I’m Noah Schoen, and I’m Aliza Becker and this is October 27th, a podcast about the October 27th, 2018 synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh. Aliza and I co-founded an oral history project that recorded over 100 interviews with local Jews and non-Jews about their life stories and reflections on the shooting. Our interviewees taught us so much and we’ve created this podcast to share their insights with you. This is October 27th. 

I first heard about Naomi Kitchen when I read an article by her in the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle. She wrote about the challenges of being a mixed race Jew in a community which assumed that all Jews were white. If this continues, she wrote, “we will lose our Jews of color.” 

I was impressed by the depth of her thinking and even more impressed when we did this interview as she was finishing up her senior year of high school. Naomi is a descendant of survivors of the Holocaust and the Korean War. In the interview, she contextualizes the synagogue shooting within the long history of her people’s suffering. She believes that Jewish safety is ephemeral—it’s here and then it’s gone.

Naomi Kitchen: I am Naomi Jordan Kitchen. “I come from Pittsburgh” is what I say to people, but I was born in Houston, Texas, and I lived there for four years. And then I lived outside of Philly for two years, which is where my mom is from, and then when I was about eight is when I came to Pittsburgh, and that's where I have been since. I think saying I'm from Squirrel Hill is much more accurate than saying I'm from Pittsburgh. 

I recognize that the part of Pittsburgh that I live in is really a bubble. It's Squirrel Hill. It's the East End. It feels like a small town, and I think that's very unique, because in America, Jews don't live in small towns for the most part. Jews live in the cities, or they live in the suburbs, but I live in a Jewish small town, richly Jewish, and yet also incredibly diverse. The East End of Pittsburgh has many more people than just Jews. We have the universities, which bring in a lot of immigrants. 

At my high school, Taylor Allderdice High School. It's forty percent Black. I want to say it's like twenty-five percent Jewish. For the most part, the other part is just white from like Greenfield area. And so, there's a lot of different cultures coming into that building at one time. 

We have Squirrel Hill, which is what I would call the Jewish part of Allderdice, and we are all kind of meshed together. There is segregation, but everyone takes a little bit of the culture of the other. No one, I think, leaves that building untouched by the other people who have come in. 

Becker: How have you been touched? 

Kitchen: I have seen different parts of America in a very close up way that I otherwise would not have. I went to CDS, Community Day School, before Allderdice, and it's like the most bubble of bubbles, right. It's a private Jewish day school. Everyone's parents know each other. I graduated with sixteen kids in my grade. And so many of us go through the same thing we're getting to graduating, eighth grade comes, and our parents send us to this school that's literally across the street. They tell us, "This is where you're going to go," and it's culture shock like nothing else. I went, and I came home crying. 

There's so much disruption, so much distraction, and I think when I originally came, I was like, "Are we just not going to learn anything?" All  there is to do in that school is to talk to people. And that’s who you’re learning from. And I actually learned so much. 

You realize just because we speak differently, and maybe we look a little differently, we're all the same. Some people have had more hardships than other people, but most of us have had experiences with pain and love and like we can all relate over these things. We're not really so different.

What I spent four years doing was building relationships, and I met people whom I would never have crossed paths with. 

I took the SAT at Allderdice and in my case, I had SAT tutoring also before and you know I had a mom who read to me my whole life. I always have had books in my house. I've been given every resource to do well on that test. 

Ah, we’re taking the SAT and the kids in the room a lot of them start like kind of yelling, "I don't know how to read this, I don't know how to do this, I was never taught this? How am I supposed to know what these words mean?” You know, even if you had paid attention to every moment of every year of that education, you still would never be ready to take that test. 

What I walked out thinking about is how I don't feel prepared even though I’m the most prepared. How unfair. It’s almost like you’ve been lied to. Like you can go to school every single day, always pay attention, and then this is the test you're supposed to be prepared for, and then you don’t know anything on it. 

I think this all to me ties together in this like “pull yourself up from your bootstraps.” We hear that, you know, politically all the time. What if you don't have bootstraps? 

Becker: In one of the articles you wrote, you described yourself, "I am Syrian, Hawaiian, Columbian, Korean, Israeli, Persian, Mexican, Native American, white, Cambodian and Indian." How do you unpack that identity? 

Kitchen: I think that watching the world perceive me, watching them perceive me so wrong was something I was not prepared for. 

I listed those things because those are the things that I've been assumed to be. Some people look at me and are confused and curious and trying to figure out what they're seeing—maybe racially, maybe class-wise. And other people are sure. And it's the certainty that is interesting, because they're usually certain and very wrong at the same time. 

When I was younger, I was unaware about race. It was not a part of how I saw things and how I understood things. My parents never talked about it. 

My father, he's half-Korean. My Korean grandmother, when she came here, she got a lot of racist things said to her. 

It makes me sad for her, because I think she has such rich history.

Becker: And how do you self-identify, today? 

Kitchen: I identify as Jewish.  My mom was raised Israeli, and her parents, they are Israeli children of Holocaust survivor Jews. And it's very much about where our history is. And I love Israel, but I don’t think I consider myself Israeli. I think that I have a weird meshed identity with it and my Jewish identity. But I definitely wouldn’t say I am Israeli. I feel actually very American.

In terms of what race, I am a quarter Korean, I am Jewish, and then I have a quarter of American and white and European, like getting here on the Mayflower. And then, my mom's half is just Jewish in a way like we are from Israel. All the trips from you know Spain to Poland to Russia to Germany, like they were just temporary. And even here. 

In terms of a person of color, it’s a title that I don't feel right taking, and at the same time, when it's given to you, I don't know if it's a choice or not. 

Being in Israel, everything's different there. Race is different there, even though it's still very much present. And in Israel, people still ask me much more than they do here, "Where are you from?" and "Where is your family from?" But the biggest difference is that I'm never not assumed to be Jewish, ever. There's never an assumption that I'm not Jewish. It's “What kind of Jew are you?”

Becker: And here?

Kitchen: That's usually never part of the million assumptions that someone will get. Especially in Pittsburgh, I think, because Pittsburgh is a mostly Ashkenazi predominantly white Jewish community. It's hard to know, really know what we don't see. The other thing about Pittsburgh is that so many of the Jew, their families have been here for so long, it's an American Jewish community. Your parents are from here, your grandparents are from here, maybe your great-grandparents, maybe even before then. 

It's rare that here I see other Jews that also like stray from that norm, so I don't fault the Jewish community here for not knowing, and for assuming that I wouldn't be. That would make sense, because that's what's here. 

This community I really am a part of, it’s also rare at this point that I meet people who are part of the community who don't know me, and I don't know them. But definitely when someone's new, or I'm in a new Jewish space, it's like, "Whose friend are you? Who are you coming with?" you know, or, "What are you doing here?" 

Becker: How would you like to be treated by other Jews? 

I think I would like to be assumed to be Jewish. I mean that’s clear by how I feel when I'm in Israel, and like that excitement when I’m like "Oh, you already know.” But I think for me it’s the coldness and the suspicion when I'm approached as more of an interrogation, like, "What are you doing here? Where are you from? Oh, you say you're Jewish, well, prove it, What synagogue do you go to? Have you been here before? Do you have a bat mitzvah?” 
It doesn't feel home, when you're supposed to feel at home in your community. That's the part that has definitely turned me off. I don't want to go to those places with people who don't want me there. I don’t want to make people uncomfortable. It makes me uncomfortable. 

And my mom at the time, she's like, "Why can't you just know you're Jewish. They’re just wrong. Why do you need them to validate you? You don’t need that.”

And I remember explaining it like, "You would never tell me to chase after a boy who doesn't want me, so why are you telling me to do that with a community? I'm not going to chase after something that doesn't want me.” That's not how I feel anymore. But I think at the time that is what I was feeling. 

I have much more perspective, and even though it feels loud, I try to pay more attention to the people that have never looked at me that way or who are genuinely just curious. 

I think that I feel much more confident in my own Jewish identity, and I can see it as just a part of something much bigger— something about discomfort and fear of what we don't know.

Becker: I want to pivot now to October 27th, 2018. Can you tell me about that day? 

Kitchen: When it happened, I was in Israel. And I was on study abroad. It was an open weekend, which means you can go and visit family or just go somewhere else, and I was with my mom's sister's husband's family, near Haifa.

It’s  a big family, lots of babies, lots of kids. I remember playing with them. We were watching their like baby show, and like every channel in Israel started covering what was going on in Pittsburgh. There was a shooting in Pittsburgh at Tree of Life.

I hadn't talked to my family in like two weeks. I knew one of my closer friends, his sister was having her bat mitzvah there around this time. And I started calling everyone. My mom wasn't answering her phone. My brothers weren't answering their phones. No one was answering their phones. It was early in Pittsburgh.

I was on the phone with Benji who was there in Israel with me and is also from Squirrel Hill, and I was asking him if he had gotten in contact with his family. 

It was one of the most terrifying moments of my life. I swore the bat mitzvah must have been happening. I didn't know why they wouldn't be answering their phones. So, there was a lot of waiting. 

I was looking at my phone. No American news was covering it, and in Israel they're covering it.
Finally people started answering, and the bat mitzvah had happened the weekend before. My family wasn't there. 

That's really where my head was. It was much more personal than, “Oh, this is my community."  I really did think my brothers and my mom and all the people I know were going to be at that bat mitzvah. For hours I feel like I was holding so much, and that was a big release.

And that's when I remember really the tears coming of like, "Oh my God, this happened, this happened to my community. This happened a block away from my house." And there's grief in that.

But I think that what was different about my experience, like mine and Benji's. We were learning our Jewish history then about all of the times that we've been persecuted, all the times that this has happened. It felt like something that's part of something much bigger. 

At the same time, it was a shattering moment of like "Oh my God, how could this happen?” I was never thinking this could happen." But I think when you're learning history, when you're in the environment that me and Benji were in, it felt logical, almost.

And then, the next morning we were out in Tel Aviv and the graffiti showing support for Pittsburgh was everywhere. Lots of hands holding of the Israeli flag, the American flag, but the American flag would have some Jewish sign on it, so it's Jewish America that they were holding. There was signs of weeping. I saw the Steelers sign everywhere—I think they took that as like, okay, that’s a sign of Pittsburgh. That’s what we’ll use. There’s a lot of that. 

I was really ready to hear from the Israelis, "Should have seen it coming. We deal with it all the time.” Kind of like, “I told you so, it was always going to happen.” No one said that. They would hear we're from Pittsburgh, they would offer very sincere condolences. They grieved too. We were their Jewish brothers and sisters who were affected by it, and it might as well have happened in Israel. 

It really did feel like the homeland of the Jewish people. I actually think that I was in the best place possible. I felt so surrounded by support and love, and I think the way that I felt like I had a whole country behind was very healing.

Becker: Did the shooting affect you in any other way personally?

I think that watching the people who aren't Jewish in Pittsburgh and Squirrel Hill react was something I wasn't expecting. Every business on Forbes, Jewish and not Jewish, were putting up signs in support of the Jewish community. 

In the history of all the persecution that hasn't happened for the most part. We haven't seen our neighbors come out and support us the way that they did. So the history didn’t, didn’t prepare me for how supportive and how personal it was for a lot of them, too. 

You know, some of my closest non-Jewish friends felt like it had happened to them, too. You know, this was theirs also. And it didn't matter that they weren't Jewish, it happened to Squirrel Hill. And the Jews are a part of Squirrel Hill, and that makes them also a part of it. And that was beautiful for me to see.

I watched for a lot of my friends, it be a huge wakeup call of like, “You should not feel safe”. And that was interesting for me, because I think I assumed that everyone was kind of waiting for it, or knew that the world is scary. 

I realized after Tree of Life that most people were not waiting for it, and they did believe that nothing would ever happen and that there is no one that wants to hurt us. No one that would hurt us. You know, we are safe, always, forever. 

Kitchen: When Tree of Life happened, Allderdice reacted well. They started planting trees. They like made announcements about it. They really showed support.

No one from our school was directly affected by the Tree of Life, meaning that no one's grandparent died. But kids from our school have been killed, and school has done nothing about it. 

Antwon Rose died while I was in high school. And he was a seventeen-year-old boy from Woodland Hills and a lot of people knew him at school. Then another boy died, Jon-Jon, who also went to Allderdice, who I did not know personally, but also everyone knew. 

And the Black Student Union held an assembly for what had happened, and they brought in community speakers. And they asked people to raise their hands if someone in their immediate family or right after their immediate family was in prison, was dead, and almost every hand in the room went up. And there were tears. And I just, I had no idea. I had no idea that I had been going to school with these people who every single one of them had experienced something like that, where if you asked that question to my Jewish community, almost no one's hand would go up.

And so when Allderdice stopped everything for Tree of Life and won't stop anything when a Black student who goes to our school is killed, it sends a bad message. And so I think when that happened, a lot of the Jewish students at Allderdice pushed back and there had to be some mending.

Being at Allderdice, I have seen political issues up close and there are things that I now say that I know, because it's what I saw. I have seen how our government does not believe that Black Lives Matter. It's totally different than reading about an issue that I don't know about, that I haven't seen up close. 

Becker: What are those things that felt personal and up close, besides Black Lives Matter?

Kitchen: I grew up with a mother who very much instilled in me, and because I think it was instilled in her you know that a time of calm and a time of peace is just temporary and never get too comfortable and that just cause things are good right now doesn't mean they will be and expect that they won't be, because most of your ancestors it wasn't, so why would it be different for you. 

My grandmother and my grandfather, they both are children of Holocaust survivors. I know my grandmother's parents' stories better, because I've spent more time with my grandmother. She was from near Belarus. She left with her father in like ‘39 when hey thought that the Germans were coming just to take the men. That was like the rumor going around. So in her town, the men were all going to leave. She was seventeen years old, and the story is that the night he was leaving, she begged to come with him. And so he let her, and so she ran away with him. And they were running the whole time from Belarus all the way to Uzbekistan. 

And then later she found out that her sister Rachel was taken to a concentration camp and was murdered there. And the nanny was a not-Jewish woman named Nastia, who I'm named after, just with the n. The story is that Nastia, when they came to take the child, Nastia the nanny, wouldn't let them and fought with them, and she wouldn't let them take her without her. So she went through the ghetto and the camps with her and died there also. She was not Jewish. 
My great-grandmother then met my grandfather in Uzbekistan. He was in a Russian prison in Siberia for most of the war. 

My Korean grandmother, her family story from WWII is that her mother’s sister was taken when she was, you know, a girl by the Japanese to be a comfort woman, a sex slave, and, ah no one ever saw her again, so assume that she was killed. 

Becker: What has it meant to you to have this history? 

I think I have adopted my mother's view that we are so lucky and we are so blessed. I am so blessed to live in a time when I haven't had to be hungry, haven't had to be scared. And I've been able to live and not just survive. But also to remember that it could happen. It's never not a possibility. 

But also I feel strong because of it. I think I draw strength from all of it, all of these ancestors who continued to survive. I do. I have faith in myself that I can survive whatever comes because they did.

When I don’t have to survive then I have the duty to live the right way, and to, you know, use my opportunity and my freedom and exercise it, because so many people right now and my own family didn't have that. 

We became a foster family just recently. We got certified. And it happened, really, because my little brother, who's twelve, started learning a little more about the Holocaust, and he was learning about how children were hidden and taken by non-Jews to protect them, and how dangerous that was for them, and how that's how so many children were saved. And he asked my mom, “If you were non-Jewish, would you have hidden a Jewish child?"  You know, and she says, "Of course I would have, of course I would have." 

And you know then the conversation went, "Well, we're not doing it now. Why do we think that? There are children now who are in just as much danger, who need a place to go, and there's nothing holding us back and what, we're not? So what makes us think that we would have taken Jewish children at that time?”  

Who we think we are in history is who we are now.

October 27th is written and hosted by Aliza Becker and Noah Schoen, and it’s produced and edited by Carly Rubin. We get administrative support from Tina Stanton Gonzalez of the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College. Our music is from Blue Dot Sessions and our closing theme is Tree of Life by Nefesh Mountain. If you want to support our work and the creation of more episodes like this one, you can make a donation at October27podcast.org where you’ll also find episode transcripts, a link to this full unedited interview, and more. That’s October27podcast.org. And lastly, thank you to all of the amazing Pittsburghers who shared their stories for the Meanings of October 27th Oral History Project. We’re so grateful for your trust and your generosity.