PublicSource | News for a better Pittsburgh (https://www.publicsource.org/author/jordana-rosenfeld/)
Explosions of anti-Semitic violence like the Tree of Life shooting can sometimes appear to come out of the blue. And many people reference only the Holocaust in Hitler’s Germany when discussing anti-Semitic violence. But in reality, anti-Semitism functions as a system of oppression that goes beyond these violent acts.
Avi Baran Munro has lived nearly half her life in Squirrel Hill. Along with her husband, Paul, she’s raised four children there, just blocks away from the Tree of Life synagogue. Her parents, Holocaust survivors, followed the family to Pittsburgh to stay close.
The Oct. 27 massacre at the synagogue was a blow to the entire family.
I was 23 years old when I learned about my family’s history with anti-Semitic violence. Before last year, I had thought there was no significant family history of experiencing anti-Semitic violence. There is, but no one in my family ever talks about it.
It’s increasingly possible to earn a living wage without attending college, but recent high school graduates often lack the skills to enter those occupations and the awareness that such career opportunities exist in the first place. Several for-profit and nonprofit organizations in the region have stepped in to address the various barriers to high school graduates gaining skilled employment, including lack of technical skills, career readiness or “soft skills,” and contemporary career awareness.
However, a recent report from the Allegheny Conference on Community Development signals that advantage for truck drivers may be temporary. Using a study from the University of Oxford, the conference determined that 39 percent of workers (about 435,000 people) in the seven-county Pittsburgh Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) are in jobs at high risk of automation. All of the jobs characterized by the conference as 'high risk' were assigned an 85 percent or higher likelihood of automation in the Oxford study.
When Tarana Burke speaks about #MeToo, the movement she has founded, her story starts with Heaven. Heaven, a girl Burke met when she worked as a summer camp director in Alabama, was what Burke calls “her special.”
The disastrous decision that Megan Fahey made as she was trying to care for her fictional family after being abandoned in poverty by her husband was to spend her last $10 on food rather than bus passes.