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In an unusual alliance, Jewish media and striking journalists are uniting to cover the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting trial
PITTSBURGH (JTA) — How many times should an alleged synagogue shooter’s name be mentioned in a news story about his trial, now beginning after more than four years?
For the Pittsburgh Union Press last month, the answer was seven. For the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle, it was an uneasy five, in a departure from its usual answer of zero — a number chosen out of deference to a community devastated by the shooting.
The slight difference was the only discrepancy between one set of stories published by the two news organizations covering the trial of Robert Bowers, accused of murdering 11 Jews in their synagogue here in 2018.
The anomaly offers a window into an unusual partnership between the two publications — the city’s Jewish paper and the news site established by striking staffers for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette — born in February when it became clear that the trial would last months.
Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle editor Toby Tabachnick was dreading the trial coverage, with a staff of just three on the editorial side: herself and two reporters, David Rullo and Adam Reinherz.
“I started getting really nervous. Like, how are we going to do this?” Tabachnick said on the eve of the trial, speaking at the federal courthouse where jury selection would soon begin. “Our regular reporters could have been here. But it would have been extremely taxing, difficult and emotional for us, because we’re so ingrained in the community too.”
Plus, she added, “In addition to this trial, which is going to be every day for three months, we’re covering the synagogues, events and the holidays, the lectures, we still have a regular community newspaper to put out.”
Tabachnick knew Andrew “Goldy” Goldstein, one of the Post-Gazette’s team that picked up a Pulitzer for their coverage of the massacre, from his time as a Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle intern. She also knew he was on strike and wondered whether he could use the extra freelance opportunity.
Instead, Goldstein immediately offered up a better idea: Join with the Pittsburgh Union Progress, the strike paper, in a joint reporting project, organized in part through the Pittsburgh Media Partnership, an incubator for local journalism. (The Jewish Telegraphic Agency is raising funds for the coverage.)
Working together just made sense, Goldstein said. The Chronicle was deeply resourced and credible in the Jewish community, and the Progress had on board Torsten Ove, a local legend.
From left to right, Bob Batz of the Pittsburgh Union Progress, Toby Tabachnick of the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle and Andrew Goldstein of the Progress pose in the Joseph Weis Jr. Courthouse in Pittsburgh, April 21, 2023. (Ron Kampeas)
“We have the all-star federal courts reporter in Torsten and we have a lot of really great journalists who love Pittsburgh, love this community, and we’ll do our best to cover it,” Goldstein said, noting that the Chronicle would also have access to the Progress’s photographers. “But the Chronicle brings something different entirely to the table, which is, they’re so deeply sourced in the Pittsburgh Jewish community, and they have such an interest in this trial in particular.”
Newsroom collaborations have become more frequent in recent years as publications realize they can expand their impact and audience by working together. But while there are a growing number of relationships between local and national publications and between daily and investigative outlets, ties between mainstream newsrooms and community or ethnic media are less common.
S. Mitra Kalita, the founder and director of URL Media, a network of Black and Brown community news outlets that share content and revenue, said the value in such partnerships was not just in delivering relief as media staffs shrink, but also in sensitizing mainstream media to minority sensibilities.
“Talking about who [the ethnic media outlet is] serving and why we’re doing it this way — the spirit of real collaboration is a bit of that give and take,” she said. “We make mainstream media way better because it starts to infuse mainstream media with aspects of community and thus redefine the mainstream.”
The residual trauma of the massacre in the Pittsburgh collaboration made it all the more important for the mainstream reporters to be sensitive to the nuances that the Jewish media was bringing, she said.
“Especially a story like this one, which was such an attack on a community — a community that was singled out for their sheer existence, the strategy cannot be ‘let’s just work in parallel,” Kalita said. “It’s not going to work. It has to be kind of a cross-pollination and a real collaboration.”
That’s exactly what is happening, according to the reporters and editors involved in the project, with communication easy between each publication’s editor and expertise flowing in both directions.
Ove a denizen of the Joseph F. Weis Jr. Courthouse for so long that he can tell stories about a sizable stretch of the portraits of judges that line its corridor walls; he may be the only court reporter to seek an interview with a judge after his death, to ask him why he was haunting the place. (The judge never showed, but his widow was less than surprised to hear that he was still working.)
He led a passel of Chronicle and Progress staffers through the warren-like courthouse on the Friday before the trial, handily impressing them with his intimacy with the building — he knew the provenance of the paintings in each courtroom — and its staff. Soo Song, the assistant U.S. attorney who is leading the prosecution team, smiled and nodded as she passed.
Torsten Ove, left, of the Pittsburgh Union Progress and Adam Reinherz of the PIttsburgh Jewish Chronicle confer on the first day of jury selection for the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre trial, April 24, 2023. (Toby Tabachnick)
Ove showed the reporters how to access court records for free, and while they stood around him at one of the computer terminals, the teams’ different emphases emerged: Ove predicted that jury selection, which started last week and is expected to last as long as three weeks, would not be a news generator, because in his experience, it rarely has been.
Reinherz and Tabachnick, attuned to reporting on faith communities, were not so sure: Reinherz wondered whether believing Catholics, who reject the death penalty, would be eliminated, and Tabachnick wondered whether defense attorneys would seek to keep Jews off the jury — and how they would go about doing that.
Reinherz ended up covering the first day of jury selection. “Local and national reporters decided the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle should have one seat during the initial session of day one,” Reinherz explained in a story that appeared on both news sites. He noted that the first member of the public to enter the courtroom was Daniel Leger, one of two survivors of the attack.
Working together across platforms was odd, said Bob Batz Jr., the Progress’s interim editor, but he could get used to it.
“This is uncharted territory for someone like me, and I’ve been doing this for a long time, and we don’t, you know, we don’t collaborate,” he said.
“We compete!” Tabachnick interjected.
“What we’re doing is not common, and it’s not going to be easy,” Batz said. “Surely, we’re going to tick each other off about something or somebody is going to put the wrong word in or there’s a million things that can go wrong, but the breaking of ground where you’re actually working together, it just makes sense in so many ways on this story. We’re really trying to serve the community.”
Tabachnick said she saw added value in keeping journalists she admired in the limelight while they are on strike. Journalists at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette went on strike back in October over wages and working conditions, in a crescendo of mounting tensions between the paper’s longtime owners and the staff that contributed to a newsroom exodus even in 2018, when the paper won a Pulitzer for its synagogue shooting coverage. The strike is now one of the longest in journalism history, and the staffers contributing to the Pittsburgh Union Progress are doing so despite earning well below than their regular salaries.
“I feel good about getting their names, their publication’s name out,” Tabachnick said.
Each story is running in essentially identical form on both publications’ websites, with a line crediting their collaboration. Tabachnick and Batz had a brief and friendly email exchange before each clicked “publish” on their story about debate among victims’ families about the appropriateness of the death penalty.
The Chronicle is minimizing appearances of the name of the accused killer, out of sensitivity to readers who may want to see their community members centered rather than their aggressor. Some researchers and law enforcement officials have also called on journalists not to print mass shooters’ names and photographs, citing evidence that doing so may contribute to their glorification and even copycat crimes.
Batz says he totally gets the Chronicle’s thinking, despite making a different choice in his newsroom.
“We’re still feeling our way, we’re still figuring this out,” Batz said. “They don’t name the defendant in their story, and they haven’t. And our guy Torsten who’s an all-star courts reporter, he’s going to use the guy’s name. And then in real time going back and forth on email and text we came up with his solution and that story was on both websites in minutes and it was really kind of cool.”
Tabachnick picked up the account of the previous night’s collaboration as if she’d been working across a desk from Batz for decades instead of online since February.
“The solution was that I realized that with the trial starting, it really didn’t make sense not to use his name at all anymore that we really needed to as a news organization,” she said. “But that didn’t mean we had to overuse his name. And I’m not saying Torsten overused his name. He used it as much as he needed to use it in terms of style, but I took out a few of them and replaced it with ‘the defendant’ and we were all happy.”
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The post In an unusual alliance, Jewish media and striking journalists are uniting to cover the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting trial appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Joe Kent Suggests Israel Behind Charlie Kirk Assassination, Controls US Foreign Policy in Tucker Carlson Interview
National Counterterrorism Center Director Joseph Kent attends a House Homeland Security hearing entitled “Worldwide Threats to the Homeland,” on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, US, Dec. 11, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Elizabeth Frantz
After Joe Kent, director of the US National Counterterrorism Center, resigned in protest of President Donald Trump’s military campaign against Iran, he appeared on Tucker Carlson’s podcast on Wednesday.
While on the podcast, Kent, who resigned from his position on Tuesday, argued that Israel dragged the US into the war against the Iranian regime, suggested that Israel may have been involved in the murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, claimed that Iran posed no imminent threat to the United States, and said that Iran was not pursuing a nuclear weapon.
Themes of Israel controlling US policy and conspiracy theories about Kirk’s assassination have become commonplace on Carlson’s podcast in recent months.
“We don’t know what happened with Charlie Kirk. I’m not saying the Israelis did this — I’m saying there are a lot of unanswered questions there, and there’s enough data to say there’s a good chance that President Trump feels he is under threat,” Kent said.
“The last time I saw Charlie Kirk on this earth was in June, in the West Wing stairway,” Kent said on Carlson’s podcast. “And he said very loudly to me … ‘Joe, stop us from getting into a war with Iran.’ Very loudly. He was single-minded.”
“So, when one of President Trump’s closest advisers who was vocally advocating against a war with Iran is suddenly publicly assassinated, and we’re not allowed to ask questions about that — it’s a data point. A data point that we need to look into,” Kent said, suggesting that Israel may have something to do with the assassination.
There has been no evidence to support claims of Israeli involvement in Kirk’s assassination. Tyler Robinson, 22, has been charged for murdering Kirk and potentially faces the death penalty. He was romantically involved with his transgender roommate, and prosecutors have reportedly argued that Kirk’s anti-trans rhetoric was a key factor that allegedly led him to shoot the Turning Point USA founder.
Kent also argued that the US is not really in charge of its own foreign policy: “Who is in charge of our policy in the Middle East? Who is in charge of when we decide to go to war or not?” he asked.
Ther former counterterrorism chief argued that Israel forced Washington’s hand by saying it would attack Iran and that the US would be forced to be caught up in Iran’s inevitable retaliation.
“The Israelis felt emboldened that no matter what they did, no matter what situation they put us in, they could go ahead and take this action, and we would just have to react. That speaks to the relationship — but also it just shows there was a lobby pushing for us to go to war,” Kent said.
In addition to claiming Israel was driving US foreign policy, he also claimed Iran was not close to achieving, or even pursuing, a nuclear-weapons capability. “No, they weren’t [on the verge of getting a nuclear weapon] — not three weeks ago when this started, and not in June [2025] either,” Kent said, referring to last year’s 12-day war between Iran and Israel
“The Iranians have had a religious ruling — a fatwa — against actually developing a nuclear weapon since 2004. That’s been in place since 2004. That’s available in the public sphere. But we also had no intelligence to indicate that that fatwa was being disobeyed or was on the cusp of being lifted,” Kent added.
Experts on Iran have widely dismissed the Iranian regime’s so-called fatwa against having nuclear weapons, noting Tehran has repeatedly lied about and tried to hide aspects of its nuclear program.
The interview occurred one day after Kent resigned from his senior intelligence position, saying he could not support the war and arguing Tehran posed “no imminent threat” to the United States. But it was Kent’s broader assertion, that pressure from Israel and pro-Israel voices influenced the decision to go to war, that especially drew swift pushback from the White House and national security experts.
In his resignation, Kent also drew parallels to the Iraq War, suggesting that similar dynamics shaped both conflicts by arguing that Israel pushed the US into the war.
“Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby,” Kent wrote in his resignation letter.
The Trump administration forcefully disputed Kent’s claims, maintaining that the decision to strike Iran was based on credible intelligence about threats to US forces and interests in the region. Trump dismissed Kent as “weak on security,” defending the operation as necessary to deter Iranian aggression and protect American personnel and allies.
“When I read the statement, I realized that it’s a good thing that he’s out, because he said that Iran was not a threat,” Trump said. “Iran was a threat.”
Kent himself previously described Iran as a major threat that needed to be addressed.
In a September 2024 post on X, for example, he wrote that “Iran has been after Trump since January of 2020 after he ordered the targeted killing of the terrorist Qasem Soleimani. This isn’t a new threat.”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt lambasted Kent’s resignation letter as inaccurate.
“The absurd allegation that President Trump made this decision based on the influence of others, even foreign countries, is both insulting and laughable. President Trump has been remarkably consistent and has said for DECADES that Iran can NEVER possess a nuclear weapon,” she posted on social media.
Kent previously faced scrutiny during his US congressional runs in Washington state over links to far-right, antisemitic, and white nationalist figures, including Nick Fuentes.
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Brandeis Center Reaches Settlement With UC Berkeley in Antisemitism Lawsuit
Students attend a protest encampment in support of Palestinians at University of California, Berkeley during the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, in Berkeley, US, April 23, 2024. Photo: Carlos Barria via Reuters Connect
The Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law has reached a major agreement to settle a lawsuit it filed against the University of California, Berkeley in 2023 over its allegedly failing to address a series of incidents of campus antisemitism which culminated in anti-Zionist students establishing “Jewish-free zones” where pro-Israel advocates were barred from speaking.
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, the complaint provided several examples of alleged antisemitic harassment and exclusion on campus, including a bylaw banning Zionists speakers that 23 Berkeley Law groups adopted in September 2021, campus groups Women of Berkeley Law and the Queer Caucus requiring support for the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel to join its ranks, and the Berkeley Journal of Gender, Law, and Justice banning Zionists from submitting articles and speaking at its events.
The campus environment worsened after Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, onslaught across southern Israel, in which the Palestinian terrorist group murdered over 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took more than 250 hostages to Gaza, according to the complaint. Indeed, the suit alleged that hate mail and death threats have been sent to Jewish students, that Jewish students have opted not to attend class because walking through campus risked encountering angry pro-Palestinian supporters, and that an anti-Israel demonstrator bashed a Jewish student draped in an Israeli flag over the head with a metal water bottle.
“As a UC Berkeley alumnus, I am glad that we can finally resolve this long battle with a victory for Jewish American students and for all Americans who care about free speech and fairness,” Kenneth Marcus, chairman of the Brandeis Center and former US assistant secretary of education for civil rights, said in a statement on Thursday. “What began as a ban on Zionist Jewish voices, regardless of the subjects they wished to address, and mushroomed into a widespread hostile environment will no longer be tolerated.”
He continued, “What happened at Berkeley is a cautionary tale. Universities, corporations, and political parties cannot create an anti-Zionist exception to their conduct codes. They cannot silence Jewish Americans on the pretext of advancing their own political agendas.”
The details of the settlement are disclosed. They call for Berkeley’s using the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism as a reference tool, stating a “reaffirmation” of antisemitism as a violation of the code of conduct, conducting an annual survey of the Jewish student body, and appointing an official to manage the school’s compliance with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination at universities receiving taxpayer money to fund research and other operations. UC Berkeley will also pay the Brandeis Center $1 million as reimbursement for “outside attorneys’ fees and costs incurred” during litigation of the suit.
UC Berkeley saw some of the most shocking antisemitic incidents in recent memory in the months which followed the Hamas-led Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel, as previously reported by The Algemeiner.
In February 2024, a mob of hundreds of pro-Palestinian students and non-students shut down an event at UC Berkeley featuring an Israeli soldier, forcing Jewish students to flee to a secret safe room as the protesters overwhelmed campus police.
Footage of the incident showed a frenzied mass of anti-Zionist agitators banging on the doors of Zellerbach Hall while an event featuring Israeli reservist Ran Bar-Yoshafat — who visited the university to discuss his military service during Hamas’s Oct. 7 invasion — took place inside. The mob then stormed the building — breaking glass windows in the process, according to reports in the Daily Wire — and precipitated school officials’ decision to evacuate the area.
During the infiltration of Zellerbach, a member of the mob — which was recruited by Bears for Palestine, which had earlier proclaimed its intention to cancel the event — spit on a Jewish student and called him a “Jew,” pejoratively.
“You know what I was screamed at? ‘Jew, you Jew, you Jew,’ literally right to my face,” the student who was attacked said to a friend. “Some woman — then she spit at me.”
In July, the chancellor of UC Berkeley described a professor who cheered Hamas’s Oct. 7 atrocities as a “fine scholar” during a congressional hearing held at Capitol Hill.
Richard Lyons, who assumed the chancellorship in July 2024, issued the unmitigated praise while being questioned by members of the US House Committee on Education and the Workforce, which summoned him and the chief administrators of two other major universities to interrogate their handling of the campus antisemitism crisis.
Lyons stumbled into the statement while being questioned by Rep. Lisa McClain (R-MI), who asked the chancellor to describe the extent of his relationship and correspondence with Professor Ussama Makdisi, who tweeted in February 2024 that he “could have been one of those who broke through the siege on Oct. 7.”
In Thursday’s statement, Marcus implored the Jewish community to be unrelenting in its fight against antisemitism.
“As we have now seen time and time again, if left unaddressed, antisemitic bigotry, whether or not masked as anti-Zionism, only continues to expand. We will fight this bigotry wherever and whenever we find it, and we will win.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Ukraine Leverages Drone Defense Expertise to Aid Gulf, Strengthen Strategic Role Amid Iran War
Fire ignited at the impact site following an Iranian missile strike, amid the US-Israeli conflict with Iran, in central Israel, March 13, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Gideon Markowicz
As the US-Israeli war with Iran reshapes regional security dynamics, Ukraine is leveraging its battlefield-honed drone defense expertise to assist US allies in the Gulf, potentially strengthening its diplomatic standing and shifting the balance of power, experts say.
Earlier this week, a team of around 200 Ukrainian military experts arrived in the Middle East to provide both “expertise” and “practical support” in countering Iranian drones.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy confirmed that specialized units have already been deployed in the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia, with additional personnel en route to Kuwait, as Kyiv strengthens coordination with countries across the region.
Since the start of the war last month, Ukraine has actively offered its technology and personnel to Middle Eastern partners to assist the United States and its allies in countering Iranian drones, positioning itself as a key strategic player amid conflict and shifting diplomatic alliances.
Zelenskyy stressed that he had instructed government officials “to present options for assisting the relevant countries” in a way that safeguards Ukraine’s own critical defense needs amid the ongoing war with Russia and its relentless missile and drone attacks.
“Ukrainian experts will operate on-site, and teams are already coordinating these efforts,” Zelenskyy said in a statement.
Among a delegation of military, intelligence, and defense officials traveling to the Gulf was National Security and Defense Council Secretary Rustem Umerov, as the group worked to finalize what was described as “concrete agreements.”
“Ukraine has the greatest experience in the world in countering attack drones,” Zelensky said. “Without our experience, it will be very difficult for the Gulf region, the entire Middle East, and partners in Europe and America to build strong protection.”
“We are ready to help those who help us,” the Ukrainian leader continued. “The regimes in Russia and Iran are brothers in hatred and that is why they are brothers in weapons. And we want regimes built on hatred, to never, never win in anything. And we want no such regime to threaten Europe or our partners.”
According to John Hardie, deputy director of the Russia Program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington, DC-based think tank, Ukraine has “unmatched experience” in developing and scaling cost-effective systems that can detect and neutralize the one-way attack drones widely used by Iran.
The Iranian regime has been supplying Russia with drones throughout the war in Ukraine, and Moscoe has been reportedly supplying Tehran with intelligence, satellite imagery, and drone technology to target US forces.
“With Russia working to help Iran kill American servicemembers, that’s all the reason for the United States and its Middle East allies to take advantage of Ukraine’s hard-won expertise,” Hardie told The Algemeiner.
“Replicating Ukrainian solutions at scale won’t happen overnight, but Ukrainian deployments to the Middle East could offer a taste of some of the Ukrainian technology, namely interceptor drone systems,” he continued.
Hardie argued that this expertise could help Ukraine “cultivate closer security cooperation” with the United States and its Arab allies, while also opening opportunities for Kyiv to expand its defense industry exports and strengthen its role as a key security partner in the region.
When the United States and Israel launched coordinated airstrikes on Iran on Feb. 28, Tehran struck back quickly, firing missiles and long‑range drones at military and civilian targets in neighboring countries — repeatedly hitting infrastructure and population centers even as it claimed to be focusing solely on US military assets.
In just the first few days of the conflict, Iran launched more than 500 ballistic missiles and over 2,000 unmanned aerial systems (UAS) — remotely operated or autonomous aircraft commonly used for surveillance and strike missions.
Even though the regime’s ballistic missile launches have dropped sharply since then due to US and Israeli strikes on its launchers and broader missile program, its drone attacks are, while also down significantly, proving more difficult to stop with air defenses, threatening key military targets as well as civilian areas.
Some regional countries struggle to defend against Iranian drones because these low-cost systems consistently evade fighter jets and conventional air defenses. They have struck a wide range of targets — from diplomatic and economic sites to residential areas — including Dubai International Airport and Saudi oil facilities.
According to Jason Campbell, senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, a Washington, DC-based think tank, Ukraine has revolutionized counter-drone warfare over the past three years through cost-effective, easily reproducible technologies and adaptive battlefield tactics.
“The Gulf states have invested heavily in high-end and highly capable missile defenses, but the Iran war has demonstrated the need for solutions that can better confront their comparatively inexpensive and easily reproduceable Shahed drones,” Campbell told The Algemeiner, referring to the Iranian-made drones.
After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the Islamist regime in Iran began supplying drones to Moscow, providing a relatively inexpensive way to expand its long-range strike capabilities, which Russia later advanced by producing modified variants domestically and in greater quantities.
Over more than four years of war, Ukraine has dramatically improved its counter-drone strategy, increasingly relying on interceptor drones — low-cost unmanned aerial systems that detect, track, and destroy incoming drones identified by radar — offering a highly effective and economically sustainable alternative to traditional air defenses.
“I would say that this capability has already elevated Ukraine’s (and Ukrainian companies’) status throughout the Gulf,” Campbell told The Algemeiner.
According to multiple media reports, Saudi Arabia is planning a major contract with Ukrainian companies to purchase interceptor drones.
Zelenskyy has also suggested that Ukraine could “exchange” interceptor drones for Patriot air defense missiles, a US-made system designed to detect, track, and intercept incoming ballistic missiles, aircraft, and drones.
“Russia probably is not very excited about the prospect of Ukraine bolstering its air defenses and demonstrating its utility to an array of deep-pocketed clients,” Campbell explained.
“This is a win for US interests and could provide more impetus behind efforts to provide necessary assistance to help Ukraine in its ongoing war with Russia,” he continued. “One thing to watch, however, will be the near-term availability of higher end air defenses which remain in high demand now in multiple theaters.”