In memoriam
May the memories of Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky be a blessing
The most important thing at this moment is to mourn the loss of Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky. May their memories be a blessing. May their killer face justice. May these people who loved peace and pursued it inspire us to love peace and pursue it.
From AJC:
Sarah was warm, compassionate, a wonderful listener, and an optimist. Her life’s work was peacebuilding, connecting Israelis and Palestinians. Sarah believed in crossing divides to bring people together. She was only 26.
From the New York Times:
[Yaron] was born in Israel and moved with his family to Germany, where they lived for several years before returning to Israel when he was 16… [He] had known from a young age that he wanted to be a diplomat for Israel… “He was a devout Christian,” [said Ronen Shoval, the dean of the Argaman Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem] “but he had tied his fate to the people of Israel.”
I am praying for them, for their families, and for my many former colleagues and all in the AJC family who are deeply shaken and personally affected by this news.
Unfortunately, there is more that must be said. We have all been witnesses to a rising tide of antisemitism in this country and around the world. The response from people of goodwill has been wildly insufficient. Americans on the left had no trouble condemning the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017. Americans on the right are happy to condemn the antisemitic flavor of the pro-Palestinian rallies on college campuses. It is always convenient to push back against the antisemitism you see among your political opponents. How many of us have the moral courage and intellectual honesty to rebuke the antisemitism among our own political tribe? We need more of that; without it, the tide will continue to rise.
Nothing about the American pluralism that has enabled Jews and other minorities to thrive here is guaranteed. If we do not fight for it, it can be swept away.
It has been nearly 20 years since an American Jew was killed in America by someone angry about Israel. But nothing about this attack is unpredictable. What major city in America hasn’t echoed at some point in the past 19 months with the chant “Globalize the Intifada”? Where are the far-left political leaders brave enough to condemn the overheated rhetoric of the Hamas apologists, rather than opportunistically try to harness their hateful energy? Remember that multiple far-left members of Congress visited the encampment at Columbia University and praised the students for their activism, even as one of the leaders of the encampment had said that “Zionists don’t deserve to live.” Remember that Columbia’s main anti-Israel student group issued an apology to that bloodthirsty encampment leader for initially condemning his violent rhetoric, saying that it “support[s] liberation by any means necessary, including armed resistance.”
The question, then, is not “how could this happen?” but rather “what took so long?” and, in an environment that tolerates jihadism, “when will they strike next?”
I wrote the following words in Newsweek on May 21, 2021, four years to the day before someone radicalized by anti-Israel hatred went to the Jewish museum in Washington, which was hosting an event for a Jewish organization, and opened fire on Jewish people leaving the event:
Perhaps it's fitting that May is Jewish American Heritage Month. After all, despite our success in America and the richness and beauty of our faith and culture, there may be no more consistent part of our heritage as Jews than to be violently attacked, viciously demeaned, and utterly disregarded as we cry out for support. In that respect, some of our fellow Americans have been doing an excellent job marking the month…
It turns out, if you ignore all evidence, turn Israel into the villain in your morality play, and insist that Americans have a 'responsibility' to do something about Israel, the thing that they will do is beat up American Jews, throw rocks through the windows of American synagogues, and harass Jews who try to speak up on social media.
And now, “the thing that they will do” is gun us down in the streets.
Will you stand for this? More to the point, will your non-Jewish friends and neighbors?
It’s ok to be sad and frightened. But it is imperative to be outraged, and to channel that outrage toward making change. Urge your friends to speak up. Vote out your political representatives who tolerate this hatred. Tune out from the celebrities who adopt the fashionable bigotry of antisemitism.
Do it for Sarah and Yaron. Do it for American Jews alive today and those yet to be born, who deserve a country that will love them for the contributions they will make to society and not one that hates them for the actions of a country halfway around the world. And do it for America, which will not long survive if its people give in to this senseless hatred.