Why I joined the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle board

The Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle is more than a newspaper. It is the institution that preserves, protects and amplifies our community’s voice at a moment when that voice is under assault from every direction.

The gruesome shooting during the Chabad candle lighting on Bondi Beach in Sydney on Dec. 13 was a horrifying reminder of that reality. Within minutes of the news breaking, before the victims’ names were even known, the usual chorus online rushed not to mourn, but to blame the Jews. Social media accounts immediately called it a “false flag,” accusing Mossad and Israel of staging the attack.

This is not an isolated incident; it is a pattern. Whenever tragedy strikes, there is a reflexive instinct among those who hate us to twist the story so that Jews — in Pittsburgh, in Israel, anywhere — become the villains. Lies spread at the speed of a repost. Conspiracy theories outpace facts. And too often, even traditional media, chasing clicks or bending to fashionable narratives, amplify these distortions instead of challenging them.

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In that environment, we need — more than ever — a place where the truth is recorded through our voice and our lens. The Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle is that place.

I feel this urgently not only as a Jew in 2025, but as someone whose family story spans our people’s two defining traumas of the last 100 years.

My grandparents survived the Holocaust. They watched most of their families betrayed by neighbors who happily gave them away to a murderous antisemitic regime that decided the world would be better without Jews. When the killing finally stopped, they were not welcomed home. They were displaced, stateless, haunted by profound loss. With the world largely indifferent to their future, they made their way to Israel as refugees and rebuilt their lives from nothing. Israel was not an abstraction to them; it was the place that gave them a future when every other door had been slammed shut.

For a long time, I thought their experience was past tense — important, foundational, but safely consigned to history. Then came Oct. 7.

On that day, my cousin was killed in Israel while trying to protect civilians from Hamas’ jihadist onslaught. Once again, our people were hunted in their homes and in their beds. Once again, the attackers justified their actions with a distorted ideology promising utopia only with the removal of the Jew.

What has stayed with me is not only the loss itself, but the reaction that followed. People I knew celebrated my cousin’s killers online as “freedom fighters.” They called to “globalize the intifada” and repeated talking points that turned the murder of Jews into a morally righteous act.

Despite hearing my grandparents’ stories all my life, it was only in the aftermath of Oct. 7 that I fully understood how the Holocaust became possible. Those who kill Jews — and those who watch from the sidelines with approval or apathy — are not driven primarily by hate. Rather, they are convinced of their own righteousness. They believe Jews stand in the way of redemption, that if the world could only rid itself of Jews, or of the Jewish state, it would finally become pure, just, or free. This belief system erases empathy. It trains people to see us not as individuals with names, families and lives, but as legitimate targets.

The Chronicle pushes back against this erasure and this inversion. It gives our community the power to tell our own story — truthfully, proudly and with the full complexity we deserve. Through careful reporting, it corrects misinformation, challenges lazy tropes, and provides the context so often missing from national coverage. It ensures that conversations about Jewish life and Jewish vulnerability include the voices of those actually living it — here, in Pittsburgh, where we have known both extraordinary resilience and staggering grief.

At the same time, the Chronicle strengthens our internal bonds. It documents our congregations, schools, organizations, celebrations and milestones. It captures life cycle events and communal struggles. It highlights the breadth of Jewish life in Pittsburgh across denominations, ages, neighborhoods, backgrounds and viewpoints. In a world determined to reduce us to hashtags or stereotypes, the Chronicle insists that we are a people, not a caricature.

Most importantly, the Chronicle is creating an enduring record. Generations from now, when our grandchildren and great-grandchildren look back to understand what it meant to be Jewish in Pittsburgh during this era — in the long shadow of the Holocaust, after the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, after Oct. 7, amid the disinformation and conspiracies that followed attacks from Sydney to Sderot — they will not be forced to rely on hostile social media feeds or distorted outside narratives. They will be able to turn to the Chronicle’s archives and see, in our own words, who we were, what we faced and how we responded.

Our voice, as a Pittsburgh Jewish community, will have been preserved because of the exhaustive and remarkable work of the Chronicle’s reporters, editors and staff. They are a treasure — professional, committed and too often underappreciated. While others recycle outrage and amplify lies, they do the essential work of reporting, editing and fact-checking.

That is why I am proud to be joining the board of the Chronicle. At a time when our story is being twisted, appropriated and attacked, the Chronicle is one of the few institutions ensuring that our truth is recorded. Supporting it is not only an act of communal responsibility; it is an act of self-respect and of faith in our future. PJC