A Year After Oct. 7 Massacre, Jewish Anxiety Peaks in Pennsylvania
The New York Times
Jewish voters in Pittsburgh feel squeezed by intolerance on the left and the right, and torn by presidential candidates seeking their support in a vital battleground state.
On Wednesday evening, as Rosh Hashana began in Pittsburgh’s heavily Jewish neighborhood of Squirrel Hill, Rabbi Daniel Fellman stepped up to the pulpit of Temple Sinai and lamented: “Our American Jewish community cries out in despair.”
“A person seeking the highest office in the land can utter the most base, crass, hate-filled language, day in and day out,” he told his congregation. No names were necessary.
Then he turned to the rise in antisemitism on the pro-Palestinian left, and to the two assaults within the past month on Jewish students at the University of Pittsburgh. “Students, misguided in their pursuit of real freedom for those in harm’s way, can utter phrases once deemed abhorrent and beyond the pale,” Rabbi Fellman said.
It has been a year now since Hamas terrorists from Gaza stormed into Israel and massacred an estimated 1,200 people, most of them Jewish civilians in their homes or at a music festival, and took hundreds hostage. Israel’s retaliatory war has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza, expanded to Lebanon and prompted a barrage of Iranian missiles aimed at Israel.
It has also kept Jewish communities across the United States gripped by an enduring state of anguish — divided, doubtful, and feeling betrayed from within and without.
“There is apprehension,” Bob Bernstein, 70, said Friday night as he strolled with his wife down Murray Avenue. “and it’s increasing.” His wife, Ellie, also 70, chimed in: “But we can’t live in fear.”
A businessman in the Bronx falsified information on thousands of returns, committing one of the largest tax frauds in Department of Justice history, prosecutors said.
Officials in Wisconsin gave little new information on Tuesday about a shooting that left a student and a teacher dead and six others injured.
The president-elect’s latest attempt to overturn his Manhattan conviction was rebuffed by the judge overseeing the case, who called it “mere hearsay and conjecture.”
Undocumented immigrants whose children or spouses are U.S. citizens are feeling particularly vulnerable to President-elect Donald J. Trump’s threats to push them out.
The man whom authorities call a serial killer was charged with second-degree murder in the case of Valerie Mack, who disappeared in 2000.
The Commerce Department is banning the few remaining operations of China Telecom in the United States, a move that appears unlikely to deter Beijing from conducting sophisticated cyberoperations.
The police in Wisconsin are working to establish a motive for the attack, which left a student and teacher dead and six others injured.
The defendant, Rex Heuermann, is due in court Tuesday. Investigators have been trying to tie him to other unsolved killings on Long Island.
Some Republicans have said that a constitutional convention is overdue. Many Democratic-led states have rescinded their long-ago calls for one, and California will soon consider whether to do the same.
The New York City Campaign Finance Board voted to withhold as much as $4.3 million in matching funds from Mayor Eric Adams, hampering his re-election bid.
He built Mississippi’s Republican Party into a conservative powerhouse, making himself a regional power broker in the process.