Antisemitism Has No Home Here

By Kathryn Jean Lopez

Monday, May 26, 2025

 

‘Jewish students were excluded from portions of the UCLA campus because they refused to denounce their faith.” That’s not my interpretation of what happened. It’s from the order of Judge Mark C. Scarsi, who added, “This fact is so unimaginable and so abhorrent to our constitutional guarantee of religious freedom.” It was unimaginable precisely because it happened at a public institution supposedly devoted to education and the pursuit of truth and freedom. A university tends to pride itself on academic freedom, but there’s something foundational about religious freedom, since it’s rooted in man’s very existence and endowed by the Creator. But are these still our values? Or do we side with those who put up encampments on campus to prohibit Jewish students from attending class? The question is mandatory for American citizens in the wake of the murders of two young Israeli Embassy employees at an American Jewish Committee dinner at a Jewish museum in D.C. Do we recoil not only at the barbaric murder on the streets of our nation’s capital but also at the fact that they were killed only because they were assumed to be Jewish (one was Jewish, one was Christian).

 

A night later in Manhattan, leaving a dinner dedicated to religious liberty that began in prayer for the souls of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Lynn Milgrim and for the impossible consolation of their families, a Catholic man asked me, rhetorically but reflectively, in disbelief and righteous anger: “How, in 2025, is there antisemitism? How is it that people are being killed simply for being Jewish?” I asked a similar question years ago, hearing a Hasidic mother talk about routine life on the streets of Brooklyn — getting yelled at and shoved, even with children in tow. Simply for being Jewish.

 

And they weren’t simply murdered. “Once RODRIGUEZ walked past the decedents and two witnesses, he turned to face their backs and brandished firearm from the area of his waistband,” the official affidavit in the criminal complaint against their murderer reads. “RODRIGUEZ is captured on the video extending both his arms in the direction of the decedents and firing several times as indicated by the muzzle flashes.” The terrorist moved toward Lischinsky and Milgrim, both now on the ground, having been hit by bullets, “leaning over with them with his arm extended and firing several more times.” Milgrim tried to crawl away. But her murderer followed her. He fired again and then reloaded his gun; she sat up and was then shot “several times” again. When Lischinsky and Milgrim were believed to be dead, their murderer jogged away.

 

“Free Palestine,” the murderer exclaimed as he was being arrested. So we knew immediately that generic, lethal hate and evil — coincidentally erupting at a Jewish event  — were not the reason that the victims were murdered. We knew that the real cause was the pernicious, insidious, heinous evil of antisemitism. We knew that politicians could not pull out their senseless gun-violence-gun-control talking points, even though we knew they’d try. When something like this happens on American soil, the blood cries out in a particularly haunting way. For parents to have to know these details of how their daughter died — here, in Washington, D.C. —  related to her noble work . . .  It should be unthinkable. Unimaginable. We will always have evil with us, and this certainly seems to be the case for the evil of antisemitism. Circumstances on campuses such as UCLA don’t make life any easier for Jews. We seem to tolerate antisemitism when it is veiled as a mere geopolitical disagreement, a conflict in which only one side is usually seen as sophisticated and correct. In an unscientific poll, the number of people I encountered within 24 hours of Lischinsky’s and Milgrim’s murder suggests that antisemitism has become just another news story in crowded news cycle. This cannot be.

 

Online, people who saw the breaking news Wednesday night couldn’t sleep. The writers among us — including John Podhoretz and Seth Mandel at Commentary — were sick with the knowledge that this had happened on a weeknight in the East Coast’s Acela Corridor. This shouldn’t be happening anywhere, but especially here. That was the conviction.

 

But it has.

 

“We look to America as a model for a just society, where the right to worship and freely exercise religion is enshrined, because we live in countries where paranoid despots despise any allegiance other than to them,” Cardinal Timothy Dolan said at a Becket religious-liberty dinner in New York City (Becket is responsible for many recent religious-liberty wins at the Supreme Court). Dolan was being honored for his commitment to religious freedom. Dolan said that this is what fellow cardinals told him while they were in Rome burying Pope Francis and electing Pope Leo XVI. “Please,” they would plead with him, “keep showing us that the paranoid despot approach “is not the way.”

 

Can we plead with one another? Please, we must show the world — and our fellow countrymen and visitors — that antisemitism is not tolerated here? From obnoxious comments to illegal encampments to violence and murder, it is all anathema to who we are as a people. That’s what religious liberty means. That’s what America is about. It’s what men and women have died for in defense of this country.

 

May the memory of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Lynn Milgrim be a blessing — in no small part to make us insist that antisemitism has no home here. They are heroes for living their short lives with joy, knowing full well what hate exists. We’ll never eradicate evil, but we can’t be silently complicit while it kills.