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A Head-of-School’s Response to Pittsburgh

The capacity to receive comfort and the impulse to offer comfort are a cycle of caring that shows the best in humanity. And this cycle of caring is what perhaps distinguishes the response to this anti-Semitic attack from past atrocities. A good friend told me she’d found comfort in the Facebook status posted by one her friends, Alice Sahel-Azagury: “The difference is the absence of indifference.” Alice and her family moved to Pittsburgh from Paris in 2016 after the sharp increase in anti-Semitic attacks. There was no Magen David (Star of David) on billboards, and little outcry beyond the Jewish world to recognize the attacks as anti-Semitic and anti-humanity, all by white men.

AVI BARAN MUNRO, head of school at Community Day School, Pittsburgh, from the school newsletter, “Eton,” November 15, 2008.