Squirrel Hill resident targeted with hate
"What they did was a cowardly act. It wasn’t an act of bravery.”
Jennifer Murtazashvili’s daughter made the disturbing discovery.
Washers inscribed with the phrases “F— Israel” and “Zionists Eat S—” were left at the family’s home in January, only to be found by Murtazashvili’s 10-old-daughter, who was outside playing with her 7-year-old brother.
“She was very upset,” Murtazashvili recalled. “She brought them inside to my husband and said, ‘It’s not safe to be outside.’ So, she brought her little brother inside and we called the police and the Jewish Federation.”
The discovery was not the only antisemitic incident the family experienced that day.
Murtazashvili is a professor at the University of Pittsburgh and had been named a co-chair of the university’s new antisemitic working group. A story in The Pitt News prompted the anonymous antisemitic group Steel City Antifascist League — which has a history of publishing antisemitic and anti-Zionist posts and calls for violence — to publish an Instagram story calling Murtazashvili’s appointment to the position “immensely dangerous.” It labeled her a “proud Zionist,” something meant to serve as a pejorative.
The brief Instagram story got multiple facts wrong, including the name of Pitt’s Faculty Assembly President Robin Kear, whom it incorrectly said “acknowledged the university’s definition of Anti-semitism leaves room to conflate it to anti-Zionism,” something Kear never did, but was reported in The Pitt News as a concern among some faculty members in previous meetings.
The targeting of Murtazashvili is an odd choice, given her history.
The Pitt professor grew up attending Tree of Life Congregation, one of three congregations targeted on Oct. 27, 2018, in the most violent antisemitic attack on U.S. soil. She is the founding director of the Center for Governance and Markets at Pitt and has a long history of building relationships with people of dissimilar backgrounds.
Murtazashvili volunteered in the Peace Corps beginning in 1997, spending time in Uzbekistan before becoming the democracy and governance officer at the U.S. Agency for International Development. By 2007, she was in Afghanistan.
“I worked on democracy and governance issues in Central Asia and Uzbekistan, in particular,” she said. “I was working to get human rights advocates out of the country and supporting dissidents and activists there. I was not welcome in Uzbekistan for about 12 years, so I pivoted my work to Afghanistan.”
She’s written two books on the Central Asian country and is working on a third.
She eventually joined Pitt, where she serves as a professor and the founding director of the Center for Governance and Markets. She continues to help Afghans resettle in Pittsburgh.
“My center has hosted up to a dozen scholars from Afghanistan and I just think of them as colleagues,” she said. “I think of them as the best and brightest of their country, who deserve an opportunity to continue doing their work. I would host anyone from any part of the world, including scholars from Gaza.”
That work illustrates Murtazashvili’s fundamental belief in bridging divides, something she continues to do.
“I’ve had many conversations with my Muslim colleagues who went through very difficult times after 9/11,” she said. “I think that Jews and Muslims share a lot in common when it comes to bigotry and hatred. I think there are real opportunities for us to stand together, even when we have political disagreements because it is the dehumanization of the other that leads to violence.”
Murtazashvili saw the best in the Pittsburgh community after Oct. 27, 2018.
“Remember how many people came around and how many signs there were in Pittsburgh saying, ‘No Place for Hate?’” she asked.
She then noted that the recent uptick in antisemitism has shown the flip-side of that support.
“I thnk we’ve learned very quickly that it is a place that’s very welcoming, unfortunately, for a lot of hatred and has become a target, in a very macabre way, for a lot of hatred,” she said.
And yet she refuses to allow fear to influence how she lives her life. Her husband, she said, comforted their daughter after the discovery of the washers, but they’ve continued to teach their children to be proud of their Jewish identity.
Murtazashvili has not been alone in experiencing antisemitism since Oct. 7, 2023.
Adam Kolko found washers with the same antisemitic messages in January. He alerted the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh and the Pittsburgh police, both of whom “were extremely responsive,” he said. A few weeks later a “Stand with Israel” sign was stolen from his Point Breeze lawn.
Other Jewish community members have found washers at their residences and have had signs stolen from their lawns. The vandalism and attempts at intimidation are among a litany of offenses that have occurred since Oct. 7, 2023, including the harassment of Jewish day school students on their way to and from school. A masked individual dressed as a Hamas terrorist stood in front of the Manor Theatre earlier this week holding a sign with an inverted red triangle, a symbol used by Hamas to mark Israeli military targets.
The same group that targeted Murtazashvili online has also created “wanted” posters of City Council members, Mayor Ed Gainey, Chronicle employees and other community members.
Despite the antisemitic screed on the washers left at her home, Murtazashvili refuses to back down or change her behavior.
“I am not scared of these people,” she said. “I am not deterred. I’m not changing anything. The last thing that I will let these cowards do is affect our day-to-day lives. What they did was a cowardly act. It wasn’t an act of bravery.” PJC
David Rullo can be reached at drullo@pittsburghjewishchronicle.org.
comments