Antisemitism experts to shape Tree of Life’s museum and educational programs
Amy Spitalnick of the JCPA and Holocaust expert Daniel Greene join advisory council
While The Tree of Life hasn’t begun construction on its new facility at the corner of Wilkins and Shady avenues, the organization is nonetheless already working to uproot antisemitism and identity-based hate, according to its CEO Carole Zawatsky.
Part of that work includes assembling a committee of antisemitism experts — The Tree of Life’s Academic Advisory Council — who will advise Tree of Life leaders as they create a museum devoted to educating visitors on historical and contemporary antisemitism.
The building will also serve as a memorial to the 11 people, from three congregations, murdered in the antisemitic attack in the Tree of Life building on Oct. 27, 2018: Joyce Fienberg, Richard Gottfried, Rose Mallinger, Jerry Rabinowitz, Cecil Rosenthal, David Rosenthal, Bernice Simon, Sylvan Simon, Dan Stein, Melvin Wax and Irving Younger.
The advisory council’s newest members are Amy Spitalnick, CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, and Daniel Greene, a history professor at Northwestern University. Greene is also a subject matter expert at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and in 2018 he curated “Americans and the Holocaust,” an exhibition at that museum that commemorated its 25th anniversary.
Spitalnick and Greene join 10 other council members, including Pittsburgh historian Barbara Burstin; Abraham Foxman, national director emeritus of the Anti-Defamation League; Jeremy Issacharoff, former ambassador of Israel to Germany; and Yolanda Savage-Narva, assistant vice president of racial equity, diversity and inclusion for the Union for Reform Judaism.
The diversity of the advisory committee members is one of its strengths, Zawatsky said. Several members, such as Greene, she noted, come from “deep museum backgrounds.”
“They will really be able to help us think deeply about how you exhibit objects, artifacts and tell a story,” she said. “How do you tell a story of trauma without traumatizing? How do you use artifacts and text to encourage people who are visiting the museum to think about the one act that each of us can do to move from bystander to upstander? How does telling stories help a community heal?”
Spitalnick is no stranger to antisemitism stemming from white supremacism, the motivating factor of the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter. Before taking the helm of the JCPA, she was executive director of Integrity First for America, which won a groundbreaking lawsuit against the neo-Nazis and white supremacists who chanted “Jews will not replace us” and were responsible for the violence at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017. The Pittsburgh synagogue shooting occurred around the time Spitalnick was beginning her work on the lawsuit.
The Tree of Life’s work is essential, Spitalnick said, as acts of hate continue to rise in the U.S.
“We’re seeing record levels of antisemitism,” she said. “We’re seeing record levels of violence targeting Jews, and it’s part of a broader rise in increasingly normalized extremism. And so looking over the last decade — you can just look at the numbers — it’s both the big horrific events like Tree of Life, and it’s also the individual hate crimes and incidents that we’re seeing increase on a significant basis, year over year.
“It’s real,” she stressed. “Jews are not imagining this. And we also need to understand it in the broader context of overall rising extremism in this country. We know that, for example, beliefs and conspiracy theories are deeply connected to antisemitic belief. That’s what the data and research shows. And so it’s no surprise that at a time when we’re seeing these sort of conspiracy theories become normalized in our public discourse or in our politics, it also leads to a rise in direct hate violence.”
There was a 288% increase in antisemitic incidents in the U.S. in 2024, peaking in April, according to a report published last month by the World Zionist Organization and the Jewish Agency for Israel. Much of that surge correlates to a rise in anti-Israel extremism. In October 2024, the Anti-Defamation League reported that there were more than 10,000 antisemitic incidents in the U.S. in the year since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attack in Israel — “the highest number of incidents ever recorded in any single year period since ADL started tracking in 1979.”
Both the far-right and the far-left have espoused antisemitic conspiracy theories, said Spitalnick, who has worked for various government officials, including the New York attorney general, and for several advocacy organizations, including as J Street’s first press secretary.
“I think the Pittsburgh community understands all too well the invasion and replacement conspiracy theories that fueled the Tree of Life attack, much like the Charlottesville attack, the Poway attack, the El Paso attack, the Buffalo attack and others, particularly post-Oct. 7,” she said. “We’re also seeing a rise in certain conspiracy theories connected to Jewish, or so-called Zionist, control or power.
“This is what’s unique about antisemitism,” she continued. “It’s not simply a form of prejudice or bigotry hating Jews because of who we are or what we look like or what we do or don’t practice. It’s also this insidious, pernicious conspiracy theory rooted in these lies and tropes about control and power, and that shows up in different forms across the political spectrum, and even removed from any one particular political ideology. This idea of Jews being all-powerful or controlling or a puppet master has been around for millennia, and we are just in this moment seeing how it’s manifesting in very acute and dangerous ways.”
“We talked explicitly about antisemitism in all forms,” Spitalnick said of the program. “Antisemitism can’t be considered a partisan issue or even a political or ideological issue.”
She is eager to do the work of The Tree of Life.
“I’m a granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, and it is just incredibly meaningful to get to be a part of this effort,” she said. “I have such deep admiration for the Pittsburgh community, and the ways in which this horrific tragedy ultimately became something that spurred action and community solidarity in a way that so many across the country should learn from.”
Greene, too, said he is honored to be a part of the advisory council.
“That was a horrific day, and so to see a memorial and an educational space rise here is really important,” he said, speaking from Chicago. “I think it’s important to American Jews, but I think it’s important to a group far beyond American Jews. So I hope that this can be a space of teaching and learning. I hope it can be a space of memorialization of the victims, and I hope it can be a place of real dialogue, where we can have some difficult conversations about the history of antisemitism in the United States, contemporary manifestations of antisemitism and the way that antisemitism is not a Jewish problem, but it’s an American problem right now.”
It’s important, Greene said, to understand that antisemitism has a history, and that attacks like the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting don’t happen in a vacuum.
“That horrific attack on that day did not come out of nowhere,” he said. “There’s a history that does connect to white supremacy in the United States, to this idea — this hateful, false idea — of a replacement theory that Jews are somehow pulling the strings behind events in the United States and events in the world. And I think that this space, The Tree of Life, has an opportunity to help people understand that conspiratorial thinking feeds antisemitism, and that we’re seeing more and more conspiratorial thinking in our societies, and more and more of an assault on truth. And antisemitism thrives in spaces where conspiratorial thinking thrives.”
Education, he said, is an important tool in the battle against hatred and bigotry, as are law and advocacy.
“But I deeply believe in educational spaces as important spaces to help people understand the history and the ways that conspiratorial thinking is feeding antisemitism right now,” he said. “And I think that The Tree of Life space is envisioned as an educational space that will make that kind of difference for people.”
While construction on the building will not begin until late summer or early fall, Zawatsky said, some educational projects are already in the works, such as an exhibition slated to open at the University of Pittsburgh in March. The Tree of Life is partnering with the Rauh Jewish Archives to display “many of the gifted items that came into The Tree of Life in the days, weeks and months, and actually years since the shooting.”
This will be the first time that the community “will get a sense of some of those very moving objects,” and will be a sort of preview of what “the museum exhibition on site will feel like.” The intention is for the exhibit to travel around the country, she said.
Contemporary antisemitism stemming from both the far-right and the far-left will be covered at the museum, she said. “The story is not over, so to speak.”
While The Tree of Life will be telling that story, it will not be making policy statements,.
“It’s important for us to be an educational institution, to shine a light on antisemitism, to think about how you can bring light into these darkest times, to give people a pathway to helping to uproot antisemitism, but we are not a policy organization, and we’re not an advocacy organization,” Zawatsky said. “There are great institutions in the Jewish world doing that work.” PJC
Toby Tabachnick can be reached at ttabachnick@pittsburghjewishchronicle.org.
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