A man kneels next to emergency personnel working at the site where two Israeli embassy staff were shot dead near the Capital Jewish Museum, in Washington, on May 21.Jonathan Ernst/Reuters
Several battles involving antisemitism careered to a significant collision in the United States this week, providing both clarity and complexity on what is emerging as a significant issue in American politics.
The flashpoint was the shooting of two Israeli embassy officials outside a Jewish museum in Washington. The couple allegedly was killed by a gunman who shouted support for Palestinians in the Israel-Hamas war.
In ordinary times, this episode might be considered a simple hate crime, horrible in its own right, perhaps explained by the surface evidence of one man expressing private rage in a public way. But this is a time, both in the United States and in the Middle East, when rage and other passions no longer remain under the surface.
The shooting occurred at the convergence of several disparate forces coursing through American life.
One is the growth in antisemitic sentiment, rhetoric and action, on university campuses but also in private settings beyond the searching eye of the news media.
Another is the proximate cause of that spike, first the Hamas invasion of Israel in 2023 and then the battering response that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu unleashed in Gaza.
A third is the offensive against antisemitism undertaken by President Donald Trump and his administration, one that has put elite American universities on the defensive and on edge.
Any one of those factors would, alone, provoke important tensions in American life. The combination of them has added a fresh and, as demonstrated this week alone, consequential front in the political, social and cultural battle under way throughout the country.
It has added new tensions, and new questions, to a country roiled by Mr. Trump’s first frenzied months in the White House and the yawning divisions he has harnessed into a political movement.
Earlier in the week, the commencement ceremonies at Columbia University, the Ivy League educational powerhouse in Manhattan, were disrupted by pro-Palestinian protests and the booing of the university president at an event that customarily is a celebration of academic achievement and a landmark moment in the life of students and parents. Columbia, a centre of protest in the turbulent year 1968, again has emerged as the venue for high-profile demonstrations as the Gaza war continues and related hostilities deepen.
Now a shooting in a public place in the very downtown of the capital of a country already unsettled and divided is adding to the sentiment that the country is at an important, perhaps historical turning point, at the least an echo of the transformations of the 1960s, more likely a turbocharged reprise of them.
That’s because Mr. Trump is an unconventional president bent on upending established ways while Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon were conventional political figures shaped by tradition and disinclined to attack the elements of a political system that took them to power.
Both Mr. Johnson, a graduate of Southwest Texas State Teachers College, and Mr. Nixon, a graduate of Whittier College in California, resented the Ivy League, with Mr. Johnson sneering about what he called “the Harvards” who had filled top positions in the administration of his predecessor, John F. Kennedy, Harvard class of 1940, and whom he inherited after the 35th president was assassinated in 1963.
But neither undertook an offensive against Harvard and five of the other seven Ivy instructions the way Mr. Trump, Penn class of 1968 and thus an Ivy Leaguer himself, has done – all under the argument that Harvard and the others have been insufficient in their efforts to fight antisemitism on campus.
At the same time, Jewish leaders who might otherwise applaud a president who fought antisemitism, are concerned that the President is using antisemitism as a pretext in a separate battle that he cares much more about – diminishing the wealth and, ultimately the influence of the elite institutes he believes harbour and nurture anti-American sentiments, and are skeptical if not outright opposed to his priorities and supporters.
Mr. Trump cannot plausibly be blamed for the Washington shooting incident and, indeed, he reacted swiftly to the shooting. He telephoned Yechiel Leiter, the Israeli ambassador to the United States. “These horrible D.C. killings, based obviously on antisemitism, must end, NOW!” he wrote on Truth Social, his social- media platform. “Hatred and Radicalism have no place in the USA.”
Mr. Trump’s reaction to the shooting was consistent with how other presidents might have responded to such a crime. But there is enormous distrust among some Jews toward Mr. Trump, which is why there were pickets and protests when the President, in his first term, flew to Pittsburgh to visit the site of the Tree of Life massacre of October, 2018, the deadliest antisemitic action in American history.
So while on the one hand, a fight against antisemitism led from the Oval Office might ordinarily provide comfort for American Jews, it also is providing some unease to some Jews, who voted against the President in 2024 by some measures on a three-to-one basis, by others by as much as four-to-one.
The two victims in Wednesday’s shooting were slain where the American Jewish Committee was putting on a reception for young diplomats. It took the lives of two people a week from their reported intention to get engaged in Jerusalem. It occurred in the district of Washington well trod by tourists, political officials and embassy personnel.
But it also occurred in a country riven by divisions and targeted a people for whom shootings in the street has ominous undertones and for whom such public, targeted violence provokes deeply unsettling memories.