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October 27th is a podcast that tells the story of the 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue shooting through the voices of the local community.
Each episode introduces us to the story of a person who experienced the synagogue shooting and its aftermath: survivors and family members of those who were killed, Jewish community members, and their non-Jewish neighbors.
October 27th is adapted from Meanings of October 27th, an oral history project that interviewed over 100 Pittsburghers about their life stories and reflections on the shooting.
Visit the oral history archive: https://october27archive.org/oral-histories
Donate to support this project: https://bardian.bard.edu/register/meanings
Noah Schoen: I spent a month each summer with my Mom’s family growing up, and it seemed like we were always telling family stories. Me and my cousins would sit on the white couches in my grandparents’ house and hear about the time my mom got kicked in the stomach by a horse, or the story of when Zayde read Shakespeare to Nana as he courted her. She thought it was weird, but she liked him. And there were stories of hardships, too, like when Nana nearly died from a bad case of cancer in her 40s.
These stories have always felt important to me—they’re like this link to the past that helps me know myself. And so a few years ago, when I learned about two psychologists who were studying family stories, I was interested.
Marshall Duke and Robyn Fivush found that there are these three typical “shapes” to the stories that families tell about themselves.
The first shape is the ascending narrative. It’s a story that’s all about the upward trend—it says, “our family’s life just keeps getting better and better.”
The second shape is the descending narrative, and it’s the opposite of the ascending one; it’s about the downward trend, about how things were better before and are only getting worse.
But the third shape is the oscillating narrative, and this is the one that really caught the eye of Duke and Fivush. The oscillating narrative focuses on the ups and downs of life and how the family sticks together through them. Their research found that kids who told the story of their family in an oscillating narrative shape showed more resilience in the face of traumas and hardships.
Now I’m Jewish, and as I learned about the oscillating narrative, it struck me that this is the story shape of the Jewish tradition. For thousands of years, Jews have been reading the Torah, and with its family dramas and Exodus journey from slavery to freedom, the Torah doesn’t shy away from the difficulties of being human.
I think there’s something about telling this oscillating narrative over and over again that has helped Jews to persist, preparing us for difficult periods and helping us to hold fast to hope in our darkest moments.
One of those dark moments in my life—a moment we’ll be focusing on in this podcast—happened on October 27th, 2018. In Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, just six blocks from the house I grew up in. A gunman entered a synagogue and killed 11 Jews as they prayed. I can still remember the phone call I made to my mom minutes after I learned about the shooting. I told her, “It’s Shabbat, and they’re killing our people,” and we cried together.
The trauma of this attack—it didn’t just affect Pittsburgh—it rippled out to Jews across the country. One of the things I’ve noticed is that nationally, the story of the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting is often told in the form of a descending narrative. There are these dark phrases, like “the worst antisemitic attack on U.S. soil,” and there’s a suggestion that perhaps American Jews’ best days are behind us.
And that could be true. Who can know? But I believe that to be Jewish is to understand that we become the stories that we tell about ourselves. And the violent antisemitism of October 27th, 2018; it’s a big part of what happened that day—but it’s not the only part.
I’m Noah Schoen, I’m a community organizer and antisemitism educator born and raised in the heart of Squirrel Hill, the neighborhood where the synagogue shooting happened.
Aliza Becker: And I’m Aliza Becker. I’m an oral historian from Chicago who has been collecting stories about the American Jewish experience for over ten years.
As soon as I saw the news about the shooting, I felt overwhelmed with fear. But as I spoke of my concerns at a vigil in my hometown of Chicago, it occurred to me that I actually had no personal relationship to the shooting, even though it felt like it. While so-called experts around the world were analyzing its meaning, I began to wonder what it was like for Pittsburghers on the ground for whom the trauma was immediate and for whom the impact would linger much, much longer.
Together, Noah and I have spent the last five years recording interviews for an oral history project that spoke with more than 100 Jewish and non-Jewish Pittsburghers about their life histories and reflections on the synagogue shooting.
Most of what we have heard nationally focuses on the horrific events in the Tree of Life building on October 27th, 2018. But what we learned from listening to Pittsburghers is that what happened on that day and those following were part of a more complex story—a story that mirrors the ups and downs of the oscillating narrative.
Tracy Baton: So, my earliest memory was my mom teaching me that if somebody is antisemitic they probably hate you too.
Audrey Glickman: We’re people. We have lives, we affect other people. We do things in the world. We do things in society.
Rabbi Admon Elisar: And I came to them. And I says with tears, "It's okay to cry. We working together. I want to help you.
Reva Simon: There's always a fear. A wonder if this can ever happen. again.
Clara Gourley: There wasn’t really anybody there to speak up and say, “hey don’t do that,” besides like me.
Jasiri X: Every community should feel a wave of love, support, compassion, access to financial resources in the wake of any tragedy.
Drew Medvid: October 27th had this very unique impact where it brought the Pittsburgh community together.
Dan Leger: The values that we apply to living a Jewish life are both freedoms and constraints. And balancing those is the way to find that melding of justice and love. That is the great challenge of life.
Becker: To understand the big picture of October 27th, we need to listen to stories of the terrible tragedy, the resilience of the community, and everything in between.
And that is what we are going to explore in this podcast. To tell the story of what happened after the synagogue shooting in all of its complexity, and to begin to incorporate what happened in Pittsburgh into the thousands-year-old oscillating narrative of the Jewish people.
Schoen: This is October 27th.