On Wednesday evening, as Rosh Hashana began in Pittsburgh’s heavily Jewish neighborhood of Squirrel Hill, Rabbi Daniel Fellman stepped up to the pulpit of Temple Sinai and lamented: “Our American Jewish community cries out in despair.”
“A person seeking the highest office in the land can utter the most base, crass, hate-filled language, day in and day out,” he told his congregation. No names were necessary.
Then he turned to the rise in antisemitism on the pro-Palestinian left, and to the two assaults within the past month on Jewish students at the University of Pittsburgh. “Students, misguided in their pursuit of real freedom for those in harm’s way, can utter phrases once deemed abhorrent and beyond the pale,” Rabbi Fellman said.
It has been a year now since Hamas terrorists from Gaza stormed into Israel and massacred an estimated 1,200 people, most of them Jewish civilians in their homes or at a music festival, and took hundreds hostage. The ensuing, escalating regional war has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza, expanded to Lebanon and prompted a barrage of Iranian missiles aimed at Israel.
It has also kept Jewish communities across the United States gripped by an enduring state of anguish — divided, doubtful, and feeling betrayed from within and without.
“There is apprehension,” Bob Bernstein, 70, said Friday night as he strolled with his wife down Murray Avenue. “and it’s increasing.” His wife, Ellie, also 70, chimed in: “But we can’t live in fear.”
In Pennsylvania, the intensity of the political season — now overlaid by the High Holy Days — has only compounded those anxieties, as Jewish voters in this hotly contested battleground state are courted by the leaders of both political parties, while being repelled by elements in each of them.
With more than 434,000 members, the Jewish community in Pennsylvania is larger and stronger than those in any of the six other battleground states. Around 50,000 Jews live in greater Pittsburgh, a city that helped launch the Reform Judaism movement in 1885 with the Pittsburgh Platform, a document that cemented an indelibly progressive stamp on much of American Judaism.
Pittsburgh, and the Squirrel Hill neighborhood, also remain scarred by the 2018 Tree of Life massacre, when an antisemite stormed the synagogue on the morning of Oct. 27 and took the lives of 11 worshipers, the largest shedding of Jewish blood in the nation’s history.
Former President Donald Trump has often appeared incapable of understanding some of the most deeply rooted traditions that undergird American Jewish liberalism, such as the Torah’s dictate “Justice, justice shalt thou pursue” and the admonition to show compassion for immigrants “for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”
Mr. Trump has routinely fumed that Jews would need to get “their heads examined” if they vote Democratic, has insisted that he is their protector, and most recently suggested that if he loses it will be their fault.
Yet the year since the Oct. 7 attack has put Jewish progressivism to the test. Anti-Zionist activists have taken to the streets, called for the destruction of Israel, the “globalization” of the intifada — the violent Palestinian struggle against Israel’s occupation — and at times veered into incontrovertible antisemitism.
In the early hours of Sept. 27, the police say, a group of men saw a Jewish student from the University of Pittsburgh leave a bar wearing a Star of David necklace, began berating him about Israel and then assaulted him. It was the second assault on a Jewish student at Pitt in less than a month.
Those violent episodes have fueled a suspicion of the left that competes with the mistrust many Jews feel toward a former president who dined with the rapper Kanye West, who repeatedly made antisemitic statements, and a neo-Nazi, Nick Fuentes, in 2022.
“At this time in which many of us are anxious about world events, about antisemitism in America and around the world, the challenge is that many feel that we’re not welcome in either end of the political spectrum,” said Rabbi Seth Adelson of Congregation Beth Shalom, a conservative synagogue on Squirrel Hill.
For Rabbi Adelson, the anxiety is personal. His son, a soldier in the Israeli military, was called up just after the Oct. 7 attacks. Last week, two days before the Jewish New Year, his son was recalled to active service as Israel stepped up its military operations in Lebanon.
Mr. Trump is appealing directly to Jewish voters like Rabbi Adelson. One of his newest ads intones, “Hamas saw Harris’s anti-Israel statements and will use it as a green light to keep murdering Israelis.”
And for some Jews, when Mr. Trump says that if he loses the election, Israel “will cease to exist” within two to three years, that apocalyptic vision sounds upsettingly plausible. Israel is, after all, threatened, they say — by Iranian ballistic missiles, Hezbollah rockets, Hamas terrorists, and the prospect that Iran could develop a nuclear weapon — yet the left debates how far Israel should be allowed to go in defending itself, and how much the United States should help it.
“You would have thought that after Oct. 7, everyone would have known what this was about,” said Levi Mondshein, a rabbi with the Chabad-Lubavitcher movement who had stopped on a Squirrel Hill sidewalk on Friday night to blow his shofar as the celebration of the Jewish New Year drew to a close and the Sabbath began. “Instead, you have people speaking unclearly,” he said — a reference to Democrats who, he added, were not forthright enough in confronting those condemning Israel.
For her part, Ms. Harris has made her own overtures to Jewish voters. She resisted pressure from Arab American and Muslim groups, refusing to give a Democratic Convention speaking slot to a pro-Palestinian activist, even as she allotted time for the parents of an American hostage held by Hamas. (That hostage, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, has since been killed in Gaza.)
She has also dispatched her husband, Doug Emhoff, who is Jewish, to Pennsylvania with some frequency. On Friday night, as more religious Jews were at Sabbath services, Mr. Emhoff joined the musicians Jason Isbell and Michael Stipe at a get-out-the-vote rally in Pittsburgh’s student-rich Oakland district.
Still, Jewish frustrations with the left are hardly limited to Orthodox Jews, or confined to Pittsburgh. In New York, at the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue, Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch made no mention in his sermon of the suffering of the Palestinians, but he heaped condemnation on elite liberals he described as abandoning their Jewish allies over the past year.
“Oct. 7 was an easy moral case: Babies in cribs and grandparents who could barely walk were slaughtered in their houses,” he thundered. “What does it take for those who consider themselves paragons of social justice to speak out for Jews, and if not Jews, at least in defense of the central values of Western enlightenment?”
It was a similar framing, if more eloquent, to Mr. Trump’s scolding of Jews for not supporting him despite his promises to act as their protector.
Yet on Squirrel Hill, where Harris-Walz yard signs jostle with “We Stand With Israel” and “Black Lives Matter” banners, many Jewish voters said they had no difficulty seeing through Mr. Trump’s rhetoric.
Judy Bernstein, 70, who on Friday night had come to Pittsburgh for Shabbat services from suburban Robinson Township, recalled a friend from out of state asking her why Pennsylvania’s Jews were not voting for Vice President Kamala Harris. She said she texted back furiously: “We are!”
It is a testament to the political views of his Reform congregation that Rabbi Fellman, of Temple Sinai, freely shared his own. In an interview, he said that Mr. Trump’s recent statements — complaining about Jewish support for Ms. Harris and suggesting that Jews would be responsible if he lost — had scared people far more than any notion that Ms. Harris had not stood up to anti-Israel elements in her party. He praised Ms. Harris’s husband, Mr. Emhoff, for his proud and recognizably Reform brand of Jewishness.
And he pointed to what he called continued expressions of antisemitism among Mr. Trump’s allies on the right. On Thursday, he noted, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, wrote on social media, “Yes they can control the weather,” without specifying who “they” were — a remark that some tied to Ms. Greene’s 2018 suggestion that laser beams controlled by a powerful Jewish banking family might be responsible for wildfires. The same day, another Republican, Representative Tim Burchett of Tennessee, went on Fox News to condemn the Jewish philanthropist and Democratic donor George Soros as “a money changer of the worst kind.”
Given such sentiments, Rabbi Fellman said he had more faith in the Democrats, who he said have confronted extremists in their party’s left wing, than in Republicans, who have absorbed much of the far right into the party’s mainstream.
“Deep down, the vice president gets it,” Rabbi Fellman said of Ms. Harris. “I think she is working hard at holding a coalition together, and coalition governments and coalition politics are messy, but I’m not afraid that she’s not speaking out against the far left. I mean, the far left is a problem, but I think that they are being addressed.”
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