthy technical readings about the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, known as the DSM-5-TR, to attempts to undermine Dietz’s credibility. Returning repeatedly to the psychiatrist’s IMDB entries, he challenged Dietz’s consultation on hundreds of episodes of “Law and Order” and his participation in true-crime documentaries, some with sensationalist titles.
But the most salient exchanges came as Burt interrogated Dietz about whether Bowers’ antisemitic beliefs reflected mental illness. The gunman said he targeted the Pittsburgh synagogue in part because one of its congregations was partnering with HIAS, the Jewish refugee aid group. In a social media post, Bowers said HIAS “likes to bring invaders in that kill our people,” in an articulation of the antisemitic “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory.
Dietz, who interviewed Bowers for 15 hours in May, testified on Monday that the defendant’s thinking could be traced to a number of late 20th-century writings that have underpinned white supremacist ideology, including the “White Genocide Manifesto” authored in 1985 by David Lane — the leader of a white supremacist group called The Order who killed Jewish radio host Alan Berg.
Burt asked Dietz whether there are circumstances in which antisemitic falsehoods can double as delusions. “Can you have a delusion that relates to false beliefs that relate to antisemitism?” he said.
“You could, but there has to be something idiosyncratic about it,” Dietz said. “The belief that Jews are the children of Satan has been idiomatic of the Christian identity movement since the 18th century. This is a lie that has been conveyed from generation to generation, that has been conveyed for centuries and is core to the view of some white supremacists.”
The defense argument that antisemitism signals mental illness has precedents. In the 1940s, Ezra Pound’s lawyer got the poet to dodge a capital treason trial by persuading U.S. authorities that Pound should be institutionalized, in part by depicting the virulent antisemitism that spurred him to propagandize on behalf of the Axis as driven by mental illness. (Pound spent his 13 years at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C., befriending and encouraging American racists and fascists.)
Understanding of both hate and mental illness has evolved in the subsequent decades. Last year, after the rapper and designer Kanye West went on an extended spree of antisemitic comments, some connected his behavior to bipolar disorder, the mental illness that West has said he has. (West has said the condition causes him to become paranoid but also called it “dismissive” to question whether he has stopped taking his medication whenever he “speaks up.”) At the time, an array of mental health experts cautioned that mental illness should not be seen as an excuse for bigotry.
In Pittsburgh, the intersection between antisemitic beliefs and mental illness is now pivotal. The jury, which on June 16 convicted Bowers of 63 crimes related to the attack — including 22 capital crimes, two for each fatality — must now decide whether Bowers’ crimes merit the death penalty. Dietz was the second-to-last witness in this stage — after his testimony lawyers questioned the psychiatrist who first evaluated Bowers at the county jail two days after the massacre. Lawyers are set to deliver closing arguments on Wednesday for this phase of the trial, which started June 26.
A single juror persuaded by the defense’s arguments would end the trial, and Judge Robert Colville would sentence Bowers to life without parole. On the other hand, unanimous agreement that the crimes merit the death penalty would launch a second segment of the penalty phase, in which the jury would consider mitigating factors, including Bowers’ life hardships. That phase would also include testimony from those affected by the shooting, including relatives of the deceased and members of the tight-knit Pittsburgh Jewish community.
The victims of the attack were Joyce Fienberg, Richard Gottfried, Rose Mallinger, Jerry Rabinowitz, Cecil Rosenthal, David Rosenthal, Bernice Simon, Sylvan Simon, Daniel Stein, Melvin Wax and Irving Younger. They worshipped at three congregations housed in the building at the time: Tree of Life, Dor Hadash and New Light.
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Antisemitism Continues to Skyrocket in France, With Over 1,500 Incidents Recorded in 2024, New Report Finds
Sign reading “+1000% of Antisemitic Acts: These Are Not Just Numbers” during a march against antisemitism, in Lyon, France, June 25, 2024. Photo: Romain Costaseca / Hans Lucas via Reuters Connect
Antisemitism in France continued to surge to alarming levels across the country last year, with 1,570 incidents recorded, according to a new bombshell report.
The Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France (CRIF), the main representative body of French Jews, on Wednesday released its annual report on antisemitism, which was compiled by the Jewish Community Protection Service using data jointly recorded with the Ministry of the Interior.
The total number of antisemitic outrages last year was a slight dip from 2023’s record total of 1,676, but it marked a striking increase from the 436 antisemitic acts recorded in 2022.
In late May and early June, antisemitic acts rose by more than 140 percent, far surpassing the weekly average of slightly more than 30 incidents.
The report also found that 65.2 percent of antisemitic acts last year targeted individuals, with more than 10 percent of these offenses involving physical violence.
One such incident occurred in late June, when an elderly Jewish woman was attacked in a Paris suburb by two assailants who punched her in the face, pushed her to the ground, and kicked her while hurling antisemitic slurs, including “dirty Jew, this is what you deserve.”
In another egregious attack that garnered international headlines, a 12-year-old Jewish girl was raped by three Muslim boys in a different Paris suburb on June 15. The child told investigators that the assailants called her a “dirty Jew” and hurled other antisemitic comments at her during the attack. In response to the incident, French President Emmanuel Macron denounced the “scourge of antisemitism” plaguing his country.
Comme chaque année, le Crif publie le rapport annuel sur les chiffres de l’antisémitisme en France établi par le Service de Protection de la Communauté Juive (@SPCJFRANCE) sur la base des chiffres recensés conjointement entre le SPCJ et le ministère de l’Intérieur.
Pour la… pic.twitter.com/VuPwVXvq0f
— CRIF (@Le_CRIF) January 22, 2025
Antisemitism skyrocketed in France following the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, amid the ensuing war in Gaza. According to CRIF’s report, the surge continued unabated last year, with over 30 percent of antisemitic incidents, or 43 out of an average of 130 per month, making direct reference to “Palestine.”
In November, for example, a monument honoring victims of the Nazis located in eastern France was vandalized with graffiti reading “Nique Israël,” or “F—k Israel” in English.
On the one-year anniversary of Hamas’s Oct. 7 atrocities, three men brutally attacked a Jewish woman at the entrance to her home in Paris. The victim stated that the assailants threatened her with a box knife, made antisemitic threats, and mentioned the events of last Oct. 7.
In September, a kosher restaurant in Villeurbanne, near the eastern city of Lyon, was defaced with red paint and tagged with the message “Free Gaza.”
CRIF’s latest data also showed that 192 antisemitic acts were committed in schools, which accounted for 12.2 percent of all such incidents recorded last year.
Synagogues were targeted as well. In August, for example, French police arrested a 33-year-old Algerian man suspected of trying to set a synagogue ablaze in the southern French city of la Grande-Motte.
France is one of several countries that has experienced a surge in anti-Jewish hate crimes and demonstrations since Hamas’s invasion of Israel.
According to a report from the World Zionist Organization and the Jewish Agency for Israel, there has been a staggering 340 percent increase in antisemitic acts worldwide in 2024 compared to 2022.
The report showed a sharp rise in antisemitic outrages in North America and Europe, with the US up 288 percent, Canada increasing by 562 percent, and Britain seeing a 450 percent spike, with nearly 2,000 incidents recorded in the first half of 2024 in the UK.
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Cornell University Statue Vandalized by Anti-Zionist Activists
Cornell University workers begin the work of cleaning anti-Zionist graffiti off a statue of the school’s co-founder on January 21, 2025. Photo: Screenshot
Anti-Zionist agitators at Cornell University kicked off the spring semester with an act of vandalism which defamed Israel as an “occupier” and practitioner of “apartheid.”
“Divest from death,” the students, who have not yet been identified, graffitied on a statue of Cornell co-founder Andrew Dickson White that is located on the Arts Quad section of campus — as first reported by The Cornell Daily Sun on Tuesday. “Occupation=death.”
Speaking anonymously to The Sun, the university’s official campus newspaper, the students provided an account of their grievances, which addressed what in their view is the insufficiency of the recently negotiated ceasefire between Hamas, a Palestinian terrorist group, and Israel. In so doing, they put forth the view that all of Israel must be surrendered to the Palestinians, whose leaders have serially rejected viable two-state solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict ever since the United Nations voted in 1947, via Resolution 181, to partition what was then known as British Mandatory Palestine into Arab and Jewish states.
“We demand that Cornell divests from the weapons manufacturers that make genocide possible,” they said. “A ceasefire will save lives, and we hope it will be permanent. But a ceasefire is not a free Palestine, and we will organize until we see a liberated Palestine free from genocide, occupation, and apartheid.”
Anonymous collectives of anti-Zionists have vandalized Cornell University property before, and the school as a whole has seen some of the most disturbing incidents of campus antisemitism since Hamas’s massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
In August, a group vandalized the Day Hall administrative building, graffitiing “Israel bombs, Cornell pays” and “Blood is on your hands” on it and shattering the glazings of its front doors. They justified their actions.
“We had to accept that the only way to make ourselves heard is by targeting the only thing the university administration really cares about: property,” the students told The Sun. “With the start of this new academic year, the Cornell administration is trying desperately to upkeep a facade of normalcy knowing that, since last semester, they have been working tirelessly to uphold Cornell’s function as a fascist, classist, imperial machine.”
Anti-Zionists convulsed Cornell University’s campus during the 2023-2024 academic year, engaging in activities that are without precedent in the school’s 159-year history. Three weeks after Hamas’s massacre across southern Israel, now-former student Patrick Dai threatened to perpetrate heinous crimes against members of the school’s Jewish community, including mass murder and rape. Cornell students also occupied an administrative building and held a “mock trial” in which they convicted school president Martha Pollack of complicity in “apartheid” and “genocide against Palestinian civilians.” Meanwhile, history professor Russell Rickford called Hamas’s barbarity on Oct. 7 “exhilarating” and “energizing” at a pro-Palestinian rally held on campus.
By the end of the year, Pollack announced her resignation as president of the university, which followed the installment of an illegal “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” on the campus in which pro-Hamas students had lived and protested the university’s investments in companies linked to Israel.
Cornell now has a new interim president, Michael Kotlikoff, and his administration has vowed to punish and deter criminal behavior undertaken in the name of anti-Zionist activism.
“Acts of violence, extended occupations of buildings, or destruction of property (including graffiti), will not be tolerated and will be subject to immediate public safety response,” he said in August. “We will enforce these policies consistently, for every group or activity, on any issue or subject …We urge all members of the community to express their views in a manner that respects the rights of others. One voice may never stifle another. There is a time, place, and manner for all to speak and all to be heard.”
So far, Kotlikoff’s administration has executed its zero-tolerance policy, pursuing criminal investigations against protesters who break the law, as happened on Sept. 24 when a mass of students disrupted a career fair because it was attended by Boeing and L3Harris, an American defense contractor. The incident resulted in three arrests, and, later, severe disciplinary sanctions, including classifying five students as “persona non grata,” which, Cornell says, bans from campus “a person who has exhibited behavior which has been deemed detrimental to the university community.” However, the university did downgrade sanctions levied against a doctoral student after his supporters decried that dis-enrolling him as a student would lead inexorably to his deportation from the US.
Regarding this latest incident, Cornell has vowed to bring the vandals to justice.
“Vandalism violates our code of conduct and the law,” the Cornell University Police Department (CUPD) told The Sun. “Graffiti is property damage, which is a crime. We are committed to identifying the perpetrators responsible.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Trump Fires Head of Terrorist-Linked World Central Kitchen From President’s Council on Sports, Fitness, Nutrition
World Central Kitchen (WCK) barge loaded with food arrives off the Gaza coast, in this handout image released March 15, 2024. Photo: Israel Defense Forces/Handout via REUTERS
US President Donald Trump on Tuesday announced the firing of celebrity chef Jose Andres, founder of the controversial World Central Kitchen (WCK), from the president’s Council on Sports, Fitness, and Nutrition, claiming that the restaurateur and humanitarian is “not aligned with” the current White House’s mission.
Trump shared the news of Andres’s departure in an “Official Notice of Dismissal” on social media. The statement explained that his administration is currently in the process of “identifying and removing over a thousand presidential appointees from the previous administration, who are not aligned with our vision to Make America Great Again.”
Over the past year, Andres has found himself embroiled in controversy regarding the alleged conduct of WCK employees in Gaza. WCK, a US-based NGO founded by Andres to help feed needy people caught in disasters or conflict zones, has been operating with roughly 500 employees in Gaza since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas war in October 2023. The charity has often engaged in heated public disputes with the Jewish state, accusing the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) of purposefully targeting its workers with airstrikes — allegations that Jerusalem has adamantly rejected.
In April 2024, the IDF came under fire after it conducted airstrikes on a WCK vehicle convoy, killing seven employees of the charity. Israel acknowledged responsibility for the incident and insisted that the airstrikes violated internal protocol, subsequently dismissing two senior officers over the botched military operation.
Israel has accused WCK of insufficiently vetting its workforce and employing terrorist members within its ranks.
Last month, WCK fired at least 62 of its staff members in Gaza after Israel said they had “affiliations and direct connections” with terrorist groups. Israel conducted an investigation into the backgrounds of the charity’s employees after the Jewish state discovered that a WCK employee named Ahed Azmi Qdeih took part in the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Qdeih was killed in an Israeli airstrike in Gaza on Nov. 30. At the time, WCK said it had no knowledge of an employee involved in the Oct. 7 onslaught, in which Hamas-led Palestinian terrorists murdered 1,200 people and kidnapped over 250 hostages during their rampage in southern Israel.
Israel has long insisted that Hamas and similar terrorist groups have infiltrated humanitarian organizations in Gaza. In August 2024, the United Nations admitted that nine employees of UNRWA, the controversial United Nations agency responsible for Palestinian refugees and their descendants, were fired over their alleged involvement in the Hamas terrorist group’s Oct. 7 attacks on southern Israel.
Andres responded to Trump’s statement on X/Twitter, claiming that he had already resigned.
“I submitted my resignation last week … my 2 year term was already up,” Andres wrote.
“I was honored to serve as co-chair of the President’s Council on Sports, Fitness, and Nutrition. My fellow council members — unpaid volunteers like me — were hardworking, talented people who inspired me every day. I’m proud of what we accomplished on behalf of the American people,” he added.
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