Today, Explained - Tree of Life

Episode Date: October 29, 2018

A mass shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue has confirmed what many believed to be true: Anti-Semitism is on the rise in America, and it's fueling white nationalism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today Explained is supported by a movie today. Everybody loves movies. This one's called Viper Club. It's a drama starring Susan Sarandon as a mother struggling to free her captured journalist son. It's also got Matt Bomer and Edie Falco from The Sopranos. Love The Sopranos. Viper Club's now playing in theaters in New York and Los Angeles, and it's Nationwide Friday. During Shabbat morning prayers on Saturday, October 27th, a white gunman walked into the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and killed 11 people who were members of Tree of Life Synagogue, as well as Dor Hadash and New Light congregations.

The Wednesday prior, and to shamefully less attention and collective mourning among many of our communities, a white gunman tried to enter a black church, and then shot and killed two black people in Jefferson Town, Kentucky. We remember all of their names. Joyce Feinberg, 75 years old. Richard Gottfried, 65 years old. Vicki Lee Jones, 67 years old. Rose Mallinger, 97 years old. Jerry Rabinett, 66 years old. Cecil Rosenthal, 59 years old. David Rosenthal, 54 years old. Bernice Simon, 84 years old. Sylvan Simon, 86 years old. Maurice Dollard, 69 years old.

Daniel Stein, 71 years old. Melvin Wax, 88 years old. Irving Younger, 69 years old old may their memories be for a blessing I pass a lot of big, important federal buildings on my bike ride into Vox every morning. The Department of Labor, the Capitol, the White House. All the flags outside these buildings were flying half-staff today. That's the reaction we can count on in this country after each and every mass shooting. And now we have another one. On Saturday, a man named Robert Bowers opened fire at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

By all accounts, Bowers was a quiet guy out in the world, but he was a raging anti-Semite online. He believed Jews were helping refugees into the country, refugees who were going to commit violence against white people. So he went to Tree of Life and opened fire. Eleven died. More were injured. Some are saying it's the deadliest attack targeting Jews in American history. There were vigils held across the country yesterday. Today explained producer and reporter Noam Hassenfeld attended one right up the street from our office in DuPont Circle here in D.C. Noam, we heard a bit of the vigil at the top of the show. What else did you hear from people out there? So I talked to a lot of people and the thing that kept coming back to me, the thing that

I kept hearing was just how not surprised everyone was. I was in shock, but honestly, I wasn't that surprised. It's a terrible thing to say, but I feel like it's a long time coming. Like we're just bracing ourselves for the next act of hate. I'm not surprised that this happened. All these people who say they're surprised, I'm not sure why they're surprised. A lot of people I spoke to were either from the same Pittsburgh neighborhood where the shooting took place or had close personal connections to Squirrel Hill. Four of my closest friends live in Squirrel Hill, regular attenders of the synagogue, and it all felt very personal as a result. So I am here to be around other people who are also feeling kind of the personal impacts of

this. I met Benjamin Epstein at the side of the gathering just after Mincha. What's that? It's a communal afternoon prayer service. Okay. He was standing with a group of friends on the side of the gathering. He was wearing thin glasses and he had a yarmulke on. Does this make you think differently about going back to synagogue next Saturday? No, it doesn't. It's too important and too big of a part of my life. There's a lot of things that need to change. My going to synagogue is not what needs to change.

Is there anything about the fact that this happened in a synagogue that changes it for you? I wonder if someone had targeted Jews in another location that was not, you know, the holiest spot. It does for a couple of reasons. Number one, because the synagogue is a very important place to me personally. I grew up with a family that was very involved in our synagogue life growing up. You know, this felt particularly striking to me as a synagogue, particularly because this happened so early in the service. You know, this was within the first 10 minutes of the service starting. And there aren't usually very many people there. One of the reasons it's

important to have some people there is so that people who are saying Kaddish and mourning for people can do that with a community, with a minion, and that those dedicated people who showed up to help those people be able to engage in Jewish communal ritual of mourning, where the people who would have been attacked here, feels particularly painful. I just didn't even, I didn't put two and two together. Those are the, like, and that's why it's all the old people too, because they're the ones that make the minion. Who show up at, you know, 945, you know, at kickoff. No one shows up at kickoff. You know,

you ask me who the first 11 people in Shul are, who's there after 10 minutes starting, I can tell you who they are in my synagogue growing up. You know, it's a specific group of people and it was really painful. Do you think this is going to close off the Jewish community? In reality, it will in part close off parts of the Jewish community in fear and worry. I think it's going to be a pretty big task to push back against that and remain an open and welcoming place, particularly in the context of Jews who come from less mainstream or traditional backgrounds. And I think we're going to have to work really, really, really hard to make sure that the things that people decide to do in order to keep their places safe don't end up closing off and shutting people out of the community and shutting us off from the broader world around us.

I wonder, so to that end, as Benjamin's saying, to remaining open, did you see people from other religious communities out there in DuPont Circle, from other cultures? Yeah, actually, the vigil itself was put on by a whole bunch of organizations, Jewish organizations, not Jewish organizations, including the March for Racial Justice. There were a ton of people, white Jews, Jews of color, Muslims, black people, Latinos. I even ran into Linda Sarsour, who's a well-known Muslim activist. She's actually one of the people that helped organize the Women's March. What was your reaction when you heard the news? It was that punch in the gut, that nauseous. I felt shattered.

I felt heartbroken. But I also reminded myself that anti-Semitism is not new in this country. Racism is not new. But what's different now is that we have an elected leadership that is not taking responsibility nor trying to bring people together. And it just scares me that those in power who have power to bring people together are actually dividing us. Do you draw a connection between a lot of the rhetoric that we've been hearing and these violent attacks? Absolutely. I mean, if you look at from the person that sent the pipe bombs to the different kind of democratic leaders to this person who engaged in this act of domestic terrorism against these Jewish Americans at the synagogue, the rhetoric is clearly connected to this emboldened

racism, anti-Semitism and white nationalism, we have a president who actually admitted on national television that he himself was a nationalist. And we know that the foundation of white nationalism is anti-Semitism. So when you hear that one day, and a few days later, 11 innocent people are killed, there's no way around it. You have to make that connection, and we have to hold our leadership accountable. In this week alone, we've had three terrorist attacks against leftists, black people, and Jews. How do you build a coalition that allows everyone to work together to see everyone else's problems as their own? White nationalism uses divide and conquer as a tactic. And what we need to do is resist with unrelenting solidarity and love, which is why

I'm here today. An attack on a Jewish synagogue is an attack on a mosque is an attack on a temple or church on a community center. And, you know, when we need to be able to come out because they don't want to see us together. Jews will not be safe if Muslims are not safe, if black people are not safe, if Sikhs in America are not safe. And I think I'm hopeful to see these these types of gatherings and the types of people coming together. Were people responsive to Linda's message, that argument that people need to come together and fight white nationalism right now? Yeah, a lot of people I talked to were really emphatic about the need to work together. I heard it in the speeches. I heard it from people I talked to. Michelle Zavis told me that when she heard about the attack at Tree of Life, she started thinking about other types of hate and violence in America. I think it's

incredibly important for those of us who are white to recognize what is happening in this country and be just as horrified by what happened in Charleston, what happened at the Kroger, what happened at the Pulse nightclub, what happens on the border. We've already separated children from parents. It's just that it's been people who are brown. The seeds are being sown. The seeds are being sown. Why do people do these things? Why do they believe this stuff? What is it that they are looking for?

What is it that our society is not providing? These white men who feel like they're being disenfranchised, who believe things that are totally crazy. And why do they believe it? How does this get out there? How are these young white men from Charlottesville so open to believing that Jews are trying to replace them? This is something that I don't understand.

I think it's easy to think of white nationalists as a fringe group, especially after this year's Unite the Right rally in D.C. fell on its face. But the shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue suggests that this impulse is not going away anytime soon. All Americans need to understand the forces at play here, and anti-Semitism is a central piece. Noam Hassenfeld is a reporter and a producer here at Today Explained. I'm Sean Ramos-Firm. Up next, we try to understand modern antisemitism in America. Another note about the movie Viper Club. It's a new drama from the producers of All Is Lost and Margin Call. As I said up top, Viper Club stars Academy Award winner Susan Sarandon as a mother struggling to free her captured journalist son.

After hitting walls with the FBI and various state agencies, she discovers a clandestine community of journalists, advocates, and philanthropists who might be able to help. Again, the movie also stars Matt Bomer and Edie Falco from The Sopranos. Viper Club was an official selection at the 2018 Toronto International Film Festival. It's out in theaters in New York and Los Angeles, and it's going to be nationwide Friday. You can check out the trailer if you just type in Viper Club trailer. I just did it. You can do it too. My name is Eric Ward and I am executive director of Western State Center,

a national civil and human rights organization based in the Pacific Northwest and mountain states. And where are you right now, Eric? I am actually in New York, where I've been speaking actually on anti-Semitism. And can I ask you a personal question? Are you Jewish? I am not, actually. But you speak about anti-Semitism. I do speak about anti-Semitism. When I was younger, I lived in Oregon. I moved to Oregon from Southern California at the same time that an organization called the Aryan Nations was attempting to turn the Pacific Northwest into an Aryan homeland.

And I worked with community organizations around the region to build a response. And that response really drove us to understand the importance of anti-Semitism as a fuel of the white nationalist movement. So what did you encounter when you moved to Oregon? Years ago, this November, a young Ethiopian man by the name of Moligata Saraw, who was a student in Portland, Oregon, was attacked and beaten to death by a it was homophobic, what we began noticing is that in the propaganda and speeches that Jews were always centered as the ultimate evil that was secretly trying to dispossess whites of the United States of America. And what we noticed is that, yes, racism existed, homophobia existed, xenophobia existed. But at the core, anti-Semitism seemed to always be the driving narrative for this movement. And the movement is what?

The movement is called white nationalism. It has its roots, ironically, in the victory of the civil rights movement. If you looked at the period of the 1960s, largely racists believed in segregation. You know, they believed in a concept called white supremacy, which was based off of white superiority. Jim Crow was natural. Separate but equal was natural. And then all of a sudden, they face a huge political defeat called the Civil Rights Movement that crushes Jim Crow. Now imagine you believe in white superiority. You believe Black people are inferior.

How do you explain all of a sudden that you've lost to people you saw as inferior? Ultimately, those who wanted to cling to Jim Crow in the days of old began to develop an answer for their political defeat. And that answer became white nationalism. The idea that there was a Jewish conspiracy that formulated the civil rights victory. That in fact, blacks could not have done this on their own, and it is how anti-Semitism becomes the driving force of this new social movement. Anti-Semitism allows those whites who believe in white superiority to cling to it by saying that people of color and immigrants or women or Muslims have no real agency,

that their demands for equality in this society are nothing more than the strings being pulled by a puppet master. It's not new. It is the mainstreaming of anti-Semitic tropes like globalist, like financiers, that have signaled to this extremist movement that it is okay and acceptable to act out on their fantasy of a racial revolution. Where are you seeing all this happen? I think the average American doesn't encounter a lot of anti-Semitism in his or her day-to-day. It certainly has been very prevalent over the last few weeks, including statements made by the President of the United States, who in a recent speech a few days ago talked about globalists.

They're called globalists. They like the globe. I like the globe, too. I like the globe, too, but we have to take care of our people. We have to. Globalists. The crowd there supporting him started chanting Soros, Soros, Soros. You know, there are ads being run that echo this. Prima Donna athletes protesting our anthem. Left-wing mobs paid to riot in the streets. Billionaire George Soros bankrolls the resistance. NRCC is responsible for the content of this advertising. Anti-Semitism functions as a narrative of ultimate evil. And this means

when anti-Semitism becomes weaponized, it typically leads to violence such as we saw two days ago. Where does someone like Robert Bowers, who shot up the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, get his ideology? Where are his ideas being allowed to sort of flourish? He became very active on social media. We know that he had individuals who were following him, who liked what he was saying or found him interesting. What we know most about Bauer is what he says before he commits his act of mass murder. He blames a Jewish organization, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, for asylum seekers who are moving through Central America and Mexico. My next guest just returned from Guatemala, where he spent four days on the ground witnessing

the caravan just north of the honduran border joining us tonight chris farrell director of investigations for judicial watch tell us what you can't sure uh look this is a criminal involvement on the part of these leftist groups it's highly organized very elaborate sophisticated operation a lot of these folks also have affiliates who are getting money from the Soros occupied State Department, and that is a very great concern. People can frame this as some partisan left or right issue, but again, I want to point to the fact that when Bauer walked into that synagogue, he did not stop to see who was from the left or who was from the right. Bauer didn't care. The only thing he cared about was that they were Jewish. And what that meant to him was that they were the enemy.

And if we think anti-Semitism only impacts the Jewish community, communities of color, American Muslims, gays and lesbians, poor people in America are going to find out that we are likely more in danger because of the potential of anti-Semitism to undermine democracy than the Jewish community itself. People in Pittsburgh right now are calling on the president to denounce white nationalism. Do you think President Trump denouncing white nationalism, if he felt compelled to do so, could have any effect on this community that you know well? I think it would be responsible for Donald Trump to unequivocally denounce white nationalism. If Donald Trump refuses to do so, I believe that the Senate and House need to step up, condemn anti-Semitism publicly and the environment that has created it. And I believe that they should center the president for his role in helping to curate this environment that led to this mass killing two days ago. Eric, you've spent time with white nationalists as a black man, and I'm a brown man,

and I'm sitting across from a Jewish man. I wonder, you know, what would you say to people who are fearful, who are fearful that the president won't condemn white nationalists and that there are going to be more attacks like this? I mean, I saw some AP report that said the shooter took advantage of unlocked doors, which seemed like an insane way of couching what happened on Saturday. And there are a lot of unlocked doors in this country. The normalizing of bigoted violence and the rationalization of bigoted violence is very disturbing at this time. So this is what I would tell individuals. We're in a very volatile time, and it's a very frightening time. We have to respond to this by resisting the inward pull that this type of intimidation causes. This type of terror

seeks to make us feel isolated. And we have to know that we are not. We are the majority. And it means closing ranks with one another. It means understanding that this is not just an assault on the Jewish community. This is an assault on democracy. This is an assault on America. We have to build bridges with one another. We cannot wait until these events happen to do so. These are our communities. We are not always going to agree on everything, but we do agree that violence and bullying tactics are not the way.

We have democratic practices that are supposed to be people-centered and inclusive, and we have to stand up for those things, and we have to stand up now. Thank you. There are plenty of podcasts focused on what's going wrong with the world, but here's one about what we can do right. It's called Future Perfect. It's from Vox's Dylan Matthews. It's all about effective altruism, using all the resources we have to help others the most. The latest episode asks how our drinking water could help prevent suicide,

which might seem crazy because no one's talking about it, but Dylan is. Lithium is a potent drug used to treat bipolar disorder, but it's also the third element in the periodic table. It's also a great Nirvana song, and you can find tiny amounts of lithium in most drinking water. Scientists have discovered something remarkable. In areas where the tap water has more lithium, fewer people seem to die by suicide. And that raises a big question. Should we put small amounts of lithium in the drinking water? Listen to the latest episode of Future Perfect to find out. You can find Future Perfect wherever you find your podcasts.