Mohamad Hamad, 23 years old, got to the courtroom first. He wore a white button-up shirt that hung loosely around his thin body and had a close-cropped haircut that curved over high-arching eyebrows. He looked dazed to the point of total blankness.

His codefendant, Talya Lubit, age 24, wore a light vintage blazer, dark blue with bright white stripes. Stress-swollen cheeks cracked through layers of makeup. Her hair was a resigned chaos of thinning tangles and zigzags.

Hamad and Lubit sat face-to-face on opposite heads of the defendants’ table. They did not speak to each other and avoided eye contact.

Two weeks earlier, the pair had been arrested for allegedly vandalizing Chabad of Squirrel Hill, a synagogue and religious center in the heart of Jewish Pittsburgh, during the early hours of July 29, 2024. The hearing, held at the federal courthouse in downtown Pittsburgh, would determine whether there was probable cause to refer an Oct. 25 criminal complaint against the pair to a grand jury, which could then decide to indict them. The federal crimes in question were “Defacing and Damaging Religious Real Property” and “Conspiracy to Commit an Offense Against the United States,” misdemeanors that carry a maximum penalty of a year each in federal prison.

Pittsburgh FBI counterterrorism task force agent David Derbish told the court that a little after midnight on July 29, surveillance cameras captured a masked individual with “a female gait” approaching the Chabad house. This person spray-painted the words JEWS 4 PALESTINE in large red letters on the facade behind the menorah on the center’s front lawn, along with a downward-pointing red triangle. As Derbish explained, this is a symbol commonly used among members and supporters of Hamas, the jihadist group and U.S.-designated terrorist organization responsible for the Oct. 7 slaughter in Israel. “It is a marking indicating Hamas has a target at that specific location or on that specific person,” Derbish explained.

The conspiracy charges technically referred to Hamad and Lubit’s alleged collaboration in the Chabad vandalism, but they also had a nebulous connection to more violent fantasies that established a beachhead in the real world. The original complaint claimed that in June of 2024, Hamad, a Lebanese-born American citizen and an aircraft hydraulic systems specialist in the 171st Maintenance Squadron of the Pennsylvania Air National Guard, had anonymously ordered two pounds of Indian Black aluminum powder and two pounds of potassium perchlorate (KClO4) from two online retailers using an alias and a phone number purchased through a voice-over-IP service. These explosive inputs arrived at a house in Coraopolis, Pennsylvania, where Hamad, his parents, and his two younger sisters lived.

In Signal messages the FBI obtained from his phone, Hamad and a 22-year-old Pittsburgh woman named Micaiah Collins, the daughter of a Presbyterian pastor who is also one of the city’s leading anti-Israel activists, appeared to discuss the construction and detonation of a homemade bomb. “I kinda just wanna test it with you as I’ve never done something that big lol and then another day very soon we can do bros ankles with Talya,” Hamad texted this alleged accomplice on June 29, 2024. Derbish, like the criminal complaint, acknowledged he did not know what “bros ankles” meant, though in context it appeared to be Hamad and his contact’s internal code for an artisanal bomb. In current basketball slang, a “bro’s ankles” are said to be broken when he is tripped-up through an especially balletic or devious crossover dribble. Derbish testified that Hamad had also purchased “cylindrical one-inch cardboard tubes” three inches in length, which could be used to contain and focus the force of an explosion.

On July 7, 2024, Collins, who appeared as an unnamed individual in the October 2024 complaint and who prosecutors only identified and indicted earlier this month, sent Hamad a video of a fireball several feet in width. The complaint includes stills from the video: The explosion expands and plumes upward and outward, the fire verging into a small burnt cloud. Collins reveled in their accomplishment. “i keep watchin the video!” she texted. “Hell yeah,” Hamad replied. Derbish told the court that the explosion could easily have been created with only a small fraction of the black powder and potassium perchlorate Hamad had ordered, materials that the FBI was now unable to locate.

An April 8 prosecution filing and an updated April 22 indictment claim that Hamad drove to State College, two and a half hours east of Pittsburgh, on July 18, 2024, with two homemade pipe bombs and “at least one other destructive device made with spray paint cans in his trunk.” In photos included in the filing, a man who prosecutors identify as Hamad lights a small metallic cylinder stuffed into the end of a long metal tube. Based on the angles of the photos, Hamad could not possibly have been alone during this second explosive test-run in 11 days, though neither the filing nor the new indictment identify who else was with him.

“Imagine the terror they saw if they had cams,” Hamad told a group text, in reference to the stolen banner. “Hamas operative ripping off their flags in white suburbia.” In another photo, which appeared in the April filing, Hamad’s eyes peer out from between a balaclava and a green Hamas headband—he’s in the passenger seat of a car in broad daylight, his seatbelt dutifully buckled over a fake blue Gucci t-shirt.

Behavior like this quickly reaches a point where the intent of the individual in question, which may be ironic or playacting or dead serious, doesn’t explain very much and may even be unknowable to the person. “Hamas operative” could be Hamad’s aspiration or fantasy or a description of his physical appearance or an expression of guilt at fighting the enemy in Squirrel Hill rather than in Gaza City. It is legal to obtain Indian Black powder and potassium perchlorate, both of which can be bought online for about $20 a pound.

In the courtroom, Lubit and Hamad appeared smaller and more delusional as the sunless afternoon dragged on. They had committed boneheaded errors at every turn while creating a rich archival record of their potential crimes. “How far you from Walmart,” Lubit texted at roughly the moment Hamad purchased what the complaint described as “one can of Rust-Oleum ‘Strawberry Fields’ red, high-gloss spray paint,” an object that investigators were able to identify down to the serial number even before they found it in Hamad’s bedroom at his parents’ house. Lubit reverted her phone to factory settings on July 7, erasing its contents the day the FBI executed its search warrant on Hamad. But her lack of care won out. “Is the resistance chat still around?” Lubit texted activist friends of hers on September 11, the day before a judge authorized a search of her apartment.

In court, the two were in a shock so deep that it often seemed as if they were watching someone else’s criminal hearing and not their own. Hamad often wedged his thumbs together, and he rubbed his eyes when Derbish described the one explosive test-run then known to prosecutors. At one point Lubit seemed in danger of sobbing. She then swallowed any oncoming tears and settled back into sphinxlike impassiveness, while avoiding eye contact with Hamad.

In the run-up to the vandalism of the Chabad house on July 29, Lubit was a sympathetic listener to what Hamad said were his deepest hopes and dreams. “My ultimate goal in life is Shaheed,” Hamad texted Lubit, words that Derbish read out in court. A martyr in an Islamic holy war is called a “shaheed.” The agent continued through Hamad’s messages to Lubit: “Everything else doesn’t matter nearly as much … My goal sets are very different from the average person.” Hamad told Lubit, “I don’t see myself living long. … It’s really hard to think long term.”

In a July 4 Instagram story included in the April 8 prosecution filing, Hamad posted an image of a Hamas funeral, with masked fighters crowded around a casket draped in a green flag. “Ya Allah, I can’t take this anymore, I want to fight and die,” Hamad wrote over the image. “I don’t want to live here anymore. I’m jealous of these fighters, they got to fight in the way of Allah and have achieved the highest level of Jannah,” the Islamic concept of paradise. “I want to die fighting,” he’d texted Micaiah Collins on that same Independence Day, according to the April 22 superseding indictment. “I want it now so bad!!”

The original criminal complaint states that during one of their text exchanges, “LUBIT referenced previous conversations with HAMAD regarding marriage and having children.” Hamad told Lubit that there were times when he could “really see myself doing that life,” but that his “heart yearns for being with my brothers overseas.” Lubit ended that conversation by texting, “It’s fine you’re doing an honorable thing.”

The “honorable thing” Lubit refers to is left unclear. Maybe the “thing” was theoretical, and Hamad’s intense feelings and commitments were what Lubit admired. Perhaps Hamad was a guilt-racked fantasist, someone whose pain and envy, though real, weren’t torturous enough to inspire violence aimed at actual living people. Maybe Hamad lacked the stomach to harm total strangers, but would eventually have found it intolerable not to try.

By one plausible reading of the superseding indictment, Hamad’s honorable leap of action might have been a steadily advancing but not-yet-focused bomb plot (though Collins made that passing mention of ‘bros ankles with Talya,’ prosecutors haven’t claimed Lubit knew anything about Collins’ and Hamad’s alleged activities). “I made that big shell,” Hamad texted Collins on June 29. Hamad sent Collins a video of still unknown origin demonstrating the design and detonation of a bomb made out of five metal fuel canisters, duct-taped together around an explosive core.

Collins was excited by the possibility of building their own variants of the device. “You think . . . w that new crazy shells n 4-5 cans we can rlly take bros ankles...concrete gon blow?” “Maybe,” Hamad replied. “gotta see what she hittin for,” Collins mused a few texts later. “we gon fuck shit up.”

On July 2, while dreaming of the possibilities of their very own homemade can-bombs, Collins’ seeming lust for destruction reaches a pre-Independence Day fever pitch: “i can’t wait i wana learn how to make em! n can’t wait to set em off too! i been thinkin abt wft we gon use em for like allll day every dayyyy.”

In his presentation to Lubit and others—and possibly in his own mind—Hamad was a man of action, an avenging Islamic holy warrior. But the first and so-far only “honorable thing” Hamad may have executed in his war against Israel turned out to be a parodic compromise between paralysis and militancy.

It is evident from the text messages shared in court that Hamad, who by then had been involved in the construction or detonation of at least four experimental bombs, came up with the idea of having Lubit vandalize a Chabad house. “If I join you in doing graffiti on this building it matters to me that it is done in good taste,” she texted at 9:25 p.m. on July 27, the night before the spray-painting. “But any bank or anything else that’s not a religious institution I’m happy to trash.” A minute later she texted, “I wish I knew how to paint damn.” By 10:21 p.m., any concern over the application of her limited artistic skills to the façade of a Jewish religious institution was gone: “Fuck it, I’ll do it. The thing. Decorating Chabad.” Lubit continued to object that “trying to make it ugly and abnoxious [sic.] feels like borderline desecration of religious place,” especially since the Chabad Hasidic movement “usually use[s] [their] buildings for synagogues.” Thus: “the art needs to not look like it’s an attempt to vandalize.”

By 11 p.m., though, Lubit seemed in increasingly urgent need of taking out her ever-hotter-burning fury and confusion on an explicitly Jewish target, regardless of how the result might look to her or to anyone else. “[C]an literally feel myself starting to see Jews as my enemies,” she texted at 11:08. At 11:20, she hinted at how completely the situation in the Middle East had taken over even the in-between moments of her life: “Well the vandalism part is the part I’m most fearful of. I mean, I guess I can just watch a documentary about Gaza & read some stuff and wait.”

In actuality, she couldn’t wait. And like Hamad, she expressed her impatience within the context of her religious identity. At 11:40, she texted: “Scares me that I want revenge. I can feel it. Like, I’m ANGRY. I’m so tired of feeling like being Jewish means I have to second guess being anti oppression. I will not survive being Jewish if I don’t learn to get past that. I’ll just end up abandoning it.” Between 11:41 and 11:43 the following night, shortly before the vandalism at Chabad, she wrote: “I’m tired of the voice in my head, telling me that a Jew would not go with the oppressed. … Every day I think ‘I don’t want to be Jewish anymore.’”

Whatever Judaism might have meant to Lubit—and as a Hebrew speaker who observed Shabbat and kashrut, it must have meant something more to her than just standard-issue left-wing anti-oppression activism—she could not imagine leaving it behind. “This feels kinda like a last ditch attempt at staying Jewish,” she texted Hamad at 11:45. “Actually, you’ve given me hope.”

Court attendees heard these words in Derbish’s voice. Meanwhile, Lubit rested her chin on the bridge of her arching hands and cast her eyes down at the table, away from Hamad.

Still others—a small number, but young, adept at drawing attention to themselves, possessed by stark and unshakable moral ideals, and politically influential in cities like Pittsburgh—have found still another answer to the question of how to live as an American Jew after Oct. 7. They believe the moment demands a full-on assault against a perceived communal sin, and understand Israel’s killing of tens of thousands of Palestinians—combatants or not—as a crime in which all Jews are personally implicated, including themselves. They either do not believe or do not care that among these war dead are tens of thousands of terrorists, including the entire upper-level leadership of Hamas and Hezbollah. Horrified at the death toll in Gaza, Lubit found succor and meaning in the purification of her corrupted community, something she could only achieve once she looked deep into herself and defeated whatever guilt or fear restrained her.

Judaism is eternally at odds with itself, and its schisms have been a powerful enough force in history to collapse the Israelite kingdoms and to give the world Christianity, Communism, and the 19th-century quasi-secular, quasi-messianic movement of Zionism, which began on the fringes of what was then organized mainstream Jewish life. The post-Oct. 7 American version of this never-ending inner conflict is individual and moralistic in nature; it comes from the tortures of believing that the great majority of one’s fellow Jews carry the rot of militarism, ethnic solipsism, and intolerance, a litany of the least-forgivable American sins. The old social and psychic architecture has collapsed around the dissenting minority, leaving intimate crises of identity and selfhood amid the rubble. Family, religion, Jewish education, college, the overall American climate, and Israel’s real-world condition all worsen the torment, which is only endurable with the help of other Jews in a similar state of crisis.

Talya Lubit’s crisis reached its climax after Oct. 7, but it began long before that. She grew up in Manhattan and is the daughter of two medical doctors who both also hold PhDs. Her mother, Dr. Elana Lubit, is a Harvard Medical School-educated anesthesiologist in the New York University hospital system who holds a chemistry doctorate from MIT. Elana Lubit’s parents were both Johns Hopkins University science professors. She is a Hebrew speaker whose mother was born in pre-statehood Israel. When reached by email, Elana Lubit wrote, “My daughter is not, and has never been, antisemitic. She is deeply and proudly identified with Judaism and the Jewish community.”

Roy Lubit, Talya’s father, is a forensic child psychologist. The son of a dentist, he earned an MD from NYU and a PhD in political science at Harvard, awarded for a dissertation that “explored the impact of organizational learning on international conflict,” according to his online curriculum vitae. He is an authority on childhood trauma, the recognition of trauma symptoms in children, the treatment of childhood post-traumatic stress disorder, the evaluation of children in custody cases, the effects of the 9/11 attacks on children, and other topics related to the pain that adults knowingly or unknowingly inflict on the very young.

Roy Lubit would not comment for this article. He has gotten occasional media exposure as an expert witness in high-profile court proceedings, testifying in support of the parents of children murdered in the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School Shooting in their lawsuit against the Infowars broadcaster Alex Jones.

Jones, who is perhaps the country’s most famous paranoiac, might have epitomized a conspiratorial turn in American society that mirrored events in Roy Lubit’s own life, starting with his divorce. The two Dr. Lubits divorced in 2007, kicking off a years-long custody battle that is well-known in New York family legal circles. The First Department of the New York Supreme Court of Appeals’ 2009 determination in Lubit vs. Lubit has been cited in subsequent New York case law 38 times, as it cleanly illustrates that the state’s courts generally do not grant joint custody when divorced parents cannot get along.

The Lubits learned how the legal system can preserve someone’s deepest and most private conflicts and embarrassments, something that their daughter, who was eight years old when her parents divorced, would discover in Pittsburgh a decade and a half later. “Although the court found that the father is a loving, committed parent, it also found that his parenting skills had significant shortcomings,” reads a public summary of the case, which upheld a trial court’s 2007 determination that Elana Lubit would get sole custody of the children. “Among other things, the father demonstrated excessive anxiety about the children’s physical well-being, and was inflexible in his response to the children’s needs.”

On Oct. 7, 2012, Elana Lubit married Jon Christopher Geissmann. According to New York voter registration records, Geissmann and Elana Lubit share an address in the Upper West Side. Records of Geissmann’s political donations on the Federal Electoral Commission website show that he was working as a driver for a taxi company in Baltimore between 2014 and 2017. Before that, in the early 2000s, he had been a graduate student in the classics department at UC Berkeley.

After 2017, Geissmann has identified himself as a New York-based “independent scholar.” His online footprint offers at least some hints as to the direction of his inquiry. Geissman is a signatory of 911Truth.org’s 2009 Truth Statement urging a “thorough and unbiased accounting of the facts” of the 9/11 attacks as well as a 2007 “Commitment to More Civil and Effective Collaboration in the 9/11 Truth Movement.” In 2014, Geissman made three donations to the New York Coalition for Accountability Now, an organization “funded by 9/11 conspiracy theorists,” per the New York Post, that was pushing for a ballot referendum on a new Department of Buildings investigation of the collapse of the World Trade Center towers.

Talya and her older sister, Rina, attended Solomon Schechter Manhattan, a kindergarten-through-eighth-grade institution linked to the Conservative Movement that closed in 2021. A 2009 story in The New York Times about a series of joint events between the school and an Islamic academy in the Bronx described a show-and-tell of family religious objects that featured “Sabbath candlesticks from Poland that had been in Rina Lubit’s family for five generations.” Talya went to two private high schools, beginning at York Prep School in the Upper West Side and graduating from the Dwight School on Central Park West, where tuition caps out at $64,000 a year. She appeared in a 2017 documentary about grassroots supporters of Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential run, an effort to which the teenage Lubit donated $128.

Lubit arrived at Dickinson College, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in the fall of 2018. Dickinson is a liberal arts school with 2,200 undergraduates and a 2018 acceptance rate of 43 percent. There are usually about 200 Jews in the student body, and the campus has a kosher meal plan. Lubit was a regular presence at Dickinson’s Hillel, though she never held an officer position. For her first two years on campus she shared a dorm room with a shomer Shabbat classmate. Multiple people who have been close with Lubit told me she is a Shabbat observer and a vegan.

As a freshman, Lubit cofounded a short-lived animal rights club. In 2019 she attended a discussion of a work exhibited at the Dickinson art gallery that had sparked controversy over its explicit comparisons between factory farming and the Holocaust. “Sometimes it’s as if we forget … that we are animals,” The Dickinsonian, the campus student newspaper, reported Lubit saying at the event. “We kind of set ourselves above as if we are this higher creature.”

An ethic of sapient humility and concern for defenseless animals is an easy sell at sustainability-minded Dickinson, which powers 30 local homes using an experimental manure-fed biofuel plant. Lubit’s efforts to advance the 9/11 truth movement at the college met with much less support. “One of the reasons I chose Dickinson was our school’s commitment to open inquiry: asking questions, even if they are scary questions to ask–and even scarier to answer,” begins a 2019 opinion piece of Lubit’s that the Dickinsonian rejected. Lubit argues that the government, as well as Dickinson students, must explore whether the World Trade Center was destroyed through a controlled demolition, perhaps using “neo thermite, a military explosive which can melt steel.” Many of her data points have the air of being technical and granular, and thus convincing to a simultaneously sharp and impressionable young mind. “I invite all of you to join me this coming fall to explore what we know so far about this topic,” she wrote. “I hope we can lend our voices to the call for a new investigation that looks at all the evidence, no matter where it leads.”

Dickinson does not have a Students for Justice in Palestine chapter, and the college’s branch of J Street U sputtered and eventually went dormant before Lubit got there. Only one major Israel-related controversy gripped Dickinson during Lubit’s time, over a student government motion to ban Sabra products from the school’s dining halls. Lubit was uninvolved in that campaign. Her views on Israel appear to have fallen within a diverse mainstream of Jewish opinion on a campus that is not especially activist. It could be hard to tell what her true opinions even were. “She was very passionate about Israel, both as a Palestinian cause and a Jewish cause,” one classmate recalled. “I think it very much changed based on who she was talking to.” The classmate recalled that Lubit, who studied Arabic as part of her Middle East studies major, spoke Hebrew “slightly better than someone who spent 12 years in day school—it was Hebrew with an accent, with some English mixed in.”

The Middle Eastern studies department where Lubit pursued her major is not a site of ideological foment. Andrea Lieber, Dickinson’s Sophia Ava Asbell Chair in Judaic Studies, would not discuss Lubit, noting by email that “all aspects of my relationship with Talya are part of her educational record, and therefore protected by FERPA,” the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. Lieber noted that Middle East Studies majors are required to take at least one class related to modern Israel and that Hebrew study counts toward the major’s language requirement. “We don’t all agree on politics,” Lieber wrote of her colleagues. “But we try to lead with mutual respect and empathy. We make a concerted effort to model that for our students.”

Lieber is not being self-serving. If Lubit became an anti-Israel radical, it did not happen as the sole result of anything she did or experienced at Dickinson—just as it didn’t happen only because of her parents’ divorce, or the influence of her conspiratorial stepfather, or her horror at Israeli conduct in Gaza, or a romantically self-sacrificing male influence like Hamad. She was radicalized for reasons that are both convenient and inconvenient. Thousands of civilians really have died in Gaza, for instance, though the great majority of people who care about this fact, including ones who blame Israel for every single one of those deaths, haven’t vandalized a synagogue in response.

At some point, Lubit’s sympathy for the vulnerable and her insistence on bold truth-telling devoured her sense of judgement and proportion. Long before that, she was a sociable person with a contrarian and humanistic streak who never really fit in. As one college classmate put it, “she is someone who I think is always looking for community and has been pushed away.”

With its universities, tech economy, lingering industrial presence, and low cost of living, Pittsburgh remains one of the sunniest places in the Rust Belt. Lubit had no job or family or graduate school enrollment waiting for her in Pittsburgh, though. She was a Jew entering adult life in a city in which she had never lived and where she had nothing specific to do. The nearby campuses were a natural place to meet people who were roughly her own age. The Oct. 7 attacks, and the stirrings of guilt and anger their aftermath provoked in her, might have heightened Lubit’s need to be around other Jews no matter who they were or what they believed.

In the weeks after the attacks, Lubit showed up to events at Carnegie Mellon’s Chabad and Hillel. Julius Arolovich, student president of CMU Hillel, described her as “an odd one out.” There were, he recalled, “pathological” things about Lubit’s behavior: She was disheveled enough that some students wondered if she was homeless. “I didn’t understand why she was on our campus,” Arolovich said. She did not try to conceal her ambivalence about Israel’s actions and even its very existence, but believed she would be accepted in spite of her views.

In November of 2023, Lubit alarmed a number of CMU Hillel-goers when she recited a prayer in Hebrew at a CMU Muslim Students Association vigil for Palestinian victims of the post-Oct. 7 fighting. Not long after that, Arolovich pointedly asked what she was doing on the CMU campus. “I asked her, ‘Why are you here?’ She said, ‘I’m Jewish and I want to see and experience the community.’ But there wasn’t a concrete answer there.” Arolovich eventually asked that she stop attending Hillel events.

In early December, Lubit sent him a text written in stiff, not quite fluent, but still understandable Hebrew: “I am sorry that you seemed uncomfortable around me because I spoke at the Palestinian vigil. I just want to mention that if you ever want to discuss it, I’m here.” No discussion took place. Other than her own individual need for communal belonging, Lubit had no specific reason to be on campus. Arolovich felt he had a responsibility to keep potential outside agitators away from the Hillel he helped run.

Lubit dropped in on other undergraduate clubs at CMU. In early November of 2023, at the meeting of an on-campus group whose purpose has nothing to do with Judaism, religion, politics, or the Middle East, she struck up a conversation with a sophomore, a math genius with a poetic streak who turned out to be a brother at AEPi, the campus’s Jewish fraternity. “We had a very dense three days of conversation,” he recalled to me.

Lubit told him that she had worked as a receptionist at a veterinary clinic, but then quit after Oct. 7 to more fully commit herself to anti-Israel activism. The student was fascinated. “Like her, I’m interested in unique human beings that pop up in this world,” he said. Like himself, he told me, “Talya might be the type to try to understand everyone.”

Such deep sensitives can unmoor people, the student observed. “She’s a higher being truly attached to nothing who understands the deeper level of everyone. But when you have very few attachments, you have to find something to grab onto.”

The student soon realized, with growing alarm, that he was the thing Lubit was now grabbing onto. Their conversations consisted, he said, of hours of what he described as one-way “trauma-dumping”: He learned about her past romantic partners and close friendships ruined in the aftermath of Oct. 7. She told him she grew up religious and had painted pictures of Israeli flags as a kid. She visited Israel and had her conscience pricked during a Palestinian-guided tour of Hebron. “She said she prayed for all the people killed in the Middle East, not just the Jews. She said no one should be dying, but then would say she wanted to burn an Israeli flag. She would have these shifts. I think she was drifting through the world.”

Lubit stopped coming to the CMU campus in early December. The student said he and Lubit texted sporadically until February of 2024, long after he tried to make it clear that he wasn’t eager to see her anymore.

Unwelcome at Carnegie Mellon, the natural next stop for Lubit was the Chabad house at the University of Pittsburgh, a 20-minute walk from her apartment. “We have hundreds of messages together,” said Rabbi Shmuli Rothstein, the campus shliach. The messages spanned from November 30, 2023, to April 2024, the time of the first of two protest encampments at the university that year. At Chabad she attended bagel brunches, Shabbat dinners, and a midnight breakfast in the runup to winter finals week. “She’s a kind heart,” Rothstein said. “She said she wanted to keep her Jewish identity while disagreeing with Israel’s stance.”

The rabbi often observed anti-Israel protests on the Pitt campus and would always “walk and talk” with Lubit whenever he saw her at one. When I met him last November, Rothstein said he would still welcome Lubit if she showed up at his Chabad house. He wondered whether he failed her. “She didn’t have a support group,” he said. “That’s what hurts me the most.”

The Pittsburgh Chabad house is almost never empty. I met Rothstein on a Wednesday night, dozens of students were gathering for a dinner of chicken and beef ribs, followed by a talk on post-Oct. 7 campus civil rights issues from two Pittsburgh-area legal scholars. Many Jews feel the University of Pittsburgh has become an unwelcoming place for them. Three Pitt students have been victims of suspected antisemitic assaults since the outbreak of war, while influential members of the faculty senate, including one of the leaders of Pitt’s Jewish Voice for Peace presence, stonewalled the creation of an ad hoc committee dedicated to campus antisemitism.

At the Pitt Chabad, it was not hard to find people who had crossed paths with Lubit. Alon Leshem, a junior, recalled meeting her at that midnight breakfast in December of 2023. Leshem and a small group of his friends talked with Lubit until seven in the morning. “My sense is she was very confused,” he said. Lubit told Leshem she had a grandmother who was born in Palestine under the British mandate, but that she “grew up feeling a disconnect” from Judaism. She wore a sweater from Dickinson’s Arabic club, which struck everyone as an odd choice for a Chabad house at a different college in the winter after Oct. 7. “She didn’t seem to know that large numbers of Jews had died on October 7,” Leshem claimed. This seemed impossible, but two other students backed Leshem’s version of the meeting.

One of them is Matt Garber, a Pittsburgh junior who spoke to me from Spain, where he was studying abroad. He volunteered the detail about Lubit’s apparent ignorance of Oct. 7—however genuine or feigned—without my having to ask him about it. “I remember very distinctly her saying, ‘Oh my God, this happened, a bunch of Jews were killed and murdered?’ And we were just shocked she didn’t hear about this.” The all-nighter was astounding enough that the friends had to have “a debrief at 8 a.m. right after we met her.”

Garber described Lubit as “a person who changes her personality very often. That’s what’s so confusing about this. She just changed so much in three or four weeks.” But the changes he witnessed over the course of a monthslong text exchange went in only one direction, toward growing upset, pain, and inner turmoil over her Jewish identity, brought on by her belief that Israel was guilty of appalling evils in Gaza.

The first time they texted, not long after that all-night talk, Lubit joked that she was now “a little addicted to Chabad,” and asked if there were always people hanging around the University of Pittsburgh house. Lubit’s messages to Garber then grew rapidly more anguished. “Like, I’m out of words,” she texted in January of 2024, describing the effect her understanding of the Israeli campaign in Gaza was having on her. “We’ve all been deeply deeply betrayed.” Garber asked her to be more specific. “You might want to brace yourself,” she warned him. “There’s just insane amounts of life-shattering information.”

She offered to send him the “insta accounts” of Palestinian information sources. “My plan is to make an alternative to the mainstream Jewish community cuz I believe the reason that people aren’t standing up is cuz they feel they have to pick between community and their beliefs. No one should have to do that,” she texted. A community without beliefs is an even more radical thing to expect than a community that shares all of your beliefs. She kept texting: “The list of atrocities just goes on and on,” she said, horrors like the IDF deliberately blocking aid trucks and shooting refugees in a bread line. “I know people now whose family and friends are literally dying and being starved to death,” she wrote.

She continued, “I’ve known a lot about the occupation for years and I’m not in the mainstream community and I’m still really struggling.” She articulated her struggle in an image she sent Garber from the iPhone Notes app. The text had poetry-like spacing:

I’m forcing myself to stay on my feet despite this dichotomy: I’m the descendent of holocaust survivors, who helped create a new one …

I was raised in my family’s ashes, and now I’m watching those still alive make their pain a poison. If they were capable of hearing me I’d tell them that: A part of me broke when I saw who you have become

If you could understand, I believe you’d want me to try to stop you. So I’ll keep reaching for the values you tried to teach me…for love, loyalty, and integrity.

I wish you saw what I do. If you did I think you would be really proud of me.

In these reflections—which have a degree of stern judgement, Sabbatean egomania, and vulnerability beyond what most people are willing to admit to or even write down in private—Lubit casts herself as the only person in her family line, and one of the few people in her tribal line, who understands both Israel’s Nazi-like nature and the moral obligations of Holocaust victimhood. At the time, she did not yet know what to do with this dreadful, “life shattering” knowledge.

By February, Lubit had found a place among the campus’ Students for Justice in Palestine and no longer had any need for acceptance at Chabad: “SJP at Pitt have been nice to me but some people are total idiots and are actually hateful, but it varies. That’s just people though,” she wrote to Garber, adding, “It’s pretty healing when Palestinians defend me against hateful people. Trust is a cycle.”

She texted, “I’m only just starting to find an in-person peacenik community…I don’t think i’ll be able to really go back to Chabad unless things changed dramatically.”

On March 5, 2024, Lubit was one of dozens of activists who spoke in favor of a failed pro-ceasefire resolution in front of the Allegheny County Board of County Commissioners, an effort pushed by a range of local activist groups, including Jewish Voice for Peace and the China-linked Party for Socialism and Liberation. She didn’t discuss the war in Gaza in terms of geopolitics or American moral hazard or any civic or national interest. The conflict was instead about her individual identity and her personal understanding of what Judaism required of her. She garbled the opening lines of her speech, nervous and perhaps over-conscious of a ruthlessly enforced 90-second time limit, but recovered in time to say: “If anyone thinks backing daily massacres of Palestinians and sending my Israeli cousins to their deaths is protecting Jews I have to wonder what you think Judaism and safety is about.” Lubit added that she was “proud to follow a long tradition of Jewish dissidents…Don’t let Israel continue to destroy Gaza in our name.”

How a Pennsylvania county council could stop such a thing, or why it should care about the psychodramas of a fairly anonymous 23-year-old, did not have to be explained. The speech was part of a public act of in-group validation, a way of making sense of a dissolving world with the help of friendly company. By the end of April 2024, Lubit was one of the vest-wearing activists who served as a lookout and facilitator of the Schenley Plaza protest encampment, held across from the University of Pittsburgh’s Cathedral of Learning. She helped organize the Pesach seder that Jewish Voice for Peace activists held at the camp-out. A student I met at the Pittsburgh Chabad house told me he tried to talk to her at the protest and was rebuffed: “I have no intention of talking to a Zionist,” Lubit said.

There are perhaps 20 or 30 activists who reliably appear at Jewish Voice for Peace-organized protests in Pittsburgh, comprising a small but energetic circle of mostly young people. Kuhn had met Lubit before the first Pitt encampment, at an anti-Israel protest in Pittsburgh’s Strip district. Hamad and Lubit may have met for the first time at that original camp-out, which lasted from April 23 until April 29, 2024. When it ended, organizers wanted to donate their tents to charities that help the city’s homeless. Hamad was one of the people bringing the tents to Kuhn’s truck. “He’s got that BMW,” said Kuhn, a vehicle registered in Hamad’s mother’s name that was mentioned frequently in his probable cause hearing. “He was showing me that. My truck is pretty old, and I’ve had to do some of my own repairs to it, so we started talking about mechanical stuff, car repair. He showed me his car and I thought, That thing is fuckin’ cool.”

Among the small group of regulars at Pittsburgh’s JVP-organized protests, Hamad, a religious Muslim, became known as something of a philosemite. He was interested in Jewish history, saw similarities between the Jewish and Arab historical experience, and even took a class on Holocaust history at a local university. “Something positive can be gleaned from the fact that somebody with his politics and his background can become such close friends with so many Jews,” Kuhn said in late 2024, before the April filings gave a fuller picture of Hamad’s alleged activities. “We shouldn’t undervalue that.”

Hamad entered the Pennsylvania Air National Guard on June 14, 2023, and achieved the rank of Airman First Class after seven and a half weeks of basic training and 49 days of job training as an aircraft hydraulic systems specialist. According to the April 22 updated indictment, Hamad was attending Air Force training in Texas on Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas launched its assault on Israel.

The 171st Air Refueling Wing, where Hamad was assigned, is next to Pittsburgh International Airport. It provides repair, maintenance, and logistical support for KC-135 Stratotankers, which are used to refuel warplanes in mid-flight. Hamad was never assigned to the Guard full-time, and identified himself as a delivery driver for an O’Reilly Auto Parts store in a November 2023 donation of $10 to Ilhan Omar. His only other political contribution is $5 he gave to Rashida Tlaib the following April.

Even a part-time airman with Hamad’s responsibilities needs a top-secret-level security clearance for their Guard service. According to the updated indictment, Hamad “completed the Standard Form 86” questionnaire required of all clearance applicants in December of 2023, and sat for three pre-clearance interviews with contractors for the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency between February and September of 2024. Applicants are bound by law to be truthful for the entire clearance process. The interviewers repeatedly asked Hamad to affirm that his “ultimate allegiance” was to the United States, thus confirming the oath that all U.S. military enlistees swear at the beginning of their service. In a voice note Hamad sent on October 28, 2023, a time when he was still in training in Texas, he told the recipient that “Palestine and Lebanon were ‘on top’ for him and that ‘people will say America, America, but let it lick my ass.’” Joining the Guard was a means towards serving the places he really cared about: He wrote to a friend that the “combat skills” he was learning in Texas were needed “in case something happens in my country [Lebanon] or Palestine.”

In addition to his alleged bomb-making, Hamad repeatedly praised Hamas on social media at a time when he knew he was being investigated for a security clearance. “On or about July 23, 2024, HAMAD posted a collage of prominent Hamas leaders to his Instagram story and stated, ‘Without these men our resistance would be 100 years behind,” the April indictment reads. The next day, he “posted a collage of pictures in tribute to Nour Al Din Barakah, a deceased al-Qassam Brigades leader, to his Instagram story.” According to one of Hamad’s captions, Barakah was “The man who discovered the infiltration. Without him 10.7 would’ve been impossible. Glory to the m@rtyrs.”

Believing you can openly support a U.S.-designated terror group during a security clearance probe is a delusion born of childish arrogance. Still, in early 2024, Hamad could behave in public as if he accepted the rules and limits of civic activism as most Americans understood them. He spoke before the Allegheny Board of Commissioners on April 24, 2024. They had voted down the ceasefire resolution over six weeks earlier. Hamad still wanted to say his piece. He introduced himself as “a United States service member.” He said he was there “to give light on what kind of stuff is happening in Palestine—and my brothers and sisters suffering over there, my Muslim brothers and sisters, and of course my Christian friends over there in Gaza.”

The bulk of the speech was about “a friend who is Palestinian-American. He was born here in America, and he travels to Palestine all the time. And I always tell him, like, it’s a little dangerous. He tells me, that’s where his home is, you know, that’s where his family lives.”

Hamad’s friend, he said, played soccer for a college. During one trip, Hamad said, his friend “was shot in the leg by an Israeli military officer. He was shot with an M4A1. It’s an American rifle with a 5.56 NATO round. ... He came from soccer practice. He was heading home. Israeli intelligence found out that he played soccer and shot him specifically in the leg so that he could not play here anymore.”

Joe Truzman, who tracks security incidents in the West Bank as a researcher for the Washington, D.C.-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies, could find no reports of any college-age Palestinian-American soccer player being shot in the leg in the West Bank. Kuhn said Hamad never discussed this friend with him. Elements of the story don’t make sense: It is hard to see how someone can belong to soccer teams in both the United States and the West Bank simultaneously. This would also be the first alleged targeted shooting of a Palestinian American in the West Bank on which Palestine solidarity activists have remained totally silent.

Still, Israel often shoots young Palestinian men in the West Bank, a place that is home to numerous armed groups dedicated to the violent destruction of Israel and the wanton killing of Israelis. One possible response to this situation is to advocate for policies that make violence an untenable option for both sides. The University of Pittsburgh campouts, with their seizure of public space and insistence on the attention and conscience of people with every right to ignore a conflict 6,000 miles away, were a rejection of the usual modes of democratic persuasion, and thus an acknowledgement on the part of the BDSers that normal politics had failed to convince much of anyone in Pittsburgh.

This sense of failure is notable because these activists have protection and prominence that vastly exceed their small numbers or the limited popularity of their ideas. In a dynamic familiar in much of urban America, the fringe and the political mainstream are mutually legitimizing in Pittsburgh, and organized so that large political donors, members of Congress, and activists orient each other towards similar ideological goals. For instance, Talya Lubit was one of over 130 signatories to a Nov. 20, 2023, letter to Congresswoman Summer Lee thanking her for her support for an immediate cease-fire in Gaza; some 52 signatories did not list their full name or signed anonymously. Lee’s second-largest individual donor is Nancy Bernstein, a member of the board of directors of J Street, which has endorsed Lee in each of her primaries. Lee voted against congressional resolutions condemning Hamas and declaring that “Israel is not a racist or apartheid state,” wore a keffiyeh to the 2024 State of the Union, and tweeted that “opposing genocide is good politics and good policy” the day after her last primary win. As a result of Lee’s 988-vote victory in her first Democratic primary in 2022, the Jewish communities of Squirrel Hill are represented in the House by one of the chamber’s most anti-Israel members.

Pittsburgh isn’t especially left-wing by the standards of U.S. cities; Donald Trump won 39.4 percent of the vote in Allegheny County in 2024. But Pittsburgh’s millennial leftists took maximum advantage of their burst into mainstream politics under the otherwise notably unexciting reign of Joe Biden. Sara Innamorato, a DSA member in her mid-30s, was elected Allegheny County executive in late 2023. Left-wing support, and discontent over incumbent Bill Peduto’s handling of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, helped make Ed Gainey the city’s first Black mayor in 2021.

Lee, Innamorato, and Gainey decided that Oct. 7, 2024, was the ideal date to release an anti-Israel statement together. “Today, we mark one year since the October 7 attacks with hearts big enough to grieve both those killed one year ago by Hamas and those killed in the year since by the Israeli military,” the trio boasted. “This violence did not start on October 7th, but it can end now if we all commit to peace and diplomacy.” The statement echoed the conspiracy theory that aid to Israel is at the root of social problems in the United States. “Our country cannot spend more tax-payer money on bombs when healthcare remains out of reach for so many and our infrastructure is crumbling.”

The statement made tangible the disillusionment shared among many of the city’s Jews. On the windows of the Starbucks at Forbes and Shady Avenues in Squirrel Hill, there are still images of a dove, a Magen David, and a tree enclosed in interlocking hearts, painted in the days after the 2018 Tree of Life synagogue shooting in which 11 shul-goers were murdered. Aaron Bisno, the rabbi at a nearby Reform congregation, showed me a picture he’d recently taken of a once-ubiquitous Stronger than Hate sign, an icon of the weeks after the massacre, posted in a shop window above a Stop Genocide Free Palestine placard. “After the shooting, there were interfaith, interracial, intersectional clergy gatherings,” the rabbi recalled—he participated in many of them. “What surfaced was: No matter how horrific Tree of Life is, it turns out if you kill 11 Jews, the president comes to them. If you kill a Black kid a day, nobody gives a shit. The response was, Wow, we’re in a bubble, we only care about ourselves. It leads to a kind of guilt.”

That guilt was a phenomenon of an earlier and very different time, though. Summer Lee did not attend the most recent anniversary commemoration of the Tree of Life shooting, a massacre that took place in her district.

“Now the feeling after 10/7 is that Jews feel very much alone,” Bisno says. During Hamad and Lubit’s probable cause hearing, detective David Derbish testified that there had been “hundreds of incidents” of suspected antisemitism in Pittsburgh that law enforcement had been made aware of since the Oct. 7 attack, including damaged vehicles, spray-paint vandalism, and other “criminal mischief.” In a July article in The Dispatch, Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili, a professor of international affairs at the University of Pittsburgh, catalogued the post-Oct. 7 psychic and physical assault. “We’ve seen homes splattered with paint and graffiti. We have seen Jewish children harassed on our streets. Antisemitic graffiti is ubiquitous. Antisemitic pamphlets now pepper our neighborhood. Windows of Jewish-owned businesses have been shattered. At my children’s school an Israeli flag was torn down. My own home was graffitied with antisemitic scrawls.” In early January, Murtazashvili’s 10-year-old found a large metal washer in their front yard. It was about the size of the palm of an adult’s hand. “Zionists eat shit” was written on one side; the other said “fuck Israel.”

In March, Pitt received a D from the Anti-Defamation League’s antisemitism report card. Later in the month, the university administration temporarily suspended the school’s SJP chapter, partly in response to an attempted library occupation in February. In late 2024 the faculty senate finally authorized an ad-hoc committee to investigate antisemitism on campus—but the committee has only met once, and its mandate and leadership remain unclear. (These moves were enough to convince the ADL to bump Pitt up to a C.)

Jews were once an object of city-wide sympathy, but that turned out to have been facile and politically convenient, a result of the perceived right-wing politics of the Tree of Life shooter rather than any particular regret over Jews being slaughtered. “There’s helplessness, sadness, fear, and exclusion, after a period when we were hugged and loved,” Murtazashvili told me. “The whiplash people felt here was extraordinary.”

The activists were impatient, though. In another familiar story of activist overreach, brought on by a misguided confidence in their own inevitability—a small replay of the collapse of the nearly successful Stop Cop City movement in Atlanta, or the unraveling of Chesa Boudin’s experiment in legalizing crime in San Francisco—the activists spent whatever capital they had in ways that made them look powerless. The March 2024 ceasefire resolution debate at the Allegheny County Board of Commissioners was political theater in the service of what was at best an energizing failure. A more serious summer 2024 effort to amend the Pittsburgh Home Rule Charter to prohibit all municipal investment and tax exemptions to “entities that conduct business operations in or with the state of Israel” got slightly less than half of the 12,000 signatures it needed to appear on the ballot. Hamad and Lubit both signed the ballot access petition. Lubit signed two lines below Benjamin Case, a Pittsburgh-based sociologist and “resistance studies affiliate” at the University of Massachusetts who was one of the leaders of the referendum campaign. Hamad signed a few lines below Alexandra Weiner, a mathematician active with Jewish Voice for Peace at the University of Pittsburgh.

In June, activists established a second Pitt encampment, on the lawn outside the Cathedral of Learning, a neo-Gothic skyscraper at the center of campus. Protesters painted slogans on the exterior of the Cathedral, and there were outbreaks of violence with the police. The June campout involved almost no Pitt students and ended after two days, when Lee, Rainey, and Innamorato visited the encampment and spoke with its leaders in private for nearly four hours.

One of the public faces of the second Pitt camp-out was a Presbyterian pastor named Chad Collins, leader of a small congregation in one of the city’s eastern neighborhoods. Collins is a national organizer for Friends of Sabeel North America, a group that serves as the unofficial American Protestant wing of the BDS movement. Collins was a member of the Pennsylvania delegation during Americans for Justice in Palestine’s Oct. 25, 2023, lobbying day on Capitol Hill, where he was able to personally thank Lee for her cosponsorship of an early cease-fire resolution. More recently, Collins has shown up in campaign materials for Ed Gainey’s re-election. On Facebook and Instagram, Collins posts almost nothing about his church or about Christianity, unless it is in connection to the struggle against Israel—for instance, he led Pittsburgh’s recent Ash Wednesday Pilgrimage for Palestine, in which a small group wandered the city praying and reciting anti-Israel messages at symbolic public locations, including the University of Pittsburgh campus.

On April 8, Federal prosecutors filed a response to a defense motion, opposing the proposed removal of some of the conditions of Hamad’s pretrial house arrest. The filing mostly consisted of new information about Hamad that prosecutors had obtained in the five months since his indictment, and it hinted at a growing disillusionment with protest among Pittsburgh’s anti-Israel organizers. For instance, on June 6, two days after the end of the second Pitt encampment, Hamad posted a photo of himself as a young boy to Instagram. He wore a gray track jacket and clutched a decades-old East German-made variant of the AK-47 assault rifle. His shoulders were draped in an empty load-bearing rig used to store extra magazines of ammunition, canteens, and other combat supplies. “Been toting that K since I was a boy, don’t play with me,” Hamad wrote over the image.

The same day Hamad posted this picture to Instagram, he also sent it to Micaiah Collins, the 22-year-old daughter of Chad Collins, along with “another image of himself holding another rifle,” according to the April filing. “Been a terrorist since I was a kid in Lebanon,” he wrote to Collins, “real shit.”

In the October 2024 criminal complaint, the fireball images and celebratory text messages related to the July 7 testing of a homemade explosive device were attributed to an unnamed individual. The April filing identifies this person as Collins: “Hamad bought explosive materials and detonated an explosive device on one occasion with another individual, Micaiah Collins (listed as Individual 1 in the Complaint Affidavit),” the filing reads.

Hamad gave fellow activists a bracingly honest glimpse into himself. “To be clear I want to go over there in Palestine. And help. Fight,” Hamad texted a friend on July 5. On July 4 he posted that picture of a Hamas funeral, sharing his envy of the masked and gun-strapped fighters standing over their comrade, who had achieved “the highest level of Jannah,” or paradise. On July 6, Hamad posted an image of an assault rifle to Instagram with the caption: “Alright yall say a prayer with me. Inshallah one day each bullet in this mag kisses the foreheads of the Zionist oppressor, ameen.”

Prosecutors allege that Hamad brought at least three homemade explosive devices to State College on July 18. The pipe bomb pictured in the filing is compact, a palm-length galvanized steel cylinder with sealed end-caps. In the photos, hands belonging to someone who the filing identifies as Hamad load the device into a black metal tube, likely meant to contain the sound and intensity of the coming blast. It is a fairly sophisticated little bomb, the work of either a dedicated hobbyist or someone with a natural talent for explosives. The updated April 22 indictment alleged Hamad had studied the design of a can-based bomb and successfully produced his own versions with Collins’ help.

In October, as Hamad learned he was under federal investigation, he discussed his possible next moves with another leading Pittsburgh anti-Israel activist. Prosecutors found a note on his phone where he toyed with the idea of continuing to attend protests even knowing he had attracted the attention of law enforcement. “I really want to,” he wrote. “Elyanna and M are both onboard. … Elyanna and M both said me being alone and being isolated is what [investigators] want.”

The April 8 filing notes that a young woman named Elyanna Sharbaji signed a petition in support of the removal of Hamad’s home detention conditions. Earlier this year, Sharbaji received a small trophy from the Not On Our Dime Campaign for collecting more signatures in support of a new Pittsburgh BDS ballot referendum than any other activist. In late April, activists at Pitt Apartheid Divest put out an online flier asking supporters to show up at the Pittsburgh federal courthouse on April 22nd. “A Syrian community member, ES, was subpoenaed to a federal grand jury,” the flier reads, describing this ES as “a frontline organizer who has shown up for us countless times!”

Prosecutors charged Collins and issued their superseding indictment of Hamad the same day as Sharbaji’s scheduled testimony. The federal government has now accused three anti-Israel activists in their early- to mid-twenties—a conservative Muslim, a shomer Shabbat Jew, and a pastor’s daughter—of a series of interrelated crimes. Collins and Hamad were charged with knowingly and unlawfully making and possessing a firearm. Collins faces a maximum of five years in prison. Hamad received additional charges for allegedly lying to federal security clearance investigators about his chief loyalty being to the United States. He now faces a possible ten years in prison. No additional charges were added against Lubit, who still faces one year in prison if convicted of “decorating” Chabad of Squirrel Hill with a Hamas symbol.

Lubit, Michaiah Collins, Sharbaji, Hamad’s still-unidentified State College bomb-making accomplice, and any of Hamad’s Instagram followers knew that he fantasized about violence and holy war against Israel. Collins and Lubit were allegedly eager participants in these fantasies and helped them find disquieting manifestations in the real world.

According to the April 8 filing, Hamad’s friends in the Pittsburgh activism scene continue to exhibit a remarkable degree of loyalty, while Hamad has taken on potential legal risk in accepting their friendship. “The government believes that Hamad may be attending a Presbyterian Church on Sundays,” the filing concludes. “Notably, the government believes it is the church associated with the father of Micaiah Collins, who, as noted above, detonated an explosive device with Hamad. If Micaiah Collins has been present at the church, this could be a violation of Hamad’s pretrial release condition not to have contact with any person associated with this investigation.”

During a brief recess at the November preliminary hearing, it became clear that Lubit had completed her search for a nurturing group of Jews in which she didn’t feel morally compromised. Among the two-dozen people who had taken hours out of a weekday afternoon to support Lubit were two men in kippot, a young woman with an Invader Zim backpack and a rainbow face mask, a woman with a black keffiyeh and a floral face tattoo over her left temple, and a young man in Lennonesque wire glasses wearing jungle fatigues and a matching sun hat with a plastic flower tucked in the band. Lubit smiled and socialized, the center of a circle that formed around her in the hallway (away from Hamad, who greeted his own friends in the courtroom). Her face was suddenly bright with human expression, something that had been absent and impossible during the hearing itself.

That she had landed in federal court proved how high the price of Lubit’s search for acceptance had been and how much its success must have meant to her. An anonymous group of local anti-Zionist Jews published an essay in late 2024 “in defense of the Squirrel Hill vandals,” making an affirmative case for defacing Chabad houses and other Jewish communal targets. In December, Aaron Kuhn told me he had attended a recent Shabbat dinner at Lubit’s apartment, a place she is barely allowed to leave.

Lubit has had to wear a heavy ankle monitor since November. In December, she needed a judicial consent order to travel to Maryland to visit her “mom, sibling, stepfather, and her 91-year-old grandfather who suffers from Parkinson’s disease” for two days, another indignity preserved in the freely available federal court record. Lubit, “upon a showing that the defendant is financially unable to employ counsel,” was allowed to replace her earlier public defender with a new court-appointed attorney in late December.

Even while rejecting a chance to talk to me, Alexandra Weiner, the mathematician who had been active at the University of Pittsburgh Jewish Voice for Peace chapter during Lubit’s time coming to the campus, was able to convey the electrifying effect of total commitment to a long-shot communal purification project, waged among the very few people who don’t think you’re damaged or hate yourself. “Tablet is not the favorite of those who believe Palestine should be free from Zionism,” Weiner noted over email. If anti-Zionist Jews wouldn’t talk to me, “that’s probably because your paper has consistently supported genocide. People don’t want to talk to a paper that supports genocide that will most likely misrepresent them. I hope you do some soul searching and maybe change paths.”

Lubit had searched her soul and acted according to her conscience. She now had people to witness her and support her. A different kind of validation came in the courtroom moments after the recess concluded. Judge Kezia Taylor informed the defendants that in her view, federal prosecutors had more than established probable cause that the two had committed offenses against the United States. “Both will be held to answer in district court for the crimes set forth in the complaint,” Judge Taylor pronounced.

In psychic suffering, public humiliation, and lost time, Lubit has likely paid out of all proportion to the vandalism she is accused of committing. But the price may have been worth it: By living up to what she thought her Jewish identity required of her, Lubit found like-minded people who finally allowed her to live as a Jew in a time when she feared that to be impossible. For a person who appears to have experienced a painful alienation from the crumbling institutions and norms built to nurture and reward her, and who now faces the prospect of federal prison, discovering the community she longed for must be a welcome and even redemptive surprise. Lubit might have made other Jews feel physically threatened as she traveled her path towards being able to live with herself and her identity. But perhaps that is someone else’s problem.