As it turned out, Samuel discovered the shooter's diatribe actually spent more space — 30 of its 180 pages — on Jews than on any other group. This was a surprise — I'd thought of Samuel's piece as a simple accounting for the historical record, but now it contained a bit of news as well. It also made the framing more challenging.
We originally published the piece with the headline, "The gunman killed Black people. But his screed focuses more on Jews." I cringed a bit at that, concerned about the use of both "but" and "more," and changed it Wednesday morning to say: "The gunman killed Black people. Here's what his screed says about Jews." I still worried it could be interpreted as trying to shift focus away from the victims and onto ourselves, but couldn't come up with a better option.
A few people on Twitter, and more in a Jewish women's Facebook group I'm privileged to belong to, derided the whole article. Some said it fell into the false-binary trap that erases the existence of Black Jews. Others said it distracted from the victims, suggested some kind of "competition" among targeted groups, and was particularly offensive during this first week of mourning those killed.
"This is not something the Jewish community needs to make about ourselves," one wrote. "We're never going to find solutions for these problems unless we really listen to people — Black people, especially — and let them lead."
I responded to some of these comments, trying to explain — as I did above — why we had done the piece and how it fits into our mission as a Jewish news outlet serving the breadth and diversity of our communities. That was a mistake. What I had intended as transparency and engaging criticism read to others like defensive doubling-down. I was urged to shut up and listen.
So I spent several hours yesterday in conversation with the Forward's editor-at-large, Robin Washington, and Rabbi Sandra Lawson, a member of our Forward Association, who are both Black and Jewish; and with Emilia B. Diamant, who leads anti-racism workshops across the Jewish world; and listening in to a Zoom event the progressive Jewish action group Bend the Arc hosted about the attack.
Robin, a veteran journalist who has run both a Black publication and a metropolitan daily, among many other things, said he "was not terribly thrilled" about the article. He saw no need to give air to the ramblings of a "crazy" person, thought it falsely suggested Black and Jewish are "mutually exclusive" identities and that the headline diminished the Black experience of the attack regardless of what the article itself said.
Rabbi Sandra, as she likes to be called, also said the headline was problematic, explaining: "Black people are in pain, so the hypersensitivity around anything that looks like it's centering white people is going to be painful for Black people, and particularly for Black Jews."
"This is the tricky thing: anyone who pays attention to this understands that the root of all this vitriol, this white supremacy stuff, is hatred of Jews," she noted. "It's hard to navigate — I don't envy what you have to do. The way our country is structured, it's like you talk about Black stuff, you talk about white stuff, you talk about Jewish stuff, you talk about Christian stuff — we don't do a good job on the intersection of things. We need to be thinking multiculturally about everything."
Emilia, who it turns out went to the same high school as I did — alas, 15 years later — focused on my Facebook responses explaining our intent and journalistic responsibilities, which she saw as a "fight or flight" mode common among white people in conversations about race.
"It's a natural reaction, it's understandable — in so many institutions, we were trained to be, like, 'no, I want to explain myself,'" she said. "It gets scary for us as white folks when we get implicated in any way. We want people to know: that's not us. It tends to, unfortunately, create a dynamic where it makes things worse, not better."
Thursday evening, I signed onto Bend the Arc's event, which began with a powerful tribute to the 10 people murdered in Buffalo, with a slide listing their names and ages and a speaker sharing poignant details about their work, hobbies and families. Ben Lorber, a researcher and writer who focuses on white nationalism and antisemitism, later spoke about the attack with Ginna Green, a Black Jewish activist (who, as devoted readers of this space know, also co-hosts our advice podcast, A Bintel Brief — and who had posted in the Facebook group that she agreed with other Black Jews' critique of our screed article as insensitive and problematic.)
Ginna said that in the days since the shooting, she had been concerned about "a competitiveness around who is at most risk and who is in the most danger," particularly among white Jews, and asked Lorber for his "thoughts on how our community can resist the temptation to be divided."
Lorber, who is white, said it was important for white Jews "to realize that we weren't the main targets here and to center Black voices," and "to really show up for our comrades right now." At the same time, he said, "I want to validate the aspect of that fear that's rooted in the knowledge that antisemitism and anti-Blackness are deeply connected in the ideology of this white-nationalist shooter and across our broader society."
When Ginna opened for questions from the audience, the first one was: Why is the mainstream press not talking about the extreme antisemitism underlying the great replacement theory?
Lorber challenged the premise of the question, saying he had been "heartened that many mainstream sources are able to draw these connections," and I agree; antisemitism has been a core part of coverage of this attack and previous work on replacement theory and other white-supremacist canards.
The question also affirmed my instinct that our readers need us to provide more detail, depth and nuance on the antisemitic elements of this and other attacks. Which we have done and continued this week with seven pieces (so far). Samuel's fine examination of what the shooter's screed says about Jews is not the whole story, should not be anyone's focal point. It is, though, an important element in the broader coverage.
