When antisemitism became acceptable

OPINION:

The most recent shooting attack, a deadly assault at a celebration in Australia targeting Jews, didn’t feel distant to me here in Pittsburgh. It forced me to confront something this city knows too well.

On Oct. 27, 2018, a gunman entered the Tree of Life synagogue in my hometown during Shabbat services and opened fire. The people targeted were not soldiers or protesters. They were elderly men and women gathered in prayer. Eleven were murdered. Six others were wounded.

During the federal death penalty trial in May 2023, jurors heard audio from a 911 call placed that morning by Bernice Simon, an 84-year-old congregant. She and her husband, Sylvan, were married 62 years earlier in that same synagogue.

“Tree of Life, we’re being attacked,” she told the dispatcher. “My husband’s shot. … Oh, dear God, my husband’s bleeding.”

The dispatcher stayed on the line, asking whether she could still hear her.

Bernice Simon never answered. She and her husband were both killed.

Pittsburgh police rushed the building. Officers ran toward gunfire, stepping over bodies to stop the carnage. Several were wounded. Pittsburgh mourned.

President Trump did not hesitate to come to the city. From the outset, he had two intended destinations: the synagogue and the police officers who ran toward the gunfire. When he was not welcomed by the synagogue or the victims’ families, he did not turn back. He continued on to meet with the officers, including visits with those injured and recovering.

For a moment, the recognition mattered. It lifted men who had seen unspeakable horror, if only briefly, out of the nightmare they carried.

At the time, the attack was described as unthinkable. A line had been crossed. Never again, we said.

That promise did not last.

Years later, I returned to Duquesne University to earn a second master’s degree in clinical mental health counseling. It is a private, Catholic university, and the setting made what I witnessed even more disturbing.

After the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre in Israel, when concertgoers were murdered at a music festival, classmates didn’t mourn. They celebrated. They said the victims deserved it. I was horrified.

I pushed back. I said they weren’t soldiers; they were civilians. I asked what it would feel like if this happened at a concert they attended. I said people were calling it Israel’s 9/11.

The response still makes my stomach turn.

“We deserved that,” someone said. We deserved 9/11?

This wasn’t shouted online. It was said calmly, in an American university classroom, by students training to become counselors. Four of us were in the room. Two agreed. One stayed silent. I was the only one who said we didn’t.

When I continued to object, a doctoral student cut me off. “That’s enough, Kelly.”

This was a clinical mental health counseling program. We were supposed to be learning how to help people through grief and trauma. Instead, ideology replaced humanity. Empathy was selective. Some victims counted. Others did not.

At the same time, I was interning at a private practice serving autistic children, nearly all of them Jewish. After the concert massacre, I asked during supervision how we should support the children if they had questions.

The room went cold. There was no guidance. No concern. No discussion.

Not long afterward, I learned that one of our clients had an older sister at the concert. The family hadn’t heard from her. No one followed up. I still don’t know how that story ended.

I quit the internship that semester rather than compromise my ethics, though I did complete the program.

Across the country, Jews are now attacked at random: on sidewalks, on public transit, outside synagogues. Jewish students are harassed on campuses. Online, violence is excused as “activism.”

The attack in Australia is not an outlier. It is part of the same pattern: hatred that travels when it is tolerated.

In 2018, America recoiled in horror. In 2025, horror has been replaced by something far worse: indifference.

Antisemitism is not a misunderstanding. It is a hatred with a long memory, and it thrives when decent people convince themselves it isn’t their problem.

We owe Bernice and Sylvan Simon more than remembrance. We owe them honesty.

• Kelly Rae Robertson is a former criminal court and jail investigator in Allegheny County and a clinical mental health counselor in Pittsburgh. She has firsthand experience inside the justice system and clinical training programs and writes about antisemitism, public safety and moral failures in American institutions.