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  • Rethinking the Historiography of American Antisemitism in the Wake of the Pittsburgh Shooting
  • Rachel Kranson (bio)

The shooting that ravaged a synagogue in my neighborhood forced me to re-learn every aspect of my Jewish life. From basic weekly and daily rituals to my most profound political and scholarly engagements, enactments of Jewishness that once seemed second nature felt unfamiliar, labored, often impossible. Stepping into a synagogue became an excruciating lesson in how to walk, physically propelling myself forward while my mind kept telling me to turn back, to run away, to grab my family and hide. Once there, I lost my ability to follow along in the prayerbook. Well-known Hebrew letters became undecipherable glyphs as I frantically scanned the room for exits, plotting my family's escape from a murderer's assault rifle. I rediscovered how to send my nine-year-old to his Jewish day school with a quick hug and a smile, a transition we had mastered when he was a toddler.

The shooting rendered my political investments no less fraught. Since 2016, I had been quietly trying to minimize the harm of a Trump presidency with Bend the Arc: Pittsburgh, a collective of progressive, local Jewish activists affiliated with the national organization. We had been supporting the work of seasoned activists in Pittsburgh, largely immigrants and Muslims who found themselves particularly vulnerable under the new administration. The shooting thrust us from behind the scenes into the spotlight. In an open letter followed by a protest march, we used our platform to decry this antisemitic shooting as one facet of a broader white supremacist ideology that President Trump's rhetoric both encouraged and legitimated. While it was gratifying to see our analysis gain traction, the attention came at a cost. Our names and faces appeared in national newspapers and on television, our inboxes inundated with press requests and personal commentary—both positive and negative—from friends, acquaintances, and strangers. Coming so soon after the attack, the public scrutiny made me feel like a target. Within [End Page 247] days, I took down my faculty page, refused to speak with journalists, and withdrew from social media.

In the midst of this, friends and colleagues alike asked how my training in American Jewish history helped me think through the violent attack on my own Jewish community. More than once, I asked myself the same question … and came up short. I found myself struggling to apply the scholarly frameworks that had long moored my understanding of Jewish life in the US to the situation at hand. In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, I found that the informal discussions I had within my embryonic activist collective about the relationship between antisemitism, xenophobia, racism, and white supremacy sustained me more than the academic field to which I had devoted the previous sixteen years of my life. Like so much else, I had to rediscover how to be a scholar of American Jewish history.

Admittedly, in the days and weeks immediately following the shooting I found it difficult to maintain focus on anything other than my fear, hopelessness, and rage.2 But it was not just trauma that prevented me from using the historical scholarship on American antisemitism to think about the shooting. Fundamentally, the central debates of the field did not address my most pressing concerns. Arguments over whether American Jewish historians have taken antisemitism seriously enough—or whether, conversely, they have echoed Baron's lachrymose conception of Jewish history and made too much of it—could not help me gain perspective on why the building in which I had so recently celebrated a bat mitzvah had become a blood-soaked crime scene. In the wake of the shooting, I could only take for granted that antisemitic violence in America mattered, that it was dangerous and devastating. Neither did I feel inclined to ponder the question of why antisemitism in the US tended to be less deadly than antisemitism in Europe. It offered little clarity to recall that the deaths of my neighbors did not register a statistical blip when compared to the carnage of genocide.3 [End Page 248]

What I sought were critical, historical analyses of how American...

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