The Stories We Tell: Noah Schoen

Noah Schoen is a community organizer, oral historian and co-founder of “Memories of October 27th,” an oral history project that has interviewed over 100 Jewish and non-Jewish Pittsburghers about their life histories and reflections on the October 27th, 2018 synagogue shooting. He is also the Community Outreach Associate for the Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh, where he works to build HCPGH’s community connections and sharpen its approach to dismantling antisemitism and the injustices of today. Noah is a graduate of Columbia University and the JOIN for Justice Jewish Organizing Fellowship. He has been organizing in Jewish communities and in the labor movement for over 10 years.

In this interview we focus on Noah’s work on the Meanings of October 27th oral history project, his reflections on what the project can teach us about antisemitism, the power of stories, and the ways that collective narratives are shaped in community.

Why are stories so important to you? What meaning do you gain from collecting stories?

I believe that the stories you tell are a part of the process of becoming who you are. They actually shape you, the present, and the future.

I have ongoing questions about what stories we choose to tell about antisemitism. What do we notice, what do we not notice, what do we choose to focus on, emphasize, de-emphasize? Stories have a real impact on how we as Jews – Judaism being a religion based strongly around stories – understand and reckon with the world.

We know from research and understanding that when a major event happens people have lots of different personal stories of the event, but over time those stories coalesce into a collective narrative of what happened. People actually forget their individual experiences and a collective story is formed. Because I believe that the stories that we tell become who we are, and because the shooting happened in my community that I grew up in, I feel an investment in the collective story that we will tell.

My colleague Aliza Becker, who originated the idea, approached me to co-create the project with her. It instantly appealed to me in the sense that I would be able to both collect a lot of individual stories and by recording them preserve those individual stories, while also beginning to understand the collective narrative that would emerge. By preserving the individual stories, it really invites us as we tell our collective narrative to not erase certain perspectives. Collective stories are stronger when they are able to hold a lot of different threads.

From the beginning it was very important to me that the archive not be difficult to access, because to me one of the purposes of collecting these stories is to find ways to listen back to them, to draw out more of our own stories, and to create space for inquiry and questions. That is why the Meanings of October 27th interviews will be made available soon as part of the October 27th Archive website being designed by the Rauh Jewish Archives at the Heinz History Center.

Can you talk to me more about your questions around how Jews have been processing antisemitism since the 10/27/2018 shooting and how that connects to your work?

As I began this project I was really interested in how Jews were processing this antisemitism. What meanings were they making from it and what conclusions were they drawing? There’s this phrase that is thrown around a lot – the worst antisemitic attack in United States history. What does this phrase suggest? How will telling these stories orient us in a certain way or create certain linkages to the past?

In Jewish history there’s a particular pattern that occurs when Jews move to a place and begin to integrate. Things will be going good, going really well, and then all of a sudden, something bad happens. And perhaps that will then go away, perhaps it’s just a one-off. Or, some years later it will reach a tipping point, and then all the Jews will have to leave.

What can you tolerate, and what is intolerable? What is particularly challenging is that we’re living only two generations after the Holocaust. One of the main stories that comes out of the Holocaust surrounds “when was the right time to leave?” Those who were more paranoid left, and those who didn’t often died. That inclines you towards a more conservative approach! But now, of course, we’re in a new context. But it really is confusing and not so easy to figure it out.

I think because of the synagogue attack and the context around it, including the heightening of antisemitism in the last few years, many American Jews, whether consciously or not, are asking a question about the suitability of America for them. I remember one narrator [interviewee] of the  project talking about whether they should stay or leave the country after the synagogue shooting, and deciding it wasn’t yet the right time. But just the fact that that question was present is very significant. The stories that we tell matter. If one story of 10/27 is that it was an aberration, that is going to lead to one communal approach. If the story is that this is the beginning of the end, that is going to lead to a very different communal approach.

There is a particularity to the Jewish experience, but it is a human experience that we live in a world full of chaos, we never know what is going to happen next, and we live with extraordinary uncertainty. Perhaps one of the reasons that the Jews have been a resilient people throughout time is that we have had to learn how to deal with a certain kind of uncertainty and find a balance of attuning to it and also trying to live joyous, meaningful lives.

How have these interviews changed over time?

While it seems that as distance from a traumatic event increases people are perhaps able to not be so influenced by that experience on a conscious day-to-day sense, I don’t think that distance correlates with whether a person has actually grieved the full effects of that event on them. Distance creates a difference, but I don’t think we as humans automatically grieve. We grieve the best we can in the containers we’re offered. More important than the distance from the event is whether a person has had the time or space to think about and process what has happened. There’s a balance to be found between living your life and not going so deep into the grief wormhole that you start making all your meaning through grief.

I think Judaism understands that you’re going to need a set of containers for your grief. We light a candle every year from the anniversary of someone’s death. The stories that we tell become who we are. That ritual is a choice to keep that story, that person, and their meaning in your life with you.

One of the miraculous things about being a human being is that despite all the constraints and limitations on all of us, we do to some, and maybe the full extent, get to choose the story that we tell and the meaning that we make. But we don’t tell the story that we really want to tell until the space is there for that telling. It seemed to me that one of the most important things that I could do with Meanings of October 27th was to open up space for people to begin the process of telling their story and making their meaning. Certainly not every interview accomplished that goal. But there were several interviews that I think about where, from conversations we had afterwards, it was clear that people found that this space allowed for them to learn things about themselves through the telling. That is to me a satisfying and valuable outcome. It’s a part of why I’m so interested in creating opportunities for people to listen back, because it’s another invitation to tell your own story.

How have you been impacted by this project?

I have processed the impact of the shooting enough to do the project. I was also the first narrator of the project; my own interview is in the collection. But in truth I am still looking for the space to ask the questions that I have raised for myself about how we deal with antisemitism, how we listen deeply to one another, and what would come up if we could tell that someone was really listening. What might we say? How is our story shaped by the listener?

If there’s one thing that has driven me throughout this project, it is a conviction that if the story we tell about the synagogue shooting is that it’s the beginning of the end, I fear it will become that. We don’t know what the future holds for us, as Jews or as people, but where I do think we have agency is to choose to invest in stories that give us meaning and purpose, and that create opportunities for us to grow and be in deep community, to feel that deep sense of safety that comes from knowing and being known.

In part this is because I still long for those things myself. I really want to be in a community where I and other Jews around me don’t have to live with this specter of fear about us. I want us to revel in our beautiful traditions and build the communities we want and become neighbors with other communities.

The project has certainly changed me. I am still metabolizing it, but it has affirmed many of the things that I think are most important: space to tell our stories, safety in the world, the electricity that comes from meeting someone that is different from you and connecting with them, and the tension and dynamism that comes from that. These are things that make us human.