Following the fatal shooting last week of two employees of the Israeli embassy outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington D.C. on May 21, Rabbi Noam Marans of the American Jewish Committee offered a prayer.

“Our modern American Jewish chronicle of pain has a new locus: Pittsburgh, Poway, Monsey, Jersey City, and now Washington,” it read in part. “And innumerable antisemitic attacks, too many to list, in Brooklyn, on campuses, and beyond.”

The next day, The Guardian, the left-leaning British paper, linked the murders of Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky to a different set of violent attacks.

“This is the latest act of violence in a string of incidents that have affected Jewish, Arab and Muslim communities in the US,” read its report. “A man in Illinois attacked a six-year-old and his mother, both Palestinian American, and killed the boy in 2023 soon after Hamas’s 7 October attack on Israel, and three Palestinian students were shot in Vermont in November 2023. Reports of antisemitism, Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism have soared since the war began.”

The difference between the two litanies is wide and telling. For Marans, whose organization hosted the “young diplomats” reception that the murdered couple attended on the night of the shooting, the attack was the latest in a series of incidents, unrelated to the conflict in Israel, that left American Jews dead or wounded in synagogues, a rabbi’s home and a kosher supermarket. For the Guardian, it was a political shooting, a sort of globalization of the conflict in Israel and Gaza.

Attempts to characterize the murder of Milgrim and Lichinsky may be premature: We haven’t learned how the shooter, who chanted “Free Palestine” while being arrested, identified his victims, or whether he knew they were embassy employees.

But in the absence of clarity there is anger and certainty. Some Jews have bristled at news outlets that lean hard into the couple’s Israeli affiliation, as if suggesting that the shooting, however heinous, was strictly political. A recent Associated Press headline becomes Exhibit A: “Court papers say suspect in embassy killings declared, ‘I did it for Palestine, I did it for Gaza.” The shorthand “embassy killings” falsely implies that the shooting took place at the Israeli Embassy and not at an American Jewish institution.

“I was really upset when I saw the news and all the mainstream news channels said, ‘Two Israeli Embassy staffers shot and killed,’ instead of, ‘Two young people murdered in an antisemitic attack, coming out of a Jewish event in a Jewish museum in Washington, D.C.,” Sharon Brous, the rabbi of the independent IKAR community Los Angeles,” told The New Yorker. “This person was looking for Jews to kill.”

In the week since the shooting, two distinct framings of the murders have emerged, sometimes overlapping, often not.

In a Truth Social........

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