Tree of Life debuts programming in Washington D.C.

The Tree of Life — the organization formed after the Oct. 27, 2018, Pittsburgh synagogue shooting to “uproot antisemitism and identity-based hate” — held its first public program on Sept. 26 at the Sixth & I, which bills itself as a historic synagogue that is “a center for arts, entertainment, ideas and Jewish life in Washington D.C.”

The program, “Antisemitism, Democracy and the Struggle for an Inclusive America,” featured Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the ranking member of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability; Amy Spitalnick, CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs; and, Maya Wiley, president and CEO of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.

Presented in partnership with the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, the hybrid in-person and virtual program was moderated by Yolanda Savage-Narva, vice president of racial equity, diversity and inclusion for the Union for Reform Judaism.

Tree of Life CEO Carole Zawatsky, who introduced the panel, remembered the 11 Jewish Pittsburghers murdered during Shabbat services in the Tree of Life building. In the hours following the attack, she said, the City of Pittsburgh and the world banded together with Jewish community members and the three congregations attacked — Dor Hadash, New Light and Tree of Life — to oppose antisemitism and hate.

The Tree of Life organization, Zawatsky said, is the communal response to Oct. 27, created to transform the site of tragedy to one of “life, hope and possibility.” It is, she said, a locally grounded institution with a national reach.

After each panelist briefly spoke about what inspired them, Savage-Narva asked how to make sense “of the complexities of these interesting challenges that we are up against, rising antisemitism, the possible erosion of democracy as we know it and the continuous struggle of co-creating a truly inclusive America.”

Wiley, who later noted that she was a Black woman married to a Jewish man and whose children are grandchildren to Holocaust survivors, said it was important to look at the shared roots between racism and antisemitism. She referenced the Pittsburgh synagogue murders, the 2022 murder of 10 Black people at Tops Grocery Store in Buffalo, New York, and the murder of nine members of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina.

The root connecting all three attacks, she said, was the “great replacement theory.”

“I see the same root,” Wiley said. “When I see antisemitism, I think of who’s coming for my community.”

This relationship, she said, is especially important after Oct. 7.

“Even if there’s a disagreement, which is not new, it brings us back to acknowledging that every single human life has value and deserves protection,” Wiley said. “We need to find a way to have the hard conversations within family, recognizing that we are a family.”

Spitalnick picked up on Wiley’s theme, noting that the “great replacement theory” is an antisemitic conspiracy rooted in the idea that Jews are a powerful cabal seeking to replace the white race with Black and brown people, immigrants, refugees and others.

This, she says, endangers not just the Jewish community, but Black people, immigrants, refugees, the Latino community, Muslims and the LGBTQ+ community.

Spitalnick said that since Oct. 7, hate has also come from some communities on the far-left.

“We’re seeing efforts in certain places to keep Jews or Zionists out of certain coalitions,” she said. “When we effectively seek to ban and boycott Jews from certain spaces, whether it be what we’re seeing on certain campuses or some of what’s happening in academic or literary or artistic communities, it, in turn, divides the very coalitions we need to be building.”

Saying that America has always been the “greatest multiracial, multiethnic, multicultural constitutional democracy,” Raskin noted that coalition politics have been an important part of the country’s progress, even if they’ve been “transactional” at times.

One of the things that made America great, he said, was that people from other countries could hold on to whatever part of their culture they wanted.

“They can make the very best of the traditions that they view as part of their culture, their religion and belief system,” Raskin said. “But they also have the opportunity to cross over and meet other people from other faiths and other belief systems, which creates something uniquely American.”

Savage-Narva asked the panel about diversity, equity and inclusion, which she said is being “weaponized” by claims that it promotes antisemitism.

Spitalnick said groups are using DEI to pit people against one another. Hate, she said, is manifesting itself on college campuses and synagogues, and it’s also being directed at Muslims.

Fears over antisemitism, she said, have been used against DEI, the same way those fears were used, in part, to oust Pauline Gay, the first Black president of Harvard.

Spitalnick said we need to be able to both confront antisemitism wherever it exists and recognize there are extreme voices exploiting the trauma of the moment to pit communities against one another.

“We can do both things,” she said.

Wiley said it was painful for the Black community to watch Gay lose her job.

“That was traumatizing,” she said. “There are all kinds of ways we’re all traumatized and that requires us to have, in the civic tradition, real honest conversations about what we need to be to stand up for diversity, equity and inclusion.”

Coalition, she said, means having “quiet, hard conversations.”

Quoting Fredrick Douglass, Raskin said that if there’s “no struggle there’s no progress.”

“Power concedes nothing without a demand, and it never will,” he said.

Nearly 1,100 people signed up to attend the discussion, either in person or on Zoom, Zawatsky said.

The attendance, she said, speaks volumes to the general concern about “how we uproot antisemitism, antisemitism as the threat to democracy and what are possible pathways to a more just world.”

Tree of Life Board Chair Michael Bernstein said the conversation was meant to help build the organization as a “national platform that is convening what we feel are the most important discussions around American Judaism and issues we’re all living with as Jews in America. Certainly, antisemitism being a core part of that.”

Bernstein said that Tree of Life will continue to create local and national programming meant to combat hate, and noted that the 10.27 Museum and Education Center, Institute for Countering Hate and Antisemitism, the Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh and the LIGHT Initiative are important parts of that mission.

“We’re finding there are people around the country and around the world, certainly right now in America, that want to partner with us, hear our story and bring our experience and perspective,” he said. PJC

David Rullo can be reached at drullo@pittsburghjewishchronicle.org.