“This one hurts more,” my seventy-something congregant, a Philadelphia native, tells me as we observe that the new cemetery monument to the three men killed in an attack at our Pittsburgh synagogue in October 2018 is in the direct sightline of one dedicated in 2012 to those lost in the Shoah.
Past Katz Center fellows and affiliates have been reflecting on the anti-Semitic attack in Pittsburgh since it happened on Saturday, October 27. We are collecting their work here; it is testimony to the thoughtful social engagement of our community.
It is unclear what scholarship can do to ameliorate the voracious momentum of hatred, nor how inhumanity is tempered by the humanities, but at the core of the work of scholarship is a profound and enduring optimism in the worth of being human.