Gemma Birnbaum: All We Have Standing Between Us is made possible thanks to the generous support of the Knapp Family Foundation. Additional funding provided by the Leon Levy Foundation, the Achelis and Bodman Foundation, the Atran Foundation, and Anonymous.
Visit the companion exhibition in New York City, on view now at the Center for Jewish History, through 2026.
Archival Audio – Police Blatter
Multiple gunshots are heard from the lobby, possibly 20-30 shots. 5898 Wilkins Avenue, Tree of Life Synagogue. Several calls of persons sheltering in place within the structure. It sounded like from the calls that I was getting that as soon as he came into the lobby, he opened fire.
Gemma Birnbaum: On October 27, 2018, a gunman opened fire on congregants of the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Eleven Jews lost their lives in what would become the deadliest act of antisemitic violence in American history. In the days and weeks that followed, Americans of all faiths expressed their shock and sorrow at the horrifying event. How could a nation whose founding tenets promised equality and liberty birth such deep hatreds? And how could American Jews, after decades of campaigning for safety and security in the United States, meet their greatest challenges in the twenty-first century?
These violent hostilities surfaced after years of rising political polarization and antisemitic conspiracy theories, all nurtured within a climate of growing radicalism. As Jews wrestled with these forces of hate, they responded through civic engagement, coalition-building, and a firm commitment to racial and religious unity.
Welcome to All We Have Standing Between Us. I’m Gemma R. Birnbaum, executive director of the American Jewish Historical Society.
Today’s episode, Our Common Humanity, begins with an historic Presidential election.
Archival Audio – Katie Couric
CBS projects that Senator Barack Obama of Illinois will be the next President of the United States. No matter who you voted for, you’d have to agree this is an incredible milestone in the history of this country, a century and a half after the Constitution abolished slavery and guaranteed Blacks the right to vote, four decades after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, voters have chosen our first African American president.
Gavriel Rosenfeld: Like so many millions of other Americans, I saw it as a sign of breaking through a racial glass ceiling, or at least that was the way it was framed at the time. That was an election, of course, that took place against the backdrop of a global financial crisis, a crisis that had led the Republican Party’s reputation to have tanked essentially at that point.
Gemma Birnbaum: Gavriel Rosenfeld is President of the Center for Jewish History and Professor of History at Fairfield University.
Gavriel Rosenfeld: Barack Obama definitely benefited from that. But symbolically, of course, it was a sign of great progress in the larger sweep of American history.
Gemma Birnbaum: Barack Obama’s victory in the 2008 presidential election carried significant historical weight. As the first Black president, his triumph appeared to symbolize a more inclusive, transformative era of American politics, what some pundits even dubbed a ‘post-racial’ society. 78% of Jewish voters cast their ballots for the new president.
Pamela Nadell: The majority of Jews voted for Obama. It was seen as an extraordinary breakthrough.
Gemma Birnbaum: Pamela Nadell is the Chair in Women’s and Gender History and Director of Jewish Studies at American University.
Pamela Nadell: Because I’m in Washington, we always close on inauguration day. My university closes, and the schools close. I mean, you can’t move around the city. I remember the number of people who poured out in freezing, freezing cold, all ages, heading downtown.
Archival Audio – Obama’s Inaugural Address
Our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus — and non-believers. We cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass, that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve, that as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself.
Gemma Birnbaum: In his Inaugural Address, President Obama vowed to help bridge America’s racial divide, and to stem the growth of political tribalism that threatened to deepen such rifts. But those who had dreamed of a post-racial America received a rude awakening.
Gavriel Rosenfeld: There was tremendous racism that accompanied that electoral campaign. He didn’t have much time for a honeymoon phase because as Rush Limbaugh famously said, he didn’t wanna give him one second of peace before he started opposing everything, and the Republicans started opposing everything he was gonna advance legislatively.
The Tea Party came into existence to oppose Barack Obama’s presidency, which he took up in January of 2009. The whole idea of Tea Party political philosophy was small government, no spending, cut taxes, sort of a byproduct of the Reagan revolution. But it had a much more populist tinge.
Gemma Birnbaum: Conservative media pundits aligned with the Tea Party sometimes invoked anti-Semitic tropes. Radio and television personalities like Rush Limbaugh frequently attacked several prominent Jewish figures, including the philanthropist George Soros, castigating him as a shadowy, manipulative figure who used his wealth to dictate American politics. The issue of immigration was central to these conspiracy theories, with figures positing that Jewish elites controlled the Democratic Party’s stance.
Gavriel Rosenfeld: And so what it essentially did is put the Democratic Party in a position of being labeled as promoting amnesty for illegal immigrants, and that was something that many Tea Party Republicans went to town on because it allowed them to exploit the dissatisfaction among major parts of the American electorate against immigration, which as we know has its ebbs and flows as a hot button political issue over the course of many decades in American history.
Archival Audio – HIAS Rally
We’re concerned about policies that potentially are going to be adopted in our country that are not aligned either with our traditional commitments as Americans or as Jews. So we’re standing here to participate in our democratic process to raise our voice and to let people know that what Lady Liberty stands for, welcoming the refugees of the world, remains a hundred years later still our commitment.
Gemma Birnbaum: In June of 2012, the Obama administration announced DACA — Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals — to protect undocumented immigrants who are brought to the United States as children from deportation. The executive action followed years of intense debate regarding Latino migration to America. Conservative lawmakers promoted strict border security, and attributed job shortages, economic distress, and crime to immigrant communities.
Throughout the 2010s, thousands of Jewish citizens publicly weighed in on these issues in defense of vulnerable immigrant groups. HIAS, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, hosted rallies where concerned and impassioned Jews spoke out, continuing the organization’s tradition of advocating for refugees and immigrants.
Archival Audio – HIAS Rally
My great grandparents were Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe … I’m a descendant of immigrants, and we all matter … My mom was a refugee fleeing from Romania to Israel and she had a country that took her in, and everyone deserves a country to take them in.
We have an obligation to be here. As Jews, we know very clearly what happens when the gates are closed, the doors are closed, and America has always been a place to welcome the stranger.
Gemma Birnbaum: For many Jews, renewed debates over immigration and belonging echoed their own community’s history.
Pamela Nadell: I really would take it back to the 1890s. I would take it back to the creation of the Immigration Restriction League … Henry Cabot Lodge actually did a study that he published in a mainstream magazine in the United States where he was trying to measure the success in American society. This is in the early 1890s, and he finds that all of the leaders in business and industry and economy and intellectual fields, that he categorizes them by background and by state, and he’s from Massachusetts.
No surprise, the largest contingent of successful people who’ve contributed to American life come straight out of Massachusetts. But the idea is that these are the storied families, becomes the basis for fighting against immigration and calling for immigration restriction.
Archival Audio – Obama’s Speech on Immigration
Immigration’s always been an issue that inflames passions. That’s not surprising. There are a few things that are more important to us as a society than who gets to come here and call our country home.
When we talk about that in the abstract, it is easy sometimes for the discussion to take on a feeling of us versus them. And when that happens, a lot of folks forget that most of us used to be them. We forget that.
And it’s really important for us to remember history. Unless you’re one of the first Americans, a Native American, you came from some place else, somebody brought you.
Gemma Birnbaum: Amid these controversies and debates over immigration, Barack Obama defeated Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential election. Within a few short years, these nationwide disputes over demographic change multiplied when over one million refugees escaping war in the Middle East sought asylum elsewhere. Jewish organizations like HIAS made their stance clear.
Mark Hetfield, then-CEO of HIAS, testified before Congress in support of refugee aid.
Archival Audio – Mark Hetfield’s Testimony
We’ve been resettling refugees since 1881, not just because it makes us feel better but because it saves lives. Refugee resettlement has saved millions of lives since 1881, but not nearly enough. We’re confronting the world’s most horrific refugee crisis since World War II with 60 million displaced across the globe, 20% of whom are Syrian.
So far the United States’s response has been tepid at best … I mistakenly thought that attitudes and signs like ‘Irish need not apply,’ ‘no coloreds,’ ‘No Jews or dogs allowed,’ were ugly relics buried in the past but apparently not. Governors are clearly saying openly no Syrian Muslims are welcome in my state.
Gavriel Rosenfeld: American Jews and HIAS in particular stayed true to its traditional position of supporting a liberal policy towards immigration, supporting refugees and people in need. That of course put them in the crosshairs of those who were becoming increasingly militant about immigration being the first, second, and third order of business that they wanted to take care of once and for all.
Gemma Birnbaum: Rejecting the premise of a more racially and religiously diverse society, figures on the far-right exploited these domestic tensions, including several who openly touted the Great Replacement Theory, attempting to instill fear in white Americans that liberal elites, and in particular powerful Jews, were plotting to replace them with immigrants and refugees of color.
Pamela Nadell: The great replacement theory. We’ve got cartoons about it from the 1890s that are in the American Jewish Historical Society collection, where we see East European Jewish immigrants being chased out of Russia by the pogroms and by the tsar, coming into New York, which the cartoons show have been re-named New Jerusalem.
And who’s leaving New Jerusalem, but the storied American families like the Van Beekmans and the Schuylers, and they’re fleeing the city that the Jews have taken over.
Gemma Birnbaum: A century later, proponents of the Great Replacement Theory recast the roles of those involved. Jews were no longer the “replacers” arriving en masse, threatening to uproot white Protestant communities. Now, they were the orchestrators, responsible for ushering in legions of new Americans deemed unfit for citizenship.
Archival Audio – Unite the Right Rally
“Jews will not replace us! Jews will not replace us! Jews will not replace us!”
Gemma Birnbaum: In 2015, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and Republican nominee Donald Trump campaigned for the presidency. In June of that year, Trump debuted his new campaign slogan: Make America Great Again.
Gavriel Rosenfeld: MAGA is the Make America Great Again movement, which has been sort of the rank and file base of support for Donald Trump’s presidency, and his run for office in 2015. We could say perhaps that 25, 30% of the American electorate could be classified as diehard MAGAists. I would personally see MAGAism as an outgrowth in the short term of the Tea Party.
Gemma Birnbaum: Ultimately, Trump narrowly defeated Secretary Clinton. In the weeks that followed, civil rights organizations reported an increase in far right activity. “POST-ELECTION SPATE OF HATE CRIMES WORSE THAN POST 9/11,” reported USA Today in November of that year.
Pamela Nadell: It took the lid off of attacks on all minorities in American life. And what happened at Charlottesville was in August of 2017, there was a Unite the Right rally planned that drew together almost exclusively, but not, not only men, from neo-Nazi groups, from white supremacist groups, and the rally was planned for a Saturday.
On the Friday night before the rally took place, they marched across the campus of the University of Virginia, deliberately echoing the tiki torch parades of the Nazis of the 1930s. Their arms were outstretched in Nazi salutes. They carried torches and they chanted, “Jews will not replace us.”
Archival Audio – Unite the Right Counterprotesters
“No hate, no fear, white supremacy not welcome here! No hate, no fear, white supremacy not welcome here!”
Gemma Birnbaum: Nearly 2,000 counterprotesters also filled the streets of Charlottesville. When a white supremacist deliberately and fatally drove his vehicle into protester Heather Heyer, observers spoke of a new phase of American history, one characterized by domestic terrorism.
Archival Audio – Police Blatter
7-1 shots fired. Give me additional resources! Additional resources, third floor.
Archival Audio – Audrey Glickman
My name is Audrey Glickman, and I live in Greenfield, which is right next to Squirrel Hill.
Somewhere down the hall from us, we heard this crash. It sounded to us like a coat rack falling or a bunch of things falling down. We were afraid someone was hurt. I saw people from–my face is in my book, because you’re not supposed to look up from your book, but I saw from my peripheral vision, I saw people go out to see if they could help. A half a sentence later in the Kaddish, we heard gunfire down the hall. You could hear it ricocheting. It was machine gun fire. It was rapid, and it was clear what it was. It was echoing off the marble in the halls.
There was a woman screaming continually, just screaming, shouting and screaming about whatever. I don’t know what good that was doing. It wasn’t helping us, because we couldn’t hear what was going on. But we could hear the sirens. We knew the police had come. We could hear plenty of sirens. And we could still hear shooting.
Gemma Birnbaum: October 27, 2018. As a small group of congregants convened at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, a gunman opened fire. The killer, Robert Bowers, had participated in online extremist forums where racist and antisemitic propaganda flourished.
Pamela Nadell: His justification was that one of the congregations the week before, the Sabbath before, had commemorated the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, HIAS, as an organization which is an organization established at the end of the nineteenth century, originally to aid Jewish immigrants, which is an organization that has helped immigrants not only in the United States, but around the world.
In the week that followed when Pittsburgh turned out for 11 funerals, was the headline in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that read in Hebrew, “Yikadash v’yikadash sh’mei rabba,” the memorial prayer that Jews say for the dead. And it was an event that just shattered the community, shattered, I think, American Jews’ sense of their security.
Archival Audio – Audrey Glickman
The week following, the Shabbat service with all the congregations together that happened at Beth Shalom …
I asked, could I lead Pesukei d’Zimra again. The head of the religious services at Beth Shalom said yes, and that was good, and Rabbi Myers said yes, and Rabbi Adelson, my boss, said yes. They let me do that. Getting back up in front of–there were thirteen hundred people in that room. This is a room that I regularly walk in and I’m the only person in there, because it’s part of my job. To see that room full of people praying all together was, well, it was marvelous. It was not marvelous in one sense, and it was marvelous in another sense. I got to lead Pesukei d’Zimra. I almost didn’t make it through Kaddish d’Rabbanan, but once I did, every time since then I lead Kaddish d’Rabbanan, I have the memory, and then I get through the prayer. Every time we finish it, it’s another small accomplishment against the hatred.
Gemma Birnbaum: The Jewish community of Pittsburgh leaned on religious and cultural traditions, as well as interfaith solidarity to heal. Just days after the shooting, local Muslim organizations spearheaded a widely successful fundraising campaign to help support victims. Wasi Mohamed, Director of the Islamic Center of Pittsburgh, announced his community’s solidarity.
Archival Audio – Wasi Mohamed
We decided to do something for our Jewish brothers and sisters. We realize that it’s such a tragic time. That these are brothers and sisters. These are family. Money should not be an issue, that should not be a concern, paying for a funeral or paying for medical costs, that is not what should be focused on, it’s about mourning right now. So the Muslim community, we started to raise some money, and since yesterday afternoon, we’ve been able to raise over $70,000 for the community. And this is sincere that we’re not going to stop. We don’t think our work is finished because that’s a high number. We just want to know what you need.
Archival Audio – Audrey Glickman
People said all the right things. People of all faiths have come together. I mean, we already knew each other. It wasn’t like this introduced us to people of other faiths. We knew each other already, and we had dialogue going on already. That they stood up for us–I absolutely would stand up for them as well. I can’t imagine that everyone else wouldn’t do the same.
Gavriel Rosenfeld: Jews are not the only object of this wave of violence, but that it’s a byproduct of America today being a very violent society, and antisemitism is through this medium of mass shootings, which Jews are a tiny minority of in terms of the mass victims.
But, one of the realities of Jewish life for 2,000 years, and certainly American Jewish life, is that we’re a small minority. We’re 2% of the population barely. We need allies. We can’t exist only unto being unto ourselves. And historically, I think we’re at a moment now where we’re trying to figure out who are our friends, who can we rely on.
Pamela Nadell: There are 160 new organizations combating antisemitism in American Jewish life. Jews have internally a very rich life. They’ve multiple religious expressions, thousands of synagogues, 10,000 or more Jewish organizations, and Jews have not let this particular rise of antisemitism restrict their encounter with Jewish life.
Gemma Birnbaum: As these moments of antisemitism and resistance demonstrate, the American Jewish story is one of paradoxes, defined by exclusion and acceptance, hardship and prosperity, and tragedy and triumph.
Following in the footsteps of the industrious immigrants “yearning to breathe free,” the tenement dwellers forging new communities, the labor pioneers striving for equality, and the activists challenging injustice, Jews today continue to make breakthroughs.
Archival Audio – Audrey Glickman
We’re a country of immigrants, and yes, we care about people who are looking for freedom. We don’t have any shortage of liberty here. We have plenty to share. I think we should always be happy to share it.
Gemma Birnbaum: From the American Jewish Historical Society, I’m Gemma R. Birnbaum. This episode was written by Andrew Sperling. Recording, sound design, and mixing were done at Sound Lounge. Archival material is sourced from NBC News, CBS Pittsburgh, The Associated Press, The Guardian, HIAS, The Obama White House Archives, and the Heinz History Center’s October 27th Archive.
For episode transcripts, additional resources, and links to the collections discussed in this episode, visit ajhs.org/democracy. If you enjoyed this episode, please rate and review us on your preferred podcast platform which helps others discover our series.
