Seventeen-year-old American Jewish girls are worrying about going to their synagogues and schools — here, today, in America.
On August 18, 1790, George Washington sent a letter to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, R.I. It’s a moving artifact of the character and the promise of the early republic, and of our first president’s intentions for it.
“The Citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves,” Washington wrote, “for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy: a policy worthy of imitation.”
All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.
“May the Children of the Stock of Abraham,” our first and greatest president continued, “who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants; while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and figtree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.”
“May the father of all mercies scatter light and not darkness in our paths, and make us all in our several vocations useful here, and in his own due time and way everlastingly happy.”
There is much to say about the horrific terrorist attack in Washington on Wednesday night, an attack that resulted in the brutal murders of 30-year-old Yaron Lischinsky, an Israeli Christian who served as a research assistant at the Israeli Embassy, and Sarah Milgrim, a 26-year-old Jewish woman raised in the Kansas City suburbs. It is a tragedy compounded by the news that Lischinsky was set to propose to Milgrim next week, in Jerusalem. He had bought a ring.
One thing worth focusing on is the rising tide of terror that has been directed at Jews in America. We all should be familiar now with the outrages and thuggery perpetrated on the campuses of our most prestigious universities in the 18 months since the October 7, 2023, pogrom in Israel. Nearly every Jewish institution, synagogue, school, and community center in America has had to radically upgrade its security, to include armed guards, in response to violence and the threats of violence.
But, of course, that was not the beginning. In 2019, three American Jews were murdered at a kosher grocery in Jersey City for the crime of being Jews.
There was the horror of the 2018 Tree of Life synagogue massacre in Pittsburgh, in which eleven American Jews were shot dead for the transgression of being Jews.
In 2014, outside a Jewish community center in the Kansas City suburb of Overland Park, three American Jews were murdered for being Jews.
There have been many other incidents.
Sarah Milgrim’s life was changed by all this a decade before she was murdered this week. In 2017, the campus of Shawnee Mission East High School in Prairie Village, Kan., was defaced by swastikas and other graffiti.
Dumb, stupid kids getting a thrill from edgelording? Perhaps. A local boy associated with a neighboring high school was later charged. The incident may have been the result of the spillover from a high school rivalry.
But in a resurfaced interview given to a local TV station, a 17-year-old Sarah Milgrim explained how the incident affected her. “It’s so ignorant that you would bring up a symbol like that, that would bring so much pain to people,” Milgrim told an interviewer. “It’s not okay.”
“I worry about going to my synagogue and now I have to worry about safety at my school and that shouldn’t be a thing,” Milgrim continued.
No, no it shouldn’t. That should not be “a thing” here in America.
In America, every one of us should be able to sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree. In America, there should be none to make us afraid.
In their long history, the Jews were exiled to Babylon and expelled from Judea by the Romans. The Jews were barred from England in 1290 and from Spain in 1492. Russian Jews were confined to the Pale of Settlement by Catherine the Great. The 1930s and ’40s saw Jews driven from Germany, Austria, and most countries of continental Europe or slaughtered there. The postwar period saw Jews expelled from the Muslim and Arab world in the aftermath of the establishment of the State of Israel.
Now, 17-year-old American-Jewish girls are worrying about going to their synagogues and schools, here in America.
No, Ms. Milgrim, this should not be a thing. But it is.
I don’t believe we will see a day when America formally expels its Jews. But could we make them progressively unwelcome? Could we make them feel progressively unsafe, vulnerable, and insecure? I fear that we might, and that it might be happening already.
If that were ever to happen, if we ever reach that point, our people will have abrogated George Washington’s vision. America’s honor will be blackened, and the shame will be on our own heads.