Killings in Washington follow series of attempted terror attacks against US Jews
Murder of Israeli embassy staffers appears to be first instance of deadly terror against Jews in US since 2019, but there have been repeated attempts, including in past year
Luke Tress is The Times of Israel's New York correspondent.
The deadly shooting outside the Jewish Museum in Washington, DC, on Wednesday appeared to be the first lethal antisemitic attack in the US since 2019, but followed a string of attempted terrorism against Jewish targets in recent years.
Two staffers from the Israeli Embassy were killed in the attack at an event hosted by the American Jewish Committee.
The last deadly antisemitic attack on US Jews was in 2019, in Monsey, New York, when an assailant wielding a machete entered a Hanukkah party at a rabbi’s home and stabbed Josef Neumann, 72, who died of his injuries shortly after.
That killing came weeks after a shooting at a kosher grocery in Jersey City, New Jersey, that killed three people. The shooters also killed a police officer before the attack.
Earlier in 2019, an attacker killed 60-year-old Lori Gilbert-Kaye at a synagogue in Poway, California.
And in a watershed moment for American Jews, in 2018, a white supremacist shooter massacred 11 worshipers at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
The American Jewish community has invested heavily in security since that string of terror attacks, using measures including grants to shore up synagogue security, training in krav maga, setting up intelligence centers, and enlisting volunteer community guards. And while antisemitism has surged in recent years, violence causing severe injury to US Jews has been relatively rare since then, although there have been a number of violent street assaults.
There have been repeated attempts at deadly attacks, though, including during the wave of antisemitism following the October 2023 invasion of Israel.
In February, a suspect was arrested in New Jersey while attempting to travel into New York City after he threatened to kill Jews at a Manhattan synagogue.
The previous month, police in Florida arrested an armed man for planning an attack on the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
The month before that, in December, the FBI arrested a suspect for a planned mass casualty attack against the Israeli consulate in New York City.
In September 2024, a suspect was arrested in Canada while attempting to travel to New York City to carry out a “mass shooting in support of ISIS” at a Jewish center in Brooklyn.
In July 2024, a neo-Nazi in the country of Georgia was indicted for planning mass casualty attacks against Jews in New York City. Michail Chkhikvishvili, also known as “Commander Butcher,” planned to distribute poisoned candy to children at Jewish schools in Brooklyn and other attacks against minorities, prosecutors said.
In 2022, police in New York City arrested two men who had threatened to “shoot up a synagogue.”
Non-deadly attacks or attempted attacks have also occurred in Chicago, Brooklyn, upstate New York, Texas and Los Angeles.
Other deadly incidents were not prosecuted as antisemitic murders. A man who caused the death of pro-Israel protester Paul Kessler in 2023 has been charged with involuntary manslaughter, and in 2022, an antisemitic attacker murdered a professor in Arizona who he thought was Jewish. A shooting in Highland Park, Illinois, an area with a large Jewish population, killed four people who were Jewish or had ties to the local Jewish community.
A man who torched the home of Jewish Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro during Passover in April this year has been charged with terrorism, but not a hate crime.
White supremacists were long considered the leading deadly threat to US Jews, but several of the recent incidents have been tied to Islamists or anti-Israel sentiment. The shooter in Washington on Wednesday shouted “Free Palestine” during the attack.
The Times of Israel Community.