Perhaps the most enduring phrase from the period following Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination, 30 years ago this week, was then-President Bill Clinton’s valediction for his slain friend: “Shalom, haver” — goodbye, friend. It exemplified not just the genuine kinship between Clinton and Rabin, one amiable and telegenic, the other awkward and camera-shy, but also the ironclad bond between Israel and the United States.

Today, however, the so-called special relationship is under considerable duress — not least because generations of younger American Jews are increasingly suspicious of Zionism. And Rabin? He’s at risk of being forgotten altogether in the US, said Barak Sella, editor of Class of 95, a new English translation of an Israeli poetry anthology about Rabin’s murder and legacy.

Sella, who was born in Texas but came to Israel in 1994 when he was 10, was part of a generation of Israeli schoolchildren for whom Rabin’s death in November 1995 loomed impossibly large. “It was my moment of political awakening,” he said. “The first event I went to at my youth movement was a Rabin memorial ceremony. So for me, the assassination ran parallel to my socialization into Israeli society.”

In 2013, Dror L’Nefesh, the printing press of the Habonim Dror Youth movement to which Sella belonged — he was by this point also a well-established activist and community organizer — published the anthology in Hebrew under the title ‘Machzor 95’. Its publication was something of a happy accident: The movement had wanted to do something literary to mark the 18th anniversary of Rabin’s passing, Sella recalled, “but we couldn’t find any poetry or literature about it — only op-eds and articles.” When they put out an open call for contributors, the response was so overwhelming they had enough material to produce Israel’s first poetry anthology dedicated to Rabin’s passing.

The title, Machzor 95,  was a pun of sorts, for in Hebrew Machzor has both a colloquial meaning — class, or generation — and a liturgical one: a Machzor is a prayer book for Jewish holidays. The aim was “to create a tradition of memory that was cyclical,” Sella said, “to create an artifact you can return to year after year.”

By 2022, when a second Hebrew-language edition was published, Sella was already toying with the idea of putting together an English version, as he’d always seen Rabin’s assassination “not as an Israeli event, but as a Jewish event.” Indeed, in 1995, much of American Jewry had mourned Rabin intensely. “It was everything American Jews talked about,” Sella said. “One of the largest ever Jewish gatherings was for Rabin’s shloshim in Madison Square Garden.” (On Dec. 11, 1995, a crowd of more than 15,000 packed the New York arena to mark thirty days, shloshim in Hebrew, since Rabin’s death.)

But Rabin’s legacy faded from view, Sella believed, because Israel itself could not agree on what he represented. “Israel is still so deeply divided about this,” he said. “So it’s very hard to expect American Jews to create some kind of shared culture around Rabin’s memory.”

That’s where the translated anthology comes in, which Sella hopes will serve “as an education tool,” something “teachers and rabbis who want to talk to their community about the assassination can pick up, choose a poem or two, and invite people into a conversation.”

The anthology is at once a guide to the assassination and a window into how Israeli society responded. One poem, Shachar-Mario Mordechai’s ‘Before the Government of Israel Announces With Astonishment’, invokes the official announcement of Rabin’s death. Another, ‘Blank’, by Raanan Ben Tovim, explores the claim, never substantiated, that immediately after the shots rang out somebody shouted “srak, srak” (in English, blank) a phrase that, among Israelis, has become a shorthand for Rabin’s murder — and has fueled conspiracy theories ever since.

Sella’s vision for the anthology is decidedly long-term. “This translation is not only for the thirty-year anniversary,” he said. “I’m thinking about, you know, in 50 years, in 100 years, what are the artifacts of our time that will assist not only the current generation, but also future ones, to build a story, to understand, and to reflect?”

The translation is therefore aimed especially at younger American Jews. “The people who will carry this memory forward are not going to be those who were at the square,” Sella said. He still firmly believes Rabin can be a “symbol for overcoming our differences, for shared destiny and democracy.” In short, American Jews would do well to recall not simply that Yitzhak Rabin was killed, but, no less important, the ideals he died for.

The post Could poetry revive Yitzhak Rabin’s legacy among young American Jews? appeared first on The Forward.

Illustrative: A detained anti-Israel demonstrator on July 19, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Isabel Infantes

The Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law has asked a US federal court to allow a whistleblower of antisemitism at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) to pursue her lawsuit anonymously and avoid acts of retaliation which may await those who come forward to report civil rights violations against Jews in higher education.

The request comes as an amendment to a suit the Brandeis Center filed earlier this year after its client, Jane Doe, sought representation in a civil suit alleging that FIT allowed what the nonprofit has described as “one of the most alarming antisemitic environments on a campus.” According to the complaint, students there traded antisemitic tropes, allegedly charging that Jews “literally control our school,” calling on the student body to “punch a Zionist,” and denying a Jewish student the presidency of a club by citing his identity as the reason.

Meanwhile, school officials weaponized procedures for investigating discrimination by allowing anti-Zionists to filed politically charged complaints which reversed the roles of victim and perpetrator in order to create new ways of harassing Jews, the Brandeis Center said.

Jane Doe has asked for the chance to tell her story behind the protection of a pseudonym, a courtesy that would minimize the disruption of her life that being forced into litigation has already caused.

“We routinely hear from Jewish students and professionals who are too afraid to come forward publicly,” Brandeis Center founder and chairman Kenneth Marcus said in a statement. “They fear being doxxed, stalked, defamed, or ostracized — and without anonymity, many will simply remain silent. Courts must not allow antisemitism to chill Jewish voices seeking justice.”

He added, “By preventing victims from filing complaints anonymously, more Jewish individuals will be forced to abandon their civil rights rather than face potential consequences from their abusers. Our nation’s legal system was created to protect the most vulnerable populations.”

The Brandeis Center suit comes amid a worsening campus antisemitism crisis that continues to roil Jewish students, faculty, and staff across the Western world.

On Wednesday, members of Toronto Metropolitan University’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter led a mob that spilled blood and caused the hospitalization of at least one Jewish student after forcibly breaching a venue in which the advocacy group Students Supporting Israel had convened for an event featuring veterans of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).

The former soldiers agreed to meet Students Supporting Israel to discuss their experiences at a “private space” on campus which had to be reserved because the university denied the group a room reservation and, therefore, security personnel that would have been afforded to it. However, someone leaked the event location, leading to one of the most violent incidents of campus antisemitism since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel sparked a surge of anti-Jewish hostility in higher education.

By the time the attack ended, three people had been rushed to a local medical facility for treatment of injuries caused by a protester’s shattering the glazing of the venue’s door with a drill bit, a witness, student Ethan Elharrar, told The Algemeiner during an interview.

“No one should have known where this event was, but they were setting up when a couple of girls with keffiyehs walked in yelling ‘baby killers!’ and ‘free Palestine!’” Elharrar said. ‘Then more started coming in, and then we closed the door trying to make sure no one could come in, and then these individuals in masks then began banging on the door and trying to open the door.”

“Our universities don’t care, and it comes down to our government, which won’t do anything about it,” he continued. “They don’t want to support us. I’ve had maybe a dozen calls with the human rights division at the university, and they told me specifically that they won’t help with anything having to do with Israel.”

According to a study released by the Combat Antisemitism Movement’s Antisemitism Research Center, there were 53 antisemitic incidents on college campuses in the month of September alone, a 178 percent increase over the previous month, when 19 were recorded despite students not being present on campus during the summer holiday.

“This surge reflects the resumption of the academic year and the persistent problem of antisemitism at colleges and university,” the report said. “In France, students at Sorbonne University in Paris discussed a targeted shooting attack against Jewish students at the school. In Argentina, students at the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba seized control of parts of the campus, protesting Israel’s ‘genocide’ of the Palestinians.”

The report added that the US saw 38 campus antisemitism incidents in September, several of which The Algemeiner reported.

In upstate New York, for example, law enforcement agencies filed hate crime charges against two Syracuse University students who they say forcefully gained entry into a Jewish fraternity’s off-campus house during Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and heaved a bag of pork at a wall, causing its contents to splatter across the floor. In Hanover, New Hampshire, an unknown person or group graffitied a swastika, the symbol of the Nazi Party, outside the dormitory of a Jewish student at Dartmouth College.

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.