Aviva Lubowsky: A progressive Jew’s take on the PA-12 race

Back in the 1990s, I was in Poland visiting a concentration camp. As I exited the gas chamber, I looked across the camp to the barbed wire fence. Immediately beyond it were the backyards of the residents of the town in which the camp was situated.

“Were those houses there during the war?” I asked the docent. They were.

I wondered about the people who lived in those homes in the 1940s. The reality of the vast numbers of people who knew about what was happening in the concentration camps became apparent. In the years since, I have found a great deal of empathy for those residents. By the time the camps were built and running at full force, what could any of those neighbors possibly have done to help the Jews?

There were the righteous who through stores of money, ingenuity and bravery were able to save lives. But by and large, once the gas chambers were running, there was little most German or Polish citizens could do to stop the mass killings.

Those citizens’ window of opportunity to meaningfully impact the fate of the Jewish people had passed some years before, when the weapons being used against the Jews were not cans of Zyklon B but, simply, words. Propaganda. The masterful spinning of rhetoric about the Jewish people, which led entire societies to believe that Jews were a lesser race needing to be eliminated.

This brings me to the PA-12 primary election this month.

I was a fan of Congresswoman Summer Lee in the prior election cycle. She has many progressive stances that I agree with. I voted for her in the last primary (when she ran against a Jewish man) because she was a strong advocate for causes that are important to me and because I was excited to support a strong Black woman. However, it has become impossible to ignore in her words the echo of the propaganda from 1930s Germany.

Lee has repeatedly and knowingly shared misinformation about the war in Gaza. She promoted the falsehood that Israel bombed the Al-Alhi hospital (the statement remained on her social media for weeks after the Pentagon discredited it), and stated that the war in Gaza had a “99% casualty rate” that, again, disregards the figures provided to her by the U.S. government.

In her recent televised debate, Lee stated that Israel was “targeting” aid workers in Gaza despite no finding of fact from any investigation that this was the case. In pronouncing these distortions and exaggerations, Lee is spreading blood libel — a tactic favored by antisemites for centuries: the false accusation that Jews are murdering others for nefarious reasons, which ultimately incites violence against Jewish people.

Those campaigning for and supporting Lee are many of the same people who publicly spouted antisemitic tropes at two recent county council meetings, some even denying that the atrocities in Israel on Oct. 7 occurred.

Lee has voted no on bills that can help protect Jewish people, including a bill aiming to address antisemitic hate speech on college campuses. Even though I agree that criticisms of Israel and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are valid and necessary, Lee’s choices and words repeatedly endanger me, my family and the Jewish community.

Five years after the Tree of Life shooting, hate has reappeared in our streets. Jewish schools have been vandalized: at one K-8, American and Israeli flags were torn down and flagpoles damaged just steps away from a Holocaust memorial. Streets are repeatedly painted with antisemitic graffiti. Visibly Jewish children are harassed on their way to school. A Jewish business’ windows were smashed. Signs supporting Israel have been defaced and burned on lawns, including my own.

The connection between these escalating acts and the rhetoric from Lee could not be more clear.

People look back at the Jews in Europe in the 1930s and wonder why they didn’t leave. The writing was on the wall. It’s on the wall here in Pittsburgh, too.

Voters, I implore you: If you care about the safety of your Jewish neighbors, you cannot vote for someone who hurts us. The time to show that you stand against hate is now, on your ballot.

Aviva Lubowsky is a social worker and lifelong Pittsburgh resident.