23 May Sarah and Yaron, RIP
I am frustrated. I am discouraged. And most of all, I am angry – about two matters in particular.
I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s in quiet, peaceful Lincoln, Nebraska. I went to Catholic school in Lincoln, which is to say that my social circle was not what you would call “diverse.” With the exception of my best friend and his brother, who lived next door and were adopted, everyone I knew and was friends with was white and Catholic. How could they not be?
When I was 18, I ran away from home and joined the circus – or at least that’s what it felt like. Lawrence, Kansas may only be two hundred miles due south of Lincoln, but it felt like a whole different world to me. Lawrence may be in Kansas, but as its residents will proudly tell you, it’s not really of Kansas. IYKYK. Over the course of my four years there, most of the friends I made, most of the people I still keep in touch with now, were from Kansas City – or, more specifically, from the Johnson County, Kansas suburbs of Kansas City; Overland Park and surrounding environs. Overland Park became (and in some ways still is) home away from home for me. Indeed, the reason I got into the financial services business in the first place was because of the intervention of my roommates’ dad, who just happened to be a longtime senior portfolio manager at an asset management firm then headquartered in Overland Park.
My first friend at the University of Kansas – who lived on my floor, just down the hall, and who helped me move my stuff into the dorm and cut the carpet remnant I brought to fit over the press-down tile floor – was a Jewish kid from Overland Park. The first girl I ever had a crush on at KU was a pretty, little Jewish girl from Overland Park. (As I found out later, my friend and the girl had been in the same youth group in high school, and he took her out on one hilariously cringe-tastical date a couple of years earlier). I remember all of this explicitly because, as I say, it was an entire universe away from my previous life.
It’s also the reason I read the following with just a bit more horror than I might otherwise have experienced:
[Yaron] Lischinsky, 30, had planned to propose to [Sarah] Milgrim, 26, next week in Jerusalem, said the Israeli ambassador to the United States, Yechiel Leiter. Lischinsky had planned to spend the Jewish holiday of Shavuot with his family in Israel, the AJC said in a statement.
Their deaths prompted an outpouring of grief in Israel and in Overland Park, Kansas, where Milgrim was from, according to the AJC.
Milgrim, who was Jewish, graduated from the University of Kansas in the spring of 2021 with a bachelor of arts degree in environmental studies and a minor in anthropology, the university confirmed. She earned her master’s degree in international affairs from American University.
Goddammit.
I know that this story, this horrific act of vile, antisemitic hatred, has nothing whatsoever to do with me. I know that I am not suffering the grief and the pain that these two young people’s families and friends are. I know that Sarah Milgrim was about as far removed from me and my life as most of the rest of the 330 million people in this country. And yet…
It feels personal now.
I also know that it’s probably felt very personal for many of you – those of you who are Jewish – for a long time now, for obvious reasons. But for me, it was mostly theoretical, academic. I’ve written a great deal over the past few years about the rise in antisemitism in the West and, in particular, about the rebirth of the millenarian antisemitism that plagued Europe from the early Middle Ages through the Holocaust. But even that has seemed more an academic exercise than anything. Even the mass murder at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018 seemed, in some ways, less menacing because the perpetrator was a lone crackpot, who was radicalized on social media.
But this…this is different. The shooting the other night in DC was an open, unabashed, premeditated expression of the millenarian ideology that dominates the political Left these days and dominates academia even more profoundly. The shooter wasn’t a crackpot. He wasn’t a deranged loner. He was a full-fledged member of the “in-group” on the Left. And even now, the only politician on the Left who has the guts to condemn the shooting as an expression of ideology isn the one his fellow partisans have decided to destroy in the most Soviet way possible. The rest condemn the act but refuse to acknowledge the role of the ideology, knowing full well that at least half their constituents are likely to believe it.
And that makes me angry.
The other thing that makes me angry is directly related and can be found in the following precis of Sarah Milgrim’s education and interests:
She held a Master’s in International Studies from American University, and a second Master’s in Natural Resources and Sustainable Development from the United Nations University for Peace. At the Israeli Embassy in Washington DC, she dedicated her work to building a future where Israelis and Palestinians could live side by side in peace and dignity. She also volunteered with Tech2Peace, an organization that brings together young Israelis and Palestinians to foster dialogue, understanding, and reconciliation.
She sounds like a sweet girl – and hopelessly naïve, someone who was betrayed by those who educated her (at my alma mater as well) and who should, therefore, have known better. She believed – and was explicitly taught to believe – that it’s possible to make peace with those who don’t want it, who see the “peace process” as an opportunity to take advantage of people like her and her basic goodness and decency. She was taught, in other words, that it is possible to find common ground with millenarian fanatics (be they Western “Orientalist” millenarians like her murderer or the Islamist millenarians whose cause he purported to support).
I can’t, for the life of me, think of a more perfect real-world demonstration of the consequences of Eric Voegelin’s “Gnostic dream world” in which “leaders will recognize dangers to their existence when they develop, but such dangers will not be met by appropriate action in the world of reality.” Rather than solve the problems at hand, Sarah Milgrim’s educators taught her to engage instead in magical thinking:
[Dangers to existence] will rather be met by magic operations in the dream world, such as disapproval, moral condemnation, declarations of intention, resolutions, appeals to the opinion of mankind, branding of enemies as aggressors, outlawing of war, propaganda for world peace and world government, etc. The intellectual and moral corruption which expresses itself in the aggregate of such magic operations may pervade a society with the weird, ghostly atmosphere of a lunatic asylum.
Eventually, as Voegelin concluded, “measures taken which are intended to establish peace increase the disturbances that will lead to war”:
In the Gnostic dream world … nonrecognition of reality is the first principle. As a consequence, types of action which in the real world would be considered as morally insane because of the real effects which they have will be considered moral in the dream world because they intended an entirely different effect. The gap between intended and real effect will be imputed not to the Gnostic immorality of ignoring the structure of reality but to the immorality of some other person or society that does not behave as it should behave according to the dream conception of cause and effect. The interpretation of moral insanity as morality, and of the virtues of sophia and prudentia as immortality, is a confusion difficult to unravel. And the task is not facilitated by the readiness of the dreamers to stigmatize the attempt at critical clarification as an immoral enterprise.
Those who educated Sarah Milgrim also took advantage of her basic goodness and decency and used them to teach her nonsense – nonsense that is, in the grand scheme of things, responsible for her death.
That poor girl. Her poor boyfriend. Their poor families. What heartbreak.
