December 10, 2025
The following column appeared in the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle.
By Marisa Bearak
I work in New York for the American Jewish Committee, the organization that hosted the Washington event where two Israeli Embassy staff—Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky—were murdered on May 21.
The shooting was targeted; exactly the kind of nightmare the Jewish community quietly prepares for but prays never happens.
But what’s been harder than the grief is the reaction that followed. In some activist circles and all across social media, rather than mourning, there has been a grotesque parade of rationalizations and people twisting themselves into knots to justify or obscure what happened. Rather than horror, they have been trying to intellectualize a double murder because Sarah was Jewish and Yaron was Israeli. As if that justifies violence.
You read that right. We’re watching a growing movement that can’t bring itself to grieve murdered Jews unless it fits their politics. That’s not just anti-Zionism crossing into antisemitism. That is antisemitism.
If you can’t say point-blank that what happened—murder— was wrong then your moral compass is broken. You don’t have to support Israeli policy. You don’t have to agree with the war. You can care deeply about Palestinian lives and still be horrified by this. You can demand justice and still recognize when hatred takes over.
Antisemitism destabilizes everything around it. It enables broader societal breakdown. It fractures movements. It warps discourse and poisons the very coalitions we need to build a more just world. We saw this in the immediate aftermath of the Hamas attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Yet in the days since Sarah and Yaron were killed, alongside the nauseating vitriol we've come to expect, we’ve also heard more expressions of solidarity than in the months following Oct. 7. That support matters, but it also raises a painful question: what took so long?
Had the antisemitism that exploded globally after Oct. 7—calls to globalize the intifada, glorifications of terror, open threats against Jewish communities—been met with more clarity and condemnation then, would we be in a different place now?
Maybe we can’t stop extremists, like the man accused Sunday in Boulder, Col., of injuring eight people marching for the release of the 58 hostages still being held by Hamas. But unchecked hatred always finds someone to pull the trigger.
So if you care about democracy, civil society, about multiracial and multiethnic coalitions—you have to care about antisemitism. Not because Jews are the only ones suffering. But because when a society decides Jews are expendable, it always finds others to add to the list. It often starts with us, but it never ends with us.
The event where Sarah and Yaron were gunned down wasn’t a political rally. It was a diplomatic gathering about turning pain into purpose, focused on humanitarian aid across the Middle East and North Africa, including Gaza. Jews, Muslims, Christians were all in the room. Any one of them could have been killed. This was hatred in its rawest form. The kind of hate that doesn’t stop to ask who you voted for or what side you’re on—because extremism doesn’t check credentials.
Antisemitism runs deeper, metastasizes faster, and endures longer than many forms of hate. Combating it takes more than moments of outrage. You fight it by saying the word. Naming the threat. Doing so with consistency. With the courage to say, yes, this is antisemitism—whether it comes from the right or the left.
By making Jewish safety part of every conversation about justice, equity, and inclusion. By applying the same moral clarity we demand in the face of all hate. Only then can we be the city we say we are.
We remember “Jews will not replace us” in Charlottesville. We remember Pittsburgh, Poway and Jersey City, and now Boulder. We know the threat of far-right extremism, rooted in white supremacy and conspiracy. But we need to be honest about the far left, too, where anti-Zionism becomes a cover for justifying violence, and Jewish life is treated like collateral damage in someone else’s revolution.
I’m done being told that Jewish grief requires context. That Jewish life is less grievable when it’s tied to Israel. That our dead don’t count unless we preface them with a position statement.
We’re well past asking whether a line has been crossed.
The question now is: who will help hold it?
Marisa Bearak is assistant director of AJC New York.
