Squirrel Hill
The Tree of Life Synagogue Shooting and the Soul of a Neighborhood
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
A piercing portrait of the struggles and triumphs of one of America's renowned Jewish neighborhoods in the wake of unspeakable tragedy that highlights the hopes, fears, and tensions all Americans must confront on the road to healing.
Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, is one of the oldest Jewish neighborhoods in the country, known for its tight-knit community and the profusion of multigenerational families. On October 27, 2018, a gunman killed eleven Jews who were worshipping at the Tree of Life synagogue in Squirrel Hill--the most deadly anti-Semitic attack in American history.
Many neighborhoods would be understandably subsumed by despair and recrimination after such an event, but not this one. Mark Oppenheimer poignantly shifts the focus away from the criminal and his crime, and instead presents the historic, spirited community at the center of this heartbreak. He speaks with residents and nonresidents, Jews and gentiles, survivors and witnesses, teenagers and seniors, activists and historians.
Together, these stories provide a kaleidoscopic and nuanced account of collective grief, love, support, and revival. But Oppenheimer also details the difficult dialogue and messy confrontations that Squirrel Hill had to face in the process of healing, and that are a necessary part of true growth and understanding in any community. He has reverently captured the vibrancy and caring that still characterize Squirrel Hill, and it is this phenomenal resilience that can provide inspiration to any place burdened with discrimination and hate.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Oppenheimer (Knocking on Heaven's Door) delivers a vivid and deeply empathetic look at Pittsburgh's Squirrel Hill neighborhood in the aftermath of the October 2018 mass killing of 11 worshippers at a local synagogue. Oppenheimer, whose great-great-great-grandfather cofounded the first Jewish burial society in Squirrel Hill, focuses on how residents and outsiders responded to the "greatest antisemitic attack in American history," depicting acts of hesed, or "lovingkindness," as well as moments of discord. His profile subjects include a local woman who was photographed reciting Psalms outside the synagogue just hours after the murders, a man who has been delivering handcrafted victim memorials to the sites of mass shootings since Columbine, an archivist tasked with determining which artifacts from the day of the shooting and the weeks afterward might be worth preserving, and an Iranian graduate student whose GoFundMe account for the survivors and victims' families raised nearly $1.3 million. Oppenheimer also documents residents' varied responses to President Trump's visit to Squirrel Hill, and details how a rabbi who had survived the attack courted controversy by calling for gun control in remarks delivered on the one-year anniversary of the shooting (planners had wanted the event to be "completely apolitical"). Deeply reported and elegantly written, this is a powerful portrait of grief and resilience in "the oldest, most stable, most internally diverse Jewish neighborhood in the United States." Photos.
