"Jewish students were excluded from portions of the UCLA campus because they refused to denounce their faith." That's not my interpretation; it's a quote from a judge's order. "This fact is so unimaginable and so abhorrent to our constitutional guarantee of religious freedom," Judge Mark C. Scarsi wrote.
In the wake of the murders of two young Israeli embassy employees at an American Jewish Committee dinner at a museum in D.C., we must all examine our attitudes. Do we recoil not only at the barbaric murder on the streets of our nation's capital, but also at the fact that they were killed because they were assumed to be Jewish (one was, the other was Christian)?
As I was leaving a dinner dedicated to religious liberty that began in prayer for the souls of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Lynn Milgrim, the two murdered embassy employees, a Catholic man asked me, rhetorically, but reflectively, in disbelief and righteous anger: "How, in 2025, is there antisemitism? How is it that people are being killed simply for being Jewish?"
"Free Palestine!" the murderer exclaimed as he was being arrested. So, we know that the pernicious, insidious, heinous evil of antisemitism motivated the killing. And while evil will always be with us, circumstances on campuses like UCLA don't make life any easier for Jews. We're beginning to tolerate antisemitism when it is veiled as a mere geopolitical disagreement -- and yet one in which only one side is permitted to be seen by the sophisticated as in the right.
Online, people saw the breaking news that Wednesday night and couldn't sleep. The writers among us -- John Podhoretz and Seth Mandel at Commentary, most notably, but not exclusively - were sick with the knowledge this had happened on a weeknight in the Acela Corridor, as the East Coast commentariat calls itself. This shouldn't be happening anywhere, but especially here, was the conviction.
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But it has.
"We look to America as a model for a just society, where the right to worship and freely exercise religion is enshrined, because we live in countries where paranoid despots despise any allegiance other than to them." At that religious-liberty dinner in New York, Cardinal Timothy Dolan was being honored for his commitment to religious freedom. He said that this is what fellow cardinals said to him while they were in Rome burying Pope Francis and electing Pope Leo XIV. "Please," they would plead with him, "keep showing us [that the paranoid despot approach] is not the way."
Can we plead with one another: Please, we must show the world -- and our fellow countrymen and visitors -- that antisemitism is not tolerated here? From obnoxious comments to illegal encampments to violence and murder, it is all anathema to who we are as a people. That's what religious liberty means. That's what the U.S. is about. It's what men and women have died for in defense of this country.
May the memory of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Lynn Milgrim be a blessing -- in no small part to make us insist that antisemitism has no home here. They are heroes for living their short lives with joy, knowing full well what hate exists. We'll never eradicate evil, but we can't be silently complicit while it kills -- the route to class and actual lives.
(Kathryn Jean Lopez is senior fellow at the National Review Institute, editor-at-large of National Review magazine and author of the new book "A Year With the Mystics: Visionary Wisdom for Daily Living." She is also chair of Cardinal Dolan's pro-life commission in New York, and is on the board of the University of Mary. She can be contacted at klopez@nationalreview.com.)
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