Bob after shooting in DC...some personal reflections

How to read "Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace...where there is hatred, let me sow love." In light of murder in cold blood. How can we do that? What are our choices in responding? I invite your thoughts here.

Mourning the loss: A JFJ Press Release

Jews for Jesus mourns the devastating death of Yaron Lischinsky, a young Israeli diplomat and believer in Jesus, who was tragically killed alongside his soon-to-be fiancée, Sarah Milgrim, in Washington, DC. We grieve with their families, their friends, and the broader Messianic Jewish community in Israel and abroad.

Yaron’s life was marked by a sincere love for God, a deep commitment to the Jewish people, and a passion for peace. As a Messianic Jew, Yaron represented a growing, diverse, and vibrant community in Israel today: Jewish followers of Jesus who serve in the army, study in universities, and participate fully in Israeli society.

Many of our Jews for Jesus staff knew Yaron personally. He was a member of Melech Hamlachim, where several of our Israeli staff serve in leadership and attend.

“We are grieving the loss of Yaron, a member of the Messianic community in Israel and around the world,” said Aaron Abramson, CEO of Jews for Jesus. “What happened to Yaron and Sarah is not only a tragedy, but a sobering reminder that antisemitism is not bound by religious affiliation or political identity. It targets people simply for being Jewish. And hatred like this does not only threaten one group, it wounds all of us.”

As we remember Yaron and Sarah, we call on all people—Jewish and non-Jewish, religious and secular—to stand together against antisemitism and all forms of hate.

And we especially call on our fellow Christians to stand with the Jewish people during this time. We’re so grateful for the millions of believers in Jesus around the world who have been standing with us and our people since the tragedies of October 7, 2023.

We’ve all seen how hateful words and ideas become weaponized for evil. Now is the time to speak out, to show up, and to reaffirm that hatred toward any people is an offense to the heart of God.

May their memories be a blessing.

Jews for Jesus is an international, nonprofit organization made up of Jewish people who believe in Jesus and are committed to serving the Jewish community worldwide. Learn more ›

Eric Goldman's Jewish Cinémathèque: Ilana Trachtman: Ain't No Back To A ...

I happened on this television show in a random search while waking early in New Jersey today. After a springtime visit to Memphis' Civil Rights museum, intentional visit to Selma's famous Edmund Pettus bridge and the Birmingham jail, as well as the museum along the route of Selma to Montgomery marches (1965)... it has been a spring of learning. And grieving. And being impacted. 

This interview is stunning in its sometimes accidental serendipity findings and its import for today.

Confronting antisemitism by Michael Gawenda

 Michael Gawenda Confronting anti-Semitism

The Saturday PaperThe MonthlyAustralian Foreign Affairs

From the Saturday Paper last weekend

A few weeks ago, a young singer-songwriter booked flights to Melbourne. She did so on the basis that the venue for her gig had confirmed things were all set to go. Then last week, in the final days of the election campaign, she was informed by the venue that the gig had been cancelled following objections.

She contacted the venue and asked for a more forthright explanation. Here, in part, is what she wrote:

Look, I get that venues have their policies, but cancelling over political stuff feels pretty harsh, especially for an indie artist just trying to make music and pay the bills…

Here’s the thing – when you confirmed the show, I immediately jumped into action. I spent money and time designing a poster, and I booked flights interstate that I cannot get refunded. I’m not asking for the full amount, but half of what we agreed on would really help cover some of these costs … It would mean a lot honestly.

She received this response from the person who had booked her show:

I understand your frustration and the last thing I want to do is tell artists they’re not allowed to play, believe me. However, having identified yourself proudly and publicly as a Zionist and putting that out in the world via social media puts a small business like ours in a precarious position and immediately up for public scrutiny/backlash once the broader community connected to our business takes a hold of it…

He went on to say he was under no obligation to help with the cost of her flights.

This was not an isolated incident for the singer-songwriter. She has been unable to get gigs in Australia ever since, in the immediate aftermath of the Hamas attacks on October 7, 2023, she posted on social media that she stood with Israel and its people and condemned Hamas and those who questioned what had happened that day.

It is hard to say how many Australian musicians, and artists and writers, on the basis that they have been identified as Zionists, have been attacked and threatened on social media and have had gigs and art exhibitions and book events cancelled. It would be more than a few.

How are we to understand this? What does it mean? What are we to make of the fact that none of the publicly funded organisations – Music Australia for instance – have come to her aid or condemned her treatment?

In the same week as the singer-songwriter’s show was cancelled, flyers were distributed by a neo-Nazi group in Melbourne electorates with significant numbers of Jews, including in Macnamara – the most “Jewish” electorate in Victoria, held by the Jewish MP Josh Burns. Posters of Burns were defaced with red stars painted across his face. These flyers and the defaced posters were widely – and unanimously – condemned. It is not a hard thing to do when the pamphlets are full of Nazi stereotypes of Jews, with tentacles into every area of Australian life.

“The Jew as the devil’s worker, if not the devil himself, has figured in Jew hatred for hundreds of years. The consequences for Jews have been dire … For significant parts of the left, the anti-Zionist left in particular, left-wing anti-Semitism is considered a minor issue.”

For months, Burns has been the focus of a virulent hate campaign on social media, a campaign that has portrayed him as a genocidal Zionist. In June last year, his electoral office was vandalised, smashed up. Inside the shattered plate glass window, devil’s horns were painted on a large photograph of Burns.

The Jew as the devil’s worker, if not the devil himself, has figured in Jew hatred for hundreds of years. The consequences for Jews have been dire. The attack on Burns’s office was widely reported in the media, but the image of the Jew as a devil was not discussed.

Perhaps that was because the vandals had painted the words “Zionism is fascism” across the photograph. For many journalists, this complicated the motives of the vandals. They were, most probably, anti-Zionists who harboured no ill-feeling towards Jews as such, despite their use of an ancient and deadly anti-Semitic trope.

For significant parts of the left, the anti-Zionist left in particular, left-wing anti-Semitism is considered a minor issue. If it does exist, then it is thought of as an understandable response to what has happened in Gaza and, for that matter, what Israel – the Jews – have wrought in Palestine since 1948. Zionist Jews deserve the hostility they have been subjected to; they are not victims of racism but, rather, the victimisers.

Burns was re-elected on Saturday, part of Labor’s historic landslide. He increased his primary vote by just over 5 per cent. In the 2022 election, the Greens candidate had come within 2000 votes of winning the seat. This time, the Greens vote went backwards by more than 2 per cent.

Despite the fact the war in Gaza had been covered with such extraordinary and sustained intensity by the media over the past 18 months, despite the fact it sometimes dominated political debate, it did not have a significant effect on the election result. Not even in those seats with significant numbers of Muslim or Jewish voters.

What does all this mean for the young singer-songwriter and the writers and artists who, since October 7, 2023, have been shunned? What does it mean for the people who have had the places where they work or the small businesses they run targeted with graffiti and demonstrations and hate on social media, who have been unable to perform, unable to mount exhibitions of their work, unable to get published?

The election outcome does not diminish the way their lives have been ruined, basically because they are Jews of a particular kind, bad Jews, Zionists, which has come to be a term of abuse – Zionists as the new Nazis.

Their experience is real. The persecution is real, not a malign invention designed to cover up their support for genocide and colonialism, their support for a state that was founded on an evil ideology and is therefore unredeemable. The casting out of Jews, Zionist Jews, from the culture in which Jews have thrived and which philanthropic Jews have supported with such great enthusiasm, has had profound effects and the lives of some of these Jews will never be the same again.

It is the lack of support from those organisations that are meant to promote the work of Australian artists and writers that is disturbing. It is significant, too, that there have been virtually no artists or writers who have come out in support of these Jewish Australian artists and writers banished from participation in Australian cultural life.

In February, Creative Australia revoked the appointment of the Lebanese–Australian artist Khaled Sabsabi as Australia’s representative at the Venice Biennale. Sabsabi’s past work included controversial depictions of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and of the 9/11 terror attacks in New York, something Creative Australia apparently did not know when the appointment was made.

It was a bad decision to revoke the appointment. Sabsabi is a major and widely praised Australian artist. It was on that basis that he was appointed. It should not have been revoked – although, to complicate the matter, Sabsabi himself had signed a petition to exclude Israel from the 2024 Biennale and had signed a letter in 2022 supporting a boycott of the Sydney Festival because of the Israeli embassy’s financial support of a Sydney Dance Company performance by Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin.

There was widespread criticism of Creative Australia for its decision to revoke Sabsabi’s appointment. Many hundreds of artists and writers signed petitions demanding he be reinstated. The media covered the decision extensively and, in the main, with sympathy for Sabsabi.

A few weeks ago, the Australian Academic Alliance Against Antisemitism – a network of academics from 30 Australian universities – released a report that examined the experience of Jewish students and Jewish staff at Australian universities in the period from April to July last year.

The survey was done by two of Australia’s most respected researchers. It was not a survey about attitudes but about incidents of anti-Semitism – verbal attacks; physical attacks; lectures disrupted by pro-Palestinian students searching for “Zionists”; students being forced out of groups on the basis of their support for what is described as racism and colonialism and genocide.

A large majority of students and staff surveyed – 67 per cent – reported experiences of anti-Semitism that had a significant impact on their lives. Only a third of the students and academic staff felt physically safe on campus. Incidents of bullying and threats are detailed in the report. A majority of students and academic staff say that university administrators did not do enough to counter the hostility towards, and bullying of, Jews at Australia’s universities.

These results mirrored the recently released results of the investigation into anti-Semitism at Harvard. Jewish students have been verbally and physically attacked, made to feel unsafe on campus and subjected to ridicule and scorn by some of their lecturers.

The Harvard report had significant media coverage in the United States. The Australian report received hardly any coverage – if it received any at all – on the ABC or in the Nine newspapers.

Nor has there been significant coverage of research and surveys – conducted by major Jewish communal organisations – that has shown attacks on Jews and Jewish property have grown exponentially these past 18 months.

Individual acts of violence – a synagogue set on fire, a preschool centre vandalised – get coverage. The fact these events are part of a trend that has left Jews feeling traumatised and unheard is hardly dealt with. What this represents is a denial of the experience of Jews in Australia, the vast majority of Australian Jews.

The idea that anti-Semitism on the left does not exist, cannot exist, because Jews are the quintessential example of white privilege, because they are wealthy, successful, powerful beyond their numbers and therefore must be part of the oppressor class rather than the oppressed, is widespread among the elites at universities and in journalism and even at the Human Rights Commission.

The result has been an under-reporting at the ABC and in the Nine papers of the increased hostility towards Jews in Australia. This under-reporting exists because many journalists believe Jews have weaponised the accusation of anti-Semitism in order to deflect from the genocide by Israel of the Palestinians, a genocide they believe began in 1948 with the declaration of Israel’s independence.

At the same time, there is a view that any increased hostility to Jews must be a reasonable response to the deaths of Palestinians in the current conflict in Gaza. The suffering of Jews is trivial compared with the suffering of the Palestinians, for which Australian Jews, Zionists, must be held in some way responsible.

Journalists, like the universities, have been incapable of dealing with what is incontrovertible: there has been increased hostility to Jews in Australia since the October 7, 2023, attacks. They have been unable to accept the fact that Jews feel threatened and unheard. They have ignored the real instances of attacks against Jews, physical and verbal, and the tidal waves of hatred against them in social media, only thinly disguised as anti-Zionism.

Australia’s cultural institutions and universities – not all of them, but the sandstone universities in particular – have failed Australian Jews. The young singer-songwriter, banished from the Australian music scene because she is a “proud Zionist”, has had her life blighted by anti-Jewish hostility. What has happened to her has reverberated and affected fellow Jews in the arts, young Jews in particular.

What makes it particularly and uniquely painful is that the hostility towards her is either denied – she is making it up – or justified – that Jews who are labelled Zionists deserve what they get. 

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on May 10, 2025 as "Confronting anti-Semitism".

If I could speak with.... Rita Rudner

I first saw Rita Rudner in the early 1980s in NYC on the David Letterman Show. She was very funny, and about my age, so I took a liking to her. My wife and I laughed at times out loud! My favourite line from her then was, "I don't have any children... that I know of." She was dry, subtle, clever, clean, and in a time when filth was growing in popularity, hers was refreshing on many levels.

Where did she go? She made it as a successful author, Las Vegas entertainer, and didn't have to continue in the work she had studied and aimed for a career: song and dance on Broadway. Like my daughter, she had studied ballet from the time she was four. And her career worked to land on the stage in NYC. But she evaluated her life as 'less', and she wanted something that would sustain her, and she had always made people laugh, and found that pleasurable. So she gave it a go, and voila, it worked.

I found an interview of her wiih a Detroit newsperson from two months ago and watched with smiles and internal laughter at her continued self-effacing and personal unpacking of difficulties in navigating the world of today. I'm sure those lines were part of her shtick but they came off as off-the-cuff. Timing. It's a key to her comedy.

If I could speak to her, I would ask about the line, "I"m trying to learn new things in my life." Of course, that would include things like computer skills and cooking classes, perhaps, but I wonder if religion, and reading the Bible, not only Torah, but also the New Testament, also written by Jews, might be of interest to this Miami-born Jewish woman?" I'd like to discuss new things.

If I could speak to her, I'd ask about suffering. She was quoted in a San Francisco newspaper a decade ago about Jews and humour and said, "Humor comes from being oppressed — there’s nothing funny about everything going right; things have to go wrong to be funny, and Jews are no longer the only ones who have something to complain about." She was indicating why Jews aren't the mainstay in comedy any longer, but I'd ask her what sufferings she endured that helped frame her exceptional observational comedy and humour.

If I could speak to Rita, I'd ask about the Christmas tree/ Gentile in the house thing. Her non-Jewish stepmother brought in the tree, and when Rita was a teenager, she moved away from Florida to NYC and said, "You can keep the Christmas tree." And yet, Rita married a British man who is not Jewish. So, does she still disregard the combo holidays in December? Does she miss any spinning dreidels or fattening latkes? Maybe we would speak about the miracles of Christmas and the miracle of Hanukkah, and if she even believes in miracles. 

Those are some of my current thoughts and who knows, one day she'll be playing the Ryman in Nashville when I'm there, or a playhouse in Sydney or... you never know, but you can be sure, I will smile a lot if I would speak with her. She's that funny; she's worth going to see her. Before Nate Bargatze, whose observations on life are epic, there was Rita Rudner. 

Her image in 2025