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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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New ADL Campus Antisemitism Report Card Shows Some Improvement on Addressing Hostile Climate
Protesters gather at the gates of Columbia University, in support of student protesters who barricaded themselves in Hamilton Hall, in New York City, US, April 30, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/David Dee Delgado
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has released a new annual “Campus Antisemitism Report Card,” in which its researchers assigned grades to major US colleges and universities based on how the institutions responded to the issue in accordance with civil rights laws and their own professed values.
Released on Monday, the report rewarded some elite colleges previously accused of ignoring antisemitism with letter grades considerably above what they earned in past academic years. Most notably, no Ivy League institution merited an “F” this year, while Columbia University, Princeton University, and Yale University all improved on last year’s close to failing “D” grade by earning a “C.”
A “C” grade, a mark again given to Harvard University and Cornell University in this year’s report, indicates lingering areas of inertia in performance. Pomona College, Northwestern University, Swarthmore College, and the University of Chicago were assigned a “C” too, indicating that elite higher education across the country remains a problematic space for Jewish youth.
Meanwhile, four colleges, including Evergreen State College, Scripps College, California State University, Los Angeles, and The New School in New York City received an “F,” the only institutions in the cohort to fail the ADL’s assessment.
“The data confirms what we’ve said from the start: maintaining a safe campus climate is a matter of will,” ADL chief executive officer Jonathan Greenblatt said in a statement. “Universities that have taken a comprehensive approach — reviewing policies, clarifying expectations, and strengthening enforcement — are seeing meaningful progress. Some of the strongest gains are coming from institutions that have engaged deeply with our recommendations and translated them into lasting institutional practice, rather than symbolic commitments.”
The 2025-2026 academic year has seen a continuation of the barrage of antisemitic incidents that led Jewish community advocates to describe the issue as a “problem,” with anti-Zionist activists continuing to disrupt events, harass Jewish students, and stage demonstrations related to how Israel conducts its foreign policy and manages its conflict with the Palestinians.
In October, for example, masked pro-Hamas activists breached an event held at Pomona College in California to commemorate the victims of the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre in which Hamas-led Palestinian terrorists raped, murdered, and abducted women, children, and men during their rampage across southern Israel.
Footage of the act circulated on social media showed the group attempting to raid the room while screaming expletives and pro-Hamas dogma. They ultimately failed due to the prompt response of the Claremont Colleges Jewish chaplain and other attendees who formed a barrier in front of the door to repel them, a defense they mounted on their own as campus security personnel did nothing to stop the disturbance, according to video of the incident and witnesses who spoke to The Claremont Independent.
Following the incident, an anonymous group claimed credit for storming the event in a disturbing open letter.
“Satan dared not look us in the eyes,” said the note, which the group released on social media, while attacking event guests and Oct. 7 survivor Yoni Viloga. Appearing to threaten murder, the group added, “We let that coward know he and his fascists settler ideology are not welcome here nor anywhere. zionism is a death cult that must be dealt with accordingly [sic].”
In January, a sophomore and right-wing social media influencer at the University of Miami verbally attacked a Jewish student group, leading the school to defend free speech while saying that “lines can be crossed” in response.
“Christianity, which says love everyone, meanwhile your Bible says eating someone who is a non-Jew is like eating with an animal. That’s what the Talmud says,” Kaylee Mahony yelled at members of Students Supporting Israel (SSI) who had a table at a campus fair. She added, “They think that if you are not a Jew you are an animal. That’s the Talmud. That’s the Talmud.”
In December, an unidentified perpetrator twice vandalized the Chabad Jewish Center at Michigan State University (MSU) during the Hanukkah holiday. According to local reports, the vandal hurled rocks at and defaced the building’s entrance, shattering its glazing. Video footage of the suspect’s second trip to the Chabad center shows the vandal graffitiing the swastika, the emblem of Nazi Germany, next to which he spray-painted a message that said, “He’s back.”
That was not the first antisemitic incident to target a Jewish cultural center in the state of Michigan this academic year. In October, a man trespassed the grounds of the Jewish Resource Center, which serves University of Michigan students, and kicked its door while howling antisemitic statements.
The campus antisemitism crisis has changed the college experience for American Jewish students, affecting how they live, socialize, and perceive themselves as Jews, according to survey results released in February by the American Jewish Committee (AJC) in partnership with Hillel International.
A striking 42 percent of Jewish students reported experiencing antisemitism during their time on campus, and of that group, 55 percent said they felt that being Jewish at a campus event threatened their safety. The survey also found that 34 percent of Jewish students avoid being detected as Jews, hiding their Jewish identity due to fear of antisemitism. Meanwhile, 38 percent of Jewish students said they decline to utter pro-Israel viewpoints on campus, including in class, for fear of being targeted by anti-Zionists. The rate of self-censorship is significantly higher for Jewish students who have already been subjected to antisemitism, registering at 68 percent.
Higher education institutions have an added incentive to address antisemitism, as the reelection of US President Donald Trump brought to Washington, DC a chief executive who went on to fulfill his promise to tax the endowments of those that do not.
Shortly after taking office, Trump issued an executive order which directed the federal government to employ “all appropriate legal tools to prosecute, remove, or otherwise … hold to account perpetrators of unlawful antisemitic harassment and violence.” Additionally, the order initiated a full review of the explosion of campus antisemitism on US colleges across the country after Oct. 7, 2023, a convulsive moment in American history to which the Biden administration struggled to respond during the final year and a half of its tenure.
“This failure is unacceptable,” Trump said. “It shall be the policy of the United States to combat antisemitism vigorously, using all appropriate legal tools to prosecute, remove, or otherwise hold to account the perpetrators of unlawful antisemitic harassment and violence.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Ted Cruz, Tom Cotton Call Out Right-Wing Anti-Israel Influencers During Antisemitism Conference
US Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) speaks during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, March 11, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Julia Nikhinson
Two prominent US Republican senators issued stark warnings this week about what they described as a growing strain of antisemitism within parts of the conservative media ecosystem, using a Washington symposium hosted by the Republican Jewish Coalition and National Review to call out influential right-wing commentators and urge fellow Republicans to confront the problem directly.
Speaking at Tuesday’s event, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) sharply criticized conservative media personality Tucker Carlson, calling him “the single most dangerous demagogue in this country” and accusing him of amplifying extremist rhetoric and historical revisionism to a large online audience.
Cruz argued that antisemitic ideas have increasingly surfaced in segments of right-wing media over the past year and a half, particularly among younger audiences consuming political content online. While Republican leaders have often been quick to condemn openly extremist figures, Cruz said the party has been more reluctant to challenge more mainstream influencers who command massive followings.
“This is the beginning of a battle where our nation, our beliefs, our Constitution, the principles that built America, are under assault. And we need to gird ourselves for battle and defeat this garbage,” Cruz said to the audience.
Cruz warned that commentators with mainstream visibility can normalize rhetoric once confined to the political margins.
“I want us to be winning, but I’m not sure it is accurate as a descriptive manner that we are winning right now,” Cruz said.
Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AK) delivered a similar message during the symposium, criticizing unnamed right-wing “influencers” who he said were smuggling antisemitism into the conservative movement and promoting ideas incompatible with conservative principles. Cotton dismissed their influence as inflated and said their rhetoric echoed arguments more commonly associated with critics of Israel on the political left.
“I do not agree that I share a political movement or a political party with anyone who traffics antisemitism,” he said.
The remarks highlight an emerging divide within the Republican Party and the broader conservative movement over foreign policy, Israel, and the boundaries of acceptable political discourse. While establishment Republicans have long maintained strong support for Israel, a newer wave of populist commentators has increasingly questioned US involvement in Middle East conflicts and criticized Israel more aggressively.
Some of those commentators have drawn accusations from critics, including fellow conservatives, that their rhetoric veers into antisemitic tropes or conspiratorial narratives about Jewish influence.
Carlson has sparked backlash among conservatives over his consistent pattern of condemning Israel and platforming individuals who peddle antisemitic narratives. He has falsely suggested that Israel, the world’s lone Jewish state, oppresses and persecutes Christians.
During an interview with controversial podcaster Darryl Cooper, Carlson did not push back after Cooper argued that the US was on the “wrong side” of World War II and that former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, not Adolph Hitler, “was the chief villain” of the conflict. Cooper also suggested that the slaughter of six million Jews in concentration camps was “humane” because the Nazis did not have food to feed the “prisoners of war.”
Carlson also conducted a friendly interview with Nick Fuentes, an avowed antisemite and Holocaust denier, that was released last year. During the conversation, both men rebuked Israel and Zionism, with Carlson lambasting Christian Zionism as an affront to the values of Christianity.
In the two years following the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, attacks in Israel, conservative commentators have found themselves increasingly split over Israel and foreign policy. Beyond Carlson, popular conservatives such as Steve Bannon and Megyn Kelly have also ramped up criticisms of Israel, oftentimes arguing that the Jewish state has embroiled the United States in unnecessary wars on their behalf.
Further, recent polling reveals the existence of a sizable antisemitic contingent within the GOP base, heavily concentrated among the younger cohorts which more frequently engage with content of online pundits. For example, the Manhattan Institute, a prominent US-based think tank, released a survey poll in December examining the evolving makeup of the Republican Party (GOP) and its current attitudes toward Israel and Jewish Americans.
According to the results, newer entrants to the GOP are more likely to be antisemitic.
“Anti-Jewish Republicans are typically younger, disproportionately male, more likely to be college-educated, and significantly more likely to be New Entrant Republicans,” the survey found. “They are also more racially diverse. Consistent church attendance is one of the strongest predictors of rejecting these attitudes; infrequent church attendance is, all else equal, one of the strongest predictors of falling into this segment.”
The data also showed that older GOP voters are much more supportive of Israel and less likely to express antisemitic views than their younger cohorts.
According to the data, 25 percent of GOP voters under 50 openly express antisemitic views as opposed to just 4 percent over the age of 50.
Startlingly, a substantial amount, 37 percent, of GOP voters indicate belief in Holocaust denialism. These figures are more pronounced among young men under 50, with a majority, 54 percent, agreeing that the Holocaust “was greatly exaggerated or did not happen as historians describe.” Among men over 50, 41 percent agree with the sentiment.
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Israel Becomes World’s 7th Largest Arms Exporter
Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system, on display during a visit by US President Joe Biden. Photo: Ariel Hermoni / Ministry of Defense
Israel has become the world’s seventh-largest arms exporter, steadily increasing its share of global weapons sales even amid a multi-front war and mounting international criticism, according to a new report.
On Monday, the Swedish-based Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) released its latest report on global arms exports, analyzing trends from the last five years (2021–2025) and comparing them with the previous period (2016–2020).
For the first time, Israel has surpassed Great Britain to become the world’s seventh-largest arms exporter, with its share of global weapons sales rising to 4.4 percent in 2021–2025, up from 3.1 percent in the previous period.
“Despite conducting the war in Gaza and attacks in Iran, Lebanon, Qatar, Syria, and Yemen, Israel still managed to increase its share of global arms exports,” Zain Hussain, researcher at SIPRI’s Arms Transfers Program, said in a statement.
According to the newly released report, Israel also ranked as the 14th-largest arms importer in the world, acquiring most of its weapons from the United States (68 percent) and Germany (31 percent), with a small share from Italy (1 percent), showing that arms embargoes and international criticism have done little to slow its defense trade.
Overall, the total volume of the global arms trade rose by 9.2 percent in the last five years compared to the previous period, with European nations more than tripling their weapons imports to become the world’s largest arms-importing region amid rising regional tensions with Russia and escalating conflict in the Middle East.
The US continued to be the world’s largest arms exporter in 2021–2025, holding a 42 percent share of global sales, followed by France (9.8 percent), Russia (6.8 percent), Germany (5.7 percent), China (5.6 percent), Italy (5.1 percent), and Israel.
Among Middle Eastern countries, Saudi Arabia leads as the top purchaser of American arms with 12 percent of sales, followed by Qatar and Kuwait, while Israel ranks 12th globally, receiving just 3.1 percent of all US arms exports
SIPRI’s latest report comes as the Jewish state faces growing international pressure, with European states among the most vocally critical and threatening arms embargoes over Israel’s defensive war against the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas in Gaza and its military campaign against Iran.
Despite these threats, Israel’s arms exports have continued to grow, solidifying its position as a leading player in the global weapons market.
For example, the UK and Germany have pressed ahead with arms purchases from Israel despite repeated threats and public warnings to suspend defense trade, signaling the limits of international pressure.
Israel now supplies 8.2 percent of British arms purchases, second only to the US, which accounts for 85 percent.
In Israel’s biggest-ever arms export deal, Germany recently acquired the Arrow missile defense system, marking the largest weapons sale in the country’s history.
According to the SIPRI report, Israel’s growth in global arms exports was driven primarily by international sales of air defense systems, even as the country faced heavy domestic demand for weapons amid a multi-front war.
Overall, Israel sold arms to 23 European countries (41 percent of its total exports), 10 Asian countries (40 percent), five in North and Latin America (8.6 percent), and seven African nations.