The Free Press
Last night, outside of the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., a gunman opened fire and murdered two young people because he thought they were Jews and because they were gathered in a Jewish place for an event hosted by a Jewish organization.
Before I tell you about their alleged killer and the culture of lies that created the climate for his murderous rampage, I want to tell you about the people he cut down. Because I promise you: There will be no campaigns or hashtags or celebrities’ videos urging all of us to say their names.
Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim. Those are their names. They met at work—they were staffers at the Israeli embassy—and fell in love. Yaron, 30, had purchased an engagement ring for Sarah, 26, a few days ago. They were meant to fly to Israel this coming Sunday so that she could meet his parents, who live in Jerusalem, before he proposed.
Yaron was born in Israel to a Jewish father and a Christian mother. He was raised partly in Germany—he spoke German, Hebrew, and Japanese—and the mixed nature of his life embodied the very best of the West and the openness of our civilization. His friend Mariam Wahba, a Coptic Christian born in Egypt, said he was a “kind and generous friend, a devout Christian, and a defender of Israel. We would sit and debate early Christian theology for hours over a gin and tonic, and he would check in on me after every attack on Christians in Egypt.” (Read Mariam’s obituary of Yaron here.)
Sarah Milgrim was a Jew raised in Kansas who began working at the embassy in November 2023—a month after the Hamas massacre of October 7, 2023. She had two master’s degrees—one in international studies from American University, and a second in natural resources and sustainable Development from the United Nations University for Peace. Sarah was an idealist: she volunteered with Tech2Peace, which supports entrepreneurship between young Palestinians and Israelis. When she was a high school senior, in 2017, some swastikas appeared on her public high school. “I worry about going to my synagogue, and now I have to worry about safety at my school,” she told the local TV station at the time. “And that shouldn’t be a thing.”
That Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim happened to be at an event about delivering humanitarian relief across the region, including to Palestinians in Gaza, was of no concern to the alleged murderer. He was there to “free Palestine”—the slogan he shouted after he executed them. According to several witnesses, after the shooting, he reached into a bag, pulled out a keffiyeh and said: “I did this for Gaza.”
That may sound nonsensical to ordinary people. How would killing two Israeli embassy staffers improve the situation in Gaza? Of course one could ask the same question about the slaughter of some 1,200 men, women, and children by Hamas militants who invaded Israel on a Jewish holiday on October 7, 2023, and brought so much ruin on Gaza.
But the shooter’s evil worldview has a demented logic, and, as he proved, it’s a risk to us all.
It’s a worldview that says that Jews and those who support the Jewish state—wherever they live—are now acceptable targets. It’s a worldview that insists that a beautiful young woman and man in love in our nation’s capital might look like innocents to the uninitiated, when in fact they are monsters deserving of death.
One of the things I found when looking for news about the murder of Lischinsky and Milgrim last night was a video from October 12, 2023, of a dozen or so masked people waving Palestinian flags in front of the museum.
It’s strange to watch it now. A few people wearing masks and shouting slogans. Others beat drums. Some hold up signs.
If anyone even noticed it among the chaos that began in this country on October 8, they probably dismissed it as a few kooks or ignored it entirely. As if it were ever normal to target a Jewish museum in order to protest a war in the Middle East against a terrorist group. As if it ever had anything at all to do with “Palestine.”
Then, over the weeks and months, the flags turned into chants to “globalize the intifada,” and professional talkers dismissed it as a metaphor and not what it always was: a demand for open season on Jewish people worldwide.
The more elite the institutions, the more the people who populate them glorified evil. At George Washington University, students projected the words “Glory to our martyrs” and “Free Palestine from the River to the Sea” in giant letters on campus buildings. At Cooper Union in Manhattan, Jewish students had to hide in the library from a mob of their fellow students pounding on the door. At Harvard, more than 30 student groups signed a petition that found a way to blame Jewish victims for their own deaths—saying that they “hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” Students and faculty members at Harvard menacingly surrounded an Israeli student, intimidated him, and faced no meaningful repercussions.
Posters of women and children being held hostage by barbarians were torn down by people with PhDs, many of them smiling as they did so.
At the same time, the online world of know-nothing influencers and podcasters coalesced to condemn Zionists, to brand the movement for Jewish sovereignty in the Jewish homeland—as the Soviets had tried to do in the ’70s—as a form of racism.
And this week, the professional talkers repeated obvious lies, such as the idea that 14,000 babies could die within 48 hours in Gaza, a statement that was made and then walked back by the UN’s undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs, Tom Fletcher.
Venomous, untrue statements about Israel, its supporters, and the war against Hamas in Gaza chipped away at the old taboo against open antisemitism in America. Constant demonization of American Jews and Zionists is how a democratic state and its supporters have been made into targets. It is how the “permission structure” for violence against Jews in America has been erected.
Growing up, learning about Simon of Trent or other medieval blood libels, I wondered how something so unnatural, so deranged, could ever happen. How lies could spread so far, transmogrify into a movement, infect culture so comprehensively, and engender deadly action.
Those who participate in this culture of lies and who now want to distance themselves from yesterday’s violence will insist that the alleged killer’s acts do not represent them. That it harms their movement. But how can anyone honest with themselves not draw a connection between a culture that says Zionists are antihumans—even Nazis themselves—and the terrorists now attacking Jews across the globe?
As this terrorist attack was being carried out in Washington, I was sitting in another Jewish museum—the Jewish Children’s Museum in Crown Heights—for an evening memorializing Ari Halberstam, a 16-year-old murdered in 1994 on the Brooklyn Bridge by an Islamist terrorist. The murderer later said that he did it for a singular reason: “I only shot them because they were Jewish.”
The alleged shooter in Washington last night may have shouted the words “Free Palestine,” but that is not why he murdered Yaron and Sarah. He murdered them because he thought they were Jewish.
Among the many impressive people that spoke last night, one of them was Michael Mukasey, the former U.S. attorney general. Here is part of what he said:
“It’s hard to believe that it has been 31 years since Ari Halberstam was murdered in an act of antisemitic terrorism—and it is indeed hard—it is harder still to believe that we are living in the midst of a widespread resurgence of antisemitism. Not only around the world, but also in our own country, where many of us—and I include myself—believed that although there might be occasional antisemitic incidents, antisemitism would never become a widespread phenomenon. Oh boy, were we wrong.”
Sitting on the dais behind him was the top brass of the NYPD. Everyone who spoke, including me, thanked them for everything they are doing to keep Jews—to keep all of us—safe.
But no police force, not even the best in the world, can hold back a culture that has embraced violence as a means of expression, that has lost hold of the difference between life and death.
Join us tomorrow at 1 p.m. EST for a Free Press livestream with historian Jeffrey Herf on the murders in D.C.—and the roots of the global intifada. Click here to set a calendar alert to make sure you don’t miss it. Bring all of your questions.
Read more about Yaron Lischinsky:
On Wednesday evening, Yaron Lischinsky and his girlfriend, Sarah Lynn Milgrim, were shot and killed outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., by an anti-Israel militant. Soon to be engaged, Lischinsky and Milgrim both worked at the Israeli embassy. The Free Press is honored to publish this piece by Lischinsky’s friend Mariam Wahba.
