The Killing of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim

The killing of two Israeli Embassy staff members, Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim, by a radical left-wing activist earlier this week outside an American Jewish Committee event in Washington DC, should serve as a wake-up call to all American Jews regardless of political affiliation or stance regarding Zionism or Israel.

Not that we need another wake-up call. The last two thousand years of secular history should be reminder enough that once a reason is contrived to start killing Jews—and there’s always another reason—killing begets killing begets killing.

In the Ancient world, it was legitimate to kill Jews because Jews were “Christ killers.”  In the Middle Ages, it was legitimate to kill Jews because Jews supposedly murdered and ate children.  More recently, during Modernity, it was legitimate to kill Jews because Jews were considered biologically inferior.

Upon arrest this week, the shooter is heard yelling, “Free Palestine.”  After his arrest, he apparently told police that he “Did it for Gaza.”

This is the new blood libel.

It is now reasonable to kill Jews because Israel is an illegitimate state, this thinking goes, because the Jewish people have no right to a state, and the only reasonable response to the Jews having a state is to “Free Palestine,” which means, in no uncertain terms, that the State of Israel should be destroyed and the millions of Jews now living there should be driven from the land.

The fact that the slogans “Free Palestine,” “Globalize the Intifada” and “From the river to the Sea” are favorites at progressive rallies and radical protests across American campuses and cities should give pause to any sensible left-leaning American or American Jew who may be sympathetic to that movement.  Make no mistake: these are blatant calls to violence and murder.  Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim were murdered precisely because of this ideology of hate.

Left-leaning politicians should denounce the use of such language immediately and without reservation.  It’s fine to disagree with the policies of the Israeli government, the war in Gaza, the Netanyahu government, and so on.  But the American popular discourse surrounding all of the above has far exceeded the limit of reason and is now mutating into pathology—a clear and present danger to every American Jew.

Eric Alterman, in his recent essay for The New Republic, “The Coming Jewish Civil War Over Donald Trump,” does a good job sketching out the contemporary American Jewish landscape, with a cast list of all the major characters and institutions.  But he ultimately does American Jewry a great disservice by seeing us exclusively through American political lenses.  I would like to humbly suggest that those American political lenses—which see only left, right, and center; Democrat, Republican, and Independent; liberal, conservative, and moderate—are irretrievably broken.  They are a false metric by which our self-understanding as Jews is hopelessly distorted.

The fact is American Jews need one another now more than ever—and it’s not a political issue, it’s a blunt matter of survival.  We need one another in order to survive.  Pro-Zionist and anti-Zionist American Jews are still, first and foremost, fellow Jews.  Progressive, liberal, moderate, conservative and MAGA Jews are still, at bottom, fellow Jews.  We need to keep our disagreements in perspective and our priorities straight.  Above all we need to continue to ask ourselves, and each other, the big questions that we, as a people, have always asked: What does it mean to be a Jew in the world?  Why is the world the way it is and not some other way?  And what are my Jewish obligations to myself and others?

It is beyond disturbing to use the killings of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim here as a way to make a statement about our current American political discourse, American Jewry, in general, and the threats now facing us, it seems, from all sides.

But in order for Yaron and Sarah’s memories to be a blessing—and we are obligated to make sure their memories will be for a blessing—we need not agree with their politics.  We need only to recognize them as fellow Jews.