Was the D.C. Jewish museum shooting antisemitic?
Many groups said the shooter’s choice of target was inherently antisemitic, while others placed the murders within the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
Police and investigators work at the crime scene where two Israeli embassy staff members were killed Wednesday evening outside an event at the Capital Jewish Museum. Photo by Getty Images
By Arno Rosenfeld May 22, 2025
After two young Israeli embassy staffers were gunned down outside an event at the Jewish museum in Washington, D.C., by a suspect who later shouted “free Palestine,” the motive seemed clear to a broad swath of Jewish organizations: antisemitism.
Ronald Lauder, the conservative president of the World Jewish Congress, declared that it was “meant to cause Jews everywhere to tremble with fear.”
A similar sentiment came from progressive leaders as well. The Jewish Council for Public Affairs, which has played a leading role in opposing the Trump administration’s crackdown on activists who target Israel, also declared it an act of “antisemitic violence.”
“This was a Jewish event, at a Jewish museum... It feels like it could have been any of us.”Amy SpitalnickCEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs
The gunman killed Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky, a young couple who were expected to get engaged next week.
“This was a Jewish event, at a Jewish museum,” Amy Spitalnick, JCPA’s director, wrote on X. “It feels like it could have been any of us.”
The Nexus Leadership Project, often found encouraging Democrats to be judicious with accusations of antisemitism, relied on the same logic in its pronouncement.
“What ended up tipping it for us is that this was a person who was targeting individuals who were attending a Jewish event, at a Jewish institution where they knew there would be a number of Jewish individuals there,” said Kevin Rachlin, the Washington director for Nexus.
The FBI said it was investigating the shooting as a hate crime and Leo Terrell, chair of the Trump administration’s antisemitism taskforce, was on the scene Thursday morning.
Some stop short of ‘antisemitic’ claim
A handful of public officials qualified their condemnations — former Vice President Kamala Harris said Thursday morning that the shooting “appears to be a shocking act of antisemitism” — but you had to go further left to find Jewish organizations avoiding the label.
Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, a New York group that has accused Israel of genocide, called it a “senseless act of violence” that had caused many Jews to be “fearful of gathering in Jewish communal spaces.”
The group appeared to frame the murders in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“When we allow our hearts to harden to such an extent that we shrug off acts of violence and treat someone’s identity as grounds to deny their humanity, we lose our own humanity,” the group said. “This is true when we dehumanize Palestinians, and when we dehumanize Israelis.”
That may have been a nod to what appear to be the motives articulated by the suspect in the shooting, Elias Rodriguez, identified by police as a 30-year-old man from Chicago, who appears to have inveighed against Israel and its supporters and defended “armed action” as a form of protest on social media and in a manifesto.
The manifesto did not mention Jews, and the X account that posted it had shared video of a protest by Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow, two Jewish groups that have led protests against Israel since the war in Gaza began. And Rodriguez reportedly had a sign in his apartment window stating: “Tikkun Olam means Free Palestine,” referencing the Hebrew phrase for “repairing the world.”
But, so far, no information has surfaced about how Rodriguez allegedly selected the target of his attack. It took place outside an event at the Capital Jewish Museum, a cultural institution that does not work on issues related to Israel or engage in political advocacy.
The museum had been rented by the American Jewish Committee for an evening event hosting young Jewish professionals and foreign diplomats with the stated goal of building relationships that are “vital for the Jewish people and the promotion of democratic values.”
The event itself was focused on humanitarian aid, including in Gaza, that could be facilitated through “Israeli-Palestinian and regional collaboration,” according to a statement from IsraAID, one of the groups participating in the gathering.
“She was attending an affair to figure out how to get more aid into Gaza,” Robert Milgrim, Sarah’s father, told the New York Post. “The night she was killed, she was trying to help the situation – that’s the irony.”
Debate and consensus on what counts as antisemitic
While experts debate whether anti-Zionism — including political violence targeting Israel — is antisemitic, there is a near-universal consensus that it is antisemitic to target Jews or Jewish institutions like a synagogue, simply because they are Jewish, in order to express anger toward Israel.
Yet those distinctions are often difficult to parse. Anti-Zionist protests outside of campus Hillel buildings have drawn accusations of antisemitism for focusing on a building that hosts Jewish students for Shabbat dinners and religious events. But demonstrators often argue that they are protesting political events, like an Israeli government official, taking place inside the building or that Hillel International advocates on behalf of Israel and is therefore primarily a political, rather than Jewish, institution.
The American Jewish Committee is one of the oldest advocacy organizations of its kind, founded in 1906 and sometimes referred to as the “Jewish State Department” for its international work on behalf of Jews.
It is also a staunchly Zionist organization that has placed support for Israel at the center of its lobbying agenda in the U.S. and abroad for decades.
A looser consensus has also developed among progressives that it is not acceptable to single out Jewish organizations for their positions on Israel when other civil society groups hold similar positions.
So far, little information has emerged about how Rodriguez allegedly planned or carried out the shooting, which could address how he decided to target the event or to shoot Milgrim and Lischinsky.
The account on X, formerly Twitter, that posted the manifesto followed the AJC’s account.
The manifesto suggested that the goal of its author’s “armed action” was to demonstrate that “the impunity that representatives of our government feel at abetting this slaughter” is “an illusion.”
The document added that “the impunity we see is the worst for those of us in immediate proximity to the genocidaires” and compared its author’s predicament to a Guatemalan surgeon who watched a group of men kill one of his patients during the country’s civil war and then watched them “openly swagger down local streets in the years after.”
According to eyewitnesses who spoke to CNN, the shooter paced outside the museum and after attendees began exiting he approached a group of four people and opened fire with a handgun, killing Milgrim and Lischinsky.
He then entered the museum and kept muttering “call the police” until they arrived, when he took responsibility for the shooting and said “I did it for Gaza.”
Rachlin, whose organization encourages Democratic officials to take a more nuanced view of antisemitism and criticism of Israel, worried that the shooting would increase divisions over the issue.
“I just don’t understand what people hope to gain from things like this,” he said.
