Beth Israel was attacked in 1967 and 2026. The antisemitic rhetoric looked the same then and now.
By Jennifer Berry Hawes, ProPublica
This story was originally published by ProPublica.
In July of 1968, Samuel Bowers sat down in his office with fingers poised over his typewriter keys, thoughts filled with fury. As founder and imperial wizard of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, he cut a charismatic figure, though one with a militant Christian faith and a hate-filled mind. Just a day earlier, police had killed one of his most trusted assassins and severely injured another.
Bowers had spent the past few years masterminding bombings at Mississippi’s Black churches and, more recently, synagogues as well. His two foot soldiers, now riddled with bullets, had bombed the Beth Israel Congregation in Jackson on a foggy night nine months earlier and were en route to bomb a Jewish leader’s home when police gunned them down.
At the typewriter, Bowers pounded out a five-page missive to Thomas Tucker, a local police officer who shot one of the Klan members but had earlier faced suspicions of being a Klan sympathizer himself, journalist Jack Nelson wrote in his 1993 book Terror in the Night: The Klan’s Campaign Against the Jews.
“Mr. Tucker,” Bowers wrote, “the principle of law as it has been twisted and abused by the animals in the Synagogue of Satan, one of which you were guarding and protecting.” The Klanswoman killed, he insisted, was an American patriot “doing her limited best to preserve Christian Civilization by helping to destroy the body of an animal of Satan’s Synagogue.”
Flash forward almost 60 years after Bowers wrote his letter.
On Jan. 10, 2026, a whole new generation of congregants at Beth Israel, among Mississippi’s oldest synagogues, awoke to devastating news about their house of worship. Someone had set a fire inside. The blaze had started in the library, destroying it along with sacred Torah scrolls, prayer books and myriad other materials. Smoke had filled the sanctuary. No congregants were injured, but they would not be able to worship there for some time.
Later the day of the arson, a young man with scorched hands faced an FBI agent and others investigating the crime. Stephen Spencer Pittman was born in Jackson in 2006, the year Bowers died. Just 19 years old, he allegedly admitted to investigators that he set fire to the temple due to its “Jewish ties,” according to an FBI agent’s affidavit. He dubbed Beth Israel a “synagogue of Satan.”
The term refers to biblical passages in which Jesus described Jews in specific communities who were persecuting the early Christians. Antisemites like Bowers had co-opted the phrase to describe Jews broadly as agents of evil plotting against white Christians. He believed that Jews who hadn’t converted to Christianity were “heretics” and their houses of worship therefore legitimate military targets — especially those like Beth Israel, whose rabbi had been linking arms with civil rights protesters.
Why Pittman, who has pleaded not guilty, used those words remains unclear. But according to the affidavit, after the fire burned the temple, Pittman texted his father, “I did my research.”
What did that research entail? Little is known so far. It remains unclear whether the teenager knew much about the ideology of the people behind the 1967 bombing or if he followed any of today’s antisemitic influencers.
Pittman, a community college baseball player from Madison, Mississippi, did engage in substantial online activity. He appears to have created profiles on multiple social media platforms where he mostly posted about his sport, nutrition and his Christian faith. Yet, shortly before the fire, an Instagram account that appears to be his posted an antisemitic meme of a cartoon character with a prominent nose, a Star of David affixed to his chest and a money bag in each hand.
And across the online world that Pittman traversed, a crop of young influencers have been spreading antisemitism, often rooted in Christianity. They are attracting millions of followers, embracing conspiracy theories of global Jewish takeovers and using terms like the “synagogue of Satan” that people like Bowers would well recognize.
Back then…
In many ways, the original sin of mass antisemitic disinformation stems from a text called “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” Published in the Russian Empire in 1903, it claimed to be an insider account of Jews plotting world domination. The tropes in it weren’t new, but the text provided rich fodder to those who embraced its “evidence” that Jews were orchestrating a global plan to amass wealth and eradicate non-Jews.
“Only we, the Jews, are qualified to rule the world,” the text proclaimed. “We shall surround our government with economists, bankers, industrialists, capitalists — and the main thing — millionaires — for everything will be settled by gold.”
The fact that the text was proven a forgery did little to thwart those who embraced it. Adolf Hitler called the document “immensely instructive.” Klan groups adopted it as a foundational text.
Bowers used conspiracy theories rooted in The Protocols to contend that Jewish puppetmasters were the real masterminds behind the NAACP, the FBI and the young civil rights volunteers pouring into places like Mississippi — and that Black people were merely their pawns. With that framing, his followers could demean Black protesters and vilify federal agents and Jews, notably those who linked arms with their Black neighbors to demand equal rights.
“It’s a way of rationalizing racism and finding a way not to acknowledge Black political agency and power,” said William Robert Billups, a University of Florida historian who hails from Mississippi and published research about Bowers and 1960s synagogue bombers in the Journal of American History.
Some like Bowers, later convicted of murdering a civil rights leader, also imbued their white supremacy with a militant theology known as the Christian Identity movement.
Christian Identity adherents tapped biblical phrases like the “synagogue of Satan” to justify their antisemitic views. Because they were religious, references from the Bible “came very easily to their tongues,” said Mark Pitcavage, a senior research fellow at the Anti-Defamation League who has spent three decades studying extremism.
…And now
In 2015, the “alt-right” white nationalist movement ascended to extremist popularity online in the corners of 4chan and 8chan and on burgeoning white supremacist websites like The Daily Stormer, named for the Nazi Party’s newspaper. Followers often posted jokey, racy and racist memes where they could hide behind the plausible deniability of humor.
That summer, Donald Trump announced his candidacy for president, a move swiftly embraced by The Daily Stormer’s founder and others. The next day, a 21-year-old white supremacist named Dylann Roof drove to Emanuel AME Church, a historic Black congregation in downtown Charleston, South Carolina.
Roof had discovered the “great replacement theory,” the belief that an elite group, often Jewish and described in terms such as “globalists,” is orchestrating mass immigration and social policies designed to “replace” whites.
In 2017, hundreds of white supremacists and other extremists flocked to the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, brandishing torches and chanting, “Jews will not replace us!” An 18-year-old named Nick Fuentes was in attendance and posted on Facebook that “the rootless transnational elite knows that a tidal wave of white identity is coming.”
Fuentes later described the great replacement theory in the Congressional Record as the “Great Replacement REALITY.”
The Anti-Defamation League’s most recent audit found an 893% increase in antisemitic incidents over the past decade. In 2024, it recorded 9,354 incidents compared to 1,267 in 2016.
In the early morning hours of Jan. 10, a man in a hoodie broke a window and slipped inside Beth Israel Congregation. He poured gasoline and ignited a fire near the spot where Klan members had burned the synagogue in 1967.
Once again, the people of Beth Israel were left to rebuild from the ashes of antisemitism.
Image: The exterior of damaged Beth Israel Congregation, Mississippi’s oldest synagogue, in Jackson (courtesy Darius U. Williams)