Summary
The 2018 murder of Jews at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, which Kenneth S. Stern uses in both the main summary and Appendix A of his 2025 testimony to argue that Antisemitism must be read with a wide lens: the shooting was clearly antisemitic but was animated by dehumanising anti-immigrant rhetoric, and its shooter had virtually identical ideology to the El Paso Walmart shooter who targeted Mexicans and Mexican-Americans months later (Written Testimony of Kenneth S. Stern, PDF p.21, p.25).
Details
- The shooter picked the synagogue supposedly because it had participated in a national HIAS program supporting immigrants, against a backdrop of political frenzy over an invasion across the southern border (PDF p.25).
- Stern’s conclusion: hatred of non-Jews can be the engine for antisemitism, invisible when analysis focuses only on parsing what is said about Jews, let alone Israel (PDF p.21, p.24).
Related pages
Written Testimony of Kenneth S. Stern, Antisemitism, Hate Studies