Wednesday’s CBS Mornings and CBS Mornings Plus featured exclusive, heartbreaking interviews with the family of Sarah Miligrim, who was murdered by an alleged far-left anti-Semite last month outside the Capital Jewish Museum. After the segment on the latter show, co-host Adriana Diaz tried to insinuate there’s some equal risk of threats to people of all faiths, not just Jews.
Co-host Tony Dokoupil – who nearly found himself out of a job last year because he dared grill Ta-Nehisi Coates on his violent pro-Palestinian (and anti-Israel) views – pushed back and, when CBS News Minnesota correspondent Jonah Kaplan tried to back him up, Diaz suddenly told them all it was time to move on.
Diaz cued up a clip of Sarah’s parents telling Kaplan that their daughter “molded us” and “strongest person” they ever knew, adding she “wasn’t against the people of Gaza” and actually “working towards finding a way for everyone to live together peacefully.”
“There’s nothing more important in Judaism than life and the sanctity of life. And to what end is this fighting and sacrifice? What does it accomplish? Taking my sister from me, it’s not going to accomplish anything,” Sarah’s brother Jacob added.
Diaz naturally honed in on the humanitarian situation in Gaza saying it’s even more tragic she died as she was fighting for “more aid to go into Gaza.”
Kaplan beautifully relayed his own emotions as “a son of two rabbis” and “the father of three daughters.”
“I think for many Jews across the country, they mourned Sarah’s death like it was one of their own…[I]t’s a much different feeling than the Tree of Life shooting several years ago. That was a one-off, maybe disturbed man, wasn’t part of this growing movement. We’re here over the past 18, 19 months. The concern has been that there’s been this rhetoric boiling to a breaking point,” he added in reference to the anti-Semitic rhetoric before sharing her family had long been worried about her and security around their own synagogue.
The father of two teenagers who’ve lived in Israel, Dokoupil then chimed in that such fears are “the reality about being a Jew in America right now and I don’t think people experience – I don’t think people are aware of the extent to which when you walk in and out of a Jewish building, you are concerned for your safety” or if you’re visibly showing your faith like donning a kippah.
It was here that Diaz chimed in with her attempt at equivalency (almost certainly a veiled allusion to Islamophobia):
Dokoupil wasn’t having any of this:
But Jews are a tiny speck of the overall population, and a ridiculous percentage of the overall hate crimes in America when it comes to religion. And that’s been true for a long, long time, long even before this war. And so all religious-based hate is wrong. But we shouldn’t suggest that it’s all happening at an equal rate.
Kaplan interjected by asking if he “could just get one last word in,” but having been roundly rejected, Diaz replied, “I think we’re out of time” and “I’m so sorry.”
“We gotta go? Okay. It happens,” he replied.
In the main show CBS Mornings, Dokoupil linked the Washington D.C. shooting to the Boulder anti-Semitic attack by saying they’ve “highlighted the way anti-Semitic ideas can become anti-Semitic violence in America.”
Click “expand” to read part of Kaplan’s interview with Sarah’s family, which included more on how her views on the region still weren’t enough to prevent an anti-Semite from killing her:
KAPLAN: [I]f we think back to October 7, 2023, and that Nova Music Festival, it was about love and friends and became a massacre. Sarah Milgrim’s father told us this is a continuation of the same tragedy, the murder of a young woman who dreamed of a better world for everyone. [TO ROBERT MILGRIM] Amidst this grief what are the feelings? Anger? Frustration? Confusion?
ROBERT MILGRIM: Right now, I’m hurt – I’m just – I can’t – I’m too hurt to say it’s anger or frustration. I don’t know what I’m going to feel later on, to be honest with you.
KAPLAN: What the parents of Sarah Milgrim do know and what they want everyone to know was how their daughter’s life was filled with love starting with her father, Bob; her mother, Nancy, and older brother, Jacob.
ROBERT MILGRIM: She was the perfect child. We never argued about anything. She loved the environment, loved Mother Earth. She loved people. She – she loved family. She loved her community.
KAPLAN: It was a life full of love stories, too. First falling for Israel after her bat mitzvah in Jerusalem, Sarah would tour Israel again in college and then again as part of a program called Tech2Peace, a work study program for Israelis and Palestinians.
NANCY MILGRIM: She’s not a tech person.
KAPLAN: Right.
NANCY MILGRIM: So, she learned some things, but really she was involved with the social immersion between bringing all the people together.
KAPLAN: When Sarah got a job after grad school at the Israeli embassy, she’d fall in love again with Yaron Lischinsky.
ROBERT MILGRIM: We saw their – the love blossom for each other and we knew how strong it was. We were hoping they would be getting married.
At one point, Kaplan told them: “There are people now calling the man who allegedly shot and killed your daughter a political prisoner, a hero, someone who was working to be a liberator.”
After Sarah’s mother steered clear of that, brother Jacob denounced the suspect as having accomplished nothing towards peace by killing his sister, and father say she was “a stronger person than I ever was,” Dokoupil returned back life by praising CBS for letting this interview happen “before the news moves on and people forget and that family is left alone in their grief.”
Kaplan replied “it is important” to continue talking about anti-Semitism and ask “what can we do to stop anti-Semitism from growing and metastasizing when we know what starts with the Jews doesn’t end with the Jews.”
Diaz again tried to equivocate: “It’s also important, you know, what Sarah stood for and Yaron. They were at an event trying to bring more aid to Gaza. They – you know, she clearly cared about peace and dialogue. So, it is just – it is so heartbreaking.”
Dokoupil’s response here brought about a pregnant pause: “It is the kind of incident, if you can’t denounce that, you’re not anti-war, you’re anti-Semitic.”
Kaplan closed the segment by breaking the brief dead air: “October 7, they say, didn’t create anti-Semitism, it revealed it in America.”
To see the relevant CBS transcripts from June 4, click here (for CBS Mornings) and here (for CBS Mornings Plus).