Live Updates: Slaying Outside Jewish Museum Was Targeted Terrorism, F.B.I. Says

New York Times

22-05-2025

The entrance to the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington was cordoned off after the killing of two Israeli Embassy employees on Wednesday.
The slaying of two Israeli Embassy aides on Wednesday outside a Jewish museum in Washington was an extreme example of what law enforcement officials and others call a global surge in antisemitic incidents that emerged after Hamas terrorists killed more than 1,200 people and seized 250 hostages on Oct. 7, 2023.
Across the world, offenses against Jewish people and property have doubled or even tripled since the Hamas attacks and have remained at historically high levels as Israel has waged a 19-month bombing campaign and aid blockade that the Gaza Health Ministry says has killed more than 50,000 Palestinians.
Groups that monitor hate crimes around the world said the Hamas attack and the subsequent war had helped fuel tens of thousands of incidents, including cases of verbal abuse, a torrent of online attacks on social media, Nazi-themed vandalism, personal threats and violent attacks resulting in injury and death.
'Everywhere across the board, you had more incidents than before Oct. 7 — that impression is lasting,' said Professor Uriya Shavit, the director of the Religious Studies Program at Tel Aviv University, which produces one of the most comprehensive annual reports on the level of antisemitism worldwide.
Professor Shavit and others said it could be difficult to clearly define what qualifies as an antisemitic incident at a time of heightened political outrage around the world, especially about the humanitarian impact of Israel's conduct in the war. The complexity of the issue was underscored during the 2024 protests at universities in the United States, where administrators and police officers struggled to confront both legitimate political expression and abusive or hateful incidents.
Despite the intensity of feelings about the conflict, most of the cases of reported antisemitism around the globe fall far short of the kind of extreme violence that erupted on Wednesday outside the Capital Jewish Museum, where the American Jewish Committee was hosting a reception for young diplomats in Washington.
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Pro-Israel protesters at a demonstration outside Columbia University in New York last year.
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Adam Gray for The New York Times
'There is such a merging and mixing of ideologies and of content and language,' said Dave Rich, the director of policy at Community Security Trust, a Jewish nonprofit in London that tracks antisemitism in Britain. 'Lots of people who are not active extremists in the way most people would understand it will still use extremist language.'
But even so, experts say the trends are clear: Data collected from police departments, government agencies and nonprofit organizations around the world suggest that officials are struggling to contain the biggest wave of hate-fueled incidents against Jews that has been recorded in decades.
In France, there were 1,570 antisemitic incidents in 2024, down slightly from the year before but still a 260 percent increase over 2022, according to the latest Tel Aviv University report. In Germany, the number of cases involving expressions of hatred against Jews doubled in 2023 to 5,671, the study found, and fell to 5,177 in 2024. Similar trends were evident in antisemitic reports from Argentina, Canada, Australia, Mexico and elsewhere.
In Britain, the number of antisemitic incidents in 2024 was 112 percent higher than it was two years before, rising to 3,528, from 1,662, according to data compiled by Community Security Trust, which called the increase the 'result of the enduring levels of anti-Jewish hate observed in the U.K. since the Hamas terror attack.'
Of those cases, 201, or about 6 percent, were incidents of assault or other physical attacks on Jewish people in Britain. About half of the 3,528 incidents involved inflammatory speech about the Israel-Hamas conflict alongside explicit expressions of anti-Jewish language, motivation or targeting. The center does not include in its data statements that are only expressions of political belief, Mr. Rich said.
In the United States, the war and the pro-Palestinian movement have amped up tensions and fears about antisemitism. The shooting at the museum is the type of development that many Jews, as well as some Jewish scholars and activists, have been worried about and warning about. They argue that the explosion of antisemitic language has already led to violent personal attacks.
'You can't draw a direct line from the campus to the gun,' said David Wolpe, who's the emeritus rabbi of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles and who was a visiting scholar at Harvard Divinity School as campus protests broke out there last year.
'But the campuses normalized hate and anathematized Jews,' Rabbi Wolpe said. 'Against that backdrop, violence is as unsurprising as it is appalling. After all, 'globalize the intifada' looks a lot like this.'
Antisemitic incidents in the United States range from the physical to the verbal, from the subtle to the overt.
Federal prosecutors said a North Carolina man mailed an antisemitic threat to a rabbi at Temple Beth Israel in Macon, Ga., in February 2024. The postcard the man had sent included the phrase 'GASTHEJEWS' and showed a drawing of a person wearing a rat costume with the words 'JEWS ARE RATS,' the authorities said. The man was federally charged earlier this month with one count of mailing threatening communications.
Weeks after the Oct. 7 attack in 2023, a ride-share driver at San Francisco International Airport in California punched a customer in the face whom he perceived to be Jewish or Israeli, the authorities said. The driver, a 39-year-old California man, was arrested in March and charged with committing a federal hate crime, prosecutors said.
In most countries, the number of incidents of hate directed at Jews is down slightly from the peak in the weeks after the Oct. 7 attack. But Professor Shavit at Tel Aviv University called Wednesday's killing of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim, two members of the staff at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, a grim reminder of the hate that Jews still face around the world.
'I felt sad,' he said, 'when you see such a lovely young couple that's on the verge of actualizing their dreams in life, you know, at sort of the nicest point in life.'
Yechiel Leiter, the Israeli ambassador, said at a news conference that Mr. Lischinsky and Ms. Milgrim had been about to be engaged. The police said the suspect in the attack in Washington exclaimed, 'Free, free Palestine,' when he was taken in custody after a close-range shooting outside the museum shortly after 9 p.m.
The shooting prompted fresh outcries from political leaders around the world, including President Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, both of whom expressed outrage at what they called evidence of antisemitic hatred. Mr. Trump wrote on his social media platform that 'these horrible D.C. killings, based obviously on antisemitism, must end, NOW!'
The incident also appeared to echo a series of incidents involving Israeli diplomatic outposts around the world in the last 19 months.
Last summer, Molotov cocktails were thrown at Israeli Embassies in Mexico City and Bucharest, Romania. A man wielding a crossbow attacked the Israeli Embassy in Belgrade, Serbia, last June. An attacker opened fire on the Israeli Consulate in Munich in September, and two months later grenades were detonated near the Israeli Embassy in Copenhagen.
Last August, two cars exploded outside the Beth Yaacov synagogue in La Grande Motte, a resort town on the southern coast of France, in what prosecutors called an act of terrorism. And in the United States, the home of the Pennsylvania governor, Josh Shapiro, who is Jewish, was firebombed. The suspect cited Israel's treatment of Palestinians.
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Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania and his family had to be evacuated from the governor's mansion in Harrisburg, Pa., after it was firebombed in April.
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Kyle Grantham for The New York Times
Walter Reich, a professor of international affairs, ethics and human behavior at George Washington University, said the conflict in Gaza had exposed historical hatred of Jews that had been somewhat held at bay in the decades after World War II and the Holocaust.
'But in recent years it has returned with a fury,' Mr. Reich said. 'Pent-up violence against Jews has exploded globally. Often masquerading as anti-Zionism, it has targeted both Jews and their state. And it has resumed a violent hatred that has been the norm, not the exception, for over 2,000 years.'
There has been an increase in the number of hate crimes against other groups as well, experts say. Overall hate crimes in the United States have doubled in the last decade, rising to nearly 12,000 by the end of 2023 from under 6,000 in 2014, according to data about hate crimes reported to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
But the increase in anti-Jewish incidents has far outpaced that of every other group, according to those who compile the statistics. That has left many Jews around the world rattled and feeling unsafe. Some Jews say they are held to a standard that no other group is, with critics holding them collectively accountable for policies in Israel.
Rabbi Moshe Hauer, executive vice president of the Orthodox Union, one of the largest umbrella groups of Orthodox Jews in the United States, said in a statement, 'These antisemitic murders committed in our nation's capital are a direct result of the organized and effective effort to demonize the Jewish state and to build hatred and encourage violence toward anyone associated with Israel.'
Michael Herzog, who served as Israel's ambassador to Washington from late 2021 until January, said the attack had not 'come as a surprise' to him.
The embassy staff had felt constantly under threat since the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, which started the war in Gaza, Mr. Herzog said in a telephone interview. Citing the large pro-Palestinian protests that have taken place outside the embassy and the ambassador's residence, he said he felt it was only a matter of time until 'a brainwashed person might pick up a weapon and carry out a shooting attack.'
Anemona Hartocollis , Ruth Graham , Lizzie Dearden and Isabel Kershner contributed reporting.