At a press conference later that evening, held at the Westwood Look Resort, close to La Toscana, Sheriff Clarence W. Dupnik added his two cents to the swirling debate over what appeared to be a political crime committed by a lone psychotic. “We have become the Mecca for intolerance and bigotry,” Dupnik said of Arizona. “Unbalanced people are particularly susceptible to vitriol.” The shooting, he said, took seven minutes. “There’s never security at her events,” he said. “She’s never asked for nor refused security.” I listened from the door with a few other reporters who also hadn’t thought to bring credentials. We were joined briefly were a handful of elderly hotel guests, who complained that the resort’s staff had promised them that they could attend, too. The guests eventually decided they would hear the proceedings better from the bar.

By the time I got to University Medical Center where Rep. Giffords was lying in critical condition, at about 9 p.m., there was a gaggle of perhaps three dozen well-wishers being circled by journalists.

Perhaps 20 feet away, a Latino family was praying loudly, having positioned themselves at a respectful distance from the quiet mourners. Some of the people in the circle were shaking hands, hugging, and thanking each other for coming. Others were tending to an impromptu memorial, making sure the candles didn’t set fire to the letters, flowers, signs of support, and other offerings. Most of the notes were addressed to Giffords. There was also a picture of Judge John M. Roll, who had been killed. I spoke with two 21-year-olds, both born and raised in Tucson: Elana Satten-Lopez, a student at Haverford College, and Thomas Myers, who attends the University of Arizona.

“We need to show this is not representative of Tucson,” Satten-Lopez said plaintively. “It’s just one person.”

“The political climate is so crazy,” said Myers.

“We watched some of his YouTube videos, but we didn’t understand them,” Satten-Lopez said. “They didn’t make any sense.”

An older couple, Charles Alexander and Cynthia Miller, stood nearby. “She’s such a good person,” Miller said. “She’s helped some friends of mine when nobody else could.”

***

Congregation Chaverim, the Reform synagogue Giffords attends, is a plain brick building with thick glass windows. The interior is largely unadorned. Small tapestries and red curtains hang from pastel pink walls, and a Hanukkiah sits on top of a piano. Yesterday morning more than 150 people attended a service led by Rabbi Stephanie Aaron, a small woman in a prayer shawl. When people came to speak to her she would either hug them, or hold their arm. When she cried she seemed even smaller, until the cantor put her arms around her. Then she grew into the embrace.

Rabbi Aaron, who presided over Giffords’ wedding to Navy Capt. Mark Kelly, an astronaut, often struggled with tears as she described Gabby and said blessings for “the afflicted.” Everyone in the congregation looked miserable. Some more Orthodox Jews wouldn’t consider Aaron, a woman, a legitimate rabbi, it occurred to me. She’s one hell of a rabbi.

Aaron began the service with a niggun, a prayer of lament, and then launched into two stories:

“A hasid is depressed and goes to see the rabbi. He’s explaining his problem when the fire begins to go out. The rabbi vigorously jabs the fire with a poker. ‘Do you see what happened there? When the embers spread out they begin to dim, when they come together they reignite. So too with people.’ ”

The other story was a tale about the Baal Shem Tov, the father of Hasidism. “This is a story we’ve unfortunately told too many times,” the rabbi said.

“The Baal Shem was resting after a long day doing good works,” she began. “A melech, an angel, woke him. Suddenly they were flying and came to a clearing where a boy stood. On one side of the boy was a sea of hatred and violence, on the other was an abyss of our anxieties. The Baal Shem Tov tried to call out to the boy, but his lips were sealed. However the boy’s eyes suddenly widened, and he saw what surrounded him. Frozen, he tottered on the brink. The Baal Shem Tov finally forced a single word from his lips: ‘Fly!’ ”

Sobs and laughing infants punctuated the service. One woman was so wracked with sorrow that she struggled to rise during the Mourner’s Kaddish and remained seated with a neighbor’s arm around her.

Melanie Nelson, who leads the Pima County Interfaith Council, said a prayer for people to come together. She told me later that whenever the interfaith council requested a meeting with the congresswoman or needed something, Gabe Zimmerman, a Giffords aide who was also killed in the shooting, would arrange help.

Abraham Byrd, a 6-foot-3-inch elderly doctor, was standing in the back. He is not a member of the congregation; he isn’t Jewish. With tears running down his cheeks, he explained that he attended the service “out of respect and solidarity.” “It’s her congregation that supports her and gives her to us,” he said.

Eve Shapiro, a member of the congregation, is a pediatrician who had worked with Giffords on health-care policy. “Everyone’s still in shock,” she said. “Just such a thing to happen here.” She attended the service because she needed to be with the community, she said, “and in a place of Jewish healing.”

The service was run entirely by women, which seemed appropriate. As Giffords said in her first congressional race, “If you want something done, your best bet is to ask a Jewish woman to do it. Jewish women have an ability to cut through all the reasons why something should, shouldn’t, or can’t be done and pull people together to be successful.”

After the service was over I spoke at length with the rabbi, who had been at the hospital late the previous night. “They were doing some tests with her, so I’m waiting for them to call me until I go back,” she said. I asked her how the community was handling the shock. “There’s a real sense of people reaching out for one another,” she said. “There’s a sense of people wanting to be together. We want to begin the work of preventing this from ever happening again in our society.”

I asked her to describe the Jewish teachings that would apply to such a terrible event. “I think there’s several strands of Jewish thought,” she said. “For example, the mishaberach, the healing prayers, calling on our ancestors to bless and heal us. The body should have healing, and the full self should have healing. And asking everyone who needs healing and should be healed. There should be an ever-expanding circle into the universe from this one prayer. That’s a very helpful prayer.”

She continued talking about the need for yechidah, or togetherness. “Being connected in togetherness,” she said. “Recognizing everyone in God’s image. I think that’s where we’ve gone wrong. We don’t do that anymore.”

We’ll update as more information is available.

UPDATE, 1:55 p.m.: The Los Angeles Times has more detail, including word that the man arrested near the synagogue is not believed to be the gunman.

The two victims, both in their 40s, were arriving for morning minyan when they were shot in Adat Yeshurun Valley Sephardic’s underground parking lot. The gunman fled; other worshippers inside the synagogue called 911. The LAPD tells the Times that both victims are in good condition at local hospitals.

The police are investigating the shooting as a hate crime, but Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa called it “a senseless act of violence.”

Police Search for Gunman in North Hollywood Synagogue Shooting [LAT]
2 Shot in Legs as Gunman Attacks L.A. Synagogue [AP/NYT]

The AP is also reporting that an official with the union representing the guards says he pushed for bulletproof vests after a man made threatening remarks to guards there several years ago. The wire service notes that von Brunn, a former Navy officer, went to the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., last month to complain about increased minority enrollment at the school. The museum, meantime, was to host the premiere of a new play on Wednesday, the day of the shooting, called Anne & Emmett, which imagines a conversation between Anne Frank and Emmett Till, both teenaged victims of racism. “I went from opening-night jitters to murder at the museum,” playwright Janet Langhart Cohen told the Washington Post. “It was like a bad dream: A white racist killed a black man at a Jewish shrine.” The play will go on tonight at George Washington University.

DC Museum Reopens After Fatal Shooting [AP via Yahoo!]
Slain Security Guard Remembered as “Teddy Bear” [AP via Yahoo!]
Guards Who Stopped Von Brunn Were Retired Cop, Ex-Marine [WP]
Officials Wanted Vests for Security Guards [AP via Yahoo!]
Attack Underscores Play’s Message [WP]

But acting as if all anti-Semites are basically the same person, just slight variations on a theme, actually underestimates the power of anti-Semitism. Indeed, the power of this pathology lies in its ability to be pressed into service by all kinds of men and women, including people who would never speak to one another. Some anti-Semites are real dangers; others are misguided obsessives; others are just sad sacks. To ignore their diversity is to miss the historical significance of anti-Jewish bigotry.

Since January I have been working on a long investigation for Tablet (to run later this month) of the Holocaust denial movement, of which von Brunn is reported to be a proud member. But as I have seen close-up, it is so riven by internal divisions that it is hardly a “movement” at all. For example, Mark Weber, the director of the Institute for Historical Review, is nothing like von Brunn, from what I can tell of news reports describing the alleged D.C. shooter. Weber does not believe in race-mixing, thinks Jews are almost ineluctably disloyal to the countries in which they live, and has worked with some of the worst racists in America. But his temperament is not that of the paranoiac. Rather, he is something of a history buff gone wrong, an obsessive whose deep intelligence collects facts but can’t place them in any kind of context. The Jews fascinate him in an unhealthy way, but he doesn’t attribute to Jews magical powers to plan vast conspiracies and keep them secret. What’s more, in my interviews with him, Weber conceded to me that there may in fact have been gas chambers; he also wrote an article, discussed intelligently in the Forward last January, criticizing several famous Holocaust deniers for being stuck in the past. (Weber would prefer to stop talking about gas chambers and focus instead on the threat of Zionist influence on American foreign policy.) Many of his beliefs are loathsome and wrong, but Weber is not delusional and he is not violent. He is more comfortable with books than with guns.

For many years Weber was closely allied with Bradley Smith, the founder of a one-man shop called the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust. Like Weber, Smith would never encourage violence, and he too sees himself as something of a litterateur. But while Weber has a master’s degree in history and is widely read, Smith is almost gleeful about his anti-intellectualism. Before becoming active in questioning the existence of Nazi gas chambers, Smith was active in the libertarian movement, and he was drawn to Holocaust denial because he believed questioning of the Holocaust was a taboo worth smashing. Smith sees himself as a free-speech zealot whose great contribution is to ask a question—were there gas chambers?—that most of us are too afraid to ask. And for what it’s worth, Smith has no problem with race-mixing: he lives in Mexico with his Mexican wife.

Smith, in turn, has no use for Willis Carto, who lost control of the Institute for Historical Review in a lawsuit in the early 1990s and went on to found The Barnes Review, perhaps the strangest publication I have ever read. Its purpose seems to be extreme historical revisionism, including Holocaust denial but also the defenses of the indefensible (Charles Lindbergh, Rudolf Hess) and a bizarre white man’s pseudo-populism (“Rediscovering the Forgotten White Ancestors Of Many American Indians”). Carto is where anti-Semitism and racism intersect with a mystical, LaRouche-like detachment from reality.

And then there are the outright Nazi sympathizers or Klansman types, those who may share elements of other, more cerebral forms of anti-Semitism but also have a visceral sense that the Jews are vermin. In the writings of James K. Warner, for example, one sees none of Weber’s almost admiring sense of the Jews as a cohesive people, nor any of Smith’s relish for testing the limits of free expression. In fact, reading Warner’s attack on Weber as a Mossad agent, alongside his theories about Scientologists and the CIA, one sees exactly the kind of undifferentiated, enraged stupidity that I imagine von Brunn possesses. It’s a zealotry far different from what I have found in Bradley Smith or Mark Weber.

It is tempting, of course, to say, “So what?” The world would be better off without any of it—the racial fear-mongering of Weber, the provocations of Smith, the trashy publications of Carto, the deranged bile of Warner—so why bother to waste too much effort in classification? First, we should be more sophisticated in our thinking; let’s do better than those who pervert truth for a living. Second, it’s smart and pragmatic to try to tell the maniacs from the misguided, the merely stupid, and those just seeking attention. It’s good policing, in other words.

Third, while von Brunn sounds mentally ill in a very obvious way, many anti-Semites and bigots have become what they are by exaggerating in themselves certain traits that are in all of us. Oddly, it would be comforting to imagine that von Brunn’s fellow anti-Semites are all like him, homicidal and deranged. At least we would know what we’re dealing with—and, better yet, we don’t have worry that we or anyone we know could ever be like that.

Finally, we need to recognize the multifarious nature of anti-Semitism. It is different from other bigotries—not worse or more harmful, just different, in historically significant ways. People who hate blacks or Hispanics don’t accuse them of plotting world conspiracies or controlling the Federal Reserve; nobody has accused Mormons of plotting to overthrow capitalism. But Jews are conceived as both money-hungry usurers and anti-American communists; as preening materialists and dirty, schnorring paupers; as genetically inferior but able to control the world through secret cabals. As Sartre famously remarked, if the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would invent him. Anti-Semitism is not simple, for if it were, it would not be so useful.

Mark Oppenheimer, a Tablet contributing editor,is the author of Knocking on Heaven’s Door: American Religion in the Age of Counterculture and Thirteen and a Day: The Bar and Bat Mitzvah Across America. He is currently a lecturer at Yale University.

Security Guard Killed at U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum [WP]