The murder of two young professionals outside Washington, D.C.’s Capital Jewish Museum on the evening of May 21 was not the first time that Jews, and Christians who dare to get close to them, have been victims of antisemitism on American soil. Yaron Lischinsky, who followed the faith of his Christian mother, was born in Israel. Sarah Milgrim earned a master’s in international relations at American University, where I teach Jewish history.

Like so many young couples, they had met where they worked—at the Embassy of Israel. Leaving a reception sponsored by the American Jewish Committee, which for more than a century has combatted antisemitism around the world, they were gunned down. The alleged murderer, Elias Rodriguez, a resident of Chicago, boasted that he did it for Gaza and shouted “Free, Free Palestine” as the police carted him off.  

Eleven days later in Boulder, Colo., a man reportedly yelling “Free Palestine” threw Molotov cocktails at peaceful marchers calling to bring home the hostages still being held in Gaza. According to an affidavit, the Boulder suspect, an Egyptian national named Mohamed Sabry Soliman, told investigators that he “wanted to kill all Zionist people” and that he had planned the assault for a year.

These attacks affirm that American Jews’ angst over contemporary antisemitism is not overblown. The FBI and Department of Homeland Security agree. In early June, they issued an “elevated threat” of more violence targeting Israelis and American Jews.

Amid their dismay, many Jews wonder: “This must be a turning point.”  But what kind of turning point is this?  

Despite the long-held perception that America is a safe haven for Jews, antisemitic violence in the United States is not new. In Antisemitism, an American Tradition, to be published in October, I trace its long history. We all remember the 11 Jews murdered on Shabbat at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018. Meanwhile, the musical Parade, currently touring the country, spotlights anti-Jewish hate inflaming Leo Frank’s 1913 murder trial. When Georgia’s governor commuted Frank’s death sentence to life imprisonment, leading citizens of Marietta kidnapped Frank from jail and lynched him.

Frank’s story is well known, but almost no one remembers the attack on a Russian Jewish immigrant in Denver a decade earlier. On December 25, 1905, a group of men spotted Jacob Weisskind working on Christmas Day. They beat him so severely for what they perceived as his disrespect for their savior’s birthday that he died from his wounds.

Antisemitic violence does not always end in murder. In September 1967, white supremacists bombed Beth Israel Congregation in Jackson, Miss., to send a message to its rabbi, Perry Nussbaum, who was also a civil rights activist. Two months later, they bombed his home while he and his wife slept. Miraculously, neither was injured.

Josh Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania, and his family were similarly targeted just a few months ago, when a former Army reservist from Harrisburg set fire to the governor’s mansion the first night of Passover. The man said he targeted Shapiro because of “what he wants to do to the Palestinian people,” according to a police search warrant.

I fear that these most recent incidents in Harrisburg, Washington, D.C. and Colorado may be old news by the time Hadassah Magazine readers see this, superseded by additional violence. Today, anti-Zionist, anti-Israel zealots assault Jews and justify their attacks as the only way to eliminate the evils of Zionism and Israel.

These blows are aftershocks of the great earthquake of October  7, 2023, when Hamas invaded Israel, massacred some 1,200 people and abducted 251 hostages to Gaza. From the epicenter of these atrocities in Israel a tsunami of antisemitic hate has flooded the globe. Although many missed earlier signs of increased radicalization among the anti-Israel crowd, smaller tremors preceded that catastrophic quake.

Six months after the Second Intifada, or Palestinian uprising, broke out in Israel in September 2000, a law school graduate yelling “You f—–g Jews, You f—–g Zionists, Killers of Palestinians” beat a rabbi and his congregant in San Francisco. A year later, an Egyptian national who supported “violent jihad” and the Palestinians stormed the El Al counter at Los Angeles’s LAX airport. He left two people dead.

Smaller shocks have long rocked American campuses. In 2018, New York University’s Students for Justice in Palestine targeted students celebrating Israel’s birthday. They burned an Israeli flag, pouring gasoline on the flames to make them soar. Police charged a student protestor with assault after he snatched the microphone from a Jewish student and yelled “Free, free Palestine.”

In May 2021, when fierce fighting broke out in Gaza during Israel’s Operation Guardian of the Walls, haters of Israel attacked Jews on America’s streets. In Times Square in Manhattan, a half dozen men viciously beat a man wearing a yarmulke. On the other side of the country, Jews din­ing at a sushi restaurant in West Hollywood were punched and had glass bottles thrown at them.  

This cluster of tremors preceded the cataclysmic fracture of October 7. We live with its aftershocks. Were the murders of Yaron and Sarah one more incident in this tragic history of antisemitic hate? Or do they signal a turning point, an irrevocable change from the past when American Jews rarely worried about their safety? It is too soon to tell.

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Pamela S. Nadell, a professor at American University, is the author of Antisemitism, an American Tradition, which is slated to be published by W.W. Norton on October 14.