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She represents the ‘worst of the worst.’ Now Judy Clarke is leading the defense in Pittsburgh synagogue massacre trial.
PITTSBURGH (Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle via JTA) — When Judy Clarke delivered her opening statement to the jury that will determine the fate of the man charged with committing the massacre in the Tree of Life synagogue building, she did not deny that her client was responsible.
In fact, she sympathized with the victims and their families.
Clarke, 71, began her address by acknowledging the horror of Oct. 27, 2018, and its aftermath.
“The tragedy that brings us together today,” she said in a soft-spoken yet confident voice, is “almost incomprehensible. It’s inexcusable. … Eleven lives were taken, others shattered. The loss that occurred is immeasurable.”
She told the jury there was “no disagreement, no doubt” about the identity of the perpetrator. It was “the man seated at that table,” she said, indicating her client. “He shot every person he saw and, in the process, injured others in their sacred spaces.”
Clarke was appointed to Robert Bowers’ defense team in December 2018, after he requested the counsel of a federal public defender specializing in death penalty cases. He faces 63 criminal counts related to his attack on congregations Dor Hadash, New Light and Tree of Life*Or L’Simcha. Many of the charges carry the death penalty.
Support JTA’s partnership with the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle throughout this trial.
As the trial proceeds, Clarke won’t try to convince the jury her client isn’t guilty. A “win” for her defense team will be for the defendant to avoid a death sentence and instead have him remain in prison for the rest of his life.
Clarke has vast experience defending those whom some call “the worst of the worst.” Her roster of past clients includes Susan Smith, who murdered her two young sons by drowning them in a lake in South Carolina; Theodore Kaczynski, otherwise known as the Unabomber; Buford Furrow, a white supremacist who opened fire in a Jewish community center outside of Los Angeles in 1999; Eric Rudolph, who planted a bomb in Centennial Olympic Park in Atlanta during the 1996 Summer Olympics; and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, a perpetrator of the Boston Marathon bombing.
Except for Tsarnaev — whose case is under appeal — Clarke succeeded in avoiding a death sentence for all her clients, either by negotiating a plea deal or by convincing the jury that mitigating factors, such as a mental illness, precluded imposition of the ultimate punishment.
Clarke’s team tried to negotiate a deal for a life sentence for Bowers in exchange for a guilty plea but was unsuccessful. Four and a half years after the deadliest antisemitic attack in U.S. history, the three-week jury selection process commenced on April 24 and testimony began on May 30.
“This is not a straightforward murder case,” Clarke told the jury in her opening statement. The federal charges — which include obstruction of free exercise of religious beliefs resulting in death — must be proved by showing the defendant had the requisite intent to commit those particular crimes, she said.
She acknowledged that her client’s actions on Oct. 27, 2018, were “reprehensible” and “misguided” and recounted his virulent social media postings and other rantings about Jews. But she also portrayed him as “quiet” and “socially awkward, a man with few friends.” He didn’t live on his own until he was 44, she said, and his family saw him as someone “more likely to commit suicide than kill others.”
It’s clear that Clarke is appalled by her client’s actions. It’s also clear that she is determined to see that his rights are protected and that the judge and the jury faithfully apply the rule of law.
“Judy is one of the best lawyers I’ve ever known,” said Laurie Levenson, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angles and a former federal prosecutor. “She works insanely hard. She spends the time with the clients that she needs to. She doesn’t believe in the death penalty, and she’s devoted herself to representing people who are, you know — ‘the Voyage of the Damned’ is what she would say.”
Levenson, who has known Clarke for three decades, described her as “honest” and “very humble.”
“She doesn’t stand against the victims,” Levenson stressed. “I think she actually feels very much for the tragedy that occurred. But she has a job to do, which is to try to save her client’s life. And she does it with integrity.”
The two met during the Unabomber case, when Clarke was representing Kaczynski and Levenson was a legal commentator for CBS. Kaczynski at first resisted a plea deal sentencing him to life in prison because he did not want to admit to mental health issues.
Defense attorney Judy Clarke, at right, responds to questions at a press conference after the trial of Unabomber suspect Theodore Kaczynski was delayed in Sacramento, California, Jan. 8, 1998.(Rich Pedroncelli/AFP via Getty Images)
“She had a very difficult client, one that I think a lot of people would just sort of throw up their hands and say, ‘What can I do?’” Levenson recalled. “And she was able to get him to agree to that plea, which probably saved his life.”
Ted Kaczynski’s brother, David Kaczynski, praised Clarke for her ability to see humanity, even in those who have committed unspeakable atrocities.
“She has a really good heart, a really good intention,” David Kaczynski said. “I think she really cares about her clients. I think she has a kind of unconditional commitment to their humanity. And, of course, that meant a lot to me, because as much as I deplore what my brother did in harming people, I love him. He’s my brother.”
“So it’s a very fine line to walk, representing the client who has clearly got some serious personal problem,” he continued. “Ted was quite a loner. He was very shy. He had a very difficult time connecting with anybody. And in this very difficult situation, Judy was able to be there for him, and I think that was really meaningful for Ted, that he had some support, some human connection at this time of crisis in his life.”
David Kaczynski has followed Clarke’s career and continues to be impressed with her “professionalism and sense of humility.”
“I think the legal profession is trained to be strictly analytical and adversarial,” he said. “And she somehow works within this environment in a way that preserves her humanity as she’s trying to make people aware of the humanity of someone whose very right to exist is in question.”
Some question whether a person who has committed a heinous crime deserves a zealous defense. Levenson insists they do.
Our judicial system is “best served” when capital defendants are provided with a high-caliber defense, Levenson said, because “it’s in these situations where people are so emotionally invested that we can get it wrong.”
In addition to being a former prosecutor, Levenson created the Loyola Project for the Innocent, which works to get those who are serving sentences for crimes they did not commit out of prison.
Defense attorney Judy Clarke, seen here in Pittsburgh in 2023, is representing the man accused of murdering 11 Jews during Shabbat services in Pittsburgh in 2018. (Screenshot from KDKA report)
“I’ve seen firsthand that there are far too many lawyers who just immediately assume that their client’s not only guilty but should get the most severe punishment — that there’s nothing to be said on their client’s behalf,” Levenson said. “And you and I both know there’s a lot more to any given case, and that even people who do terrible crimes have other aspects of their lives that the justice system should consider.”
“In our system, we are supposed to consider each case, each individual, the facts, and not only determine whether someone’s guilty but what should happen to them,” she continued. “And that works well. When you have a lawyer who’s just going through the motions — and the one thing you can say about Judy is she doesn’t just go through the motions — I think the public can have more confidence in the verdict. As long as that lawyer is acting honestly and with integrity, it’s so much better to have that zealous advocate.”
The massacre at the Tree of Life building “was just a terrible, terrible, terrible tragedy,” said Levenson, who is Jewish. Clarke “will do her best to keep the case in perspective. In other words, focus not on big messages, but on this individual and any mitigating factors for this individual.”
Jon B. Gould, dean of the School of Social Ecology at the University of California-Irvine, has researched attorneys who specialize in death penalty cases. In 2019, along with Maya Pagni Barak, he published “Capital Defense: Inside the Lives of America’s Death Penalty Lawyers,” a book based on extensive interviews, providing insight into the reasons someone would willingly represent a person who has committed an egregious crime.
“They are an unusual kind of lawyer,” Gould said. “They’re actually an unusual kind of person because for many of these cases, they are representing what is sometimes said to be ‘the worst of the worst.’”
There are a variety of motivating factors for capital defense work, Gould said. Some of these lawyers are strongly opposed to state-sanctioned killing. For others, he said, “it is the excitement of the most complicated kind of law.”
Other death penalty specialists take the cases for “professional prestige,” and some do it for the money because capital defense lawyers get paid more than regular defense lawyers, Gould said. Some take the cases for religious reasons.
“Now, that’s all in the larger context of none of these lawyers looks at the facts of the case and thinks it’s anything other than a horrific tragedy,” Gould stressed. “I also found that for many of them, they are entirely sympathetic to the family members of the victims. They don’t look at these cases and think, no big deal. They look at these cases and think that’s something horrible that happened to the victim’s family, but they also look at the defendant and think, as one of them said to me, ‘No one gets to this place of being the defendant without having something horrible having happened to them earlier in life.’”
Death penalty cases are “really, really, really hard on defense lawyers,” Gould added. “It’s really distressing work. The evidence that they have to pore through is horrific. Many of them have PTSD.”
While many people “look at defense lawyers and think there must be something wrong with them,” Gould said it’s essential to remember “that they are fulfilling a very important function in the criminal justice system that none of us would ever want to have to do.”
“That doesn’t mean that any of us is unsympathetic to the victims,” he emphasized. “No one deserves what’s happened in any of these cases. But if we do believe in the rule of law, then there needs to be capital defense lawyers. And we need to respect the work they’re doing because that’s what it means to live in a system of rule of law and not simply a system where we simply execute people in the town square without the opportunity to have a defense.”
This story is part of ongoing coverage of the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting trial by the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle and the Pittsburgh Union Progress in a collaboration supported by funding from the Pittsburgh Media Partnership. It is reprinted with permission.
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Mamdani’s Oct. 7 statement draws Israeli rebuke, as anniversary bares divides among NYC mayoral candidates
In New York City, the second anniversary of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel fell against the backdrop of a mayoral election that brought Israel and Gaza to the fore of local politics.
Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee and frontrunner, attended a vigil hosted by Israelis for Peace in Union Square on the anniversary of the attack. The anti-occupation activists have rallied weekly for two years to demand a ceasefire, the release of hostages and an end to Israel’s military campaign in Gaza.
Mamdani’s pro-Palestinian advocacy and staunch criticism of Israel are central to his swift ascent in politics, and his opponents in the race have latched onto his views, accusing him of fanning antisemitism at a time when anti-Jewish attacks are on the rise.
Now, the race enters its final stretch as a tentative peace dawns on the Middle East, with President Donald Trump announcing that Israel and Hamas agreed to a hostage deal and an initial phase to end the two-year war on Wednesday night.
Mamdani attended the Tuesday vigil with Brad Lander, the city comptroller and a close Jewish ally, and held a lit candle while listening to Israeli and Palestinian speakers, as well as local rabbis. One of the speakers, Tamar Glazerman — whose aunt was killed by Hamas on Oct. 7 — decried Israel’s retaliation in Gaza, saying, “War crimes cannot justify other war crimes.” A banner behind her read, “Stop the Genocide. Save Gaza. Free All Hostages.”
These sentiments echoed a statement that Mamdani released to mark the anniversary. “Two years ago today, Hamas carried out a horrific war crime, killing more than 1,100 Israelis and kidnapping 250 more,” he said. He called for the return of the remaining hostages and said he mourned the dead.
He went on to say that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli government “launched a genocidal war,” killing more than 67,000 Palestinians and reducing swaths of Gaza to rubble. He criticized the U.S. government for being “complicit” and reiterated his long-held view that “the occupation and apartheid must end.”
The statement gathered over 20 million views on X and rebukes from many, including the Israeli government, who said he was wrong to focus on Gaza on a day anchored in Israeli tragedy.
“Two years after Hamas launched its barbaric massacre against Israel and the Jewish people, Mamdani has chosen to act as a mouthpiece for Hamas propaganda — spreading Hamas’s fake genocide campaign,” the Israeli Foreign Ministry said, adding that Mamdani “normalizes antisemitism” and “stands with Jews only when they are dead.”
Mamdani also drew criticism from Jews who said he only paid lip service to their mourning. Zachary Braiterman, a professor of modern Judaism at Syracuse University who supports the Israeli movement to end the war, said Mamdani “speaks quickly past NYC Jews as we stop and mark the 2 year anniversary of 10/7.”
Other critiques came from pro-Palestinian activists who said his statement undermined their cause. Nerdeen Kiswani, founder of the group Within Our Lifetime, accused Mamdani of erasing “the decades of siege, occupation, and systematic killing that led to that day.”
The double-sided critique drew the attention of Adam Carlson, head of the polling firm Zenith Research. “The fact that everyone on both extremes is up in arms over this statement means that he absolutely nailed it,” tweeted Carlson.
Former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, Mamdani’s closest competitor, focused his own comment on the Hamas attack and did not mention Israel’s retaliation or the fate of Palestinians.
“To the Jewish people — I stand with you. I mourn with you and I will forever be by your side in the fight against evil and anti-semitism in all forms,” said Cuomo, who lost to Mamdani in the Democratic primary and relaunched his campaign as an independent.
Cuomo has centered an appeal to Jewish New Yorkers in his bid for mayor, touting his pro-Israel record as governor. He recently collected a slew of endorsements from Jewish groups and leaders, largely representing Orthodox communities, after incumbent Mayor Eric Adams dropped out and the field narrowed to Cuomo, Mamdani and Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa.
Jewish voters are divided over this election, with many younger, more progressive Jews backing Mamdani and many aligning with his views on Israel and Gaza. A recent Marist poll conducted before Adams quit found the same proportion of Jewish voters — 35% — breaking for both Cuomo and Mamdani.
Sliwa said that Oct. 7 was “a dark day” and called for the release of hostages. He also acknowledged the ensuing devastation without explicitly naming Palestinians in Gaza.
“The death and destruction that has followed in the region is deeply disheartening, and my prayers are with all families here in New York and abroad who continue to feel this pain,” he said.
The mayoral race coincides with a dramatic shift in how New Yorkers view Israel. According to a New York Times/Siena poll last month, 44% of New Yorkers said they had greater sympathy for Palestinians, compared with 26% who sympathized more with Israel. Voters also preferred Mamdani’s approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — once viewed as a fringe left stance in the city’s political landscape — over the other candidates’ by a wide margin.
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The post Mamdani’s Oct. 7 statement draws Israeli rebuke, as anniversary bares divides among NYC mayoral candidates appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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In Good Faith: A Jewish/Muslim Night of Comedy and Conversation
Date and time: Wed, Oct 22, 2025 / 6:30 PM – 9:30 PM EDT
Location: Youngplace, 180 Shaw Street, Toronto, ON, M6J 2W5
In a post-Oct. 7 world, news feeds are filled with videos, podcasts and reports of Jews and Muslims talking at each other, about each other—but rarely with each other. This limited series brings together Jews and Muslims, Israelis and Palestinians, from across the country and the political divide, to sit down and have difficult conversations—in good faith.
In this live podcast recording, we’re bringing comedy sets from Adrienne Fish, Nour Hadidi, Foad HP and Dan Rosen before a panel discussion with all four about what it’s like performing as Muslim and Jewish comics in 2025—including all the pitfalls they have to navigate as they speak their minds onstage.
Included: Entrance to Koffler Arts and post-event reception.
Parking: Free and paid options available, but spots are limited.
All proceeds will go to charity
Hosted by The Canadian Jewish News, in partnership with the Canadian Race Relations Foundation and the Ronald S. Roadburg Foundation.
The post In Good Faith: A Jewish/Muslim Night of Comedy and Conversation appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News.
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Cycling team Israel–Premier Tech is ditching the ‘Israel’ brand. But was it entirely their decision?
After a tumultuous season, international cycling team Israel–Premier Tech, co-owned by Canadian-Israeli billionaire Sylvan Adams, is officially going to change its name and remove the word “Israel”. The decision comes after repeated anti-Israel protests across Europe disrupted the team—whose international roster of 31 cyclists includes just three Israelis—during their open-road events, which can last hundreds of kilometres across the continent. Several cyclists crashed due to protester intervention. The decision to remove Israeli branding from Israel–Premier Tech led co-owner Adams to announce he would step away from day-to-day involvement with the team.
There’s a lot to be said about the political ramifications of wearing the Israeli name on your shirt in 2025, but our sports podcasters have a different theory about the shift. Israel–Premier Tech enjoyed a successful season that brought them back to full status with the UCI World Tour, after being relegated down to the secondary UCI ProSeries since 2023. That means the stakes are higher, the stage is bigger, and the league’s propensity for risk and disruption may well have shrunk. Is this purely a political decision, or are UCI executives trying to prevent more bad press in the coming year?
Also on the docket: the boys talk about the Toronto Blue Jays’ run to the American League championship series, big baseball moves, early NHL impressions and a quick NFL check-in.
Transcript (excerpt)
James Hirsh: We want to talk about a recent story. There’s been some news with a cycling team, Israel Premier Tech, which is owned by Canadian billionaire Sylvan Adams. And it’s not going to be Israel Premier Tech anymore.
Gabe Pulver: They’ve been called Israel Premier Tech for, I guess it’s been around five years. They’ve been an official UCI squad, you know, for the last, I think, since 2020—
James Hirsh: Which means they compete in the big cycling races like the Tour de France and Giro d’Italia, things like that.
Gabe Pulver: Exactly. They were called Israel Start-Up Nation for a number of years and Israel Cycling Academy before that. They were a part of the Vuelta a España that had to be shut down due to anti-Israel protests going on across Spain. And for a while, they took the name off the jersey and just called themselves Premier Tech for the week. That seemed to not assuage the protesters, and they’ve decided to, as a quote, “move away from its current Israeli identity”.
James Hirsh: And part of that is Sylvan Adams, we should say, who has a pretty big job right now as president of the World Jewish Congress, has said that he can’t continue to be part of the team that’s not putting Israel in the name. It seems like they acquiesced to demands, I think, based on his statement.
Gabe Pulver: So what’s interesting is that Premier Tech is a Canadian company. They’re, you know, a Quebecois tech company, and Premier Tech and its president own a chunk of it. A good chunk of the riders are Canadian and previously have been pretty supportive of the team’s Israeli identity. Another interesting part of this is that Sylvan Adams is sort of, like you said, busy with his other job, but you wonder what the future of the team holds given that, you know, sort of the face of their team and, you know, a huge part of their Canadian connection is no longer going to be day-to-day running things, you know, with their identity. Sylvan Adams is a pretty proud guy, and as their identity changes and he steps back, you wonder if he’ll continue to support the team financially as much as he has.
James Hirsh: Yeah, I think it’s very interesting to see this. This is sort of a test case for Israel’s continued involvement in certain international sports or sports that have an international component. We’ll see if that will change. Obviously, there’s been great news today about the peace deal being signed. And if anyone is getting that news on that from a Jewish sports podcast, you’ve got to tune in a little bit more.
Gabe Pulver: Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Check out, close this and go to CNN and see what’s happening with that.
James Hirsh: But look, there have been calls for Israel to be removed from FIFA. We’ve talked about that. There have been calls for Israel to be excluded from other international sporting events. There have been on-the-ground protests that we’ve covered, you know, including at lower-tier sporting events. We’ll see what will come. This certainly seems like the first step of an Israeli team removing—continuing to be owned by an Israeli, is affiliated with Israeli coaches, owned by Israeli teams, all Israeli people, all that. But no longer having Israel in the name is not just a symbolic gesture.
Gabe Pulver: No. And I have a theory. It’s not a very charitable theory, but Israel Premier Tech had sort of been relegated to semi-conditional status on the World Tour this year. They had riders at a bunch of events, but they weren’t at every single event. They weren’t full Tour members. Next year, they have regained their position back in full Tour members. And after the disaster where virtually every rider on Tour was furious about all of the protesters in the Vuelta, I think they’re choosing to decide, I think they’re choosing to say we’re not going to have this shit anymore.
Like they’re going to get rid of Israel, the name, when you’re back on the Tour. Because we didn’t like the news, we didn’t like the coverage, we didn’t like the protests. You know, you can stay involved, the Israeli money. Obviously, they’ll take the Israeli money, they’ll support the Israeli riders. However, they’re very unlikely—they just don’t want the name Israel to be running around on the Tour so more people can show up and disrupt the Tour de France, which would be an enormous disaster for the sport. Maybe there are enough Jews in France and enough harmony in the international community in France that that won’t be a problem. I doubt it. But I think it’s probably a self-preservation move by the UCI before something a little bit bigger than the Vuelta a España has to get cancelled.
James Hirsh: Yeah, that makes total sense. And if there’s one thing, I don’t know much about the cycling federations and whoever runs that, but there’s one thing I know about European technocrats who run sporting organizations is that they’re all cowards and will always do the easiest thing in the goal of self-preservation.
Gabe Pulver: Yeah, self-preservation.
James Hirsh: They are about cycling, but I believe it, no matter what.
Gabe Pulver: No, they are all there. The show must go on in any possible way.
James Hirsh: Yeah.
Gabe Pulver: You know, I think if a single rider was to ever say something political, they would literally, you know, deflate their tires, like to, you know, steal a metaphor.
James Hirsh: Yeah. So when countries like Spain decide to, you know, continue their millennia-old tradition of anti-Semitism and protesters start protesting Israeli teams and non-Israeli riders at cycling events that they don’t care about in the first place—
Gabe Pulver: Yeah.
James Hirsh: —You can bet that whoever’s in charge of that cycling event is going to cave to those protesters. Absolutely.
Show Notes
Credits
- Hosts: James Hirsh and Gabe Pulver
- Producer: Michael Fraiman
- Music: Coby Lipovitch (intro), chēēZ π (main theme, “Organ Grinder Swing“)
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