Antisemitism: What a young couple's murder tells us

Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim "were young and in love," said Gil Preuss in Haaretz (Israel). Lischinsky, 30, had just bought Milgrim, 26, an engagement ring and planned to propose the next week. But there will be no proposal, and no wedding. On May 21, as the idealistic young couple left a peace event at the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., where both worked at the Israeli Embassy, they were murdered by Elias Rodriguez, 31, who first shot them in the back—then calmly reloaded and finished Milgrim off as she tried to crawl away. "I did it for Gaza," Rodriguez told police. He clearly assumed his victims were Jews, making this a textbook case of "antisemitic terrorism." (Lischinsky was born to a Jewish father and Christian mother and was both a practicing Christian and an Israeli citizen.) The violent hatred "didn't come out of the blue." Antisemitic incidents have surged 893% over the past decade, says the Anti-Defamation League, and the wave has been "supercharged" by Hamas' Oct. 7 massacre of Israelis and Israel's military response. Rodriguez undoubtedly sees himself as a hero to the Palestinian cause, not as a mere antisemite, said Emma Green in The New Yorker. But by slaughtering two people "whose lives he knew nothing about," he followed the ugly and ancient "logic of antisemitism," which holds every Jew, anywhere, personally responsible for "all the ills of the world."

Jew-hatred has a long and bloody history, said Jeffrey Blehar in National Review, but "this feels like something new." Rodriguez is from Chicago, not Gaza or the West Bank. "He is not Palestinian or even Muslim," and his social media accounts reveal "an almost frighteningly generic range of 'young progressive activist' views." Rodriguez applauded Luigi Mangione, the alleged murderer of a UnitedHealthcare CEO, and like Mangione, was driven not by mental illness or personal grievance but by "progressive empathy to a cause" and the online left's "maximalist rhetoric of panic, siege, and destruction." Make no mistake: "The progressive ecosystem is breeding killers."

And the right-wing ecosystem isn't? asked Carlo J.V. Caro in the New York Daily News. After a gunman murdered 11 worshippers at Pittsburgh's Tree of Life synagogue in 2018, the killer's online history revealed a slew of ranting posts on Gab, an early MAGA platform, about Jews' involvement in the "Great Replacement" of white Americans with immigrants. Many of the alienated young men who voted for President Trump are followers of far-right antisemitic influencers such as Andrew Tate, Tucker Carlson, and Nick Fuentes, said Zachary Basu in Axios. Holocaust denial and "racist tropes about Jewish influence" are now standard fare on the MAGA-friendly podcasts and platforms that helped get Trump elected, including Joe Rogan's.

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The hatred of Jews is "no longer a fringe opinion" in this country, said Reihan Salam and Jesse Arm in The Atlantic. We can't criminalize hateful speech, but we "can draw a clear line" against political violence and its glorification. We must use our legal system, and our voices, to affirm the principle "that no political grievance justifies murder." Whether it "emanates from the fever swamps on the Left or Right," said The Washington Post in an editorial, "politically motivated violence in America cannot be tolerated." Only by punishing such atrocities "to the fullest extent of the law," and making them "counterproductive" to the causes they seek to advance, can we "keep them from becoming contagious."