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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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A Yiddish lecture in Munich by literature scholar Nathan Cohen
דעם 17טן יוני וועט נתן כּהן, אַן אָנגעזעענער פֿאָרשער פֿון דער ייִדישער ליטעראַטור בײַם בר־אילן אוניווערסיטעט, האַלטן אַ רעפֿעראַט אויף ייִדיש בײַם אוניווערסיטעט אויפֿן נאָמען פֿון לודוויג מאַקסימיליאַן אין מינכן, דײַטשלאַנד.
כּהן וועט רעדן וועגן דער געשיכטע פֿון דער מאָדערנער ייִדישער ליטעראַטור און די וועגן און אָפּוועגן פֿון איר אַנטוויקלונג אויף די זײַטן פֿון דער ייִדישער פּרעסע, ווי אויך וועגן דעם פֿענאָמען פֿון דער שונד־ליטעראַטור.
די „שלום־עליכם לעקציע“, ווי מע רופֿט אָט די אונטערנעמונג, איז אַ יערלעכער רעפֿערעט אויף ייִדיש אין אָנדענק פֿון עוויטאַ וויעצקי, ז״ל, וואָס האָט די ערשטע געהאַט דעם שיינעם אײַנפֿאַל מיט 15 יאָר צוריק. „זי האָט אַרויסגעפֿירט ייִדיש פֿון די קליינע דײַטשישע אוניווערסיטעט־קלאַסן און פֿאַרבעטן אַ ברייטן עולם צו הערן אַ ייִדיש וואָרט – און דווקא אין אַקאַדעמישן פֿאָרמאַט,“ האָט דערקלערט דאַשע וואַכרושאָווע, אַ ייִדיש־פֿאָרשערין בײַם אוניווערסיטעט.
יעדעס יאָר האַלט אַ היסטאָריקער, שפּראַך־וויסנשאַפֿטלער, ליטעראַטור־פֿאָרשער אָדער שרײַבער אַ רעפֿעראַט פֿאַרן ברייטן מינכנער עולם אין גאַנצן אויף ייִדיש. „אין עולם זיצן אי ייִדיש־קענער אי אַזעלכע וואָס ווייסן גאָר ווייניק וועגן דער שפּראַך, אָבער האָבן דעם מוט זיך אײַנצוהערן און זיך לאָזן טראָגן פֿונעם ייִדישן וואָרט, וויסנדיק אַז זיי ריזיקירן ניט צו פֿאַרשטיין דעם מיין אָדער צו פֿאַרשטיין אים פֿאַלש,“ האָט וואַכרושאָווע געזאָגט.
פֿאַראינטערעסירטע קענען בײַזײַן די לעקציע אָדער אויפֿן אָרט אין מינכן, אָדער דורך דער אינטערנעץ. כּדי זיך צו פֿאַרשרײַבן, גיט אַ קוועטש דאָ.
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Hundreds of Jewish leaders call on Israeli ambassador to apologize for attack on J Street
(JTA) — More than 500 rabbis, cantors and Jewish communal leaders have signed onto a letter calling on Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Yechiel Leiter, to rescind and apologize for remarks describing J Street as a “cancer within the Jewish community.”
The letter, which J Street shared with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Thursday, accused Leiter, a Netanyahu appointee and former settler leader, of using language that “dehumanizes fellow Jews” during his remarks in Washington, D.C., on Monday.
J Street is the leading liberal pro-Israel lobby, and has increasingly staked out positions that have departed from other mainstream pro-Israel groups. Last month, the group announced its opposition to continued U.S. military aid to Israel, which Leiter decried in his remarks.
The signatories wrote that while Judaism embraces vigorous debate, disagreements must be conducted with “humanity, humility and respect for the dignity of every Jew.”
“At this painful and polarized moment in Jewish life, leaders on both sides of the ocean bear a heightened responsibility to lower the flames rather than fan them further,” the letter read. “We therefore call on you to retract your remarks and issue a public apology to the many American Jews, rabbis, cantors and communal leaders who have been hurt by them.”
Among the signatories were New York Rep. Jerrold Nadler, former U.S. ambassadors to Israel Daniel Kurtzer and Tom Nides, National Council of Jewish Women CEO Jody Rabhan, Union for Reform Judaism President Rabbi Rick Jacobs and Rabbi David Saperstein, the director emeritus of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism.
J Street President Jeremy Ben-Ami told JTA that his initial reaction to Leiter’s comments was “simply dismay on behalf of Israel and on behalf of the Jewish community.”
“It’s a shame, because Israel, right now, needs all the friends it can get, and it really needs diplomats who seek to open doors and not slam them in people’s faces,” Ben-Ami said.
The Israeli Embassy did not immediately respond to a request for comment from JTA.
The comments from Leiter follow a long history of criticism of the lobby from pro-Israel officials. In 2017, former U.S. ambassador to Israel David Friedman called the group “worse than kapos,” a reference to Jews who aided the Nazis during WWII.
While Ben-Ami said that the latest attack was “not new,” he felt spurred to craft a communal rebuke of Leiter’s rhetoric because he felt it was “breaking” not just the US-Israel relationship, but the relationship between the “American Jewish community and the Israeli Jewish community.”
“Within 24 hours we had hundreds and hundreds of people, and I think it just shows what a raw nerve Ambassador Leiter has touched here, and just what a big mistake it is for the Israeli government to write off the majority of Jewish Americans who are deeply critical of the government but supportive of the state and the people,” Ben-Ami said of the number of signatories.
While Ben-Ami said that J Street had long been invited to meet with former Israeli ambassadors, he claimed that since Leiter arrived, the group had been “blacklisted by the Embassy, and there’s been no engagement whatsoever.”
The letter comes as J Street has also faced scrutiny from across the political aisle, with the Zionist Organization of America calling for Hillels, Jewish Community Relations Councils and federations to cease relations with the group, while the student government of Sarah Lawrence College rejected an application to form a chapter of the group on its campus.
“There’s going to be people to our left who are intolerant and you know engage in similar tactics to folks on the right who are intolerant and try to shut out those they disagree with, and that is just as disturbing,” Ben-Ami said.
Looking ahead, Ben-Ami said that he hoped the letter would serve as a reminder that Jewish leaders need to make room for ideological differences rather than treat dissent as disloyalty.
“The message more broadly here is, we need to embrace the diversity of opinion,” Ben-Ami said. “We need to embrace our disagreements and recognize that that is indeed part of Jewish tradition.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Hundreds of Jewish leaders call on Israeli ambassador to apologize for attack on J Street appeared first on The Forward.
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Despite what (Ashkenazi) tradition says, not everyone eats dairy on Shavuot
This week, synagogues and community centers around the country will abound with opportunities for a festive scoop of ice cream. To heck with the lactose intolerant among us; it’s Shavuot, a festival that for many is as synonymous with all things dairy as Passover is with all things matzot. In my childhood Ashkenazi home, Shavuot meant my bubbe’s cheese blintzes freshly pan fried and golden brown on the kitchen table, ready for me to drench in syrup. Each year, the holiday, with its invitation to indulge in specially prepared creamy desserts, won me back to my Jewish culinary birthright after I spent Passover explaining my unleavened lunches to narrow-minded classmates. This year, however, I’ve been the one getting the education.
“Not all Jewish communities explicitly connect Shavuot with dairy foods,” Leah Koenig, whose cookbooks include the encyclopedic The Jewish Cookbook and the forthcoming The Dessert Table: 100 Joyful Jewish Sweets, told me. “It is a reminder that Jewish cuisine is anything but a monolith.”
Indeed, at Shavuot tables across the diaspora, you’ll find a parade of sweet, milky delicacies, and sometimes none at all, revealing a diversity ripe for this season when we recite the story of Ruth.
Born in Europe, Shavuot foods grew up around the world
Torah scholars and rabbis tend to agree that eating dairy on Shavuot first emerged as a tradition (minhag) during the High Middle Ages, at first among Ashkenazi Jews in France and Germany. Agreement ends there. A 2009 study offered nearly 150 reasons for the tradition. Lesser known theories posit that dairy pays homage to our nomadic ancestors. Teachings that endure today evoke the Torah and Israel’s symbolic associations with milk and honey.
Since its first appearance in Western Europe, dairy at Shavuot tables has gone global. “Sephardim, Ashkenazim, Mizrahim celebrate Shavuot eating dairy foods,” said Hélène Jawhara Piñer, author of Food, Jews, and Spain, which studies medieval Spanish Jews through their cuisine. During the Middle Ages, she noted, a culinary dialogue ran between Ashkenazi and Sephardic communities. “Rabbis, merchants, physicians, refugees and manuscripts circulated between Iberia, Provence, Italy, North Africa, France, and the German lands,” she said. In her latest cookbook, Matzah and Flour, she offers a Shavuot recipe for a sweet version of barkoukch, a Moroccan milk-and-semolina soup she calls one of the oldest Sephardi Shavuot foods still eaten today. It shares a heritage with other Sephardi and Mizrahi desserts like arroz con leche, a cinnamon-scented rice pudding, and its rose-flavored cousin, shir berenj.
For the modern-day Bene Israel, a small community of Indian Jews whose roots in the coastal region south of Mumbai date back to 175 BCE, it took 1,500 years and the arrival of Sephardic Jews before they associated eating dairy treats with Shavuot, according to Zilka Joseph, an Ann Arbor-based poet and editor who explores her Bene Israel heritage through her writing. Isolated from the diaspora, the Bene Israel sustained a handful of rituals (Shabbat, reciting the Shema). When Sephardic families arrived in present-day Kerala after their expulsion from Spain, these practices helped them identify the Bene Israel as Jewish. They went on to introduce the Bene Israel to a host of other traditions, which could have included dairy on Shavuot, Joseph told me.
Today, most of the Bene Israel live in Israel, but even the roughly 5,000 who remain in India celebrate Shavuot with dairy specialties, according to Nissim Pingle, program director at the Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) in India. These include custards and mousses — like basundi, a creamy slowly simmered milk dessert bursting with cardamom seasoning and chopped nuts, and shrikhand, a tangy strained yogurt often infused with fresh fruit like in-season mango — that are also common at birthdays and other special family occasions.
“When people ask about Bene Israel food, and they say, ‘So, is it really Maharashtrian food?’” said Joseph, referring to the Indian state where the Bene Israel’s ancestral home is located today. “It is,” she said, “but we adapted it to our kosher laws.”
The Bene Israel are not alone. Jews around the world ate the foods influenced by the places they settled and adapted them to dietary law.
“Food culture was shaped at least as much by geography, commerce and shared local taste as by rabbinic prescription,” said Jawhara Piñer.
“The cheesecake Ashkenazi Jews eat on Shavuot is a descendant of the curd cheese-based cakes that Jews and their neighbors ate in Germany,” Koenig told me.
Trading dairy for ancient harvest customs in the Horn of Africa
For communities from the Horn of Africa, near historical Judea, it’s no wonder that their Shavuot menu — which does not always contain dairy — hews closer to the foodways of our biblical ancestors, for whom the holiday was in part an agricultural festival.
To escape persecution in Ethiopia in the early 1980s, Beejhy Barhany, Ethiopian-born founder and executive chef of the Harlem cultural hub and event-space Tsion Café, immigrated to a kibbutz in Israel, where she immersed herself in the tradition of bikkurim, or festival of the first fruits.
“It was lovely to learn about other traditions and customs,” Barhany said, “but we always have to make sure that we know our traditions and teach others that there are different forms to celebrate the holidays.”
Since Ethiopian first fruits often meant wheat, barley or millet, Barhany told me that Ethiopian Jews like her (also known as Beta Israel) would make baked bread for Shavuot, such as a barley, honey-infused version of the celebratory dabo. But in Ethiopia barley wouldn’t stop there: brewing beer can help celebrate the harvest, as can roasting and consuming coffee, a ceremony called buna, an appropriate conclusion for Ethiopian spiritual occasions. (On Shavuot, coffee might be extra important, given its suspected role in popularizing the holiday’s tradition of all-night Torah study.)
Likewise, Yemenite Jews take pride in never having lost touch with their ancient traditions. They still recite prayers in Hebrew and Aramaic, as instructed by the Mishnah. Since the Mishnah doesn’t dictate eating milky foods for Shavuot, they stick to savory, classical regional holiday fare. This can include traditional Shabbat breads (thin jachnun, flaky malawach, and yeasty, pull-apart kubaneh), according to Dr. Ephraim Isaac, a Harvard scholar and former president of the Yemenite Jewish Federation of America. The Brooklyn-based Association of Jewish Yemenites told me that Shavuot celebrations would include zalabyeh, a fried pita.
Eating diversely while embracing the meaning of Ruth
No matter which foods they’re eating for Shavuot this year, everyone I spoke to said they would be reading the Book of Ruth, the story traditionally recited for the holiday. Ruth is from the Moab people, considered bitter enemies of the Israelites. Nevertheless, she stays loyal to her Israelite mother-in-law Naomi after her husband’s death. She follows Naomi to Bethlehem and gleans the fields at harvest to feed them. Rabbis note this as an instructive story to tell on Shavuot as a complement to our focus on receiving the Torah at Mount Sinai. Ruth, who wasn’t born a Jew, helps Naomi out of pure lovingkindness (hesed), not legal obligation, and Boaz marries and has a child with her that starts the lineage of Kings David and Solomon. Lovingkindness, not law alone, is what made us a people; and why we should keep widening our table. So, this Shavuot, go ahead and eat a blintz, barkoukch, loaf of dabo or cool, creamy basundi. Or grab a beer. It’s all in the family.
Nay Kedam Dabo / Meswait, or Pot-Baked Shabbat Bread*
*Holiday Festival Variant
From Gursha: Timeless Recipes for Modern Kitchens, from Ethiopia, Israel, Harlem, and Beyond by Beejhy Barhany
Makes 1 large loaf (serves 10 to 12)
INGREDIENTS
2 pounds (907 grams) spelt flour*
*For the holiday, Barhany encourages substituting some barley flour in place of spelt (around 450 grams barley flour, with 457 grams spelt)
2 tablespoons granulated sugar or brown sugar*
*For the holiday, Barhany encourages substituting honey
2¼ teaspoons (1 envelope) instant yeast
1 teaspoon fine sea salt
½ teaspoon ground fenugreek
½ teaspoon ground coriander
½ teaspoon ground cardamom
2½ cups (600 grams) warm water, plus more if necessary
1 tablespoon vegetable oil, plus more for drizzling
INSTRUCTIONS
In a large bowl, mix the flour, sugar, yeast, salt, fenugreek, coriander, and cardamom. Add the warm water, ½ cup at a time, working the water into the flour until a dough forms. Knead the oil into the dough until it is wet and elastic. If it seems too dry, add more water, a tablespoon at a time.
Cover with a damp towel and place in a warm place until doubled in size and light and bubbly on top, 1 to 2 hours.
Line a medium cast-iron pot or Dutch oven with two layers of parchment paper and drizzle the paper with oil. Transfer the dough to the pot and use wet hands to spread it into an even layer and smooth out the surface. Cover with the lid and let rise for about 15 minutes. With the pot still covered, set it over low heat and cook for 25 minutes.
Use the top layer of parchment paper to lift the bread out of the pot. Place on a plate. Drizzle the uncooked top with oil, then return the bread oiled-side down to the pot on top of the second layer of parchment paper, and drizzle the other (cooked) side with oil.
Cook until the bread is golden brown and puffed and the center reaches about 190°F on an instant-read thermometer, about 25 minutes.
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