(From left) Rob Reiner, Michele Singer, Romy Reiner, Nick Reiner, Maria Gilfillan and Jake Reiner attend the Los Angeles Premiere of ”Spinal Tap II: The End Continues” at The Egyptian Theatre in Los Angeles, California, US, Sept. 9, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Aude Guerrucci

Dozens of people in Hollywood have expressed profound sadness following the news that visionary Jewish filmmaker Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele Singer Reiner, were found dead in their Los Angeles home on Sunday night and that their middle son is being charged with murder.

Reiner, 78, was born in the Bronx, New York, in 1947. In the 1970s he co-starred in the sitcom “All in the Family” before becoming the famous director behind movies such as “This Is Spinal Tap,” “Stand by Me,” “The Princess Bride,” “When Harry Met Sally…” and “A Few Good Men.” Earlier this year, Reiner released the sequel, “Spinal Tap: The End Continues.” He also directed the 2015 film called “Being Charlie,” inspired by his son Nick’s longtime battle with heroin addiction and the impact that his substance abuse had on the family.

On Sunday, Reiner and his wife, 68, were found dead by what police described as an apparent homicide at their home in Brentwood, California. Their middle son, Nick, is being held at Los Angeles’ Twin Towers Jail, having been arrested on murder charges in connection with their deaths. The 32-year-old reportedly has his bail set at $4 million. “As a result of the initial investigation, it was determined that the Reiners were the victims of homicide. The investigation further revealed that Nick Reiner, the 32-year-old son of Robert and Michele Reiner, was responsible for their deaths,” the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) said in a statement on Monday.

“I saw them night before last looking healthy and happy,” Jane Fonda wrote in an Instagram post. “I am reeling with grief. Stunned.” She shared a photo of the late couple on Instagram and wrote that they were “wonderful, caring, smart, funny, generous people, always coming up with ideas for how to make the world better, kinder.”

Fonda also said the couple had recently been helping her to relaunch the Committee for the First Amendment, a group that champions freedom of expression from government censorship.

“My heart is broken,” Zooey Deschanel said in a tribute to Reiner, who played her father on the show “New Girl.” She called Reiner “the absolute warmest, funniest, most generous of spirits. A truly good human being. An incredible artist and such a playful and fun collaborator.”

“I cherish the time we spent working together and the many films he made that have shaped who I am,” she added. “Rob and his lovely wife Michele were always so kind and it brought me so much joy any time I was lucky enough to see them. I’m absolutely devastated. Sending so much love to their family and friends.”

The estate of Norman Lear, the legendary producer who created “All in the Family,” released a statement remembering the close relationship between the two men. “Norman often referred to Rob as a son,” the statement said. “The world is unmistakably darker tonight.”

Jerry Seinfeld said Reiner had one of the biggest influences on his career aside from Larry David, who co-created “Seinfeld,” and the late George Shapiro, who was Seinfeld’s manager and a producer on the renowned sitcom. Reiner also helped save “Seinfeld” from almost being canceled, Seinfeld said. He shared a photo of himself alongside Reiner and his father, the late actor Carl Reiner.

“Our show would have never happened without him. He saw something no one else could,” Seinfeld explained in an Instagram post. “When nobody at the network liked the early episodes, he saved us from cancellation. That I was working with Carl Reiner’s son, who happened to be one of the kindest people in show business, seemed unreal.”

“I was naive at the time to how much his passion for us meant,” Seinfeld added. “Rob and Michele married right as our show was starting and they became an imprint for me of how it’s supposed to work, each one broadening the other. Their death, together, is impossibly sad.”

Kathy Bates, who won an Oscar for her leading role in Reiner’s 1990 horror “Misery,” said in a statement to Entertainment Weekly that Reiner was a “brilliant and kind, a man who made films of every genre to challenge himself as an artist.”

“I’m horrified hearing this terrible news. Absolutely devastated. I loved Rob,” she added. “He changed the course of my life … My heart breaks for them both. My thoughts are with their family.” She also said the late director was someone who “fought courageously for his political beliefs” and praised his wife as a “gifted photographer.”

Novelist Stephen King, who wrote the books that inspired Reiner’s films “Stand by Me” and “Misery,” praised the late director in a post on X as a “wonderful friend, political ally, and brilliant filmmaker.”

“You always stood by me,” King added.

Paul Feig, the director of “Bridesmaids,” posted a photo of himself and Reiner at Comic-Con and wrote that the latter “was my true hero.”

“One never knows if it’s proper to post during something as tragic as this,” Feig said. “But I just want the world to know what so many of us know in the industry. Robert was the best.”

Reiner and his wife are survived by two sons Jake and Nick, and their youngest daughter Romy, who reportedly called 911 on Sunday after discovering the bodies of her parents.

Rob and Nick allegedly got into a “very loud argument” on Saturday night while attending a Christmas party hosted by former talk show host Conan O’Brien, People magazine reported, citing multiple sources. Rob and his wife were found dead at their home the next day.

A woman keeps a candle next to flowers laid as a tribute at Bondi Beach to honor the victims of a mass shooting that targeted a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach on Sunday, in Sydney, Australia, Dec. 16, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Flavio Brancaleone

“They don’t move from the Arab world to Europe. They move the Arab world to Europe.” So said Professor Mordechai Kedar when he spoke to me for an extended interview as part of my podcast series. That episode was published the very day the Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia, was attacked. The massacre only confirmed his words. Migration, as he described it, does not merely transfer people from one place to another. It carries cultures, ideologies, and systems of meaning with it, and those systems do not remain inert; they spread and even flourish.

Kedar’s claim is not about ethnicity or private belief. It describes the movement of social order, of moral assumptions, of ideas about authority and legitimacy. People do not arrive empty-handed. They bring with them ways of organizing life, ways of resolving conflict, ways of defining who belongs and who does not. When those systems collide with liberal societies uncertain of their own boundaries, pressure accumulates.

The Bondi shooting especially matters because it strips away the last remaining comfort. This was not Gaza, not the West Bank, not a contested border. It was a beach, during a religious festival, in a country geographically and politically distant from the Middle East. A symbol of Australia, freedom, liberty. The perpetrators identified by law enforcement, a Muslim father and son, who had taken part in “military-style training” in the Philippines in the month leading up to the attack, targeted Jews.

Kedar warned me how this form of conquest moves through ideology, through repetition, through intimidation, through the slow reshaping of public space by force and intimidation — a “migration jihad.” Islam is not a private creed, but an all-encompassing framework. As Kedar puts it, it is “not only religion … Islam is also politics, economy, and every aspect of public life.” When that framework relocates, it seeks expression. When it meets hesitation, it expands.

Europe has been living inside this dynamic for years. Jews are often the first target, but the pattern rarely ends with us. Concerts, campuses, cultural events, and public squares have become the battlefields of this unconventional war. Yet political leadership responds with ritual rather than authority: candle lighting, moments of silence, interfaith theater. Expressions of sorrow, memorial gestures, and carefully chosen metaphors replace enforcement and deterrence. In Britain, demonstrations containing explicit antisemitic incitement have been tolerated for months without clear red lines. Around the world, the language of concern circulates freely while responsibility for combating poisonous ideologies and organized dangerous networks is shirked.

Paris has just canceled its traditional open-air New Year’s Eve concert on the Champs-Élysées because authorities judged the security risks too high to safely host such a large crowd of around a million people. The event will be replaced by a pre-recorded broadcast and fireworks only. Christmas markets and other festive sites have also been flagged as high-risk targets and subject to fortified security.

So, it’s not just Jews who are under threat. In Australia the terrorists came for Hanukkah, but they’ve been targeting Christmas for years. In Berlin in December 2016, a Muslim attacker, Anis Amri, drove a lorry into the Christmas market at Breitscheidplatz, murdering 12 people and injuring dozens more in one of the deadliest jihadist attacks in Germany.

In Strasbourg in December 2018, a Muslim attacker inspired by ISIS opened fire near the city’s Christmas market, killing five people, in an assault explicitly framed by French authorities as Islamist terrorism.

And last week federal authorities in the US arrested several people in connection with a planned New Year’s Eve bombing plot in Southern California. The FBI and Department of Justice say the group responsible is “pro-Palestinian” in its outlook as well as anti-law-enforcement and anti-government. The individuals were allegedly preparing improvised explosive devices (IEDs) to be used in coordinated bomb attacks across Los Angeles on New Year’s Eve.

But the response is weak. These days, order is no longer asserted; risk is managed. Jewish institutions are advised to remain calm while accepting abnormal levels of private security as a permanent feature of everyday life. An arrangement that should register as failure is absorbed as routine. Trust erodes this way.

Bondi shows that Europe is no longer the outer boundary of this phenomenon. Australia is now inside it. America, too, is discovering the same pressures through campus unrest, ideological intimidation, and violence that increasingly treats Jewish life as a proxy target for the wider freedoms and values it represents. The geography changes. The structure holds.

What Professor Kedar described was not prediction but trajectory. When people do not simply arrive but bring whole systems with them, the question facing Western societies ceases to be one of tolerance alone. It becomes a question of whether they still possess the clarity and resolve to defend the civic order and freedoms they inherited.

Police officers stand guard following the attack on a Jewish holiday celebration at Sydney’s Bondi Beach, in Sydney, Australia, Dec. 15, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Flavio Brancaleone

The attack at Sydney’s Bondi Beach took place at a public Hanukkah celebration — an openly Jewish gathering marking a holiday meant to symbolize continuity, restraint, and survival. Candles were lit. Families had gathered. Jewish life was visible and unhidden. Violence arrived anyway. That fact matters. This was not random disorder that happened to occur near Jews. It was an assault on Jews gathered publicly as Jews.

For Jewish communities around the world, the message was immediate and chilling: a basic assumption — that peaceful religious celebration in a public space is protected — no longer feels secure.

Bondi Beach was not an aberration. It was a signal that even the most ordinary expressions of Jewish life now take place against a backdrop of heightened risk and weakened moral confidence.

Since October 7, 2023, Jewish communities have been forced to absorb a series of shocks that, taken together, reveal something deeper than a temporary spike in antisemitic incidents.

Jews have watched crowds chant “death to Jews” in major Western cities. We have seen synagogues, schools, and community centers require armed security as a baseline condition of existence. We have watched public officials hesitate, equivocate, or retreat into procedural language when confronted with explicit calls for Jewish death.

In that context, even violence that is not explicitly ideological is experienced differently. Bondi Beach occurred in a world where rage, intimidation, and public disorder have been steadily normalized — and where antisemitism is too often treated as a contextualized grievance rather than a moral emergency. It is no coincidence that Hanukkah celebrations across Europe, North America, and Australia this year are being guarded as potential targets rather than assumed civic fixtures.

For Jews, these are not abstract concerns. They shape daily life in quiet but consequential ways. This Hanukkah, many Jews will decide whether to light publicly or privately, whether to post photos or remain discreet, whether to wear a kippah or tuck it into a pocket, whether to gather openly or behind security checkpoints.

These are not acts of panic. They are acts of realism — born of a recognition that the social consensus protecting Jewish life is weaker than it once was. I have felt this calculation myself, not as fear but as prudence — an awareness that Jewish visibility now requires forethought in ways it did not a decade ago.

Hanukkah is often softened into a generic story about “light in dark times.” But that framing misses its harder truth.

Hanukkah commemorates a moment when Jews confronted a society that had lost its sense of limits — when desecration was tolerated, when power displaced law, and when public authority proved unwilling or unable to defend moral boundaries. The Maccabees did not revolt because they rejected pluralism. They revolted because pluralism had collapsed into coercion.

That distinction matters now.

Across Western democracies, restraint is increasingly treated with suspicion. Rampage violence is explained as inevitable. Public disorder is described as expressive. Antisemitic chants are reframed as political speech. Leaders and institutions speak fluently about process and context, but struggle to say plainly that some acts are beyond the pale.

The result is a dangerous permission structure. Not a conspiracy. Not a single ideology. But a cultural habit of hedging when clarity is required — of explaining rather than condemning, of balancing rather than drawing lines. Violence thrives in that space. So does antisemitism.

Sociologist Émile Durkheim warned that societies depend on shared moral frameworks to restrain individual impulses. When those frameworks weaken, violence becomes expressive rather than exceptional. Rampages become signals — not just of individual breakdown, but of collective uncertainty about what can and should be enforced.

Jews recognize this pattern because history has trained us to. Antisemitism rarely begins with laws or decrees. It begins with atmospheres. With what is tolerated. With what is explained away. With what authorities are reluctant to name because naming it might require action.

The Bondi Beach attack belongs to this broader moment. It targeted a Jewish holiday gathering, but it also reflected a wider failure to defend basic moral boundaries in public life. Violence does not emerge in a vacuum. It feeds on ambiguity — on the sense that enforcement is conditional and outrage selective.

Hanukkah offers a counterpoint to that ambiguity.

The story of the oil is not a story about optimism. It is a story about responsibility. Someone chose to protect what was sacred when it would have been easier to surrender it. Someone insisted that desecration was not normal, that collapse did not deserve accommodation, and that continuity required effort.

That insistence feels increasingly countercultural.

In recent years, Western elites have grown uncomfortable making firm moral judgments. Everything must be contextualized. Everything must be balanced. Everything must be filtered through the language of grievance. But pluralism does not survive without boundaries. And minorities suffer first when those boundaries dissolve.

For Jews, the post-October 7 world has made something painfully clear: condemnation of antisemitism has become conditional. Calls for Jewish death are weighed against political narratives. Jewish fear is treated as inconvenient. Jewish safety is discussed as a variable rather than a nonnegotiable.

Hanukkah rejects that logic entirely.

The holiday is not only about light. It is about continuity — the refusal to disappear quietly when the world becomes less hospitable. It is about maintaining Jewish presence, practice, and confidence even when public space feels uncertain.

Lighting the menorah is not an act of provocation. It is an assertion that Jewish life does not require permission to endure.

Bondi Beach will be remembered as one more moment when Jews understood something before others were ready to say it plainly: a society unwilling to enforce moral limits cannot protect its most vulnerable members. Rampage violence and chants of “death to Jews” are not separate phenomena. They are different expressions of the same failure.

A society that cannot say, without hesitation, that calling for Jewish death is beyond the pale is not morally neutral. It has already chosen sides.

The menorah burns not because darkness recedes on its own, but because someone insists — again and again — that darkness does not get the final word.

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.