There is No Justification for Antisemitism
On Feb. 25, 1996, two young American Jews, Sarah Duker and Matthew Eisenfeld, were killed by the bomb of a Hamas terrorist in the streets of Jerusalem. They were students at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City, where I was teaching at the time, on a year studying in Israel. They were about to be engaged.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]Yesterday, Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky were shot and killed on the streets of Washington, DC. They were about to be engaged.
There are moments that crystallize fears. Hatred of Jews is always a concern of Jews, one that history unstintingly supports. But in the fraught time since Oct. 7, 2023, the sense of dread has deepened. Thirty years apart, these two events remind us that no single reason or justification has ever been required to hate or to kill Jews.
Statistics are chilling but faceless. According to the FBI’s 2023 Hate Crime Statistics, 68% of all religion-based hate crimes were committed against Jews. Jews are less than 2% of the population.
It is when hatred passes for normal that the chill enters the collective psyche of the decent. As a visiting scholar at Harvard’s Divinity School in 2023, I witnessed some Harvard students chant “globalize the intifada.”
Yesterday’s murder was done, according to the shooter, for a “free Palestine.”
Causality is tricky. There is no direct line between the protests on the campuses of Columbia, Harvard, Berkeley, UCLA and other institutions to the gunman. But causality is also real. You cannot give free rein to racism and be shocked when African Americans are assaulted. And you cannot post swastikas on campus and expect Jews will remain exempt from harm. The combination of shocking statements about Jews has spread across the ideological spectrum. We have heard antisemitic claims in both left “progressive” spaces and on right-wing talk radio—often echoing conspiratorial bile that Jews have seen for centuries.
You might think that witnessing the same hatred espoused by Jihadists and shared by avatars of ultra conservatism and ultra progressivism, one would know that it is conspiracy and hate, not truth, that animates antisemites. We hear Candace Owen claim Judaism is “pedophile-centered” and believes in “child sacrifice” in vitriolic alignment with Roger Waters, who places Jewish stars next to dollar signs and tells Jews to go back to Eastern Europe. Different flags, same hate. The protean hatred of Jews is always justified, and never justifiable.
The night Milgrim and Lischinsky were killed, I was at West Point, speaking to the Jewish cadets who were graduating. I told them about the confluence between the Jewish tradition and the country they have sworn to serve. What they know is what Americans in general need to understand: an assault against Jews is an assault against the foundation of our nation. This murder strikes horribly at the lives of two people and those who love them, of course. But it also strikes a blow at the institutions and ideals of the United States. It is no mistake that the liberty bell has a verse from Leviticus and the Statue of Liberty enshrines the words of a Jewish poet. As we learned long ago, from the days of the exodus, as the poet Heinrich Heine said, freedom speaks with a Hebrew accent. And those who hate what it represents begin—but never end—with the Jewish people.
So we mourn, once again, for the savage brutality of an ancient hatred. But as a Rabbi and a Jew, I do not only mourn—I also warn: What begins with the Jewish people never ends with us. It ends with the collapse of the values that a bullet cannot kill but cowardice can: those of freedom, of equality, of tolerance and of goodness. On the streets of the capital last night, the gunman was aiming at those as well.