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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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Iran Set to Enforce Death Penalty for Starlink Satellite Internet Use
A batch of 60 Starlink test satellites stacked atop a Falcon 9 rocket, close to being put into orbit. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
Iran has prepared to implement new legislation that would make using Starlink or similar satellite internet equipment a crime which could result in death sentences under certain conditions, deepening the Islamic regime’s campaign to control information and communications while the country’s overall use of executions continues to explode.
The law — called “Intensifying Punishment for Espionage and Cooperation with the Zionist Regime and Hostile Countries Against National Security and Interests” — has been approved by the Guardian Council, which holds veto power over Iran’s parliament, according to the news website IranWire. It was transmitted by Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf to President Masoud Pezeshkian for implementation. The Iranian parliament initially passed the bill in June during the 12-day conflict between Iran and Israel.
The statute explicitly targets “unauthorized electronic satellite internet communication devices such as Starlink.” Under Article 5, those who possess or use Starlink face sixth-degree imprisonment (six months to two years) and equipment confiscation, while production, distribution, installation, or import for sale carries two to five years. If authorities believe the Starlink use was done “with intent to confront the Islamic Republic” or for espionage, and the individual is treated as an “enemy force,” the punishment is execution. Lesser offenders would still face five to ten years of imprisonment.
Article 6 allows courts to increase sentences by up to three degrees if offenses occur during wartime or “security situations,” as determined by Iran’s Supreme National Security Council. Legal observers say the statute’s reliance on abstract ideas like “intent to confront the system” invites obvious abuse.
The move comes as Iran has accelerated the speed of its executions. A new annual assessment by the Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA) reported at least 1,537 hangings between October 2024 and October 2025, the highest total in a decade and an 86 percent increase from the previous year’s 823. HRANA said more than 94 percent of executions were carried out secretly and never acknowledged by official sources. Nearly half (48.34 percent) involved drug charges and 43.46 percent involved murder cases, with other counts including rape, “moharebeh” (waging war against God), espionage, and “corruption on earth.” The report identified Ghezel Hesar Prison in Alborz Province as the leading execution site with 183 reported hangings.
HRANA also tracked organized protests inside the prison system. As of Oct. 7, prisoners across 52 facilities continued hunger strikes under the “Tuesdays No to Execution” campaign, now in its 89th consecutive week, and urged the United Nations and foreign governments to take “urgent and coordinated action” to halt the surge and press for legal reforms.
The data align with trends The Algemeiner reported last month. Rights monitors documented a sharp acceleration in 2025, with at least 152 executions in August alone, a 70 percent jump over August 2024, and an overall trajectory that suggested Iran would surpass its 2024 total of 930 by year’s end. Those figures, drawn from organizations such as Hengaw and HRANA, highlight the regime’s frequent use of vague national-security charges (including “corruption on earth”) and recurring allegations of forced confessions aired on state television.
The Starlink measure dovetails with Tehran’s broader effort to tighten control over information flows after years of mass protests — many coordinated online — and amid repeated attempts by authorities to throttle or block major platforms. By criminalizing the devices themselves and tying their use to espionage or “confronting the system,” the law gives prosecutors a new tool to treat independent connectivity as a national-security offense. In practice, rights advocates warn, amorphous intent standards and security designations from the Supreme National Security Council could be used to transform ordinary digital activity into a capital case.
While Tehran hardens penalties at home, Washington announced fresh measures aimed at Iran-aligned militias and their financial networks. On Tuesday, the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) designated entities and individuals accused of enabling the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps–Qods Force (IRGC-QF) and Iraqi militia proxies — including Kata’ib Hizballah — to launder funds, smuggle weapons, and siphon Iraqi state resources through front companies and bank access. The action, taken under Executive Order 13224, targets, among others, the Muhandis General Company (described by Treasury as a conglomerate tied to Kata’ib Hizballah) and executives allegedly exploiting Iraq’s commercial banking sector to benefit IRGC-QF and aligned groups.
The US has designated both the IRGC and Kata’ib Hizballah as terrorist organizations.
Treasury said the network backs operations that have endangered US personnel and undermined regional stability. It framed the designations as part of a broader effort to choke off revenue and logistics to Iranian proxies. The step follows earlier OFAC actions over the summer against Iranian oil smuggling operations that allegedly misrepresented Iranian crude as Iraqi, and comes amid periodic militia attacks on US and partner interests across the Middle East.
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‘Conversion therapy is having a moment’ — what will that mean for LGBTQ+ Jews?
The Supreme Court dove into the culture wars again this week by hearing arguments on conversion therapy — a controversial pseudoscientific practice that attempts to change LGBTQ+ patients’ sexuality to align with heterosexual desires. In Chiles v. Salazar, Kasey Chiles, an evangelical therapist in Colorado, is alleging that Colorado’s conversion therapy ban violates her 1st Amendment rights, leaving her unable to work with patients who want to live a life “consistent with their faith.”
Conversion therapy is not solely an evangelical Christian problem. In 2012, a group of plaintiffs in New Jersey successfully sued a group called Jews Offering New Alternatives to Homosexuality, alleging that it had committed consumer fraud by selling services that it claimed could turn someone heterosexual. The organization, known as JONAH, promised religious Jews that they could change their sexual orientation via methods that included being forced to strip naked and beat pillows that represented their mothers.
When JONAH was forced to disband after losing in court in 2015, it reformed just 11 days later as a new organization called the Jewish Institute for Global Awareness. In 2019, a judge found this was a violation of the original court order and shut down JIGA as well. Yet conversion therapy in the Orthodox world persists to this day. One new organization, Jewish Family Forever, led by Dr. Koby Frances, claims that “modern ideologies are leading people away from their values,” and its website prominently states that they are “encouraging Torah traditional heterosexual marriage.”
Chaim Levin, one of the plaintiffs who sued JONAH, is now a first-year law student at Drexel University and has been a vocal advocate for LGBTQ+ Jews.
I spoke with Levin, who was raised in a Chabad household in Brooklyn, over the phone about Chiles v. Salazar, and how the Orthodox community currently navigates homosexuality. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Can you share what your conversion therapy experiences with JONAH were like?
I had been seeing a frum therapist in Flatbush since I was 15 for several reasons, including being gay. She actually was helpful for some of those other issues. But when I was older, and finally “acting out” on my attraction to men, she said she couldn’t help me anymore.
Two weeks before I turned 18, I talked to the director of JONAH after being referred to them by a rabbi. I then went on my first weekend retreat with them shortly after my 18th birthday, and was with JONAH for about a year and a half to two years.
There was bullying, there was nudity. There was staged humiliation, where they would have us recreate traumatic experiences. There was what they called “healthy touch,” which was where typically older men cuddled with younger men as a form of “father-son bonding” — in hindsight, a very sexualized experience.
The incident that ultimately caused me to leave and to sue JONAH was when my life coach forced me to get naked and fondle myself in front of him, after I repeatedly said I did not want to.
What was your first reaction when you heard SCOTUS was taking up a case on conversion therapy?
I’m a legal nerd and a law student, so I knew it was coming. I knew that federal courts disagreed on this issue. Conversion therapy is having a moment now. It’s a resurgence driven by panic and hysteria over trans people. I’m feeling incredibly frustrated, to be honest.
Why is that?
It’s unclear how conversion therapy bans are enforced. I actually don’t know of a single example of a ban being enforced. They’re a symbolic gesture, and many advocacy groups pushed for them and spent millions of dollars to get them passed. All it did was to drive conversion therapy underground.
No person offering conversion therapy is going to call it that. They’ll offer treatment for “sex addiction,” “men’s issues,” or “intimacy issues.” All the conversion therapy bans are also solely targeting licensed medical professionals. There are specific carveouts for religious counseling and life coaches, so this practice is unfortunately still thriving.
In Chiles v. Salazar, the prosecutors are presenting conversion therapy as a free speech issue. They argue that there is a difference between the speech of a medical professional versus their conduct. In their view, simply discussing or supporting a hypothetical patient’s desire to become straight is not harmful. How do you see this argument?
It’s a really good question: is it speech, or is it conduct?
In my case, the life coach told me to take my clothes off and touch myself as part of my conversion therapy. He wasn’t doing anything himself, but he was inducing me to engage in that conduct. I found out that another star witness for JONAH had the same life coach as I did, and he ordered him and another man to masturbate each other to the point of orgasm. Is that solely speech?
As a future lawyer, I almost have a little bit of sympathy for the prosecutor’s arguments. Yet I don’t believe any of these people are genuinely concerned for the well-being of queer people. They’re pushing an agenda.
How do you think the Orthodox Jewish community has evolved (or not) on homosexuality and conversion therapy in the last decade since your lawsuit?
I want to be sensitive. But I don’t believe that it’s a safe place for gay or queer people. I certainly am not going to tell people to leave the community. I don’t think that’s the answer.
But a community can only be as safe as it wants to be. There are still tons of therapists and life coaches in the Orthodox community offering conversion therapy. Their rabbis don’t want to deal with the problem of queer people.
I think JQY and Eshel are amazing and doing important work. But those organizations are not what I would classify as being in the mainstream. It’s not for lack of trying — they have turned into some of the only safe spaces for LGBT Jews given the climate we’re living in.
Do you buy the free speech, or free practice of religion, arguments when it comes to the conversion therapy you see still happening in the Orthodox world?
I don’t think free speech means you are absolved from consequences. I think people can be held accountable.
The thing I’ve encountered a lot with these conversion therapy providers is that they don’t claim they’re using religion in their counseling. I’ve always heard: “We’re a Jewish group, we’re religious people, but our therapy is not religious.” If you’re going to tell me “our therapy is prayer,” that’s one thing, but I’ve never seen conversion therapy in the form of prayer.
I just don’t buy it. You can’t use your religion to harm people in a way that doesn’t comport with reality. You don’t have a religious or constitutional right to hurt people.
The post ‘Conversion therapy is having a moment’ — what will that mean for LGBTQ+ Jews? appeared first on The Forward.
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‘Jewish donors play into all the stereotypes,’ Charlie Kirk wrote in leaked text messages before his murder
In the days before his murder, Charlie Kirk was frustrated — and he wasn’t hiding it from his friends. The conservative influencer complained in a WhatsApp group that his “Jewish donors” were “playing into all the stereotypes” and said they were pushing him to “leave the pro-Israel cause.”
Those messages surfaced and were confirmed as authentic this week, giving new insight into what was on Kirk’s mind before his death.
“I cannot and will not be bullied like this,” Kirk wrote in the group WhatsApp conversation, which included Jewish associates.
The messages, along with the recently revealed full text of a letter Kirk had sent to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu several months before his death, provide additional evidence that Kirk’s frustrations with the behavior of Israel and its supporters were boiling over.
Kirk’s views on Israel and Jews have become one of the most scrutinized aspects of the millennial pundit’s legacy in the wake of his assassination on a Utah college campus. They also reveal the deepening trenches on the right over Israel, as young conservatives are showing signs of turning against its conduct of the Gaza war and some have percolated conspiracy theories alleging that Israel played a role in Kirk’s murder.
Pro-Israel backers of Kirk, including Netanyahu, rushed after his death to label the pundit as an unwavering friend and supporter of Israel — even as Kirk, during his life, was on record as supporting aspects of the Great Replacement theory and making other comments disparaging Jews. Netanyahu also posted his own video just prior to Kirk’s funeral refuting the idea that Israel was involved in the influencer’s murder.
Meanwhile, Tucker Carlson, a friend and associate of Kirk’s who has leaned more heavily into anti-Israel and conspiratorial rhetoric in recent years, alluded to Kirk’s assassins “eating hummus” during a eulogy at the pundit’s funeral that was also attended by President Donald Trump.
Carlson and fellow conspiratorial right-wing personality Candace Owens, also a longtime friend of Kirk’s, are at the center of the leaked texts as well. In them, Kirk discussed what he implied was Jewish blowback to his associations with both of them, including plans to invite Carlson to an event staged by his group Turning Point USA.
“Just lost another huge Jewish donor. $2 million a year because we won’t cancel Tucker,” Kirk wrote, adding, “I’m thinking of inviting Candace.” Another member of the thread, whose identity has not been revealed, responded, “Ugghhh”; later someone adds “Please don’t invite Candace.”
The text messages don’t name any donors, but the New York Times reported earlier this month that Robert Shillman, a tech mogul and supporter of pro-Israel causes, grew angry at Kirk and canceled a $2 million donation to TPUSA over Carlson’s participation at a TPUSA event.
The texts were first revealed this week by Owens, on her YouTube show. Their authenticity was later confirmed by Andrew Kolvet, a spokesperson for TPUSA, in his appearance on Kirk’s own eponymous show Wednesday.
At least one pro-Israel Jewish associate of Kirk’s, Newsweek opinion editor Josh Hammer, has confirmed he was on the text thread.
Owens, who claimed the texts were sent “48 hours” before Kirk’s murder and that their recipients included “a rabbi,” sought to paint the texts as evidence that Kirk had recently made powerful enemies in the pro-Israel sphere. On X, she has insinuated that Hammer may have had foreknowledge of Kirk’s murder.
Kolvet was more sanguine about what they revealed.
“I actually am really excited that the truth is out there,” Kolvet said on the show, adding that Kirk’s texts were “consistent with public frustrations he voiced many times” about the pro-Israel movement.
“What is the truth about the way Charlie felt about Israel? Well, it’s complicated and it’s nuanced, and it was a wrestle that was going on for months,” Kolvet said. Later, he added, “Charlie was wonderfully defiant. He was wonderfully independent, and he believed in the freedom of speech, and he felt like he deserved, as a friend of Israel over many years, the right to speak out and have criticisms.”
Kolvet noted that Kirk tended to strike “a more moderate tone in public” on the subject of Israel than the way he came across in the texts, while also sharing past interviews in which Kirk had expressed frustration that some pro-Israel circles were portraying him as an antisemite. Prior to his death, Kirk had sent a letter to Netanyahu warning him that Israel was “losing support even in conservative circles.”
Hammer, addressing the texts, wrote on the social network X on Thursday that Kirk “was blowing off steam in a private group chat setting.” He spoke with Kirk about Israel hours later, he said, adding, “Charlie sought out our advice for how to better communicate the Israel issue on campus so as to be most effective with a younger Gen Z audience.”
“Donors have every right to withhold donations, and organization CEOs/chairmen have every right to then be upset when donors withhold those donations,” Hammer wrote by way of explaining the emotions behind the texts. He added, “the notion that Charlie Kirk was ‘turning’ on his career-long friendships with the Jewish people and the Jewish state of Israel—as opposed to (sarcastically!) blowing off steam in a private group chat setting—is an egregious lie and is belied by the facts.”
On Kirk’s show, Kolvet discussed Israel with Blake Neff — a former writer on Carlson’s Fox News show who resigned from the network in 2020 after it was revealed he had written numerous anonymous racist posts.
Neff on Wednesday continued the Israel discussion by holding up a copy of “Righteous Victims,” a 1999 book about the Arab-Israeli conflict by prominent Israeli historian Benny Morris whose scholarship on the origins of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict casts significant blame on Israel. Neff said that he had finished reading it just before Kirk’s shooting in Utah.
“I read this book because Charlie said, ‘Blake, get really well versed on this so you can help me whenever it comes up,’” Neff recalled.
No evidence has been shared linking the only suspect to be charged with Kirk’s murder to Israel. Yet Kolvet, adding fuel to the conspiratorial fire, stated that he had turned over the texts about “Jewish donors” to the FBI in the wake of the shooting.
“We wanted to leave nothing unturned,” he said, later suggesting that speculation on Kirk’s relationship with his Jewish donors could wind up “tainting a jury pool.”
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