Sarah Milgrim was someone who knew “exactly what she wanted out of life,” according to people who knew her well. She was an idealist who invested herself in Jewish life, and in the future of Israel. At her high school, in the suburbs of Kansas City, she was a member of the Jewish Student Union; as a senior, she was interviewed by a local news station after someone spray-painted swastikas on a school building. “I worry about going to my synagogue,” she said. “And now I have to worry about safety at my school.”
Later, at the University of Kansas, she was on the board of her campus Hillel chapter and went on a Birthright trip to Israel. In graduate school at American University and the U.N.’s University for Peace, where she focussed on sustainable development, she got involved in Tech2Peace, an N.G.O. that brings together young Israelis and Palestinians for training in Israel’s high-tech industry. She later joined the American Jewish Committee’s young-professionals program. She considered working for U.S.A.I.D. Shortly after the October 7th attacks on Israel, though, she went to work for the Israeli Embassy in D.C. “She felt really strongly about improving the world and leaving it better than she found it,” Dana Walker, the director of the American Jewish Committee program, told me.
Milgrim’s boyfriend, Yaron Lischinsky, worked alongside her at the Israeli Embassy. He was idealistic, too, though his life had followed a different path. Lischinsky grew up in Israel and Germany. He was an Israeli citizen and he served in the Israel Defense Forces. His father was Jewish, his mother Christian. “Even though my parents had different beliefs, the internal struggles I faced mostly stemmed not from their cultural backgrounds or different religions, but from the tension between, on the one hand, growing up in a religious home and, on the other hand, living in a secular society,” he wrote on an application to a yearlong conservative liberal-arts program at the Argaman Institute, in Jerusalem. He hungered to understand the political and moral thought of the West. Lischinsky was Christian, not Jewish—“a man of belief,” Ronen Shoval, a political philosopher who has been one of the intellectual architects of Israel’s sharp turn toward right-wing religious Zionism, and who taught Lischinsky at Argaman, told me. Lischinsky “was willing to bond his future to the future of the Jewish state,” Shoval said. “This was a person who was willing to actually change his life.”
On Wednesday, Milgrim, who was twenty-six, and Lischinsky, who was thirty, attended a reception for young diplomats, hosted by the A.J.C., at the Capital Jewish Museum, in D.C. Panelists spoke about increasing aid for the humanitarian crises in Gaza and across the Middle East. At around 9 P.M., the couple left the event, walking out of the museum alongside two other people. According to the F.B.I., video surveillance shows that, as they prepared to cross the street, a man named Elias Rodriguez, wearing a blue raincoat and a backpack, walked past them. Rodriguez then allegedly turned around, pulled a gun from his waistband, and fired at their backs. They fell to the ground. He walked up to them, his arm extended, still firing. Milgrim attempted to crawl away. He followed her, and fired again. She sat up. Rodriguez reloaded, and fired again. Milgrim was transported to D.C.’s chief medical examiner and declared dead at 9:35 P.M. Lischinsky was pronounced dead at the scene. Rodriguez did not enter a plea at his first appearance in court, the next day.
Rodriguez had bought a ticket for the A.J.C. event three hours before the shooting. He later told police officers, “I did it for Palestine. I did it for Gaza.” He expressed admiration for Aaron Bushnell, a U.S. Air Force serviceman who set himself on fire outside of the Israeli Embassy in D.C., in 2024. As police escorted Rodriguez from the museum, video shows, he shouted, “Free, free Palestine!”
There is no evidence that Rodriguez was targeting Milgrim or Lischinsky specifically. It is not clear whether he even knew that they were employees of the Embassy. But their work for the State of Israel has become the dominant fact of their deaths. “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 IKAR, a prominent synagogue community in Los Angeles, told me. “This person was looking for Jews to kill.” There is constant debate about where the precise line between anti-Zionism and antisemitism falls. In this case, Rodriguez spoke in the language of anti-Zionism, but he acted with the logic of antisemitism, which has as its foundational myth that all Jews are collectively to blame for the policies of the Israeli government and, often enough, for the ills of the world. Rodriguez allegedly found two people, whose lives he knew nothing about, and made them die for Israel’s sins. That he killed a Christian and a Jew, one Israeli and one American, only underscores that their particular lives and histories and beliefs did not matter.
Members of a group of Americans who have worked for the Israeli government told me that in the past day and a half their WhatsApp chat has been flooded with messages. “Everyone is shocked and horrified and heartbroken,” Miri Belsky, who worked at the Israeli Embassy in Washington a little more than a decade ago, said. “It feels very close to home for all of us. The Americans who choose to take these roles are principled and strong-willed and are trying to forge a better future.” Aaron Kaplowitz, another former Embassy employee, who is currently visiting Jerusalem, found out that Milgrim was murdered while he was sheltering from a missile strike from Yemen. “Why should someone who works for Israel be murdered at an event in D.C.? This is where we are?” he said. “It’s crazy that, in the nation’s capital, someone took it upon themselves to murder two people who were going to an event that was based on unity and peace-building and just shot them, and ended these amazing lives so early.” Lischinsky had reportedly been preparing to propose to Milgrim in just a few days, having recently purchased an engagement ring.
Kaplowitz met Milgrim in September, when they travelled to Morocco on a fellowship with the A.J.C. and a local N.G.O. called the Mimouna Association. The trip brought together Jews and Muslims from America, Israel, France, and Morocco. The group visited synagogues and mosques and sought to build closer relationships with one another. Yasmina Asrarguis, one of the Muslim participants, is a French Moroccan researcher who studies diplomatic efforts such as the Abraham Accords and “the people who work to make peace,” she said. “Sarah was one of those people.” Asrarguis and Milgrim became close during the trip; Asrarguis felt that they were allied in their vision for the future of their countries. “She believed another Middle East was possible, where Jews and Muslims can live side by side and not kill each other for land,” Asrarguis said.
When we spoke, Asrarguis had just got off an informal memorial call with a group of Milgrim’s friends, who all shared stories about her sense of a better future. Even though Milgrim was young, “she did a lot to make her vision become something. She did what she could at her own level,” said Asrarguis. It’s a recognizable profile—the American Jewish kid who threw herself into Muslim-Jewish dialogue and the project of creating peace in the Middle East. “You can’t do justice with injustice,” Asrarguis said. “You don’t rebuild Gaza by bringing more injustice into this world.” ♦
