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Long-delayed Pittsburgh synagogue shooting trial to begin Monday, igniting pain, fear and hopes for closure
(JTA) — Every Thursday, Brad Orsini gets on a conference call with dozens of other security specialists who, like him, focus on preventing threats to American Jews. But in a few days, and for the coming months, the conference call won’t just address the dangers of the present and future. It will also deal with events that occurred more than four years ago.
That’s because next week marks the beginning of the trial of the gunman who is accused of killing 11 worshippers in a Pittsburgh synagogue in October 2018.
Orsini, who oversaw the city’s Jewish communal security on the day of the attack in the neighborhood of Squirrel Hill, hopes to find a sense of closure in the alleged shooter’s prosecution. But he also knows that the trial threatens to broadcast the white supremacist ideas that lay behind the attack, and continue to pose risks for Jewish communities. And he worries that, in addition to providing a possible pathway for survivors and victims’ families to move into the future, it could also thrust them back into a painful past.
“It’s long overdue,” Orsini said. “This has been looming large over the Pittsburgh community and, quite honestly, the Jewish community in the nation. We’re all looking toward finishing this trial and prosecuting this actor for what he did.”
At the same time, he added, “This trial is going to reopen wounds that this community has suffered for almost five years now, and it’s going to have the ability to retraumatize many people in the community. And we have to be concerned about that.”
Beginning on Monday, those countervailing emotions and expectations will come to bear as the deadliest antisemitic attack in American Jewish history is litigated in court. The trial, which will begin with jury selection, is expected to last about three months. Few doubt the guilt of the accused shooter, Robert Bowers, whose name is hardly uttered by Jewish residents of Squirrel Hill. But what remains unclear is what the trial will mean for American Jews — and for the families most directly affected by the attack.
Some hope for the defendant to get the death penalty — even though that will mean prolonging the legal ordeal — while others have advocated against it. Some hope for the trial to shed light on the threat of white supremacy, even as renewed attention on the attack could inspire other violent extremists. And some hope the trial will help them move past the tragedy, even as they know it will be difficult to hear the details of the shooting laid out in court.
“The country is going to have to undergo this unprecedented trial of the country’s worst mass killer of Jews,” said Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League. “It’s going to be really hard, so I think our community is really going to have to buckle down and brace ourselves.”
The attack on Saturday morning, Oct. 27, 2018, killed 11 people from three congregations, all of which met at the same building, and injured six others, including four police officers. The defendant faces 63 criminal charges, including hate crimes and murder charges. He has pleaded not guilty. The prosecution is seeking the death penalty — a choice some relatives of victims are vocally supporting. Previously, leaders of two of the three congregations that suffered the attack had opposed the death penalty in this case.
“This massacre was not just a mass murder of innocent citizens during a service in a house of worship,” Diane Rosenthal, sister of David and Cecil Rosethal, who died in the attack, told local journalists, according to reporting by the Pittsburgh Union Progress. “The death penalty must apply to vindicate justice and to offer some measure of deterrence from horrific hate crimes happening again and again.”
For the survivors and families of victims, the trial will likely be especially painful. Some told the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle that they intend to take time off work, delay a vacation or be away from family for an extended period of time to be present at the proceedings.
“I want to see justice happen, but at the same time, I hate to think about the families having to potentially see images of what happened and things of that sort,” Steve Weiss, who survived the attack, told the weekly Jewish newspaper. “I’m sure they have mental images, but to have to actually see photos of victims and things of that sort I think can really be difficult for them.”
One thing few people question is the shooter’s guilt, despite his plea of not guilty. He offered to plead guilty in 2019 in exchange for taking the death penalty off the table, but prosecutors, determined to pursue capital punishment for the crime, rejected the plea.
It was the same thing that had happened in the case of the man charged with killing nine Black worshippers in a Charleston, South Carolina, church in 2015. But there, despite the rejected guilty plea, the trial took place a year and a half after the attack, and the shooter was sentenced to death. (In an illustration of the length of death penalty cases, his latest court proceeding happened in October, and he has not yet been executed.)
In contrast, the Pittsburgh trial is not starting until four and a half years after the shooting there. Part of the reason for the delay stems from the work of the defense team, which has pushed back the trial through various court filings. The alleged shooter’s lead attorney, Judy Clarke, has defended a series of high-profile attackers: the Unabomber, the attacker in the 1996 Atlanta Summer Olympics bombing and the Boston Marathon bomber, among others. According to Pittsburgh’s local CBS affiliate, her singular goal is to avoid the death penalty for her client.
But in many other ways, the parallels between the Charleston trial and this one are clear. Both concern shootings by alleged white supremacists in houses of worship, tragedies that have become gruesome symbols of a national rise in bigotry. In both, the culpability of the defendant was assumed before the trial began. Like the Pittsburgh defendant, the Charleston shooter has been lionized by white supremacists, including some who cited him as an inspiration for their own violent acts.
And in both cases, there is an understanding that a conviction does not heal the wounds opened by the shooter.
“This trial has produced no winners, only losers,” said the judge in the Charleston shooter’s trial, Richard Gergel, according to the New Yorker. “This proceeding cannot give the families what they truly want, the return of their loved ones.”
Still, some who are watching the Pittsburgh trial closely hope that it will bring new facts and connections to light. Amy Spitalnick, the executive director of Integrity First for America, a nonprofit that spearheaded a multimillion-dollar victory in a civil trial against the organizers of the 2017 far-right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, hopes that the Pittsburgh trial illustrates the links among different white supremacist shootings — such as the attacks in El Paso, Texas; Christchurch, New Zealand; and at a synagogue in Poway, California.
Those attackers spouted similar conspiracy theories and referenced other recent violent attacks in their manifestos. Spitalnick said that the accused Pittsburgh shooter allegedly communicated with the organizers of the Charlottesville rally on the social network Gab, which is known as a haven for right-wing extremists.
“Trials like this can really be illustrative of how deep the poison of white supremacy and antisemitism goes,” she said. In the Charlottesville trial, she said, “The reams and reams of evidence… really helped pull back the curtain on what motivated the defendants, how they operated, the tools and the tactics of the movement, the conspiracy theories at its core.”
There’s also the possibility that, with the attack resurfacing the shooter’s motivations, and putting him back in the spotlight, it will act as an inspiration for other white supremacists. In the years following the synagogue shooting, Pittsburgh became a kind of pilgrimage site for the defendant’s admirers — leading to continued harassment of local Jews.
“We’re giving a platform to an individual who is a Jew hater, who wanted to kill all Jews,” Orsini said. “What does that spark in other like-minded people? We need to be very cognizant throughout this trial on what kind of chatter is going to be out there on the deep dark web, or even in open portals.”
In the face of concerns about retraumatization, Greenblatt said the ADL is preparing resources on how to discuss the trial with students and amid the Jewish community.
“To relive the horrors of, the grief of, the event — this thing being constantly in the news — it’s going to be hard to avoid, it’s going to be difficult and it could be grisly and upsetting,” Greenblatt said. “I would much prefer this trial didn’t happen — I would much prefer this crime never happened, I would much prefer that those people were all still with us today — but this is where we are.”
He added, “If there might be some ability to raise awareness among the non-Jewish population of what we’re facing, [that] would be of value.”
One potential challenge for American Jews as a whole, Spitalnick said, is that federal prosecutors don’t necessarily share the needs of Jews who will be following the proceedings. While the trial will conjure a mix of emotions for Jews locally and beyond, she said, prosecutors will be more focused on the nuts and bolts of what happened that day and the details of the accused attacker’s actions and motives.
“We’re going to probably spend a lot of time hearing from the prosecution about what motivated him, but it’s not through the lens of what we as Jews think about when we think about Jewish safety,” she said. “It’s through the lens of making the case that this guy did what he did motivated by this extremism and hate… It’s going to be very deliberate and tactical and precise, versus where we as American Jews have been thinking about this from a deeply personal, communal safety perspective.”
The deliberate and detailed work of prosecutors, however, may not be at cross purposes with the emotional needs of Jews, Orsini said. When the trial ends, he said, the establishment of Bowers’ guilt may itself prove to be transformative for how Jews relate to the tragedy, in Pittsburgh and beyond.
“The fact that this individual has not been fully brought to justice… and is not convicted yet of this mass shooting — in some way, yes, that closure and finality will be done at the end of this trial,” he said. “The community can kind of regroup and truly become resilient once this phase is over with.”
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In ‘31 Candles,’ a manchild becomes bar mitzvah to court his crush
In the thick of 31 Candles, a cockeyed rom-com about a 30-something’s ploy to become an adult bar mitzvah to get closer to a childhood crush, a one-night stand observes a jar of pickles in the kitchen of our hero’s Brooklyn apartment.
“Really?” she asks.
“I’m embracing cultural stereotypes,” he tells her, “What do you want me to do?”
To speak for myself: less.
Entering a now crowded field of rabbinically-inspired romantic comedies, the film — written, directed and edited by Jonah Feingold who also stars — wears its influences on its snide sleeve. A Nora Ephron autumn. Woody Allen-esque narration and titles. New York is a character!
Feingold plays Leo Kadner, a director for Lifetime and Hallmark Channel-coded Christmas films (Feingold, in real life, helmed the 2023 streamer EXmas). When he reconnects with an old flame from camp at his nephew’s bris, and learns she tutors b’nai mitzvah, he decides it’s finally time to become a man and make falling in love his bar mitzvah project.
There’s only one snag, beyond the obvious ick of the subterfuge: Feingold’s tutor, Eva (Sarah Coffey) is not the least bit interested. While the two have some kidding chemistry, it’s not a love match. The movie knows it — but the audience catches on quicker than it does.
There’s an element of subversion in Feingold’s approach, but the humor is packed in the same old schmaltz.
Leo’s mom (Jackie Sandler) somehow orders an off-the-menu martini at Barney Greengrass, while his father mentions a great uncle who invested with Jeffrey Epstein. Zabar’s black-and-white cookies play a featured role. Caroline Aaron (who already starred in a much better adult bar mitzvah film) as Leo’s grandmother, listens to his spiel on dating apps and the etiquette of Instagraming with your “situationship” at a shiva.
Watching Feingold confide in Aaron, I wondered who this movie was for. Its weekday screenings at Quad Cinema in the Village and at Movies of Delray in Florida would suggest an older crowd. A seminal discussion of an OTPHJ (over the pants handjob) and the celebrity dating app Raya suggests a younger audience that would likely groan at this sub-Apatowian dialogue.
One could contend it is for young Jews with old souls or older people who are young at heart. I kinda consider myself both and rolled my eyes throughout.
That it belongs to a growing school of self-aware comedy writing wherein every character seems to have taken at least a level one improv class, is irksome, but its use of Judaism is perhaps most objectionable.
Nothing in the film is glaringly wrong — though how Leo could struggle with basic brachas after having spent many summers at a Jewish sleepaway camp raises eyebrows — but it resists its natural endpoint of finding the rite of passage meaningful for its own sake.
Leo learns a lesson on love, and offers it in the form of his drash on his Torah portion, Jacob and Rachel’s meet cute at the well, but he finds no deeper significance in his tradition, beyond a largely played-for-laughs visit to the Museum of Jewish Heritage: A Living Memorial to the Holocaust with his situationship.
A connection to peoplehood is not Leo’s consolation prize. The bar mitzvah process turns out to be a vehicle for his pathetic epiphany that she’s just not that into him. (The logic of 31 Candles calls to mind a better treatment of manhood and entitlement on an episode of Seinfeld where the bar mitzvah boy has eyes on Elaine.)
If there were now a dearth of Jewish content, Feingold’s film might be a refreshingly frothy entry to the American Jewish pantheon. As it stands, though, it feels like we’re being served Shiva Baby and Bad Shabbos’ reheated leftovers with more jokes about product placement and AI.
Like 31 candles glowing on a cake, the film is eye-catching and ultimately excessive. And, like the cake itself, it’s a confection that goes down easy enough — even if it may give you a stomachache.
The post In ‘31 Candles,’ a manchild becomes bar mitzvah to court his crush appeared first on The Forward.
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In Gaza, It’s Déjà vu All Over Again
A Red Cross vehicle, escorted by a van driven by a Hamas terrorist, moves in an area within the so-called “yellow line” to which Israeli troops withdrew under the ceasefire, as Hamas says it continues to search for the bodies of deceased hostages seized during the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, in Gaza City, Nov. 12, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Dawoud Abu Alk
Eleven years ago, the 2014 Hamas rocket war against Israel ended in a ceasefire.
In the ensuing years, Israel and the United States should have learned something about “ceasefires” as opposed to “peace.” President Donald Trump’s ceasefire plan, however, has the flaw that every single such plan has had (in the territories and in Lebanon): the failure of anti-terror forces to control territory and enforce the rules. In the absence of that, Hamas has reemerged and is rearming in Gaza.
As I wrote in 2014:
The Hamas rockets have, for the time being, stopped; the current cease-fire is holding. The tunnel threat, a strategic one most Israelis had not understood until several days into the war, has been alleviated; many Hamas rocket manufacturing facilities have been destroyed; a substantial percentage of the Hamas arsenal has been used up; and Hamas achieved none of its strategic goals — not large-scale Israeli casualties or physical destruction, an airport, a seaport, or the opening of border crossings. Israeli children have returned to school and, after a brief dip, the Israeli economy is expected to grow for the year.
Those were the days of “mowing the grass.” Eliminating the visible threats.
As I asked at the time:
To the extent that the Israeli public wanted the destruction or elimination of Hamas, or an end to the rocket threat, it was doomed by its unreasonable expectations. Americans suffer similarly. Having understood the Islamic State [IS] as a threat not only in Syria and Iraq, but also to our interests and potentially to our own country, they want it gone. The question for the American government, as it is for the Israeli government, is: “How do you defeat an armed ideological movement with a territorial base if you are unwilling to fight in that territorial base?”
President Barack Obama spoke of “degrading, dismantling, and destroying” ISIS. He never said how — and neither has President Trump.
Try this:
Control of territory and the ability to subject one’s enemies to enforceable rules is the only known mechanism for ending, rather than managing, a war. Despite the Western propensity for “peace processes” and negotiations, it is hard (impossible?) to find a historical example of one side simply agreeing to give up its mission, arms, ideology, or interests without a forcing mechanism — military defeat.
We don’t like to talk about “winners” and “losers,” preferring to “split the difference” or find a “win-win” formula. But “peace” itself was defined by Machiavelli as “the conditions imposed by the winners on the losers of the last war.” There are different iterations of “peace,” depending on whether the winners institute good or bad conditions. There can be a cold peace, a warm peace, or the peace of the dead. The peace that followed WWI contained the seeds of WWII; the peace after WWII produced the German economic miracle.
Even when wars aren’t “won,” control of territory and enforceable rules can make the difference between long-term success and failure – the US military has been in South Korea since the 1953 Armistice, allowing a democratic, technologically advanced society to emerge despite the continuing threat from the impoverished, heavily armed, and dangerous North. The withdrawal of American forces from South Vietnam within months of the armistice there allowed North Vietnam to capture territory and impose a communist government on a single Vietnamese entity. Although NATO faced Russia across the Fulda Gap, there is no denying that the Allied presence also enforced anti-Nazi rules in West Germany.
October 7, 2023, brought about a change in Israeli military thinking. A ceasefire is no longer enough. Hamas, in Israel’s view, has to be disarmed and ripped out of the territory in a verifiable and enforceable manner. The IDF is making plans to reassert itself across the yellow line. The US appears more interested in bringing Turkish troops into Gaza, a move rejected not only by Israel but, oddly, by Egypt. Qatari troops are no better. Both are Muslim Brotherhood partners of Hamas.
As I wrote:
The enemies of Israel and the West are similar. Ideological similarities aside, both are vicious and absolutist, and neither plays by Western rules regarding women, children, religious diversity or war crimes. Both rely on the relative gentility of their adversaries — Israel and the West — to protect them from ultimate defeat. Thus far, theirs is the correct bet.
Or at least it was.
The difficulty now will be bringing the US and Israel to the meeting point. President Trump was there. He called for ,“Hell to rain down on Hamas.” But now he appears to have changed his mind. Talk, negotiate, promise, offer, talk some more. This simply provides time for Hamas to rearm and reassert itself among the people of Gaza. And Hamas is using the time.
The US and its allies have to acknowledge the original flaw in the plan — both in 2014 and 2025. Without a military presence determined to uproot and destroy Hamas in whatever manner the military deems necessary, “peace plans” and “ceasefires” are simply wishes and, with due respect to Yogi Berra, “Déjà vu all over again.”
Shoshana Bryen is Senior Director of the Jewish Policy Center and Editor of inFOCUS Quarterly magazine.
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Bias and Distortion: When the BBC Becomes the Story
The BBC logo is displayed above the entrance to the BBC headquarters in London, Britain, July 10, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Hollie Adams
“Nation Shall Speak Peace Unto Nation” (Micah 4:3).
That is unironically the official motto of the British Broadcasting Company, otherwise known as the BBC. And yet in recent weeks, the world has watched the opposite unfold: a state-funded broadcaster selectively edited footage to falsely imply that President Trump was actively inciting the January 6th Capitol riot. Presumably done because they believed the “truth” of their worldview mattered more than the truth of the footage.
This rightfully ignited an international scandal and a crisis of legitimacy. The BBC has offered a terse apology — but that apology rings hollow, given that the BBC has engaged in this behavior for decades — especially when it comes to covering the Jewish State.
The same editorial scalpel that carved Trump’s words, has for decades, performed cosmetic surgery on Middle Eastern reality. This stems from their belief that narrative truth supersedes factual truth — and that the BBC are the arbiters of all things truth.
The BBC represents the old-school institutional brand of nuanced antisemitism: never say explicitly what can be more effectively implied.
Israel is forever the aggressor and villain. Anything that contradicts that reality in any way whatsoever — from Palestinian terrorism, to Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas’ constant rejection of an Israeli state — is simply ignored.
Things simply happen, without agency, causality, or perpetrators — at least for one side of the conflict.
This is antisemitism through narrative staging. Israel is the intentional actor; its enemies are organisms responding to their environment. Israel’s choices are scrutinized; Hamas’ choices are naturalized.
To the BBC, Israel becomes a narrative accelerant while its enemies are granted the dignity of inevitability. The BBC does not invent the facts; it simply removes context. In the absence of evidence, it encourages audiences to “draw their own conclusions” — because, after all, the network is “just asking questions.” The result is reflexive antisemitism, an atmosphere rather than an argument.
According to a recent report in The Telegraph, the BBC has been forced to correct, on average, two anti-Israel Gaza stories a week since October 7th. This is not journalism; it is groupthink manipulation funded by the British public.
The ancient Greeks had a word for speech that abandons truth while avoiding outright lies: sophistry. Protagoras defined this worldview when he said, “Man is the measure of all things.” Truth becomes subjective, determined by what you want your audience to believe. Sophists mastered narrative manipulation and engineered entire populations with it.
Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle held a unanimous antipathy for all things sophistry. They believed the sophist class posed a greater threat to the republic than foreign invasion.
Plato warned that democracy becomes theatre when society loses the ability to distinguish between truth and plausibility. He could have been describing the 21st-century BBC.
The BBC has become the global engine for adjusting the Overton window — not just disparaging President Trump and American relations, but normalizing sympathy for terrorist groups, and delegitimizing Israel’s sovereignty. What are the effects of these manipulations on world events and British relations? The BBC is no longer a news organization; it is a mood architectural firm.
The Greeks understood the peril to democracy when sophistry overwhelmed truth. Throughout history this pattern has repeated itself for civilizations that ignored the early warning signs. Those signs are flashing again — and not merely at the fringes, but at the very apex of Britannia’s most trusted institution.
There is always a moment before the point of no return when better angels can still prevail. This is that moment. If “Nation Shall Speak Peace Unto Nation” is to retain any meaning, it must begin with truth. Peace built on sophistry is merely sophistry.
Britain’s closest ally is the United States, and its most besieged ally is Israel. The BBC chose to malign both, not accidentally, but institutionally.
You cannot claim moral authority while eroding the foundations of your own alliances. You cannot claim neutrality while waging narrative warfare. And just as the Greeks warned — so it begins.
Philip Gross is a London-based American businessman and writer whose work focuses on politics, culture, and Jewish history. Born in New York and living in Britain for three decades, he writes from a transatlantic perspective shaped by a career in global commodities and a lifelong engagement with Jewish thought and contemporary affairs.