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South African Jewish journalist Jeremy Gordin murdered in home burglary at 70

(JTA) — Jeremy Gordin, one of South Africa’s most prominent journalists, wrote repeatedly in recent months about burglaries at his family’s Johannesburg home.

In a weekly column, he expressed dismay at the rampant levels of crime, growing urban decay and regular power outages endured by South Africans as a result of mismanagement and corruption. In one — titled “It is getting dark, too dark to see” after the Bob Dylan lyric — he addressed his two children, both in their twenties.

“I’m not suggesting that you’re going to find yourselves in desperate flight across your own border, that your graveyard may be ploughed up and strewn with garbage. But there comes a time when things are clearly falling apart,” he concluded.

He added, with the allusion to his Jewish identity clear to anyone familiar with Jewish history, “And you, who have your whole lives before you (as they say), need to consider seriously going to live elsewhere. We’ve been doing it for centuries, after all.”

On March 31, Gordin’s worst fears came to pass: He was murdered during a night robbery at his home. He was 70.

South African police described the incident as “a robbery gone wrong” but did not describe the exact cause of death. Seven people were arrested in Johannesburg two weeks later; one was driving a car that had been stolen from Gordin’s residence.

It was a tragic end for Gordin’s 70-year South African story, which, as with so many of his country’s Jews, intersected sharply with both the story of Israel and with the struggle of Black South Africans. As a lifelong journalist, he had at times headed both South Africa’s version of Playboy and its storied working-class Black tabloid, and also ran an initiative that used reporting to prove the innocence of people who were wrongfully imprisoned. He won the country’s annual top journalism prize multiple times.

Gordin was also a friend to many, frequently opening his home in Johannesburg’s Parkview neighborhood to guests. (This reporter was one of them during a stint in Johannesburg for Efe, the Spanish newspaper.)

Gordin was born in Pretoria in 1952, in a Jewish family with Lithuanian and Latvian origins. After a spell in South Vietnam, where his pharmacist father worked for the United States, the family returned to South Africa. Gordin went to high school in Brakpan, a town in the industrial east of the Great Johannesburg emblematic of the country’s white Afrikaner working class to which he often referred in his articles.

Gordin obtained a scholarship to study in Israel and completed a bachelor’s degree while playing rugby at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Back in his country, he did his military service volunteering for the South African Defence Force’s elite 1 Parachute Battalion, then started a prolific career in journalism.

In a breakout moment, he published a book in 1998 based on his conversations with the apartheid government’s death squad leader Eugen de Kock. Then incarcerated, de Kock candidly told Gordin about his deeds, but most importantly about those who had ordered his crimes, for which they were hardly questioned and never tried.

Gordin authored another canonical book of recent South Africa history, his biography of South Africa’s former president Jacob Zuma. Published in 2010, a year after Zuma took power, Gordin’s went beyond the usual assumptions about the Zulu former freedom fighter who learned how to read and write as an adult and was often underestimated by South Africa’s intellectual class.

Zuma left office in 2018 after a tenure marked by charges of corruption, cronyism and incompetence. Gordin’s biography has been criticized for being excessively indulgent with its subject, but it remains essential for understanding Zuma’s psychology and the motivations behind his actions.

In the early 1990s, after a period living in San Francisco, Gordin became the launch editor of Playboy South Africa. (He posed nude, with only a magazine as cover, to promote Playboy’s South Africa launch.) In a recent essay, Gordin recounted trying to land a then-unknown Charlize Theron for the magazine’s first cover. Invoking Yiddish terms, Gordin recalled journalists who had passed away, described the actress’s unembarrassed audition, and also managed to explore changing race and class dynamics in South Africa.

(Around this time, his friend Roy Isacowitz wrote in a remembrance published shortly after his death, the pair had successfully gotten a media executive censured for calling them “pushy little Jewboys” — though he said they accepted the description.)

Jeremy Gordin, at right, stands in front of covers of the Sun, the South African tabloid he oversaw for many years. (Courtesy Gordin family)

In 2012 he was named caretaker editor of the Daily Sun, a South African tabloid wildly popular among the Black working class. The paper lost much of its appeal after the death of its founder, larger-than-life Afrikaner media executive Deon du Plessis. Gordin brought back the pride, the punch and many of the readers to the paper. Or, as a headline made for him by his colleagues when he retired said, he “brought rock’n roll back to the Sun.”

The tabloid’s news largely relied on cases of violence, gossip and sex often featuring “tokoloshes,” fantastic creatures of popular African mythology whose encounters with the Sun’s readers were reported nationwide in the first person to its many correspondents. The readership and the paper’s foot soldiers were 100% Black. They collected the stories and sent them to the Johannesburg newsroom, where a group of experienced white male journalists including Gordin translated their texts in the characteristic Daily Sun language.

Gordin’s world couldn’t be further away from the one his newspaper reflected. But as his colleague at the paper Vincent Pienaar wrote after his death, “Not only did he understand the ethos of the publication, he embraced it.”

The tabloid took on serious stories, too. During his tenure as the paper’s editor the Daily Sun broke the story of the death at the hands of police officers of Mozambican immigrant taxi driver Mido Macias. A reader had filmed his gratuitously brutal arrest and sent it to the newspaper. Eight police officers involved in the victim’s death in custody were ultimately sentenced to 15 years in prison.

After leaving the Daily Sun, Gordin took on a role coordinating the Wits Justice Project, a journalism program focused on the plight of innocent or unfairly treated prisoners. In 2011 he helped secure the release of Fusi Mofokeng and Tshokolo Joseph Mokoena, who had served 19 years in prison for a crime they didn’t commit.

Gordin’s many friends say that his sympathy for the underdog was inextricable from the Jewish traditions and attitudes he inherited.

Although not religiously observant, Gordin peppered his articles with Jewish stories and jokes and Yiddish words and expressions. His sense of humor was strongly influenced by his Jewishness, as it was the combination of principle and humorous compassion that defined his personality. He was extremely well-read and voraciously curious, loved to share what he discovered with friends and indulged in sassy but harmless gossip both in private and in his articles.

Sometimes, his Jewish identity and his journalism entwined as when, in 2016, he reported from Johannesburg about the extradition hearing of a Hasidic rabbi, Eliezer Berland, wanted in Israel on rape charges. His final column, published the day before his death, explained, and condemned, the proposed right-wing judicial reforms in Israel.

Rabbi Sa’ar Shaked of the Beit Emanuel Progressive Synagogue in Johannesburg said Gordin as a friend and “wild spirit” who didd’t regularly attend services but was a repeat guest speaker at the synagogue to discuss weekly Torah portions and a variety of aspects of Jewish history and law.

Despite not attending services regularly, Gordin’s role in the community is described as “very active” by Wendy Ovens, a South African health professional in the NGO sector who served with him on the management committee of Beit Emanuel in 2011.

“His knowledge on Judaism and Jewish history was incredible,” Ovens said. She said his Jewish identity fueled his core mission: “He was community-minded and believed in justice and in what was right.”

Gordin is survived by his wife, Deborah Blake, and his children, Jake and Nina.

—
The post South African Jewish journalist Jeremy Gordin murdered in home burglary at 70 appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

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The Day I Hid My Star of David Necklace

Anti-Israel protesters gather at Museumplein ahead of a 6 km march through the city as part of a protest demanding a tougher stance from the Dutch government against Israel’s war in Gaza, in Amsterdam, Netherlands, Oct. 5, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Charlotte Van Campenhout

There are moments when a small object can feel unbearably heavy.

For me, it was my Star of David necklace — a delicate piece, inherited through generations, usually worn without a second thought. But recently, for the first time, I left it at home on purpose.

I have spent more than a decade publicly defending Israel in the Netherlands. I am not easily intimidated. I have never believed in lowering my voice to make others comfortable. Yet years of activism have taught me something sobering. Conviction does not shield you from hatred.

In the Dutch debate, hostility toward Israel is often dressed up as principled anti-Zionism. The terminology sounds political, even academic. In practice, it frequently mutates into something far uglier. I have been called a dirty Jew, a child killer, a parasite. I have received death threats online. Eggs were thrown at my home. My car tires were slashed more than once. A dead pigeon was once hung on my door in a plastic bag, a grotesque attempt at intimidation.

The irony is bitter. According to rabbinical standards, I am not considered Jewish enough to qualify for Aliyah under religious law, despite Jewish roots on both sides of my family. Yet to those who despise Israel, I am more than Jewish enough to be targeted.

When I reported the harassment, I was advised to keep a lower profile. Perhaps, I was told, I should refrain from speaking so openly in support of Israel. That conversation taught me a painful lesson. Protection would not necessarily come from institutions. It would have to come from resilience.

Over the years, I have lost professional opportunities and personal relationships. I occupy a strange space. Too Jewish for some. Not Jewish enough for others. Meanwhile, I am accused of being a Mossad agent or a paid operative for advocacy groups such as CIDI. The truth is less glamorous. I am simply a Dutch woman who has studied history and refuses to distort it.

Still, something shifted recently.

I needed to see a cardiologist. A routine appointment, nothing political about it. Out of caution, I searched his public social media profile. He had shared and endorsed extreme anti Israel content, including propaganda portraying Israel as uniquely evil. Suddenly a standard medical visit felt charged.

That morning, I removed my Star of David and placed it on my dresser.

The gesture unsettled me more than I expected. It felt like surrender. The same calculation followed before an appointment with another medical professional, originally from Iran. Check social media. Remove visible symbols. Avoid potential bias. Stay invisible.

I am not proud of that instinct. For years I have urged others to stand tall. Yet when you are alone in a climate of escalating hostility, prudence can override pride. Health is not a battleground on which one wishes to test ideological neutrality.

The broader context explains why this fear is not imaginary. The Netherlands has witnessed a sharp rise in antisemitic incidents. CIDI, the Center for Information and Documentation on Israel, recorded 379 antisemitic incidents in 2023, then 421 in 2024, the highest number since monitoring began. Police figures, using broader criteria, have been even higher. These are not abstract data points. They represent Jewish students harassed in classrooms, mezuzot ripped from doorposts, and families who hesitate before displaying visible signs of identity.

Each year on Holocaust Remembrance Day, including ceremonies marking the liberation of, we solemnly repeat the words “never again.” The phrase echoes with sincerity. But remembrance without vigilance is ritual without substance.

My advocacy for Israel does not stem from blind loyalty. It arises from historical understanding. After two thousand years of exile, persecution, and statelessness, the reestablishment of Jewish sovereignty in 1948 was not a colonial experiment but an act of national restoration. Israel, like any democracy, is imperfect. It debates fiercely within itself. It includes Jews from Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, and Ethiopia. I have written extensively about the rescue of Ethiopian Jews who found refuge and citizenship there. That diversity alone undermines the simplistic caricature of Israel as a racist project.

When activists declare that Zionism is racism and deny Israel’s right to exist, they claim to be advancing justice. In reality, they are singling out the world’s only Jewish state for elimination. It is not surprising that such rhetoric often spills over into open antisemitism.

The consequences are felt far beyond Israel’s borders. Across Europe and America, Jewish communities report heightened violence and terrorism. The Netherlands is not immune. And so a necklace becomes a calculation.

Yet while I may occasionally remove a symbol, I will not silence my voice. If anything, the climate reinforces why speaking out matters.

Unity is essential. Jews and non-Jews alike must reject the normalization of antisemitism, whether it appears under the banner of anti-Zionism or any other fashionable label. This is not about suppressing legitimate criticism of Israeli policies. It is about drawing a moral line when criticism becomes demonization and when political disagreement becomes collective vilification.

One day, I hope, wearing a Star of David in Amsterdam will feel entirely unremarkable. An heirloom necklace will simply be jewelry, not a statement of defiance. Until then, even if I sometimes leave it at home, I will continue to speak publicly and unapologetically.

Because never again is not a slogan. It is a responsibility that begins in the present.

Sabine Sterk is the CEO of Time To Stand Up For Israel.

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History and Archaeological Evidence Shows Jews Were Pioneers in Learning and Education

Inside the National Library of Israel. Photo: © Herzog & de Meuron; Mann-Shinar Architects, Executive Architect.

The opening of a new building for the National Library of Israel was one of the events overshadowed by the October 7 attack on Israel.

The library, almost five million square feet of space containing five million books, did open its doors on October, 29, 2023. The impressive new building, with its state-of-the-art automated book retrieval system, is a far cry from the library’s modest beginnings in 1892.

That the library opened five years before the first Zionist Congress, and well before the establishment of the state of Israel, indicates the importance that the Jewish people place on books and literacy — and also the long connection between Jews and Israel.

In Judaism and Hellenism in Antiquity (1998), Lee I. Levine makes the point that Jews were unique in the ancient world in reading a holy text at religious services and discussing its meaning on a regular basis. (Ezra the Scribe is credited with initiating the reading of the Torah at religious services, in the fifth century BCE, after the return from exile in Babylonia [Nehemiah 8:1-8].)

That Jews are widely associated with literacy is a widespread belief. In fact, the expression “People of the Book” originated in the Koran, as a description for Jews (and Christians). But how literate were they in Biblical times? Scholars such as Meir Bar Ilan suggest that literacy in ancient Israel was low, less than 3% of the population, even as late as the first centuries CE.

After all, with the exception of priests and scribes, why would it be necessary to read and write in an agricultural society? However, recent archeological evidence signals that Jewish literacy in Biblical times was far more widespread than previously thought.

Archeological teams from Tel Aviv University used computer-based analyses to evaluate letters written by a small contingent of 20 to 30 Judean soldiers located at a military outpost at Arad, near the southern border of Judea. The letters, in Hebrew, were written in ink on ostraca (potsherds used as writing surfaces) shortly before the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians in 586 BCE.

Computer handwriting analysis used machine learning to digitize, segment, and extract features (for example, separation distances, angles, slopes, curves) from script to identify individuals. A professional handwriting expert also evaluated the writing on the ostraca.

The results, published in academic journals (PNAS, 2016 and Plos One, 2020), show that there were at least 12 different writers. They varied in rank, down to the equivalent of quartermaster (much of the material in the letters dealt with provisions and supplies). Clearly, the society represented by the soldiers at Arad must have included an educational infrastructure capable of ensuring widespread literacy.

In Discovering Second Temple Literature (2018) Malka Z. Simkovich, Crown-Ryan Chair of Jewish Studies at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, provides a comprehensive view of the extensive literary output by Jewish communities during the period of the Second Temple (539 BCE to 70 CE). While she does not refer to literacy per se, the variety of material she describes, and the volume of letters written between Jews in Judea and those in the Diaspora (mainly between Jerusalem, Alexandria, and Antioch), suggests that the ability to read and write was common.

Some of the writings Simkovich refers to were found in the Cairo Geniza, a trove of more than 400,000 manuscripts, and fragments of manuscripts, discovered in the storeroom (the geniza) of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fustat (Old Cairo), Egypt.

Most of this collection was taken to Cambridge University in 1896 and today is being digitized. While much of this material involves the post-Temple period, manuscripts from the earlier, Second Temple period, were also common.

The geniza, a uniquely Jewish concept, is rooted in Jewish law. Any old or damaged liturgical texts or ritual objects that may include G-d’s name must not be casually discarded. The geniza is a temporary repository for such material prior to burial in consecrated ground.

The material in the Cairo Geniza was unusual in that the material stored there accumulated for a long time, between the 8th and 19th centuries. It includes secular material, such as legal contracts, accounting books, and personal letters, along with Biblical texts and rabbinical writings, making it a particularly valuable historical find. But equally important, the existence of the geniza is a reminder of the reverence for the written word that is a part of the Jewish tradition.

Jacob Sivak, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, is a retired professor, University of Waterloo.

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Tucker Carlson’s Huckabee Interview: Confidence Without Comprehension

Fox personality Tucker Carlson speaks at the 2017 Business Insider Ignition: Future of Media conference in New York, U.S., November 30, 2017. Photo: REUTERS/Lucas Jackson

When Tucker Carlson announced he would be interviewing US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, it was clear this would not be a friendly exchange. Carlson, who some have speculated is funded by Qatar, a state that openly backs Hamas, has positioned himself as one of Israel’s fiercest critics in American media.

What followed was not the exposé Carlson likely imagined. It was a two-hour display of confident ignorance.

Yet much of the media coverage focused on a single distorted headline: Carlson’s suggestion that Biblical scripture implies Israel seeks to “take over the Middle East.”

That became the story.

It was also the least revealing part of the interview.

What went largely unreported was not Huckabee’s answers, but Carlson’s performance: his theological confusion, historical sloppiness, conspiratorial insinuations, and failure to grapple with facts that contradicted his narrative.

A Disaster From Start to Finish

Carlson opened the interview with a monologue that appeared designed to rehabilitate his own credibility.

He repeated claims that he had been “detained” at Ben Gurion Airport when leaving Israel after recording the interview, suggesting it was unsafe for him to travel to Jerusalem. He implied he felt endangered after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu allegedly called him a “Nazi.”

That was among the first of his distortions. There is no verified record of Netanyahu making such a statement.

Footage from the airport shows Carlson in the VIP lounge, posing for photos and interacting amicably with staff.

This pattern — reframing routine events as persecution — serves a rhetorical purpose. It casts Carlson as a dissident truth-teller under siege. It does not withstand scrutiny.

Another consequential exchange concerned Anthony Aguilar.

Huckabee directly confronted Carlson over his earlier interview with Aguilar, a former Gaza Humanitarian Foundation aid worker who claimed he witnessed Israeli soldiers kill a young boy in Gaza.

As Huckabee pointed out, that account was later proven false when the boy was discovered alive.

Huckabee stated that he personally helped coordinate the child’s evacuation from Gaza, working with four countries to secretly extract the boy and his mother less than a week after the alleged “murder.” The operation had to remain covert, he said, because Hamas would have killed the child to validate Aguilar’s narrative.

And yet Carlson still entertained the claim as plausible, naturally failing to acknowledge his own role in broadcasting this fiction to millions.

For a commentator who brands himself as a skeptic of mainstream media narratives, the absence of self-scrutiny was striking.

Bethlehem and Basic Geography

Carlson cited Bethlehem — the birthplace of Christianity — as evidence that Christians are being driven out of the West Bank by Israel.

Bethlehem has been under Palestinian Authority control since 1995. Israel does not govern it, and there has been no Jewish community there for decades.

If the Christian population has declined, the obvious question is: under whose governance?

Huckabee raised precisely that point.

Carlson did not engage.

Theology as Geopolitical Caricature

Carlson invoked God’s promise to Abraham — “from the river of Egypt (Nile) to the Euphrates” — and suggested that this covenant implies contemporary Israeli expansionism across sovereign Middle Eastern states.

This is a categorical error.

The Abrahamic covenant is a theological concept, not a modern policy platform. No Israeli government has articulated a program to annex the Middle East based on Genesis.

By collapsing ancient scripture into a present-day territorial blueprint, Carlson substituted provocation for analysis.

Huckabee attempted to correct the framing.

Carlson appeared uninterested.

Ancestry as Legitimacy Test

In one of the interview’s most jarring moments, Carlson questioned Netanyahu’s right to live in Israel on the basis of ancestry.

“Netanyahu’s family is from Poland,” Carlson said. “There’s no evidence his ancestors ever lived here. On what basis does he have a right to be here?”

Huckabee responded bluntly: “I’m totally unable to process what you’re saying.”

The exchange spoke for itself.

Framed as a critique of one politician, the logic extended further — implying that Jewish belonging in Israel requires genealogical proof acceptable to Carlson.

It was delivered not tentatively, but with certainty.

And then there was the subject of Qatar.

Carlson appeared surprised when Huckabee noted that Christians in Qatar are overwhelmingly migrant workers confined to a restricted church compound, with no Christian citizens and limited public expression of faith.

By contrast, Israel has approximately 184,000 Christian citizens, hundreds of churches, open Easter processions, and church bells ringing weekly.

Carlson initially leaned on a cursory reading of Wikipedia before conceding he did not know the details.

For someone positioning himself as a defender of Christianity in the Middle East, all while seemingly receiving funding from the Qatari state, the disconnect was difficult to ignore.

Conspiracy, Recycled

Carlson floated additional insinuations and conspiracy, including the absurd claim that the United States went to war in Iraq after September 11 because of Israel.

This trope, that Jewish or Israeli influence dragged America into war, has circulated for decades across ideological extremes.

Reducing complex American strategic decisions, Congressional votes, and post-9/11 security policy to “Israel made us do it” is not serious analysis. Yet here it was, presented as such by a former Fox News host watched by millions.

By the end of nearly three hours, a pattern had emerged.

Carlson repeatedly blurred theology into policy, questioned Jewish historical continuity, recycled war-blame insinuations, dismissed counter-evidence, and spoke authoritatively on subjects he appeared not to have mastered.

And he did so with confidence.

That is what much of the media missed.

The story was not Huckabee’s answer to a distorted Biblical question.

It was watching a prominent commentator unravel under the weight of his own thinly sourced claims.

Criticism of Israeli policy is legitimate. Debate over strategy is healthy.

But when interrogation gives way to insinuation, and skepticism morphs into selective credulity, the result is not fearless journalism.

It is confidence without comprehension.

And it was watched by nearly two million viewers in under 24 hours.

The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.

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