In late April, Sophia Jani, a young composer from Germany, traveled to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to hear the local symphony perform her composition “Flare.” Before the performance, Jani explained that it was based on a poem by Mary Oliver and that she hoped it might bring some “sweetness” into a troubled world which, at least for a moment, it did.
Her ethereal work was followed by the Icelandic pianist Vikingur Olafsson’s performance of the Brahms 1st Piano Concerto. Upon concluding that meditative work—Brahms composed it after his friend and mentor Robert Schumann (whose life the scholar Judith Chernaik recently explored in her illuminating study, Schumann: The Faces and the Masks) tried to commit suicide in February 1854 by leaping into the Rhine River—Olafsson played as an encore a transcription of Bach’s Organ Sonata no. 4. Olafsson, who has become something of a cult figure in classical music, did not disappoint. His transcendent rendition of Bach’s sonata offered a welcome respite from quotidian cares for the Pittsburgh audience.
Pennsylvania was founded in 1681 by William Penn as a refuge for Quakers and other persecuted minorities, but it has seen more than its share of violence in recent years. An arson attack on the Governors’ mansion took place on the eve of the first day of Passover. No one was injured but the damage to the mansion was extensive. The attack has drawn both national and international attention. Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro says that President Donald Trump called him and was “very gracious.” Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar contacted Shapiro to express his support as well.
Cody Balmer, charged with attempted murder, aggravated arson, burglary and terrorism, allegedly told a 911 dispatcher that “Governor Shapiro needs to know that Cody Balmer will not take part in his plans for what he wants to do to the Palestinian people.” He apparently added, “I’m not hiding, and I will confess to everything that I had done.”
The assault on the Governor’s mansion carried with it echoes of the 2018 attack on the Tree of Life synagogue in Squirrel Hill—a well-known Jewish neighborhood of Pittsburgh where I grew up. Eleven worshippers were gunned down at the synagogue by a white nationalist who blamed American Jews for abetting illegal immigration. In 2021 the journalist Mark Oppenheimer published a moving tribute called Squirrel Hill: The Tree of Life Shooting and the Soul of a Neighborhood.
This heinous attack is now being commemorated at the local University Club in an exhibit, “Lessons From the Tree of Life,” that will also travel to Cleveland, Ohio. It shows a sampling of the thousands of items—quilted hearts, cards, paper cranes–that were dispatched to Squirrel Hill in the aftermath of the assault. Today, cards and flowers continue to be dropped off outside the synagogue, but it is supposed to be rebuilt along the lines of a preliminary plan from the architect Daniel Libeskind who designed the Jewish museum in Berlin.
Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili attended the Tree of Life synagogue as a child. She is the founder of the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Governance and Markets and a professor of international affairs. Earlier this year, washers inscribed with denunciations of Israel and Jews were strewn on her family’s front lawn and discovered by several of her children. What’s more, an unsavory group called the Steel City Antifascist League has branded her a “proud Zionist” and decried her appointment to serve as co-chair of the university’s Antisemitism Working Group as “immensely dangerous.”
Immensely dangerous? Over the past several years, Murtazashvili, who worked for a number of years in Central Asia as an American government official, has sought to assist Afghan scholars and their families, as far as possible, to flee the Taliban regime and find homes in America. She has a generous and welcoming spirit. And she remains undaunted by the aspersions cast at her.
“I love my neighbors and I love this community. I refuse to let the extremists defile so many things that give us meaning,” she told me. So do most Pittsburghers. Stroll through Squirrel Hill, as I did over the weekend, and you’ll find more than a few houses festooned with signs declaring, “We Stand With Israel,” along with Israeli flags.
Pittsburgh has always had a tenacious spirit, rooted in its Steel City traditions. Since the 1970s, when the steel mills went under almost overnight, it has transitioned into a high-tech entrepôt, based around Carnegie Mellon University, a leader in computer science, artificial intelligence and robotics. Add in the rise of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and you have a recipe for Pittsburgh as the comeback kid of the Rust Belt (in stark contrast to the industrial and social decline of northern England recently chronicled by Antonia Ferrier in the JST).
The transformation of Pittsburgh is why the kind of nostalgic vision that Trump has been purveying about a return to the industrial era seems so misplaced. The mills have long since been torn down and Pittsburgh is trying to overcome the legacy of the past. Its air quality remains ranked among worst in the US for year-round particle pollution, according to the annual report of the American Lung Association.
Today companies like Google are investing heavily in the region. By contrast, the notion that high tariffs on America’s trading partners and competitors alike can restore its economic fortunes is bunk. The “City of Champions,” as Pittsburgh likes to call itself, has already demonstrated beyond cavil that there are better roads to follow than trying to return to an illusory golden age.
