![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/Employees_Washington.avif\")
<\/a><\/p>\nNotes remembering Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky are left at a makeshift memorial outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., where they were murdered on May 21, 2025. (Ted Eytan\/Creative Commons)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\u201cOur modern American Jewish chronicle of pain has a new locus: Pittsburgh, Poway, Monsey, Jersey City, and now Washington,\u201d it read in part. \u201cAnd innumerable antisemitic attacks, too many to list, in Brooklyn, on campuses, and beyond.\u201d<\/p>\n
The next day, The Guardian, the left-leaning British paper, linked the murders of Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky to a different set of violent attacks. <\/p>\n
\u201cThis is the latest act of violence in a string of incidents that have affected Jewish, Arab and Muslim communities in the US,\u201d read its report. \u201cA man in Illinois attacked a six-year-old and his mother, both Palestinian American, and killed the boy in 2023 soon after Hamas\u2019s 7 October attack on Israel, and three Palestinian students were shot in Vermont in November 2023. Reports of antisemitism, Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism have soared since the war began.\u201d<\/p>\n
The difference between the two litanies is wide and telling. For Marans, whose organization hosted the \u201cyoung diplomats\u201d reception that the murdered couple attended on the night of the shooting, the attack was the latest in a series of incidents, unrelated to the conflict in Israel, that left American Jews dead or wounded in synagogues, a rabbi\u2019s home and a kosher supermarket. For the Guardian, it was a political shooting, a sort of globalization of the conflict in Israel and Gaza. <\/p>\n
Attempts to characterize the murder of Milgrim and Lichinsky may be premature: We haven\u2019t learned how the shooter, who chanted \u201cFree Palestine\u201d while being arrested, identified his victims, or whether he knew they were embassy employees. <\/p>\n
But in the absence of clarity there is anger and certainty. Some Jews have bristled at news outlets that lean hard into the couple\u2019s Israeli affiliation, as if suggesting that the shooting, however heinous, was strictly political. A recent Associated Press headline becomes Exhibit A: \u201cCourt papers say suspect in embassy killings declared, \u2018I did it for Palestine, I did it for Gaza.\u201d The shorthand \u201cembassy killings\u201d falsely implies that the shooting took place at the Israeli Embassy and not at an American Jewish institution.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was really upset when I saw the news and all the mainstream news channels said, \u2018Two Israeli Embassy staffers shot and killed,\u2019 instead of, \u2018Two young people murdered in an antisemitic attack, coming out of a Jewish event in a Jewish museum in Washington, D.C.,\u201d Sharon Brous, the rabbi of the independent IKAR community Los Angeles,\u201d told The New Yorker. \u201cThis person was looking for Jews to kill.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the week since the shooting, two distinct framings of the murders have emerged, sometimes overlapping, often not. <\/p>\n
In a Truth Social message, President Donald Trump wrote that the killings were \u201cbased obviously on antisemitism\u201d \u2014 an assertion echoed in a news release from the Justice Department announcing the shooter\u2019s arrest.<\/p>\n
While Elias Rodriguez was charged with \u201cthe murder of foreign officials\u201d and not a hate crime, Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division Harmeet Dhillon said in the statement: \u201cLet me be clear: hateful violence against Jewish Americans will be met with the full force of the Justice Department.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cMake no mistake: This attack was targeted, antisemitic violence,\u201d Assistant Director in Charge Steven J. Jensen said in the same statement. <\/p>\n
On both ends of the Jewish political spectrum, leaders are saying it is important not to deny the fears of Jews or somehow \u201cexcuse\u201d an act that could have happened anywhere where Jews gathered. <\/p>\n
\u201cI know there are some people who say maybe it wasn\u2019t anti-Semitic, it was political. No. It was 100% an anti-Semitic crime,\u201d wrote Rabbi Jill Jacobs, of the progressive rabbis group T\u2019ruah, shortly after the attack. \u201cThere\u2019s no equivocating about that. It was an attack outside of a Jewish museum, outside of a Jewish event.\u201d <\/p>\n