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As jury launches deliberations in Pittsburgh synagogue massacre, defense concedes shooter’s hatred of Jews
PITTSBURGH (JTA) — After 11 days of graphic and emotionally fraught testimony in the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting trial, and a 90-minute closing argument that included gruesome photos and the replay of harrowing 911 calls, it was time for the defense to speak.
A lawyer for Robert Bowers, accused of being the gunman who murdered 11 worshipers at the Tree of Life synagogue, on Thursday walked across the courtroom to a podium, faced the jury, and spoke for just 19 minutes.
Elisa Long acknowledged the immensity of the crime on Oct. 27, 2018, and offered only half a defense. Bowers did not intend to keep Jews from worshipping, she said, but he did appear to hate Jews.
“There is no question that his posts on Gab.com and his statements that day reflected animosity and hatred toward Jews,” Long said, referring to a social media site that is a virtual redoubt for extremists.
It was a critical concession that 11 of the government’s charges, that Bowers committed capital hate crimes, may be irrefutable.
A prosecutor took another 20 minutes to rebut Long’s barebones defense, and then Judge Robert Colville ordered the jury to begin deliberations. Seven women and five men filed out of the court at 2:30 p.m., and clerks followed them with wheeled carts piled with evidence. They retired Thursday without arriving at a verdict.
The defense, which barely registered as a presence during the guilt phase of the trial, appears to be reserving its arguments for the death penalty phase, which begins a week after the jury returns a verdict, if it determines that Bowers is guilty of any of the 22 capital crimes out of 63 charges in the indictment.
Defense lawyers in March said they would bring up Bowers’ mental health, including evidence that he suffers from epilepsy and schizophrenia. On the first day of the trial, Colville forbade them from doing so during the guilt phase of the trial, but said they may raise mental health during the penalty phase.
In her closing argument, Long devoted most of her time to sowing doubt about 11 of the capital charges, that Bowers “intentionally obstructed by force … the enjoyment of free exercise of religious beliefs,” resulting in 11 deaths.
“It is vitally important not to convict him of crimes he did not commit,” she said.
The free exercise of religious beliefs “does not include the engagement in good works or conduct that may or may not be part of religious belief,” she said.
Then jurors would have to determine whether Bowers was seeking to stop a religious service “or to stop people who were supporting the resettlement of refugees,” she said.
One of the three congregations housed in the Tree of Life synagogue, Dor Hadash, was partnered with HIAS, the Jewish immigration advocacy group. She quoted Bowers’ Gab posts in which he identified Jews with what he believed was a planned genocide of white Americans to be carried out by immigrants.
“HIAS is a huge enabler of refugee invasions,” Bowers posted on Oct. 25, Long pointed out, two days before the massacre. Dor Hadash, she noted, was on that Saturday planning a “Refugee Shabbat.” His responses were “shocking and irrational,” she said, but “after learning about HIAS” and its advocacy, “Mr. Bowers’ sense of urgency increased.”
Long began her closing argument by acknowledging, as lead defense attorney Judy Clarke had done in her opening argument, that Bowers had carried out the massacre.
“There is no dispute that on Oct. 27. 2018, armed with an AR-15, he shot and killed 11 people and seriously injured two others who were in their sacred space,” Long said. The defense on day one of the trial promised “we would not offer justification, and we have not done so,” she said.
Summing up, Long appeared to anticipate the mental health arguments the defense would make during the penalty phase, while being careful not to violate Colville’s order not to explicitly raise the topic.
She described a 46-year old man “living alone in an apartment” where he slept on a mattress on the floor and who was obsessed with computers, coding and guns. “How and why this man who lived a quiet and law abiding life until 2018” committed the crimes may be “inexplicable,” she said.
In the months before the massacre Bowers “spent an immense amount of time on the internet absorbing hate,” she said.
Long did not argue that the government had proved the 11 capital hate crimes. But she also did not argue that it had not, telling the jury, “These are the charges the federal government has brought and these are the decisions you as jurors must make.”
In his rebuttal, Eric Olshan, a U.S. attorney, ridiculed Long’s claim that obstructing worship was not germane to Bowers’ intentions.
Facing the jury, he spun around and pointed to Bowers.
“On Oct. 27, 2018, that man, Robert Bowers, went into Tree of Life, where three congregations, not just Dor Hadash” were getting ready for services. The other two are Tree of Life and New Light. “He didn’t focus on Dor Hadash, he focused on any Jew he could find to kill or try to kill.”
He accused Long of cherrypicking Bowers’ Gab posts, and reminded jurors of evidence that in the months prior to the attack, Towers had “liked” just two posts mentioning HIAS, while “liking” some 400 mentions of “Kike,” an antisemitic epithet, and some 2,300 mentions of “Jew.”
“Did he go to a refugee resettlement meeting? Did he go to the border to stop Jews” from facilitating the entry of immigrants? Olshan asked. “Did he go to the HIAS office in Maryland? He drove about 30 minutes from where he lived to Squirrel Hill, the center of Jewish life in Pittsburgh.”
Again Olshan pointed at Bowers. “That person intended to obstruct them from free exercise of religion,” he said. “This is not rocket science.”
In any case, Olshan, who is Jewish, said HIAS’s work is inextricable from Jewish faith. “Welcoming the stranger” appears 36 times in the Torah, he said, including in the passage the congregations would be reading that morning. “That just proves his guilt,” he said.
Throughout the day, Bowers never looked toward the jury. Clad in a gray sweater with a collared blue shirt, he stared at a computer screen where he monitored evidence and scribbled notes, occasionally whispering to his lawyers.
Bowers’ aunt and a cousin were present in the courtroom, as were survivors of the attack and families of the victims. There was an expectation that a verdict would be quick; the overflow room for families was packed. Maggie Feinstein, who counsels the victims, was in the court room. So was Rabbi Jeffrey Myers, who testified on the first day that he expected to die where he was hiding, and recited the Shema prayer. He wore a white kippah emblazoned with the synagogue’s symbol, a blue tree.
The day began with Colville warning the jury that his instructions to them would be exceptionally long; he took 80 minutes. Then Soo Song, an assistant U.S. attorney, spoke for 90 minutes, reconstructing the day of the massacre, Oct. 27, 2018, detail by gory detail. Of the 11 people killed, she said, six were shot in the head.
She anticipated the argument Long would advance, repeatedly emphasizing the rituals Bowers interrupted with deadly results. Using bloody photos of victims in their place, she focused especially on religious implements.”The defendant committed mass murder in a synagogue,” she said. “He turned that sacred space into a place littered with prayer shawls and prayer books and 11 deceased worshippers.”
She concluded naming the 11 victims: Joyce Fienberg, Richard Gottfried, Rose Mallinger, Jerry Rabinowitz, Cecil Rosenthal, David Rosenthal, Bernice Simon, Sylvan Simon, Daniel Stein, Melvin Wax and Irving Younger.
Olshan ended the day holding two evidence bags, each with half of a bloodstained kippah. “No longer a reminder of God’s presence,” he said. “This is what he did to Irving Younger, leaving this tattered reminder found amid the shocks of Irving younger’s white hair.”
The obstruction of worship was “the natural and probable consequence of his actions,” Olshan said.”The only justice is a verdict of guilty in every charge in this case.”
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I was born after 9/11. I still carry the memories of that day.
Earlier this week, I was talking with my mother over the phone about her experience on 9/11. She walked me through the familiar parts — how she was in our Upper West Side apartment when she learned about the attacks from a relative, how she went to the garage to get the car so they could drive to a friend’s house upstate once she realized the attacks were acts of terror. There were still hijacked planes in the air, and she worried New York City might be targeted again. Then, she said, “This part is going to make me cry.”
I hadn’t remembered what came next, but suddenly it came back to me. “Oh no, me too,” I said.
While she waited for my father to come back uptown from his office in the Financial District, she stopped inside a fire station across from the garage. Inside was a lone firefighter, who’d stayed behind to man the station while the rest of his company was inside the towers. He was watching the news on television, and my mom stood next to him, watching too, when the towers fell.
“We just lost so many men,” he said.
I wasn’t there when it happened; I wasn’t even alive. But I’d heard this story before, I’d walked dozens of times past that same fire station, which now has a plaque commemorating the seven firefighters who died on 9/11. Hearing the story again on the phone, I found myself walking down the streets of Washington D.C., bawling.
I’m 23, born a year-and-a-half after 9/11. Most Americans my age learned about the attacks in school, as history. I’m part of the 16% who learned through family or friends.
The discovery happened by accident, when I was in kindergarten. My mom and I were in a children’s store on the Upper West Side, when we started flipping through a picture book about the history of New York City. Most of the book was unremarkable, but the end was unexpected: a scene of the smoldering twin towers.
I forget what exactly happened next, but here’s what I do remember: My mom was upset that the shop hadn’t provided a warning about the book’s end, and I was confused about why she was upset. I was five, too young to understand the image and never one to let a question go unanswered; I must have pestered her until she offered up an explanation.
She hadn’t been prepared to tell me about terrorism. She’d been evading the topic for some time, telling half-truths to avoid it. When I’d ask her why we had to take our shoes off in line at the airport, she’d just say it was to make sure no one had anything dangerous, leaving out the part about how a man had tried to get on a flight with bombs hidden in his shoes.
“9/11 is a huge thing for a parent to have to tell a kid about,” my mom told me this week. “You were a happy kid, and I didn’t want you to get scared or traumatized.”
The events, and impacts, of that day slowly unfolded for me as the years passed. I learned that my father had watched from Battery Park as the South Tower fell; he ran westward as plumes of smoke billowed toward him. I learned that my parents had friends who’d died in the towers, one of whom was the father of a boy I grew up with. I remember going to the 9/11 Memorial and Museum when it opened in 2014, feeling sick as I watched footage of people jumping out of the towers.
The New York Times recently interviewed dozens of Gen Z Americans about 9/11. I was struck by how disconnected many felt from the event. “It’s hard to feel sad about something that you don’t remember,” said Annika Heegaard, a 25-year-old now living in New York.
But for me, 9/11 doesn’t feel quite so far away. By now I’ve lived through other mass casualty events, like the Parkland shooting and the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks. But 9/11 is the only tragedy that my family members had such a direct connection to. “It was devastating,” my mom said.
I think the reason I can remember the exact moment I found out about 9/11 is because it changed my view of the world. I remember being almost unable to comprehend that anyone would do what the hijackers did. I wasn’t, as my mom feared, traumatized by learning about the attacks; I didn’t fear for my safety each day. But the knowledge was in some ways a loss of innocence — a discovery that people could do awful things and that the world wasn’t as safe a place as I had assumed.
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The DSA’s latest win was not about Israel — and it hurts the Jewish community to insist it was
When Democratic socialist David Morales defeated the incumbent mayor of Providence, Brett Smiley, in a historic primary win this week in Rhode Island, the election quickly became part of a narrative that has been coalescing around progressive political wins in the last year — the election of Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York City, Abdul El-Sayed’s primary win in Michigan, the sweep of DSA-backed candidates in New York City’s recent primaries. The idea is that this race was all about Israel — that it turned on a struggle between Zionists and pro-Palestinian activists.
A Jewish Telegraphic Agency story on Morales’s win features a quote from the founder of the Rhode Island-Israel Collaborative that Morales’s campaign was “fueled by pro-Palestinians and Israeli haters.” The founder of the far-right Rhode Island Coalition for Israel called some of Morales’ stances “anti-Israel and anti-Jewish.” Jewish Insider published a story the day before the primary headlined, “Antisemitism roils Providence mayoral race.” The Times of Israel’s story on the election is titled, “Jewish mayor of Providence loses Democratic primary to anti-Israel challenger.” (Smiley converted to Judaism in 2024, and made a controversial visit to Israel in 2025.)
But this narrative is false: Israel did not play a decisive role in this election. In reality, Morales was laser-focused on affordability, and — like most progressive candidates this year — rarely, if ever, brought up Israel unprompted. Indeed, the defining issue for the Morales campaign was not Israel, but rent stabilization.
Last April, Smiley vetoed legislation passed by Providence’s City Council to cap annual rent hikes at 4%. This ordinance is desperately needed: A recent study found that Providence is the least affordable city for renters in the country. Longtime residents are getting priced out, and essentially everyone who rents — and renters comprise 59% of the households in the city — understands that our trajectory is simply not sustainable.
By vetoing the most significant-ever attempt to bring this crisis under control, Smiley made this a race about a challenger fighting to make Providence affordable and an incumbent prioritizing his corporate donors, who gave Smiley a historically large $1.3 war chest for his campaign. (Morales had less than $300,000, largely from individual donors.)
This issue served as precisely the kind of defining contrast that pro-Israel Super PAC spending became in recent congressional elections elsewhere. Support from AIPAC has provided an impossible-to-obscure contrast to Democratic primary voters in races such as Illinois’s 9th Congressional District, New York’s 10th Congressional District, and Michigan’s Senate primary. But in Providence, the scandal wasn’t AIPAC donors — it was the wealthy developers and corporate landlords who funded Smiley’s campaign.
It is true that Morales criticized Smiley’s active participation in the Combat Antisemitism Movement, a project so Trumpian that the Jewish Federations of North America and Jewish Council for Public Affairs both left the group after it released a video claiming that diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts are antisemitic. Morales also came out in support of a ballot initiative that would require the City of Providence to divest from the debt of foreign countries “conducting ethnic cleansing, apartheid, illegal military occupation, or genocide,” as determined by U.S. and international law. Some of Morales’s supporters — and in particular some portion of his army of campaign volunteers — were undoubtedly motivated by an appreciation for Morales’s willingness to take a moral stance. But it simply wasn’t a top five, or even (by my estimation) a top 10 issue in this race.
And I don’t understand the inclination to claim otherwise. Certainly it doesn’t make sense for members of the Israel lobby; after all, having another election be lost due to voters’ anger over a politician’s fealty to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is not good for their political project. But more importantly, these allegations — particularly the false claim that this race was somehow “roiled” by antisemitism — are harmful to Rhode Island’s Jewish community as a whole.
Take, for example, the “antisemitism” referenced by Jewish Insider, which consisted, in total, of a few instances in which a Hitler mustache and devil horns were drawn on Smiley’s campaign signs. Of course, defacing political signs is never good, and Morales immediately condemned the vandalism. But as a Jewish former elected official who experienced actual antisemitism over the course of my time in Rhode Island politics, I have to laugh at the idea that this graffiti was antisemitic.
To compare someone to Hitler is basically to say they’re the worst person ever. It’s often a problematic comparison (because almost nobody is actually as evil as Hitler), but it’s not antisemitic to say, in effect, “Hitler was bad, and so is this other guy.” And vandals were drawing devil’s horns on pictures of Smiley years before he converted. In fact, I don’t think the average Providence voter even knows Smiley is Jewish; it’s certainly not an important part of his political identity, given that he literally wasn’t yet Jewish when he first won election to the mayor’s office in 2022, or during his prior run for the seat in 2014.
Antisemitism is a real and growing problem — in our country, and here in Rhode Island. Just a few years ago, dozens of swastika-brandishing neo-Nazis rallied a block from my home. Every time that cynical politicians cry wolf on this threat, they are minimizing its danger in the eyes of most people, making our community less prepared to respond to actual incidents of antisemitism when they occur.
Even worse, when some partisans of Israel claim that everyone who dares to say Israel is committing genocide and apartheid is an antisemite — that is, someone who hates all Jews — the implication is that Israel’s wars and violence against Palestinians are somehow projects undertaken by all Jews, rather than the crimes of a specific far-right government and its supporters. And if you repeat that message often enough, some people are going to start believing it — which certainly does not make me or my young Jewish sons safer.
David Morales ran on a pledge to build a Providence for all. “All” includes members of the Jewish community, many of whom — including myself, and Morales’s campaign manager and field director, to name just a few — are excited to support his vision. It is to no one’s benefit — least of all Providence’s Jews — to try to seed conflict and distrust in what should be a moment of profound hope and possibility for our whole city.
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Jewish and Muslim leaders avoided the hardest interfaith topic for years, and now face a ‘massive fault line’
It’s been a quarter century since a wave of distrust and violence against Muslims swept across America in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks. But in some pockets of New York City and across the U.S., Jewish neighbors extended a hand of friendship and an interfaith movement was reborn.
Dialogues turned into dinners. Dinners spawned theatrical collaborations. Collaborations turned out volunteers to feed the homeless and sent interfaith teams to Capitol Hill.
Still, as the Palestinian uprising known as the Second Intifada continued to unfold in the Middle East, even the most promising partnerships avoided the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“We deliberately parked it on the side,” said Daisy Khan, the former executive director of American Society for Muslim Advancement and founder of the Women’s Islamic Initiative. “We called it the elephant in the room that none of us could handle.”
Now, 25 years after the terrorist attacks that inspired a movement, leaders realize that silence was a critical mistake.
As this year’s Jewish High Holidays, a time of remembrance and repentance, begin at sundown on the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, American Jewish leaders are reflecting on mistakes made and words they wish they could take back, confronting rising antisemitism, and along with their longtime Muslim partners, asking: Where do we go from here?
“Rosh Hashanah is known as Yom Hazikaron, the day of remembrance,” said Rabbi Joshua Davidson of Manhattan’s Temple Emanu-El, adding that remembrance usually refers to the hope that God will remember the covenant with the Jewish people. “When you talk about a day of remembrance, you also talk about the experiences that have shaped us into who we are. 9/11 certainly is an experience that has shaped us into who we are. Anyone who lived in New York is forever changed by that day.”
Interfaith bridge-building
On Sept. 11, 2001, Davidson was a young associate rabbi at another Manhattan institution, Central Synagogue. Feeling otherwise helpless that morning as the towers fell, he headed straight to the nearby mosque on 55th Street to assure his Muslim neighbors that they would not be judged by the actions of the terrorists – his instinct born from years of interfaith dialogue already underway.
The same instinct led President George W. Bush to the Islamic Center of Washington D.C., a week later to proclaim, “Islam is peace.” But that perspective did not prevail in all corners.
Prominent evangelical figures condemned Islam as “evil and wicked.” Mosques were set ablaze, and the Justice Department in the three months after the attacks labeled nine murders as “possible hate crimes.” Despite the community’s fear, the term “Islamophobia” was not widely embraced, as if it was a product of Muslims’ imaginations.
“So many American Muslims were experiencing the anxiety that President Bush recognized right away,” Davidson told the Forward. “So 9/11 crystallized for many the importance of the work of interfaith bridge building … We can learn from one another. When the world becomes complicated and your own community is in jeopardy or is being targeted, you realize how valuable it is to have those friendships.”
Those existing friendships and the ground rules that had sustained them laid the foundation for the aftermath of Sept. 11 and propelled many individuals and groups working behind the scenes to publicly counter what seemed to be an anti-Muslim zeitgeist. While the previous approach to interfaith work had been intimate Shabbat dinners, Ramadan iftars, and discussion groups, the new approach involved rallies, live performances and large-scale programs.
On the morning of Sept. 12, Israeli cellist Udi Bar-David called someone with whom he had collaborated a few times – Majid Alsayegh, an Iraqi-born Muslim engineer and architect in Philadelphia. Determined to offer a constructive response, they formed a team and in Spring 2002 launched a nonprofit for creative intercultural exchanges.
“Because of the tensions of Muslim and Jewish, Arabic and Jewish communities, because of the violence, we felt we needed to speak up and do more,” Alsayegh told the Forward, “to help them understand that dialogue in many forms, including music, is much more powerful than shooting each other.”
Seeking to help audiences listen with less anger, more empathy, artists from B’nai Jeshurun, a synagogue on New York’s Upper West Side, teamed up with Methodists and Muslims to present hard truths gathered from more than 100 New Yorkers. The project titled “Same Difference” later became a documentary.
In the years that followed, connections became more purposeful and direct. In 2008, Rabbi Marc Schneier’s Foundation for Ethnic Understanding launched an annual Weekend of Twinning, which paired scores of synagogues and mosques to explore the parallels and similarities within their traditions. It also enabled them to compare notes about the discrimination each faced as religious minorities and band together to fight the hatred that targeted both.
Khan cherishes the time she spent in synagogues and the friendships she formed there.
“We had such deep ties and such deep relations we weren’t afraid to go to bat for one another,” Khan said. “I think those relationships have even served us to this day.”
‘A massive fault line’
Still, cracks began to show. In 2010, Khan and her husband at the time, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, proposed Cordoba House, a mosque and community center in Lower Manhattan. Modeled after JCCs across the country and named for a city in Spain that once had been a center of peaceful coexistence, the proposed facility would offer prayer space, a wedding venue and a swimming pool.
Opponents focused on the location: two blocks from Ground Zero. Many Jewish leaders endorsed the project. Abe Foxman, longtime leader of the Anti-Defamation League, did not.
“We believe that in this place of tragedy and pain and anguish … if you want to heal, the best way to heal is not to do it in your face.”
Foxman, who died in May, never apologized for his remarks, but his successor Jonathan Greenblatt later acknowledged “we were wrong, plain and simple.”
In 2011, when U.S. Congressman Peter King of New York, then-chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, held hearings on Capitol Hill denouncing the radicalization inside American mosques, Jewish friends showed their support by helping to organize a “Today, I am Muslim too” rally in Times Square.
Those shows of solidarity grew throughout the years. Jewish partners joined crowds at airports to protest the Trump administration’s executive order on immigration. Congregations helped each other pick up the pieces when their houses of worship or sacred sites came under assault. But the tougher conversation, probing where people stood on the Middle East conflict and why, remained largely untouched.
As anyone in interfaith relations or diplomacy of any kind will tell you, constructive conversations are best had before there’s a crisis. That crisis arrived on Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas attacked Israel, murdering more than 1,200 and taking 250 hostages. The war that followed in Gaza sparked virulent protests on college campuses and in public squares and a spike in antisemitic incidents. It also created a chasm of grief too deep and wide for many partnerships to survive.
“When Gaza happened, it created a massive fault line,” Khan said. “For Jews it reinforced existential fears about Jewish safety. For the Palestinians: ‘It’s our existential thing too. We feel we’re getting wiped out.’”
But because many conversation partners had for years avoided the hardest topic of all, they missed the opportunity to feel the emotional weight carried on both sides and hold that tension. When the grief, trauma and fear of Oct. 7 was thrust upon them, leaders could not adequately navigate the emotional landscape to offer moral clarity or comfort, Khan said.
“We could have called for calm,” she said. “We could’ve said that human loss is terrible. We could’ve said a lot of things that calmed people down. None of that happened. It became very tribal.”
Laboratory phase
Dr. Ari Gordon, director of Muslim Jewish Relations for American Jewish Committee, said while some Muslim partners have walked away from their joint advocacy work, some have stayed in touch. Khan and Alsayegh remain committed and hold out hope that their Muslim peers will return and give it another try.
“Everyone in this space has had the hits they’ve taken after Oct. 7,” Gordon said. “Relationships are a long-term investment. They can take dips and turns, peaks and valleys. On a personal level, as a friend, you have the right to say I want to engage with a person. I don’t want to. As a Jewish community we have a responsibility to keep our doors open.”
But it’s also important to keep the trajectory and time frame in perspective. The transformation of Christian-Jewish relations offers a lesson in that regard.
“The idea that a relationship can be beset by conflict and challenges for centuries and undergo transformation,” he said, “is one that I carry in my mind all the time.”
Gordon calls the past 25 years a “laboratory phase of Muslim-Jewish relations.” The Shabbat dinners, iftars, dialogue groups, coalitions, concerts – they all have fortified a connective tissue between American Muslims and Jews that did not exist 25 years ago.
“That trust may not have been sufficient to meet the stress test of October 7 and the continued war but it was definitely there and it didn’t go away,” he said. “After October 7 we entered a new phase and it’s one where we’re not going to go back to the way it used to be, but build something new.”
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