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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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Oct. 7 changed Howard Jacobson. But his new novel is as defiant as ever.
Howard Jacobson is a rarity in British public life: vocally, unabashedly Jewish.
Jews have made fine contributions to British society, of course, but typically they haven’t done so with their Jewishness front and center, preferring to stow it away in the service of a vaguely-defined Britishness that still sees outward expressions of ethnic or religious identity as verging on indecorous.
For British Jews remain a tiny minority, just 400,000 or so in total. With nothing like the profile of, say, American Jewry, most Brits continue to view the British-Jewish community as little more than a small, faith-based group.
Yet Jacobson’s funny and discursive fiction has probed the relationship between Britain and its Jews so successfully that it’s earned him the nickname the ‘British Philip Roth’. (Jacobson has said he’d rather be known as the ‘Jewish Jane Austen’.) Often, he’s been the lone British representative of a kind of Jewishness organized not around superstition and routine, but humor and creativity — in short, the secular, cultural model. In 2010, his novel The Finkler Question, about, loosely, a non-Jew so fed up of being mistaken for a Jew that he decides to carry out a sweeping survey of Jewish identity, won the Man Booker prize.
Since Oct. 7, Jacobson has made no secret of both his anguish at the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks and his anger at what he sees as the excesses of the pro-Palestinian coalition. He has come out especially forcefully against some of the rhetoric at the London demonstrations that have been the centerpiece of the UK’s anti-Zionist movement. (A couple of his op-eds and interviews were perhaps more controversial than he had intended; in one piece for the Guardian, for example, Jacobson suggested that continued coverage of dead Palestinian children was a new form of ‘blood libel’ against Jews.)
His latest novel, Howl, gives vent to these same frustrations while adding the usual Jacobsonian literary flourishes: a prickly and well-read male Jewish protagonist; a long-suffering, non-Jewish spouse; frequent references to Jewish history; fizzing dialogue; and a darkly comic tone.
Howl — the title is a nod to the Allen Ginsberg poem — charts the descent into madness of Ferdinand Draxler, a Jewish headmaster at a primary school in leafy, diverse north London, who quickly unravels in the face of growing anti-Israel sentiment after Oct. 7. Though Ferdinand is certain that anti-Zionism is antisemitism repackaged, most everyone around him disagrees, including his colleagues, his wife and his brother, who after decades living in Israel as an Orthodox Jew has returned to England newly secular and left-wing. Most galling of all is the conduct of Ferdinand’s Oxford-educated daughter, Zoe: she’s become a regular attendee at pro-Palestinian demonstrations, and is on one occasion caught on live TV tearing down posters featuring photos of Israeli hostages.
As Ferdinand casts about for explanations — is it the universities? Identity politics? A lack of Holocaust education? Plain old Jew-hatred? — his behavior grows ever more erratic, and his ordered, rather British existence crumbles.
I spoke with Jacobson about the re-emergence, to his mind, of an ancient hatred after Oct. 7; the importance of Zionism as an idea; whether he and Ferdinand Draxler are kindred spirits; and why British Jews are typically happy with what he described as “self-abridgment.” The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
You said in an interview with The New Yorker last year, and I’m paraphrasing slightly, that when people denied that children were killed and women were raped on Oct. 7, that made you a different kind of person. So in what ways does this altered person, so to speak, show up in Ferdinand?
I certainly was a different person. The world changed the day after, and in many ways, it’s remained that different world now. A world in which people rejoiced in the pain and the suffering and the murder and the rape of other people, was not one I knew. I knew people didn’t like Jews much, but the degree to which they didn’t like Jews, the degree of it I only learned that day. Call me naive, but I didn’t know it was as bad as that. So that day was the new day.
I knew I had to write about it, because otherwise I would have gone mad. But I was in such a rage that the novel I started to write was a kind of madness. So I had to find a character who was a bit more lost, a bit less angry, a bit more confused, even more surprised than I was, and sweeter than me — a kinder, nicer me. One that still had to be astonished by what had happened, maybe even more astonished than me, but somehow or other in the way one could write about him, funnier about it, or gentler about it. That was how I felt I had to go.
Ferdinand repeatedly criticizes the reductive-ness, to his mind, of the protests. Their lack of nuance baffles him. At the same time, his beliefs are rigid and unbending. What would acceptable protest against the war look like for Ferdinand? And is the reader supposed to conclude that there are two, almost competing kinds of madness, Ferdinand on the one hand, the protests on the other, and that something more middle-of-the-road is impossible today?
The protests are madder. That has to be said. The protests are more mad because they are not perturbed or changed at all by any glimmer of light or any glimmer of argument with themselves. Ferdinand is. He’s battered as the novel goes on.
But he’s not happy with himself. And maybe the marchers aren’t happy with themselves. I tried very hard, the more I wrote this book, and the more time goes by, not to argue about the rights and the wrongs of war, because the rights and wrongs of war are, more often than not, evenly spread. And the minute you start defending one side, you look pretty foolish, because in a war the other side is rarely kind, the other side is rarely magnanimous. I don’t think there are any heroes in this war.
Still, why does Ferdinand never so much as attempt to get to grips with his daughter’s beliefs, much less those of the protest movement at large?
Let’s put that down as a failure of his, if you like, and it is a novel, and the character is allowed to have failings. It might be that I, as the novelist, have a greater failing than him in that I didn’t nudge him enough. I nudged him a bit: I had his wife try to encourage him to think about Zoe more, and she [his wife] introduces him to an Italian academic at one point, who says, ‘Never mind the rights and wrongs of it, you’re not making it any better calling them antisemites all the time, that’s going to do no good.’
But he can’t do anything about that because all he hears from their mouths is antisemitic gibberish. This is the problem for my kind of educated hero. Once you hear the gibberish, you can’t get past it. I found sympathy very hard to find for the protesters, and I’m afraid my hero suffers for being so close to me at that moment. So I’ll give you that.
‘Mutti,’ Ferdinand’s Holocaust-survivor mother, has, it turns out, embellished some of her experiences as a prisoner at Bergen-Belsen — notably in her best-selling memoir. What informed how you decided to depict Mutti?
I’ve met one or two female survivors, and they’re who I thought about when I was writing Mutti. Because whenever I’ve met a Holocaust survivor, I’ve wanted to fall in love with them. To feel swallowed up in pity for them. But bad experiences don’t necessarily make a good person. I didn’t want to make a bad person, but I wanted to make somebody who was not just a quivering heap, who does what real people do, and that is she embellishes a bit, lies a bit, she forgets a bit. I wanted a little bit of murkiness around it. I didn’t want anybody to be just a hero or a heroine of anything — on any side.
One of Howl’s more interesting contrasts is Ferdinand’s impassioned defense of Israel on the one hand, and his never having set foot there on the other. What was the rationale for creating a passionate defender of the Jewish State who’d never been there?
I wanted the idea. I wanted him to sort of be naive. I wanted his Zionism to be inexperienced, because I wanted it to be a love of the idea. So much of Zionism is an idea, and it’s very cruel when an idea has to be tested against actuality, because actuality is a swine like that.
Actuality will kill many of an idea, and I wanted him to have a kind of purity about it, an innocence about it, which doesn’t mean he’s right about it. And that’s what his brother laughs at and destroys. So I think I would have ruined it had Ferdinand gone to Israel. But I was very pleased when I came up with the idea, quite late in the novel, to have the brother come back.
Midway through the novel, there’s the following summary of British Jewry: “There’s an air of self-abridgement about them, as though being Jewish were a serious accident that had befallen them and about which they would rather not talk.” Why has Britain produced this kind of Jewishness?
The way we were brought up, we were few in number, and though we did not go around in terror we did go around with the consciousness of keeping a low profile. My father, who actually was not capable of keeping a low profile, because he was an old-fashioned Ukrainian, he was out of Dostoevsky, but he always said to the family, ‘schtum, you stay schtum.’
That was how we were brought up. Don’t make a noise. Don’t run around the streets waving flags. Keep it quiet. I think Philip Roth came over at one point and kind of looked around at English Jews and said, ‘This is the worst, most undistinguished, least forceful bunch of Jews I’ve ever met.’ [It’s worth noting that Roth had a long and often tumultuous relationship with English, Jewish actress Claire Bloom.]
We are still very, very quiet, and even, dare I say it, compared to the American Jews, I think quite Philistine. Because to make art, however quiet the art, is to put yourself forward. It’s to color yourself on the canvas. It’s to announce yourself on the page. “Look, we are here.” You can’t write a Jewish novel and not announce yourself on the page.
And it wasn’t just my dad who thought, schtum, schtum, it’s still British Jews today. Most of the Jews I went to school with went on to become doctors, went on to become lawyers. And they chose those safe careers not just because they were lucrative — and you can make the usual jokes — but because they didn’t need to declare themselves as Jewish within them. Very few went where I went. Almost nobody.
Ferdinand is fairly pessimistic about British Jewry’s future. Do you share this view? How will the current tumult, for lack of a better word, shape us?
I think it will make us less quiescent. I think it will make us realize we really do have to stand on our own feet. A lot of Jews I know have gone to Israel. But I have a feeling that, in the long-term, just as Trump has taught the Europeans that NATO has to defend itself, that Jews will feel they’ve got to defend themselves, and maybe Israel can’t help them. Israel never offered to come over with tanks. But maybe the idea of Israel as a bolt hole, that’s gone.
And how do you want this novel to be remembered?
I hope that my own contribution is the laughter. My contribution in this novel is not the truth I tell about Zionism and the rest of it. That’s not it. It’s the comedy. And I think I can say that some people have loved, or are loving, the book, and it’s the jokes. It’s that strength of mind that says even the worst things that are visited upon us, we will find a way of making funny.
Funny is a big and complex thing, a little word for a very complex thing. Comedy is understanding, it’s grasping, it’s an intellectual act as well as everything else. And that’s what we’ll do. We’ll become even better intellectuals, and let them do their worst.
The post Oct. 7 changed Howard Jacobson. But his new novel is as defiant as ever. appeared first on The Forward.
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Hamas Wants Guarantees of Israeli Troop Withdrawal Before Disarmament talks, sources say
The damaged Al-Shifa Hospital during the war in Gaza City, March 31, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Dawoud Abu Alkas
Palestinian terrorist group Hamas has told mediators it will not discuss giving up arms without guarantees that Israel will fully quit Gaza as laid out in a disarmament plan from US President Donald Trump’s “Board of Peace,” three sources told Reuters.
Hamas’ disarmament is a sticking point in talks to implement Trump’s plan for the Palestinian enclave and cement an October ceasefire that halted two years of full-blown war.
A Hamas delegation met with Egyptian, Qatari and Turkish mediators in Cairo on Wednesday and Thursday to give their initial response to a disarmament proposal presented to the group last month, two Egyptian sources and a Palestinian official said.
Hamas conveyed several demands and amendments to the board’s plan, including an end to Israeli violations, implementation of all provisions and Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza, the two Egyptian sources told Reuters.
Hamas accuses Israel of breaking the ceasefire with attacks that have killed hundreds in Gaza. Israel says its strikes are aimed at thwarting imminent attacks by militants.
The sources said Hamas also sought clarification about what it described as Israel’s continued expansion of areas under its control. Israel retained control of well over half of Gaza after the ceasefire.
The sources said Hamas does not want to discuss disarmament before those issues are addressed.
Two Hamas officials declined to comment on the content of the meetings. Israel’s government did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Representatives for the Board of Peace did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
BREAKTHROUGH UNLIKELY
Another source with direct knowledge of the Board of Peace’s thinking said that Hamas’ response meant that talks over the group laying down its arms were unlikely to immediately lead to a breakthrough. The source said Hamas was supposed to meet with mediators again next week.
The US may move forward with reconstruction absent Hamas disarmament, but only in areas under complete Israeli military control, the source said. Funding pledges important for reconstruction, many of which were from Gulf Arab states, were being held up during the Iran war, the source added.
The Palestinian official close to the talks said Hamas was unlikely to reject the plan out of hand but “it will not say yes until the remarks and demands of Palestinian factions are addressed.”
Israel says it will not agree to withdraw from Gaza unless Hamas is fully disarmed first.
Trump’s top Board of Peace envoy in the Middle East, Nickolay Mladenov, said in a social media post on Wednesday that all mediating parties had endorsed the plan.
“(The) international community has supported it, now is the time to agree to the framework for its implementation. For the sake of both Palestinians and Israelis, there is not time to lose,” Mladenov said in a post on X.
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Leo, the First US Pope, Emerges as Pointed Trump Critic
FILE PHOTO: Pope Leo XIV speaks to the media as he leaves the papal residence to head back to the Vatican, in Castel Gandolfo, Italy, March 31, 2026. REUTERS/Remo Casilli/File Photo
Pope Leo last May became the first US leader of the global Catholic Church, but for the initial 10 months of his tenure he mostly avoided comment about his home country and never once mentioned President Donald Trump publicly.
That era has come to an end.
In recent weeks the pope has emerged as a sharp critic of the Iran war. He named Trump, for the first time publicly, on Tuesday in a direct appeal urging the president to end the expanding conflict.
It is a significant shift in tone and approach that experts said indicated that the pope wanted to serve as a counterweight on the world stage to Trump and his foreign policy aims.
“I don’t think he wants the Vatican to be accused of being soft on Trumpism because he’s an American,” said Massimo Faggioli, an Italian academic who follows the Vatican closely.
Leo, known for choosing his words carefully, urged Trump to find an “off-ramp” to end the war, using an American colloquialism the president and administration officials would understand.
“When (Leo) speaks, he’s always careful,” said Faggioli, a professor at Trinity College Dublin. “I don’t think that was an accident.”
Chicago Cardinal Blase Cupich, a close ally of Leo, told Reuters the pope was taking up the mantle of a long line of pontiffs who have urged world leaders to turn away from war.
“What is different… is the voice of the messenger, for now Americans and the entire English-speaking world are hearing the message in an idiom familiar to them,” said the cardinal.
POPE SAYS GOD REJECTS PRAYERS OF WAR LEADERS
Two days before appealing to Trump directly, Leo said God rejected the prayers of leaders who start wars and have “hands full of blood,” in unusually forceful remarks for a Catholic pontiff.
Those comments were interpreted by conservative Catholic commentators as aimed at US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who has invoked Christian language to justify the joint US-Israeli strikes on Iran that initiated the war.
They also led to one of the Trump administration’s first direct responses to a comment by Leo.
“I don’t think there is anything wrong with our military leaders or with the president calling on the American people to pray for our service members,” White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said, when asked about the pope’s remarks.
Marie Dennis, a former leader of the international Catholic peace movement Pax Christi, said Leo’s most recent comments and his direct appeal to Trump “reflect a heart broken by unrelenting violence.
“He is reaching out to all who are exhausted by this unrelenting violence and are hungry for courageous leadership,” she said.
POPE RAMPING UP CRITICISM FOR WEEKS
Leo had previously taken aim at Trump’s hardline immigration policies, questioning whether they were in line with the Church’s pro-life teachings. In those comments, which drew backlash from conservative Catholics, he refrained from naming Trump or any administration official directly.
The pope also carried out a major shake-up of US Catholic leadership in December, removing Cardinal Timothy Dolan as archbishop of New York. Dolan, seen as a leading conservative among the US bishops, was replaced by a relatively unknown cleric from Illinois, Archbishop Ronald Hicks.
Leo has been ramping up his criticism of the Iran war for weeks.
He said on March 13 that Christian political leaders who start wars should go to confession and assess whether they are following the teachings of Jesus. On March 23, Leo said military airstrikes were indiscriminate and should be banned.
Cardinal Michael Czerny, a senior Vatican official, said the pope’s voice would carry weight globally because “everyone can perceive that he speaks… for the common good, for all people and especially the vulnerable.”
“Pope Leo’s moral voice is credible, and the world wants desperately to believe that peace is possible,” said the cardinal.
Leo on Thursday began four days of Vatican events leading up to Easter Sunday when he will deliver a special blessing and message from the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica.
One of the most closely watched appointments on the Vatican’s calendar, the Easter speech is usually a time when the pope makes a major international appeal.