Bushkin. Hi, I'm Moe, the producer of Deep Background. You're probably wondering why you're hearing from me. Well, Noah woke up this morning with laryngitis. Don't worry, he's fine. He just lost his voice. Today's episode of Deep Background is with Mark Oppenheimer. Mark is a fantastic writer and journalist who spent the last few years documenting the recovery of Pittsburgh's Squirrel Hill neighborhood. Squirrel Hill is a historic Jewish neighborhood and was the site of the Tree of Life Synagogue shooting in twenty eighteen. Oppenheimer's upcoming book is called Squirrel Hill, The Tree of Life Synagogue Shooting and the Soul of a Neighborhood, and it comes out next Tuesday, October fifth. This episode is a really great one, and I know it's close to Noah's hard The interview was taped a while back, so I'll let Noah take it from here. Mark, thank you so much for being here. I admire all the different kinds of work that you do. I think of you as a public intellectual on religion and a reporter and a memorist of no mean talents. But the thing I really wanted to talk about today grew out of my fascination when I heard that in the aftermath of the October twenty eighteen shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh, that you responded by diving into the life of Squirrel Hill and that you're actually in the process of writing a book about the Jewish community there and it's healing. And I thought, what an extraordinary opportunity to talk to a chronicler of contemporary American Jewish religious life about something while he's actually doing it in real time. So tell me first, what gave you the instinct to get on a plane and go to Pittsburgh. Yes, thanks for having me on. It's an honor, and I'm a fan of the show, so it's great to be in conversation with you, and I really admire your work and thank you for having me on. My father grew up in Squirrel Hill, and so did his father and his grandfather, and my family goes back in Pittsburgh into the eighteen forties when my great great great grandfather, Wilhelm or William Frank, was one of four Jews who got together to a choir land for the first cemetery, the first Jewish cemetery in Pittsburgh. And for Jews, you know, one of the first things you build in addition to a ritual bath is a cemetery. If if you're staying, putting down roots, and you're staying in a particular community, you need a burial ground. So there were four Jews who in eighteen forty seven acquired land for the first Jewish burial ground in Pittsburgh. And as I say, my great great great grandfather was among those. That's genuinely fascinating its own right. I didn't know you came from that particular slice of American Jewish life. You know, I've always been fascinated by Squirrel Hill, and I'm really interested to hear that your family is actually from there. I have had just a large number of friends, teachers, and mentors who all grew up in Squirrel Hill in the sixties and seventies who have sort of become incredibly prominent intellectuals. My colleague Joseph Kerner, who's one of the leading artist darians in the world. My colleague Bill Rubinstein, who's one of the founders of the study of gainus in the law, Evan Wolfson, who ran the Marriage Project for many years pushing gay marriage, Harry Littman, who went on to become a US attorney for Pittsburgh. And they all grew up in Squirrel Hill. They all went to the same high school, they had the same high school English teacher. Your gut is correct that Squirrel Hill is something special, and it has been Jewish longer, I think it's safe to say, than any other American Jewish neighborhood. So Jews, like other human beings, and like Americans in particular, like moving from place to place. You know, We're always looking for the next frontier. And so most Jewish communities turn over after thirty or forty or fifty years. The Jews in the neighborhood moves more else, and another immigrant group or another upwardly mobile group or downwardly mobile sometimes moves into wherever the Jews were. Squirrel Hill has been a real exception to that rule. It's never been majority Jewish. It likely peaked at forty or forty five percent Jewish, but it has been substantially Jewish since World War One, so one hundred years exactly, and it is still the case that that about fifty percent of the Jews in metropolitan Pittsburgh live either in Squirrel Hill or in one of the adjacent neighborhoods in the East End of Pittsburgh within the city limits. So that's also to say that, unlike the Jews of Boston or Chicago, the Jews of Pittsburgh did not become an overwhelmingly suburban people. Half of the Jews are still within the city limits, centered around the Squirrel Hill neighborhood. So it's a very very interesting place in American and world Jewish history. So Mark, one of the things that I'm trying to do on this podcast is enable people who don't, for example, write books, to get a glimpse behind the scenes, not just talk about the book as a finished artifact, which we all like to do, but also to find out about the process. So I want you to lift the veil for us a little bit. You go to Squirrel Hill, it's after the horrible attack. What do you do on a daily basis when you're there? How do you go about creating a network of people whom do you talk to? Like, what do you actually do every day? Okay, I'm so glad you asked about that, because I think it's really important to demystify the process that journalists and writers go through when they research and when they write. For me. In this case, it began with asking a couple of people who I knew were from the neighborhood, who are the Jews who know everybody else? And who are the people who who will be happy to talk about it? Right? Like, who are the local the mayors of Squirrel Hill? Right? Interestingly, this is terribly, terribly sad. Two of the mayors of Squirrel Hill were the mentally disabled brothers who were murder Cecil and David Rosenthal, who really did walk around Squirrel Hill and pop in at storefronts and at the fire station. They knew everybody. But I was given some very good tips, and the same names kept coming up over and over again. You should talk to this person or this person. So I began with a list of about a dozen people, and I started flying to Squirrel Hill about once a week. I would either fly out of Logan Airport in Boston or LaGuardia Airport in New York City, and I would fly very early in the morning at six am, pick up a car, drive into Squirrel Hill, fighting the morning traffic into the city and get to the neighborhood around nine am, and then I would try to talk to five or six people. You were really doing these marathon days. You must have been getting up at three o'clock in the morning. That's right. I was doing eighteen hour days. And I did this thirty one times in sixteen months. And my wife was heroic and very supportive about saying this does seem like an important project. But the deal that I made with her, and I think just as important with myself, was that I was going to think of myself as not being a dad or a husband one day a week, so typically Wednesday or Thursday, I just didn't exist. And you know, we paid some extra for babysitting, and my parents helped out some who live in western Massachusetts, and my wife worked harder on those days and held it all together with the kids. But by the time everyone woke up the next morning, I was back home. And so the question I went to Pittsburgh with was how does a tight knit Jewish neighborhood come together in the aftermath of tragedy. So I did have a sense that I wanted to get a couple hundred interviews at least, and I wanted people who were from all range of Jewish observance, from the most observant orthodox to totally secular. I wanted non Jews, and I wanted non white people, and I wanted people from all different parts of the neighborhood and the adjacent neighborhoods. But at a certain point, certain characters began to seem really, really interesting, and they seem to for whatever reason, they seemed to be on journeys that would be interesting to readers. Right, how did these institutions school, synagogue, public high school, supermarket, the Giant Eagle market is where everyone sees everyone in Squirrel Hill, the Giant Eagle on Murray Avenue. So how do all these institutions bring people together to make meaning and care for each other in the aftermath of something really terrible? And some characters did end up encapsulating certain answers to that better than other characters. So there are people I began to go back and reinterview. Has anything really surprised you in terms of the overall picture of how does a community bounce back? I mean, it is the kind of thing where you must have had an instinct at first about what you expected. You spend a lot of time in communities and Jewish communities and urban communities. You have, as it were, a general sociological theory of how these communities do their thing. Right. Is there something that you found that really blew you away in terms of surprise? I mean, you could not be surprised and so write a spectacular book, but surprise would be interesting from their perspective of the listener, I think, sure, we all know that life snaps back to normal pretty fast, but it's still is really surprising to see. And I think this is a good thing. It speaks to people's resilience, but it is a little surprising to see how normal stuff begins to feel again for most people very shortly after something terrible has happened. Now, this is something that's culturally conditioned, right. So in Israel, for example, when there's a bombing at a cafe in the morning, they sweep up the debris and they try to get back in and open for dinner, because that's how they have to be as a culture, because there's been so much terrorism in their past. And you see that a lot in war zones that people can claw back a semblance of normalcy really really fast. And then the American tradition is much more that we like memorializing things, and we tend to hold onto our grief as almost a comfort a bit longer. And you saw both impulses in Pittsburgh. So for many many people, life returned to something seeming very normal, very quickly, especially if they didn't know someone who was killed. Now, look, eleven people out of the twenty two people inside the building were shot dead and two of the other eleven survivors were wounded. Everyone knew somebody whom this touched on, right, But if you were a little bit removed from it, if you didn't have a close friend or relative who died or was inside the building, if you were one or two degrees of separation out, for a lot of those people, life snapped back to normal very fast. For some of them, actually, the guilt of not having been at synagogue that day plagued them forevermore. We'll be right back. This is a really fascinating angle that you're pointing out in you mentioned the American tendency to sit with our grief and memorialize, and you mentioned the sort of Israeli approach which tends to be let's try to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, partly for the eological reason that Design as Project is committed to the idea of bouncing back and achieving normalcy. This was, after all, a movement that began with the goal of becoming a quote unquote normal people, whatever that exactly was supposed to mean. But there's another option, which is that if you're in a place which has been seriously war torn or seriously affected by terrorism, much more consistently than even than Israel has been, you do get circumstances of repetitive trauma. There are communities that become just genuinely traumatized. And the option that you were describing the sort of hybrid of the American in the Israeli it sort of depends on being a community that doesn't think of itself as in danger for its very survival or in danger for its very existence, or at least that would be my hypothesis. I mean, it's a it's a kind of luxury to be able to bounce back and think this isn't going to happen again next week or next month. You know, I'm scared, I'm upset, but I know that rationally we can, we can get back to life being normal. And I want to just first ask you, do you buy this hypothesis that in a way, it's a kind of a privilege for a community to be able to say we're bouncing back from a terrible tragedy like this one. I do buy that hypothesis. I do think that it's a privilege and it speaks to their sense that they can still be the ideal American Jewish neighborhood again, which entails not being a victim again anytime soon. I did talk to a couple of people for whom the synagogue attack in Powe in southern California, which was six months after the attack on Tree of Life, I don't want to say even worse, but it was more painful for them because there was a way in which these couple people whom I interviewed had sort of bracketed Tree of Life as this one time, horrible exception that was devastating but also an outlier, a total outlier. And if there was another attack, and of course in powwe what one person died or two people died, but not eleven, So that felt like, oh, here's a second one, a second attack on a synagogue, and then of course we have this sort of ongoing low level program in certain Jewish neighborhood New York City of people being punched in the face and attacked more frequently. So I think that you're right that the sense that we're back to normal once it begins to feel a little bit shaky because other things start happening, then that's a whole kind of re injury of people who thought that maybe they would be going on pretty well. So that's a good segue into the next question that I want to ask you. In the topic I want to focus on now, there are lots of people in the American Jewish community now who feel that the Tree of Life attack was just one in a broader succession of violent attacks that they see as constituting a significant trend of anti Semitic violence, and that they associate, among other things, with the rise of anti Semitism in association with Donald Trump's presidency. I am to say, honestly, mildly skeptical of the narrative of a big, new, significant trend that will fundamentally change the perspective of American Jews, but I also am open to being proven wrong. About that. So let me start by just asking you where you stand on that. Do you think of Tree of Life as you know, one of a growing number of anti semitic attacks, or do you think of it as to some significant degree an outlier not only because of its severity, but because we haven't seen an attack of exactly this type since well, look, in some ways, the big anti semitic attack, the eleven person shooting, like for example, mass shootings across the United States, is always going to be an outlier, thank god, right, I mean, when you're a country of over three hundred million people, the eleven people shot here, or even the fifty or however many mass shooting since nineteen ninety nine affect a number of people that is pretty close to zero statistically, right, So that's inshack, Mark, I mean, that is true. Of course, you're absolutely right about that. Right. Nevertheless, one would look since nineteen ninety nine and say, for example, school shootings or even more broadly, institutional shootings are now a familiar part of American life. There's a script. We're familiar with it. And that's not only from the perspective of observers or victims. It's also presumably from the perspective of shooters. We even have a terminology that goes with it. You know, we all know what the words active shooter means. You know, my kids know the words active shooter because they have active shooter drills in their school. This did not exist when you and I were kids. So there is a there is certainly a trend line there at the broadest level. It's a real thing. It's a real thing, right. I was just I wanted to bracket it by saying that in some ways I was agreeing with you that I think I was agreeing with you in that there is a way in which the panic that all of a sudden we're in this new age of widespread anti semitism and anti Semitic or white nationalist violence or anti Semitic violence from the left or the right, that we have to be very careful where we look for evidence for that, because the fact is not that many Jews, not that many school children statistically speaking, have been victim however, right, However, I actually don't think that's the most interesting way to think about it, or the most useful way to think about it. I go back to my old undergraduate teacher, Paula Hyman, the great historian of French jew of French Jewry, and of women in Judaism, who said to us in class one day, she said, one thing that's historically been true of anti Semitism is that in the society's word exists, it seems always to be cyclical, that it rises and falls and returns again, which is not a pattern that you see as much with other forms of bigotry, which some societies put to bed forever, or they rise occasionally, but basically they are blips when they rise or blips when they fall. But anti Semitism has a very sine wave like recurrence in the places where it exists, in England, France, America, also East Asia. It responds. It tends to flare up in times of stress, but it also tends to flare up somewhat randomly. And what she said to us, and this would have been in nineteen ninety five, we are at a low ebb for antisemitism. That's great, it's great to live through a low ebb. It will be back. And I think she was right, and she didn't have a great explanation for it. By the way, I don't think she had a well worked out theory. What she said is it will be back and then it will receive again. That is the nature of anti semitism. I think that's true. I think the tide has come in again for anti semitism, and it has various forms, but it has a kind of cultural currency right now for people who are inclined toward hatred or bigotry or ethnic chauvinism that it didn't have twenty years ago, and that I don't think it will have twenty five years from now, right So that will then take many forms, And one of the forms for some people is a kind of white nationalist eliminationist antisemitism where they want to kill us. And for some and this is a little bit trickier, but I think just as important, it will take the form of an indifference or a downplaying of the people who want to kill us. I have so many questions that I want to ask you in connection with this. Let's start with the hypothesis that we're in an uptick or a return of the cycle of antisemitism. Isn't it at least that the quantum of anti semitism out there hasn't really changed since nineteen ninety five, But that because of social media, our consciousness of it and its capacity to make itself known has substantially risen. So it does seem to me at least possible that what we're experiencing as a rise in the tide may in fact be a greater degree of awareness of what's been out there the whole time. And I think that might even be true. But that's conceivably also the explanation for the attacks on Orthodox and ultra Orthodox Jews, Hiredi Jews in the New York area. I think it's entirely possible that these attacks have gone on all the time, but we're not necessarily being conceived of as distinctively anti Semitic. We're not being reported in the same way, we're not being incorporated into a narrative, and weren't being discussed on social media and in other places in the same way that they are now. I'm just suggesting it's a possibility that seems consistent with the evidence. No, I think that's wrong. I mean, right, we never we never know for sure what goes unreported. But the idea that that has that the level of anti Semitic violence we've seen going on in New York City is nothing new, but simply this year got much more noticed. I don't think it's true. And what's more, I don't think the people in those communities think that it's true. That doesn't mean they're right. People can perceive that they're more endangered than they are and be wrong about it, but I don't think they're wrong. I mean again, I actually think statistically speaking, it's still close to nil. So we're kind of talking about are their cultural vibes that we can't pick that we can't reduce to statistics and possibly not, Possibly this is all just noise because you know, numbers wise, people still feel pretty safe. But the other thing I want to get to is your first question, which is to what extent is social media amplifying the general perception of anti Semitism. Well, social media amplifies everything, and one reason I don't like it, one reason I'm not on it is I think that I tend to do bad stuff. I'm like, I tend to amplify my worst thoughts when I'm on social media, and I think that it gives me bad information when I use it to get information. So of course that's true. I think all we can say to that is that there are people who do try to collect data and have tried to collec data since before the days of social media on attacks and on hate crimes, and the definition of hate crime has changed, as you know, there's a legal regime around what's a hate crime and what's not. But certainly, if you look at say the last ten years, when we've had, if not reasonably good data, at least reasonably assiduously collected data by people trying to do their best, both the FBI and the Anti Defamation League would show that there's been a pretty strong uptick in anti Semiticate crimes. That could be something as simple as a swastika being painted somewhere by people who might not even know the meaning right, but that could still make Jews feel unsafe. But also, and this is really really important, Jews right now, of all religious groups, are and have continued to be the most victimized in hate crime. Jews are pretty regularly not only the most victimized in absolute numbers, but also, given our tiny percentage of the population, the most likely to be victimized by some sort of hate crime. So we can quarrel with how those numbers are counted and all that, But to the extent we've tried to get data on it. The data really does support that we are in a moment where anti Semitism is relatively bad historically speaking. We'll be right back. You make an extremely persuasive case, so let me just concede it and then ask why. Ask the why question. Do you have a pet theory of why? And if so, is it connected to Trump or to the rise of populism globally? Because it's also worth mentioning that the rise in anti Semitic incidents is not merely in the United States, but it is also measured globally. Well. The answer to that question depends on how far back we want to go. Right, we could ask why anti Semitism always with us? And there's some pretty compelling theories that I think generally have to do. And here I think the historian Yuri sles Kind has written very intelligently about this, with the Jews, like some other groups of people, being kind of itinerant cosmopolitan merchants who have lived in many many countries throughout world history but have not always seen themselves as being of that particular country, but more importantly, have not been seen by the residents of those countries as being native to that country. And this has had to do with Jews having our own language, having Lingua Francas that native peoples don't understand. And of course it's also been amplified by the anti Semitism of both the Christian tradition and the Muslim tradition right, both of which have anti Semitic strains in them that many, many, many of the current adherents really have tried to downplay, but that still are there. So there are reasons why why anti Semitism is always with us historically and seems to be in more societies than you would think, including those that have had very very few The theory of Jews as the cosmopolitan other doesn't fit the United States very well because Jews in the United States, it does, from a very early period learn to speak English and integrated into a wide range of professions. I mean the other, the sort of deep, the deep origins theory of anti Semitism that focuses on religious origins. I think it's very plausible at a kind of grand scale explanation, but it doesn't work as well at the micro level to explain why now as opposed to another time, And you mentioned Paula Hyman's theory, which suggested at least that it's actually random walk. You know, it goes up and it goes down. And if we think that the going up now has something to do with current circumstances. And one hears a lot of Jews on the left saying it's because of Trump, and one hears a lot of Jews on the right saying to the contrary, the Trump is the most pro Jewish president the United States has ever had, and they are often conflating their conception of what counts as pro Israel with what they think of as pro Jewish. But nevertheless, that is a view that one here frequently. So do you have a view on this particular debate that I think is roiling in the American Jewish community today? And let me add, by the way, that you are right that that deep origins theory doesn't always work particularly well, or the deep origins economic theory doesn't always work particularly well in the United States, and that there are other micro theories that account for a lot more of it so or that may account for a lot more of it. So, for example, Jews, historic economic success makes us targets when the economy seems uncertain or in times of turmoil and stress. So there are a lot of pieces at play there. To answer a question about the contemporary scene, I think it's useful to point out that the nineteen nineties, when we were really in a beautiful era of just low levels of jew hatred of Judeopathy, as some say, was coming at the end of a period which was really a golden era for American ethnicities and micro communities and subcultures. Right. So after World War Two, most of the barriers fell to Italians and Holes and German Lutherans and Jews and all sorts of people, white people who presented as white, I should add, who wanted to move out of cities into suburbs, who wanted to begin attending elite universities, who wanted to run for office. It's not that prejudice disappeared, but things got immeasurably better than they had been, say before World War Two, or especially in the World War One, errand before when there was a lot more nativism, right, and these were groups that were now speaking English and so forth. So we were coming off a half century of really really good times for Jews and many other white looking ethnic groups. Right. But what's happening now is that a lot of those Jews who were the beneficiaries of that don't necessarily identify as Jewish anymore for various reasons having to do with lower levels of practice, or their children don't identify as Jewish, and so forth and so on, And an increasing number of the people who publicly present as Jewish are what they call ultra Orthodox, although it's a term many people in those communities don't like because they think the ultra prefix seems demeaning. People in that trust would prefer the term Haredi, their preferred chirey, right exactly. So Haredi Jews, well, that's a community that's growing enormously, right. You can go to a Haredi town like Lakewood, New Jersey, and they're opening one or two elementary schools every year, like they just keep batting people. And these are towns that are going to be doubling in size every several decades. The neighborhoods of Brooklyn that we're containing Satmar and Lebovitch or Jews and are not big enough for them anymore, which is one reason that they have outpost in places like Jersey City. So I think that one of the things going on is we are at a stress point where the what you might call highly Americanized Jews are a rapidly shrinking portion of not only of the Jewish community, but what if people perceived to be the Jewish community and people who are associated with Orthodoxy, which has more which has different folk ways, which is often more at odds for various cultural reasons with other minority groups, and which includes, by the way, the President's daughter and son in law, they would say, is a growing proportion of American Jewelry. And that is going to cause some stress. It's also conscinating that it's costing theory, Mark, and I have never heard anybody make this argument before. I mean, I think this may be completely original to you, and if I understand it correctly, it's that the visibility of Haredi Jews, coupled with the increasing invisibility in some sense of Jews who are not self identifying by their dress and necessarily by the neighborhood in which they live as Jews, creates a kind of frictional or flash point. Yeah. But the other thing I want to add is that it's not just that the Heredi Jews are becoming a more visible portion of it. It's also that on the left, as you are, I don't like those sort of binaries, but say the left end of American Jewelry, you have people who have become so as assimilated and so and feel so disconnected from the Heredi Jews who are bearing the brunt of a lot of these anti Semitic attacks that they aren't necessarily standing up for them. So, in other words, the gulf between an Upper west Side liberal Jew or an Upper east Side moneyed Jew and a black hatted Haredi Jew and his wife and children in Brooklyn is extremely great now, not just in terms of money and culture, but I also think in terms of fellow feeling and compassion. Just the gulf seems to be very, very big. I also want to point out one more thing, which is, you know, people talk about, well, you know, Joe Lieberman was almost vice president and it's what a great time to be modern Orthodox. There is almost no photograph on Google images of Joe Lieberman wearing a Yamica. You can find more photographs of Barack Obama wearing a Yamica than Joe Lieberman. And it is not at all clear to me that even in America, which I think has been very good for the Jews, and there's no other country I want to live in, it's not clear to me that a really jewey presenting Jew could be a senator from an overwhelmingly gentile state like Connecticut, like put on a Yamica. And I don't know that Lieberman is anyone you ever would have heard of, because I do think that that sense of cultural difference and well, he doesn't look like the rest of us would kick in pretty fast for a lot of people. It's a fascinating question to Complexif one would want to ask, hypothetically, let's imagine it were a very evangelically oriented state and it was a modern Orthodox Jew and close ties to the evangelical community, I wonder I think it's a it's a very hard question, but a fascinating one. Mark. I really want to thank you, and I also just want to say personally that the fact that you're writing a book that is focused on recovery and on the capacity of the Jewish community to be resilient, to me, says a lot about what I think of as the correct response to antisemitism and to tragedy. Not to spend all of our time obsessing over that question, although we've just talked about it a lot, which is great, But to be aware also that Jews living and existing and forming life and shaping life is what has always kept the Jewish community alive and will keep the Jewish community alive no matter if antisemitism continues to exist or to rise and fall or not. So thank you for that focus. And I'm dying to read the book when it comes out. And thanks for taking us a little bit behind the scenes into your process. It's been such a pleasure. Thanks Noah. Deep background is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Our producer is Mola Board, our engineer is Ben Talliday, and our showrunner is Sophie Crane mckibbon. Editorial support from noahm Osband. Theme music by Luis Gara at Pushkin. Thanks to Mia Lobell, Julia Barton, Lydia Jeancott, Heather Faine, Carlie Migliori, Maggie Taylor, Eric Sandler, and Jacob Weisberg. You can find me on Twitter at Noah R. Feldman. I also write a column for Bloomberg Opinion, which you can find at Bloomberg dot com. Slash felt to discover Bloomberg's originals. Later podcasts go to bloomberg dot com slash podcasts, and if you like what you've heard today, please write a review or tell a friend. This is deep background

Bushkin. Hi, I'm Moe, the producer of Deep Background. You're probably wondering why you're hearing from me. Well, Noah woke up this morning with laryngitis. Don't worry, he's fine. He just lost his voice. Today's episode of Deep Background is with Mark Oppenheimer. Mark is a fantastic writer and journalist who spent the last few years documenting the recovery of Pittsburgh's Squirrel Hill neighborhood. Squirrel Hill is a historic Jewish neighborhood and was the site of the Tree of Life Synagogue shooting in twenty eighteen. Oppenheimer's upcoming book is called Squirrel Hill, The Tree of Life Synagogue Shooting and the Soul of a Neighborhood, and it comes out next Tuesday, October fifth. This episode is a really great one, and I know it's close to Noah's hard The interview was taped a while back, so I'll let Noah take it from here. Mark, thank you so much for being here. I admire all the different kinds of work that you do. I think of you as a public intellectual on religion and a reporter and a memorist of no mean talents. But the thing I really wanted to talk about today grew out of my fascination when I heard that in the aftermath of the October twenty eighteen shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh, that you responded by diving into the life of Squirrel Hill and that you're actually in the process of writing a book about the Jewish community there and it's healing. And I thought, what an extraordinary opportunity to talk to a chronicler of contemporary American Jewish religious life about something while he's actually doing it in real time. So tell me first, what gave you the instinct to get on a plane and go to Pittsburgh. Yes, thanks for having me on. It's an honor, and I'm a fan of the show, so it's great to be in conversation with you, and I really admire your work and thank you for having me on. My father grew up in Squirrel Hill, and so did his father and his grandfather, and my family goes back in Pittsburgh into the eighteen forties when my great great great grandfather, Wilhelm or William Frank, was one of four Jews who got together to a choir land for the first cemetery, the first Jewish cemetery in Pittsburgh. And for Jews, you know, one of the first things you build in addition to a ritual bath is a cemetery. If if you're staying, putting down roots, and you're staying in a particular community, you need a burial ground. So there were four Jews who in eighteen forty seven acquired land for the first Jewish burial ground in Pittsburgh. And as I say, my great great great grandfather was among those. That's genuinely fascinating its own right. I didn't know you came from that particular slice of American Jewish life. You know, I've always been fascinated by Squirrel Hill, and I'm really interested to hear that your family is actually from there. I have had just a large number of friends, teachers, and mentors who all grew up in Squirrel Hill in the sixties and seventies who have sort of become incredibly prominent intellectuals. My colleague Joseph Kerner, who's one of the leading artist darians in the world. My colleague Bill Rubinstein, who's one of the founders of the study of gainus in the law, Evan Wolfson, who ran the Marriage Project for many years pushing gay marriage, Harry Littman, who went on to become a US attorney for Pittsburgh. And they all grew up in Squirrel Hill. They all went to the same high school, they had the same high school English teacher. Your gut is correct that Squirrel Hill is something special, and it has been Jewish longer, I think it's safe to say, than any other American Jewish neighborhood. So Jews, like other human beings, and like Americans in particular, like moving from place to place. You know, We're always looking for the next frontier. And so most Jewish communities turn over after thirty or forty or fifty years. The Jews in the neighborhood moves more else, and another immigrant group or another upwardly mobile group or downwardly mobile sometimes moves into wherever the Jews were. Squirrel Hill has been a real exception to that rule. It's never been majority Jewish. It likely peaked at forty or forty five percent Jewish, but it has been substantially Jewish since World War One, so one hundred years exactly, and it is still the case that that about fifty percent of the Jews in metropolitan Pittsburgh live either in Squirrel Hill or in one of the adjacent neighborhoods in the East End of Pittsburgh within the city limits. So that's also to say that, unlike the Jews of Boston or Chicago, the Jews of Pittsburgh did not become an overwhelmingly suburban people. Half of the Jews are still within the city limits, centered around the Squirrel Hill neighborhood. So it's a very very interesting place in American and world Jewish history. So Mark, one of the things that I'm trying to do on this podcast is enable people who don't, for example, write books, to get a glimpse behind the scenes, not just talk about the book as a finished artifact, which we all like to do, but also to find out about the process. So I want you to lift the veil for us a little bit. You go to Squirrel Hill, it's after the horrible attack. What do you do on a daily basis when you're there? How do you go about creating a network of people whom do you talk to? Like, what do you actually do every day? Okay, I'm so glad you asked about that, because I think it's really important to demystify the process that journalists and writers go through when they research and when they write. For me. In this case, it began with asking a couple of people who I knew were from the neighborhood, who are the Jews who know everybody else? And who are the people who who will be happy to talk about it? Right? Like, who are the local the mayors of Squirrel Hill? Right? Interestingly, this is terribly, terribly sad. Two of the mayors of Squirrel Hill were the mentally disabled brothers who were murder Cecil and David Rosenthal, who really did walk around Squirrel Hill and pop in at storefronts and at the fire station. They knew everybody. But I was given some very good tips, and the same names kept coming up over and over again. You should talk to this person or this person. So I began with a list of about a dozen people, and I started flying to Squirrel Hill about once a week. I would either fly out of Logan Airport in Boston or LaGuardia Airport in New York City, and I would fly very early in the morning at six am, pick up a car, drive into Squirrel Hill, fighting the morning traffic into the city and get to the neighborhood around nine am, and then I would try to talk to five or six people. You were really doing these marathon days. You must have been getting up at three o'clock in the morning. That's right. I was doing eighteen hour days. And I did this thirty one times in sixteen months. And my wife was heroic and very supportive about saying this does seem like an important project. But the deal that I made with her, and I think just as important with myself, was that I was going to think of myself as not being a dad or a husband one day a week, so typically Wednesday or Thursday, I just didn't exist. And you know, we paid some extra for babysitting, and my parents helped out some who live in western Massachusetts, and my wife worked harder on those days and held it all together with the kids. But by the time everyone woke up the next morning, I was back home. And so the question I went to Pittsburgh with was how does a tight knit Jewish neighborhood come together in the aftermath of tragedy. So I did have a sense that I wanted to get a couple hundred interviews at least, and I wanted people who were from all range of Jewish observance, from the most observant orthodox to totally secular. I wanted non Jews, and I wanted non white people, and I wanted people from all different parts of the neighborhood and the adjacent neighborhoods. But at a certain point, certain characters began to seem really, really interesting, and they seem to for whatever reason, they seemed to be on journeys that would be interesting to readers. Right, how did these institutions school, synagogue, public high school, supermarket, the Giant Eagle market is where everyone sees everyone in Squirrel Hill, the Giant Eagle on Murray Avenue. So how do all these institutions bring people together to make meaning and care for each other in the aftermath of something really terrible? And some characters did end up encapsulating certain answers to that better than other characters. So there are people I began to go back and reinterview. Has anything really surprised you in terms of the overall picture of how does a community bounce back? I mean, it is the kind of thing where you must have had an instinct at first about what you expected. You spend a lot of time in communities and Jewish communities and urban communities. You have, as it were, a general sociological theory of how these communities do their thing. Right. Is there something that you found that really blew you away in terms of surprise? I mean, you could not be surprised and so write a spectacular book, but surprise would be interesting from their perspective of the listener, I think, sure, we all know that life snaps back to normal pretty fast, but it's still is really surprising to see. And I think this is a good thing. It speaks to people's resilience, but it is a little surprising to see how normal stuff begins to feel again for most people very shortly after something terrible has happened. Now, this is something that's culturally conditioned, right. So in Israel, for example, when there's a bombing at a cafe in the morning, they sweep up the debris and they try to get back in and open for dinner, because that's how they have to be as a culture, because there's been so much terrorism in their past. And you see that a lot in war zones that people can claw back a semblance of normalcy really really fast. And then the American tradition is much more that we like memorializing things, and we tend to hold onto our grief as almost a comfort a bit longer. And you saw both impulses in Pittsburgh. So for many many people, life returned to something seeming very normal, very quickly, especially if they didn't know someone who was killed. Now, look, eleven people out of the twenty two people inside the building were shot dead and two of the other eleven survivors were wounded. Everyone knew somebody whom this touched on, right, But if you were a little bit removed from it, if you didn't have a close friend or relative who died or was inside the building, if you were one or two degrees of separation out, for a lot of those people, life snapped back to normal very fast. For some of them, actually, the guilt of not having been at synagogue that day plagued them forevermore. We'll be right back. This is a really fascinating angle that you're pointing out in you mentioned the American tendency to sit with our grief and memorialize, and you mentioned the sort of Israeli approach which tends to be let's try to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, partly for the eological reason that Design as Project is committed to the idea of bouncing back and achieving normalcy. This was, after all, a movement that began with the goal of becoming a quote unquote normal people, whatever that exactly was supposed to mean. But there's another option, which is that if you're in a place which has been seriously war torn or seriously affected by terrorism, much more consistently than even than Israel has been, you do get circumstances of repetitive trauma. There are communities that become just genuinely traumatized. And the option that you were describing the sort of hybrid of the American in the Israeli it sort of depends on being a community that doesn't think of itself as in danger for its very survival or in danger for its very existence, or at least that would be my hypothesis. I mean, it's a it's a kind of luxury to be able to bounce back and think this isn't going to happen again next week or next month. You know, I'm scared, I'm upset, but I know that rationally we can, we can get back to life being normal. And I want to just first ask you, do you buy this hypothesis that in a way, it's a kind of a privilege for a community to be able to say we're bouncing back from a terrible tragedy like this one. I do buy that hypothesis. I do think that it's a privilege and it speaks to their sense that they can still be the ideal American Jewish neighborhood again, which entails not being a victim again anytime soon. I did talk to a couple of people for whom the synagogue attack in Powe in southern California, which was six months after the attack on Tree of Life, I don't want to say even worse, but it was more painful for them because there was a way in which these couple people whom I interviewed had sort of bracketed Tree of Life as this one time, horrible exception that was devastating but also an outlier, a total outlier. And if there was another attack, and of course in powwe what one person died or two people died, but not eleven, So that felt like, oh, here's a second one, a second attack on a synagogue, and then of course we have this sort of ongoing low level program in certain Jewish neighborhood New York City of people being punched in the face and attacked more frequently. So I think that you're right that the sense that we're back to normal once it begins to feel a little bit shaky because other things start happening, then that's a whole kind of re injury of people who thought that maybe they would be going on pretty well. So that's a good segue into the next question that I want to ask you. In the topic I want to focus on now, there are lots of people in the American Jewish community now who feel that the Tree of Life attack was just one in a broader succession of violent attacks that they see as constituting a significant trend of anti Semitic violence, and that they associate, among other things, with the rise of anti Semitism in association with Donald Trump's presidency. I am to say, honestly, mildly skeptical of the narrative of a big, new, significant trend that will fundamentally change the perspective of American Jews, but I also am open to being proven wrong. About that. So let me start by just asking you where you stand on that. Do you think of Tree of Life as you know, one of a growing number of anti semitic attacks, or do you think of it as to some significant degree an outlier not only because of its severity, but because we haven't seen an attack of exactly this type since well, look, in some ways, the big anti semitic attack, the eleven person shooting, like for example, mass shootings across the United States, is always going to be an outlier, thank god, right, I mean, when you're a country of over three hundred million people, the eleven people shot here, or even the fifty or however many mass shooting since nineteen ninety nine affect a number of people that is pretty close to zero statistically, right, So that's inshack, Mark, I mean, that is true. Of course, you're absolutely right about that. Right. Nevertheless, one would look since nineteen ninety nine and say, for example, school shootings or even more broadly, institutional shootings are now a familiar part of American life. There's a script. We're familiar with it. And that's not only from the perspective of observers or victims. It's also presumably from the perspective of shooters. We even have a terminology that goes with it. You know, we all know what the words active shooter means. You know, my kids know the words active shooter because they have active shooter drills in their school. This did not exist when you and I were kids. So there is a there is certainly a trend line there at the broadest level. It's a real thing. It's a real thing, right. I was just I wanted to bracket it by saying that in some ways I was agreeing with you that I think I was agreeing with you in that there is a way in which the panic that all of a sudden we're in this new age of widespread anti semitism and anti Semitic or white nationalist violence or anti Semitic violence from the left or the right, that we have to be very careful where we look for evidence for that, because the fact is not that many Jews, not that many school children statistically speaking, have been victim however, right, However, I actually don't think that's the most interesting way to think about it, or the most useful way to think about it. I go back to my old undergraduate teacher, Paula Hyman, the great historian of French jew of French Jewry, and of women in Judaism, who said to us in class one day, she said, one thing that's historically been true of anti Semitism is that in the society's word exists, it seems always to be cyclical, that it rises and falls and returns again, which is not a pattern that you see as much with other forms of bigotry, which some societies put to bed forever, or they rise occasionally, but basically they are blips when they rise or blips when they fall. But anti Semitism has a very sine wave like recurrence in the places where it exists, in England, France, America, also East Asia. It responds. It tends to flare up in times of stress, but it also tends to flare up somewhat randomly. And what she said to us, and this would have been in nineteen ninety five, we are at a low ebb for antisemitism. That's great, it's great to live through a low ebb. It will be back. And I think she was right, and she didn't have a great explanation for it. By the way, I don't think she had a well worked out theory. What she said is it will be back and then it will receive again. That is the nature of anti semitism. I think that's true. I think the tide has come in again for anti semitism, and it has various forms, but it has a kind of cultural currency right now for people who are inclined toward hatred or bigotry or ethnic chauvinism that it didn't have twenty years ago, and that I don't think it will have twenty five years from now, right So that will then take many forms, And one of the forms for some people is a kind of white nationalist eliminationist antisemitism where they want to kill us. And for some and this is a little bit trickier, but I think just as important, it will take the form of an indifference or a downplaying of the people who want to kill us. I have so many questions that I want to ask you in connection with this. Let's start with the hypothesis that we're in an uptick or a return of the cycle of antisemitism. Isn't it at least that the quantum of anti semitism out there hasn't really changed since nineteen ninety five, But that because of social media, our consciousness of it and its capacity to make itself known has substantially risen. So it does seem to me at least possible that what we're experiencing as a rise in the tide may in fact be a greater degree of awareness of what's been out there the whole time. And I think that might even be true. But that's conceivably also the explanation for the attacks on Orthodox and ultra Orthodox Jews, Hiredi Jews in the New York area. I think it's entirely possible that these attacks have gone on all the time, but we're not necessarily being conceived of as distinctively anti Semitic. We're not being reported in the same way, we're not being incorporated into a narrative, and weren't being discussed on social media and in other places in the same way that they are now. I'm just suggesting it's a possibility that seems consistent with the evidence. No, I think that's wrong. I mean, right, we never we never know for sure what goes unreported. But the idea that that has that the level of anti Semitic violence we've seen going on in New York City is nothing new, but simply this year got much more noticed. I don't think it's true. And what's more, I don't think the people in those communities think that it's true. That doesn't mean they're right. People can perceive that they're more endangered than they are and be wrong about it, but I don't think they're wrong. I mean again, I actually think statistically speaking, it's still close to nil. So we're kind of talking about are their cultural vibes that we can't pick that we can't reduce to statistics and possibly not, Possibly this is all just noise because you know, numbers wise, people still feel pretty safe. But the other thing I want to get to is your first question, which is to what extent is social media amplifying the general perception of anti Semitism. Well, social media amplifies everything, and one reason I don't like it, one reason I'm not on it is I think that I tend to do bad stuff. I'm like, I tend to amplify my worst thoughts when I'm on social media, and I think that it gives me bad information when I use it to get information. So of course that's true. I think all we can say to that is that there are people who do try to collect data and have tried to collec data since before the days of social media on attacks and on hate crimes, and the definition of hate crime has changed, as you know, there's a legal regime around what's a hate crime and what's not. But certainly, if you look at say the last ten years, when we've had, if not reasonably good data, at least reasonably assiduously collected data by people trying to do their best, both the FBI and the Anti Defamation League would show that there's been a pretty strong uptick in anti Semiticate crimes. That could be something as simple as a swastika being painted somewhere by people who might not even know the meaning right, but that could still make Jews feel unsafe. But also, and this is really really important, Jews right now, of all religious groups, are and have continued to be the most victimized in hate crime. Jews are pretty regularly not only the most victimized in absolute numbers, but also, given our tiny percentage of the population, the most likely to be victimized by some sort of hate crime. So we can quarrel with how those numbers are counted and all that, But to the extent we've tried to get data on it. The data really does support that we are in a moment where anti Semitism is relatively bad historically speaking. We'll be right back. You make an extremely persuasive case, so let me just concede it and then ask why. Ask the why question. Do you have a pet theory of why? And if so, is it connected to Trump or to the rise of populism globally? Because it's also worth mentioning that the rise in anti Semitic incidents is not merely in the United States, but it is also measured globally. Well. The answer to that question depends on how far back we want to go. Right, we could ask why anti Semitism always with us? And there's some pretty compelling theories that I think generally have to do. And here I think the historian Yuri sles Kind has written very intelligently about this, with the Jews, like some other groups of people, being kind of itinerant cosmopolitan merchants who have lived in many many countries throughout world history but have not always seen themselves as being of that particular country, but more importantly, have not been seen by the residents of those countries as being native to that country. And this has had to do with Jews having our own language, having Lingua Francas that native peoples don't understand. And of course it's also been amplified by the anti Semitism of both the Christian tradition and the Muslim tradition right, both of which have anti Semitic strains in them that many, many, many of the current adherents really have tried to downplay, but that still are there. So there are reasons why why anti Semitism is always with us historically and seems to be in more societies than you would think, including those that have had very very few The theory of Jews as the cosmopolitan other doesn't fit the United States very well because Jews in the United States, it does, from a very early period learn to speak English and integrated into a wide range of professions. I mean the other, the sort of deep, the deep origins theory of anti Semitism that focuses on religious origins. I think it's very plausible at a kind of grand scale explanation, but it doesn't work as well at the micro level to explain why now as opposed to another time, And you mentioned Paula Hyman's theory, which suggested at least that it's actually random walk. You know, it goes up and it goes down. And if we think that the going up now has something to do with current circumstances. And one hears a lot of Jews on the left saying it's because of Trump, and one hears a lot of Jews on the right saying to the contrary, the Trump is the most pro Jewish president the United States has ever had, and they are often conflating their conception of what counts as pro Israel with what they think of as pro Jewish. But nevertheless, that is a view that one here frequently. So do you have a view on this particular debate that I think is roiling in the American Jewish community today? And let me add, by the way, that you are right that that deep origins theory doesn't always work particularly well, or the deep origins economic theory doesn't always work particularly well in the United States, and that there are other micro theories that account for a lot more of it so or that may account for a lot more of it. So, for example, Jews, historic economic success makes us targets when the economy seems uncertain or in times of turmoil and stress. So there are a lot of pieces at play there. To answer a question about the contemporary scene, I think it's useful to point out that the nineteen nineties, when we were really in a beautiful era of just low levels of jew hatred of Judeopathy, as some say, was coming at the end of a period which was really a golden era for American ethnicities and micro communities and subcultures. Right. So after World War Two, most of the barriers fell to Italians and Holes and German Lutherans and Jews and all sorts of people, white people who presented as white, I should add, who wanted to move out of cities into suburbs, who wanted to begin attending elite universities, who wanted to run for office. It's not that prejudice disappeared, but things got immeasurably better than they had been, say before World War Two, or especially in the World War One, errand before when there was a lot more nativism, right, and these were groups that were now speaking English and so forth. So we were coming off a half century of really really good times for Jews and many other white looking ethnic groups. Right. But what's happening now is that a lot of those Jews who were the beneficiaries of that don't necessarily identify as Jewish anymore for various reasons having to do with lower levels of practice, or their children don't identify as Jewish, and so forth and so on, And an increasing number of the people who publicly present as Jewish are what they call ultra Orthodox, although it's a term many people in those communities don't like because they think the ultra prefix seems demeaning. People in that trust would prefer the term Haredi, their preferred chirey, right exactly. So Haredi Jews, well, that's a community that's growing enormously, right. You can go to a Haredi town like Lakewood, New Jersey, and they're opening one or two elementary schools every year, like they just keep batting people. And these are towns that are going to be doubling in size every several decades. The neighborhoods of Brooklyn that we're containing Satmar and Lebovitch or Jews and are not big enough for them anymore, which is one reason that they have outpost in places like Jersey City. So I think that one of the things going on is we are at a stress point where the what you might call highly Americanized Jews are a rapidly shrinking portion of not only of the Jewish community, but what if people perceived to be the Jewish community and people who are associated with Orthodoxy, which has more which has different folk ways, which is often more at odds for various cultural reasons with other minority groups, and which includes, by the way, the President's daughter and son in law, they would say, is a growing proportion of American Jewelry. And that is going to cause some stress. It's also conscinating that it's costing theory, Mark, and I have never heard anybody make this argument before. I mean, I think this may be completely original to you, and if I understand it correctly, it's that the visibility of Haredi Jews, coupled with the increasing invisibility in some sense of Jews who are not self identifying by their dress and necessarily by the neighborhood in which they live as Jews, creates a kind of frictional or flash point. Yeah. But the other thing I want to add is that it's not just that the Heredi Jews are becoming a more visible portion of it. It's also that on the left, as you are, I don't like those sort of binaries, but say the left end of American Jewelry, you have people who have become so as assimilated and so and feel so disconnected from the Heredi Jews who are bearing the brunt of a lot of these anti Semitic attacks that they aren't necessarily standing up for them. So, in other words, the gulf between an Upper west Side liberal Jew or an Upper east Side moneyed Jew and a black hatted Haredi Jew and his wife and children in Brooklyn is extremely great now, not just in terms of money and culture, but I also think in terms of fellow feeling and compassion. Just the gulf seems to be very, very big. I also want to point out one more thing, which is, you know, people talk about, well, you know, Joe Lieberman was almost vice president and it's what a great time to be modern Orthodox. There is almost no photograph on Google images of Joe Lieberman wearing a Yamica. You can find more photographs of Barack Obama wearing a Yamica than Joe Lieberman. And it is not at all clear to me that even in America, which I think has been very good for the Jews, and there's no other country I want to live in, it's not clear to me that a really jewey presenting Jew could be a senator from an overwhelmingly gentile state like Connecticut, like put on a Yamica. And I don't know that Lieberman is anyone you ever would have heard of, because I do think that that sense of cultural difference and well, he doesn't look like the rest of us would kick in pretty fast for a lot of people. It's a fascinating question to Complexif one would want to ask, hypothetically, let's imagine it were a very evangelically oriented state and it was a modern Orthodox Jew and close ties to the evangelical community, I wonder I think it's a it's a very hard question, but a fascinating one. Mark. I really want to thank you, and I also just want to say personally that the fact that you're writing a book that is focused on recovery and on the capacity of the Jewish community to be resilient, to me, says a lot about what I think of as the correct response to antisemitism and to tragedy. Not to spend all of our time obsessing over that question, although we've just talked about it a lot, which is great, But to be aware also that Jews living and existing and forming life and shaping life is what has always kept the Jewish community alive and will keep the Jewish community alive no matter if antisemitism continues to exist or to rise and fall or not. So thank you for that focus. And I'm dying to read the book when it comes out. And thanks for taking us a little bit behind the scenes into your process. It's been such a pleasure. Thanks Noah. Deep background is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Our producer is Mola Board, our engineer is Ben Talliday, and our showrunner is Sophie Crane mckibbon. Editorial support from noahm Osband. Theme music by Luis Gara at Pushkin. Thanks to Mia Lobell, Julia Barton, Lydia Jeancott, Heather Faine, Carlie Migliori, Maggie Taylor, Eric Sandler, and Jacob Weisberg. You can find me on Twitter at Noah R. Feldman. I also write a column for Bloomberg Opinion, which you can find at Bloomberg dot com. Slash felt to discover Bloomberg's originals. Later podcasts go to bloomberg dot com slash podcasts, and if you like what you've heard today, please write a review or tell a friend. This is deep background