A review by rockcommander
Squirrel Hill: The Tree of Life Synagogue Shooting and the Soul of a Neighborhood by Mark Oppenheimer

challenging dark emotional sad medium-paced

4.0

this book is engrossing and i was very interested because i live 10 minutes from SH. the history and the neighborhood are fascinating and i think the author overall did a good job. however. his insistence on using gendered pronouns is clunky, strange, and embarassing and comes off as intentionally transphobic. furthermore he features romanticized views of israel and dismisses anti-zionist groups as “extreme” - while israel is not a focus of the book, it comes up in talking about people’s experiences and it’s clear that the author is pro-israel, which is unfortunate, to say the least. 

i think he did a good job focusing on the community & survivors & victims families, and including a breadth of experiences and opinions in the community. but his coastal elite white cis man positionality was deeply annoying to me at times. also this book is very sad obviously 
Expand filter menu Content Warnings