This is What “Globalize the Intifada” Looks Like

The murder of Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky isn’t an isolated tragedy—it’s the consequence of a culture that makes Jewish life disposable.

Photo of Sarah Milgrim, 26, and Yaron Lischinsky, 30, who worked for the Israeli embassy. Via X / Embassy of Israel to the USA / @IsraelinUSA

For some time now, being visibly Jewish in America has come with a sense of risk. You feel it walking into synagogues guarded by armed officers. Maybe you feel it before RSVPing to a Jewish event that got too much traction online. Most of the time, you tell yourself you’re being paranoid.

But not last night.

Last night, in Washington, D.C., the American Jewish Committee (AJC) hosted a small reception at the Capital Jewish Museum for young professionals on interfaith dialogue. It was the kind of thing you’d only hear about if you’re on their mailing list. I’m on the AJC ACCESS board in NY, so I know these kinds of events well. One of the panel discussions that night focused on humanitarian aid for Gaza.

Among those in attendance were a young couple: Sarah Milgrim, 26, and Yaron Lischinsky, 30, who worked for the Israeli embassy.

By 9 p.m., they were gunned down outside the building. Murdered after attending an event meant to build bridges and strengthen multi-faith pluralism.

That’s America in 2025.

They showed up to promote peace and left in body bags.

They were targeted not for anything they did, but for who they were.

Let me ruin your day even more: Yaron had just bought an engagement ring; he was going to propose to Sarah next week in Jerusalem.

Sarah’s parents didn’t know that part yet. They found out after learning from the Israeli ambassador their daughter was killed.

my friend was there

In the Jewish world, we’re all two degrees of separation from each other—and last night was no exception. A friend of mine who works for AJC in D.C. was at the event.

He said it took a moment to register what was happening. At first he thought it was just a random shooting because DC do be like that.

The shooting happened outside the museum where there was no security, then the shooter ditched his gun and entered the museum in a sort of panicked frenzy before giving himself up to security.

At first people thought he was a witness and needed protection and comfort. Apparently it wasn’t clear what was going on until he pulled out a keffiyeh and started chanting “Free Palestine.” Thankfully, he left the gun outside, or it could have been so much worse.

According to my friend, the event was not particularly focused on Israel or well publicized, so investigation is needed as to how the shooter knew of this programming. You wouldn’t have known it was happening unless you were deep in the AJC young professionals email chain.

D.C. police identified the shooter, Elias Rodriguez, as a 30-year-old man from Chicago, raising even more questions.

Sarah and Yaron were as idealistic as they come.

I don’t usually find myself digging into the personal lives of victims after a tragedy like this. But seeing that I have several mutuals with the couple from years of mingling in the Jewish professional world I was curious to learn more.

Reader: these two were extraordinary. Sarah and Yaron were true peaceniks.

Sarah Milgrim was the kind of person who didn’t just talk about peace. She fully lived it. Her LinkedIn reads like a syllabus for how to save the world. She held two master’s degrees—one in International Affairs from American University, the other in Natural Resources and Sustainable Development from a school LITERALLY called the University for Peace—a United Nations–mandated program in Costa Rica. She researched environmental policy in Central America, facilitated Jewish education on Israeli-Palestinian relations, and held a certification in Religious Engagement in Peacebuilding. In Israel, she worked for an organization that connected young Israelis and Palestinians, her father said, according to The New York Times.

She cared about sustainability, diplomacy, and actual coexistence. Not the “coexist” bumper sticker people slap on their car while retweeting Hamas apologia. The real thing. She truly seemed to embody the best of the best. For someone so young, she already made an enormous impact.

Photo of Sarah Milgrim taken from her LinkedIn.

Yaron Lischinsky was born in Nuremberg, Germany and moved to Israel at sixteen. He held a master’s in Government, Diplomacy, and Strategy from Reichman University, and a bachelor’s in International Relations and Asian Studies from Hebrew University. He was fluent in English, Hebrew, and German, with a working knowledge of Japanese. Despite some misreporting on social media, he was a practicing Christian, raised in a mixed Jewish and Christian family, who had tied his fate to the people of Israel because he believed in the mission and the country.

Photo of Yaron Lischinsky via X account @raz_sauber_

sadly this kind of thing isn’t that surprising.

This didn’t happen in a vacuum. It happened in the climate we’ve created, where ancient blood libel has been modernized into shareable graphics, and where the phrase “globalize the intifada” is printed on T-shirts and where genocidal sloganeering is mistaken for edgy activism.

The shooting also comes just days after the UN spread a lie that went viral online that 14,000 babies would die In Gaza within 48 hours without aid. Except it was a misreading of a report stating that 14,000 children are at risk of malnutrition over the next year

But the blood libel already did what blood libels do: it spread. It dehumanized. It primed the world to see Jews as villains. And in that climate, murder becomes easier to justify.

If you’re shocked by all this, I envy your ignorance.

If you’ve been paying attention for the last several years, then this doesn’t feel surprising at all. It feels inevitable.

Just a month ago, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro—a Jewish Democrat who’s never said an inflammatory word in his public life—had his house firebombed on the first night of Passover. The arsonist said he did so in solidarity with Gaza.

Interestingly, the DC shooter posted a manifesto to X with the header “Escalate for Gaza, Bring The War Home” in a screenshotted notes app (because 2025).

In the manifesto, he wrote: “Those of us against the genocide take satisfaction in arguing that the perpetrators and abettors have forfeited their humanity.” Lovely. He decided Jews aren’t people anymore.

And yet, somehow, we keep being asked to contextualize this when it comes in the form of a protest. To make room for it in our analysis. To talk about “root causes” and “power structures” and “discomfort.” The shooter brought the war home, sure—but he also brought home the proof: that mainstreaming hate speech eventually becomes deadly hate crimes, and that antisemitism isn’t some abstract nuisance of the internet age—it’s a bullet waiting for a Jewish body.

You don't have to believe in everything the Israeli government does to think killing random Jews is not a good thing to do. You don’t even have to love the idea of Zionism, which is funny considering it's literally the only ideology that says Jews deserve safety and sovereignty. But you do have to know the difference between politics and hate.

And if you can’t tell the difference anymore, that’s not an accident. That’s the point.

The slogans we were told were symbolic? “Globalize the Intifada.” “From the river to the sea.” They’re not metaphors. They’re instructions.

We’re witnessing a disturbing trend: public expressions of Jewish life are increasingly under attack. To an antisemite, every expression of Jewish life becomes a projection of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. All Jewish life is seen as geo-political. All seen as provocation.

In case it needs to be made clear, there is no cause that justifies this kind of violence.

If your worldview can’t condemn this without caveats, you don’t need a better argument. You need a better conscience.

Sarah and Yaron should be alive.

May their memories be a blessing.
And may the rest of us decide what kind of world we want to live in.