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4 decades later, new trial of alleged 1980 Paris synagogue bomber offers victims opportunity for closure
PARIS (JTA) — The courtroom was crowded but the defendant’s seat was empty on Monday as a landmark trial in French Jewish history got underway, nearly 43 years after the synagogue bombing that Hassan Diab stands accused of orchestrating.
An arrest warrant in the 1980 bombing that killed four people and wounded 46 was first issued for Diab, a Lebanese academic who lives in Canada, in 2008. Only now is a trial getting underway — and he has chosen not to attend, prompting criticism from both prosecutors and French Jews who are hoping for a sense of resolution after decades of trauma.
“Hassan Diab’s decision not to appear before your court is a great disgrace to your jurisdiction,” the attorney general said during the first day of the trial, during a discussion of whether an arrest warrant should be issued, a move that would require the trial to be dismissed.
“Which human would not make the same decision?” replied Diab’s lawyer, William Bourdon, about his client’s choice not to travel to France to stand trial. “This decision is humanly respectable. It is in no way a sign of cowardice.”
The Reform synagogue on Rue Copernic that was bombed is nested in the heart of a wealthy residential area, in Paris’ 16th arrondissement. A visitor today would not be able to tell that the ceiling had once been shattered into a million little pieces, that the floor had been spotted with blood. If not for the commemorative plaque at the entrance, nothing there would show the synagogue was once the scene of a deadly terrorist attack.
Yet the trial is freighted with the fear and anxiety that set in after what is now known as the Rue Copernic bombing on Oct. 3, 1980, understood to be the first fatal antisemitic attack in France since the Holocaust. Since then, a string of antisemitic attacks on communal targets and individuals have caused many French Jews to feel afraid, both about their personal vulnerability and about the state’s commitment to their safety.
But while the prosecution of some potentially antisemitic attacks has not always satisfied French Jews, the long ordeal to bring Diab to trial suggests great diligence on the part of many involved.
Bernard Cahen, an attorney for the synagogue and one of the victims, who is now in his 80s, promised he would see this case through until the end.
“Whatever the outcome, this has been going on for way too long,” he told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in an interview, adding with a joke, “Everybody is surprised I’m still here to represent my clients.”
Cahen represents Monique Barbé, who lost her husband in the bombing when she was 37. Now nearly 80 and living in the South of France, Barbé won’t be coming to the trial.
“I don’t have the strength. But I can’t wait for all of this to end,” she told JTA.
About 300 worshippers were attending the Shabbat service and celebrating five bar mitzvahs that Friday evening when, at 6:35 p.m., a bomb exploded right outside the synagogue. The door was blown up, the glass ceiling collapsed on the worshippers; wooden benches were projected across the room.
Outside the synagogue the scene was even more gruesome. In his book about the case, the French journalist Jean Chichizola described “cars thrown on the road like children’s toys,” “flames licking the upper floors of adjacent buildings” and “shop windows blown up all along the street.”
In what looked like a war zone lay four bodies. Israeli TV journalist Aliza Shagrir, 44, was hit by the blast as she walked by. Philippe Boissou, 22, who was riding by on his motorcycle, also died on the spot. Driver Jean-Michel Barbé was found dead in his car, which was parked right outside the synagogue where he was awaiting clients attending the service. Nearby, a hotel worker named Hilario Lopes-Fernandez was seriously injured and died two days later.
Investigators quickly established that the bomb had been placed in the saddlebag of a Suzuki motorcycle parked in front of the synagogue. It was meant to go off precisely as the worshippers left the building, which would undoubtedly have killed many more people. But the ceremony had started a few minutes late.
At first, a man close to a neo-Nazi group claimed responsibility for the attack, misleading investigators for months before confessing he had nothing to do with it. The attack was ultimately attributed to an extremist group in the Middle East, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-Special Operations, and investigators alleged that Diab had planted the bomb. After an arrest warrant was issued in 2008, he was extradited from Canada in 2014, indicted in Paris and imprisoned.
But in a surprise to many, Diab’s case was dismissed in 2018, allowing him to return to Canada a free man. Prosecutors appealed, leading to another surprising turn of events in 2021 as the court upheld the earlier decision, directing Diab to stand trial after all.
“This is a gaping wound for the Jewish community and here in France people remember this horrible attack,” historian Marc Knobel told JTA. “Let us not forget how shocked and hurt we all were at the time.”
Indeed, outrage in the immediate aftermath of the bombing was fierce. France’s major trade unions called for a nationwide strike as a gesture of solidarity with Jews, while government ministers promised a speedy response and deployed police officers to other Jewish sites. Meanwhile, Jews marched in the streets, some vowing to take security into their own hands, in a demonstration that presaged longstanding tensions within French Jewry.
Over four decades later, Monique Barbé reflected on the tragedy that has changed her life forever.
“This has ruined my life. I was nervously wrecked for a very long time,” she said. “Imagine, I had to go identify my husband’s body. At the police station, they gave me back his half-burnt ID card and his damaged wedding ring. That’s all I was left with.”
But she questioned exactly how much the bombing and trial should register for people whose connection is more distant than her own.
“I do believe this is a necessary trial but except for those who lost their loved ones, I don’t see why anybody would still think about it today, it’s been so long,” Barbé said. “Plus there have been so many terrorist attacks since.”
Jean-François Bensahel, president of the Copernic synagogue, thinks this trial is actually of great importance even to those who were not born at the time of the attack.
“It’s engraved in our community’s history,” he said in an interview. “It’s difficult for us to understand why Hassan Diab has decided not to come to the trial but nothing is over yet. I want to trust justice will be served.”
The attack’s most lasting effects may not be in the trial but in the heavy security infrastructure that is now familiar to anyone engaging with French Jewish institutions, Bensahel said.
“Sadly, synagogues in France (and many other places) are all under protection, even though it’s completely counterintuitive to have security measures in a place of worship where you usually aspire to peace,” he said. “It shows something is not right with the world.”
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The play is about Birthright, but it’s about a lot more than Israel
Towards the end of Birthright, a new play that just made its New York City debut at the MCC Theatre, two characters are arguing over Israel and Zionism in the wake of Oct. 7. The talking points will be familiar to anyone who’s been ensconced in the discourse of the past few years: Izzy says that Zionism is and has always been a colonialist project, and Chaya blames the conflict on Palestinian leaders who rejected early two-state solutions.
As they argue, each is frantically Googling; their phone screens are projected onto the walls of the set. We can see the chasm between their echo chambers: Izzy goes to the Jewish Voice for Peace website, Chaya to The Jerusalem Post. Each time they focus on their own screen, the sound of the argument becomes muffled and indistinct until they resurface to throw a new piece of evidence into the conversation.
It’s a clever piece of production magic that effectively drives home the schism over Israel in the Jewish world, and our inability to hear each other.
Birthright, commissioned by Miami New Drama from Tony Award-winning playwright Jonathan Spector and here directed by Teddy Bergman, is nominally about the eponymous free trip to Israel. But really it’s about a group of six friends that formed on the trip, and their personal journeys — through Judaism, and through life — as the somewhat motley crew diverges and reconnects over the years.
The show is a long one, three and a half hours once you include its two intermissions. Each act depicts a single night, spaced over the course of nearly two decades — first, right after they’ve returned from their trip to Israel in 2006, then in their early 30s as their careers are taking off in 2016, and finally a year after Oct. 7. While the runtime is admittedly long, it allows for well-developed characters, which are essential to approaching such a touchy topic with any nuance, and the fast-paced dialogue keeps things moving briskly. (A reasonable helping of humor, including a Kanye reference in every act, doesn’t hurt.)
And the show does manage an astonishing amount of subtlety for a topic that has become so factionalized. The characters represent a reasonably diverse range of Jewish thought and experience, though certainly leaves some out. (There are no Jews of color or converts, for example, and no true right-wing hawks.)
There’s Chaya (Zoe Winters, best known as Logan Roy’s secretary and mistress on Succession), who grew up Conservadox, but spent college rushing a sorority and dyeing her hair blonde; she ends up working for the Democratic establishment. Noah (Eli Gelb, Tony-nominated for Stereophonic) is a political wonk with a Facebook-addled dad prone to right-wing conspiracy theories. Izzy (Molly Bernard), a queer Jew who eschewed law school, has worked on the Jewish left long before it became buzzy. Lev (Hale Appleman), a lost soul wanderer with a penchant for Jewish philosophy — he name-drops Abraham Joshua Heschel’s The Sabbath and Yosef Yerushalmi’s Zakhor — has family who survived the Holocaust. Alona (Molly Ranson), a sociology PhD who fell for an IDF soldier on the trip, eventually marries an Israeli and moves to Tel Aviv. And Emerson (Nate Mann), a musician, is barely aware that he’s Jewish when he lands on their trip half by accident.
This long summary represents only a smidgen of the events in the group’s lives. The play makes sharp use of production gimmicks, opening the second and third acts by projecting a montage of messages, summarizing the events of the group’s intervening years — and also cleverly reminding us of the quirks of bygone eras. Before the second act, we see wedding invitations and job announcements sent out by email, and then newborn photos posted on Facebook. Before the third, there are group chats on iMessage and then Whatsapp, where we see more birth announcements. Later, they exchange articles about the Israel-Hamas war.
This glut of information is how the show achieves its depth. On paper, one could slot some of these characters into obvious archetypes: The Zionist who makes aliyah, the queer anti-Zionist activist who has made politics her whole identity, the centrist liberal who staunchly supports Israel. But every character has real depth and pathos, and none of the action plays out to its stereotypical end.
When someone asks Izzy, the JVP-type activist, why she hates Israel so much, she doesn’t list out its sins; instead, she’s affronted. “I don’t hate Israel. I love it,” she says. “What it could be at its best.” She doesn’t believe she’s fighting against the nation, but for it.
Meanwhile, Alona, who made aliyah, does not launch into a speech about how Hamas has to be eradicated before the war can end; Bibi, the rest of the Israeli government and settlers, she says, are just as much of a “cancer” as any terrorist group.
Though the political discussions are impressively nuanced, Birthright finds its true success in spending as much time on the rest of the characters’ lives as it does on their political stances. There are the complications of falling for a non-Jewish partner. The ways having children changes life in inalterable ways. Divorces. Substance abuse. The way a dream career can still disappoint. For a topic that is so often turned into a polemic, the play takes a broader view.
In presenting stories of real, believable Jewish lives that are not solely defined by their Judaism, the play demonstrates that Jewishness doesn’t mean just one thing to anyone. Instead, it explores the ways Jewish identity layers on, mingles with and sometimes challenges the rest of one’s choices, values and beliefs.
There are views left out of Birthright, to be sure. No one is right wing (the characters call their group “BirthLeft”), and in the first act they all make fun of their trip as a way to get Jewish kids laid. No one is truly hawkish about the war; in the first act, the characters make fun of George W. Bush and fantasize about working on Democratic campaigns. No one is making an argument, as plenty of people have in the past few years, that Palestinians should be exiled from Gaza or deserve to die.
But the overall point can apply equally: Judaism, and Israel, is not one clear thing. There’s no perfect answer. We aren’t all supposed to agree — but that doesn’t have to tear us apart. It’s a simple message, but one that is hard to believe these days; Birthright makes it feel tangible.
As Lev says when considering their Birthright trip, and his confused feelings about it. “History, Jewish history, it’s never been a straight line, and it’s never meant only one fixed thing. It’s more a thing you interpret, that you find meaning in.”
The new play Birthright is playing at the MCC Theater in Manhattan through Jul 26, 2026.
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New York Times hires Atlantic’s Yair Rosenberg to cover Jewish American life
(JTA) — The New York Times has hired Atlantic staff writer Yair Rosenberg to launch a national beat covering Jewish American life, bringing a widely known journalist on antisemitism and Jewish affairs to a newspaper whose coverage of Israel and the Jewish community has been under unusually intense scrutiny since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack.
The appointment, announced Monday by National Editor Nestor Ramos, creates a dedicated beat focused on American Jews at a moment when questions of antisemitism, Israel, religious identity and political polarization have moved to the center of public debate.
It is the first time that the newspaper, published in the city with the world’s largest Jewish population, has a beat dedicated to Jews.
“Over the course of 15 years chronicling Jewish life in America and abroad, Yair has taken on the biggest, thorniest stories on the beat,” Ramos wrote in a memo to staff. “Now, Yair will bring that boundless energy and deep expertise to a new religion beat on National focused on Jewish American life, chronicling a period of extraordinary tension but also possibility and reinvention.”
The move brings Rosenberg to a publication that he has occasionally criticized for its coverage of Jewish affairs, but without echoing some critics’ charges of institutional bias.
For the past five years Rosenberg has written The Atlantic’s “Deep Shtetl” newsletter, blending coverage of antisemitism, American politics and Jewish culture with essays on history, religion and popular culture. Before joining The Atlantic in 2021, he spent nearly a decade at Tablet, a magazine of Jewish affairs.
Over the years, Rosenberg has broken or advanced reporting on online extremism and antisemitism while also becoming known for explaining Jewish issues to a broad audience. His work has ranged from investigations into antisemitic disinformation networks to historical features. He has written about antisemitism on the far left and on the Republican right.
During the 2016 presidential campaign, an Anti-Defamation League study found Rosenberg was among the Jewish journalists most frequently targeted with antisemitic abuse on Twitter. Rosenberg became known for responding publicly to trolls and for developing technological tools — including an “Impostor Buster” bot — designed to expose white supremacists posing online as minorities in order to inflame social tensions. The effort drew widespread attention before Twitter eventually suspended the tool.
He later described those experiences in a New York Times guest essay titled “Confessions of a Digital Nazi Hunter,” and has remained a frequent public speaker on combating online hate while preserving free expression.
Ramos’s announcement emphasized that Rosenberg’s beat would extend beyond antisemitism.
“Yair knows better than most that these fraught moments are not all that define Jewish life today—not even close,” Ramos wrote, citing stories on Hanukkah traditions, Jewish representation in popular culture and other facets of American Jewish life.
The Times, through a spokesman, declined to comment beyond Monday’s announcement. Rosenberg did not respond to a request for an interview by press time.
The hire comes as The New York Times continues to navigate a complicated relationship with many Jewish readers.
For decades the newspaper has occupied an outsized place in American Jewish public life, employing prominent Jewish reporters and editors while producing influential coverage of religion, Israel and antisemitism. Yet the newspaper has also faced sustained criticism from parts of the Jewish community over its Israel coverage, criticism that intensified after Oct. 7 and the subsequent war in Gaza.
Media watchdog organizations, some Jewish communal leaders and a number of current and former journalists have accused the Times of factual errors, headline framing and insufficient skepticism toward claims made by Hamas officials in some early coverage of the conflict.
A May 2026 column by Nicholas Kristof, alleging systemic sexual violence by Israeli authorities against Palestinian detainees, was widely criticized for amplifying unverified claims and platforming biased sources. The Times stood by Kristof’s column in an editorial note.
Defenders of the Times argue that accusations of institutional anti-Israel bias often conflate disagreement over editorial judgments with evidence of systemic prejudice.
At Tablet and The Atlantic, Rosenberg occasionally criticized aspects of the Times’ reporting on both Israel and antisemitism. In a 2018 Tablet article he criticized The New York Times Book Review for offering a platform for the novelist Alice Walker to recommend a book by the English author David Icke that was heavily saturated in antisemitic conspiracy theories.
The next year he called out the Times for a profile of former CIA officer and would-be congressional candidate Valerie Plame that failed to mention her history of tweets sharing antisemitic theories. He has also regretted that the Times in 1937 dropped its subscription to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency syndication service because of the perception at the time that JTA’s coverage of Nazi Europe was alarmist.
Unlike some Jewish media watchdog groups, however, Rosenberg has not argued that the Times is institutionally or inherently biased against Israel or Jews. Against that backdrop, Rosenberg’s hiring is likely to be watched closely by Jewish readers across the political spectrum.
According to Ramos, Rosenberg will begin work July 20 and will be based in New York while traveling nationally for the beat.
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Canadian Museum for Human Rights opens ‘Nakba’ exhibit amid pushback from Jewish leaders
(JTA) — After weeks of backlash from Jewish groups and leaders, the Canadian Museum for Human Rights this weekend opened its exhibit on the Nakba, the narrative of Palestinian defeat and displacement upon Israel’s founding.
The Winnipeg, Manitoba, exhibit is called “Palestine Uprooted: Nakba Past and Present” and features photography, poetry and everyday objects that document the experience of Palestinian-Canadians impacted by the Nakba. Palestinians use the term, meaning “catastrophe,” to describe their mass displacement upon Israel’s establishment.
The exhibit has drawn fierce condemnation from some Jewish groups, including the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs.
“Materials that are one-sided and driven by a political agenda can contribute to discrimination, bullying and even assault targeting Jewish students,” the group wrote in a post on X last week. “The federal government must hold the CMHR’s leadership accountable for this egregious mishandling.”
The museum’s only Jewish board member, Mark Berlin, was upset enough by the exhibit to resign.
“Because the museum chooses to proceed with this exhibit in its present form despite repeated concerns raised by myself and members of the mainstream Jewish community and others seeking a more balanced and historically complete presentation, I can no longer, in good conscience continue to serve as a Trustee,” Berlin wrote in a resignation letter dated June 22.
In the letter, Berlin argues that the exhibit omits the context that “hundreds of thousands of Jews from Arab lands” were also displaced during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.
“A story detached from the surrounding factual details is not the truth, it is just a story,” Berlin continued. “The museum has a statutory and moral obligation to tell the full truth, not to sacrifice it at the altar of politics.”
The museum has vigorously defended the exhibit. In a statement to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Isha Khan, the CEO of the museum, said that “focusing in this one exhibit on the human violations faced by of Palestinian Canadians does not negate the human rights violations faced by Jewish people.”
“Sharing the stories of one community in no way minimizes the experiences of another,” Khan continued.
Khan added that the exhibit had drawn “both criticism and support from Jewish Canadians.”
Several progressive Jewish groups in Canada, including Independent Jewish Voices, the Jewish Faculty Network, and United Jewish Peoples’ Order, defended the exhibit in a joint statement Thursday, writing that it was the “result of dedication, persistence, care and advocacy, especially from the Palestinian Canadian community.”
“We are proud to celebrate a Canadian institution that has remained steadfast in the face of unfounded criticism and pressure and chose to move forward with integrity,” the statement continued. “We hope this historic opening, and the ongoing inclusion of the exhibition in the Museum, encourages learning, reflection and action.”
The dispute over the exhibit comes as Jews in Canada have faced a spate of antisemitic attacks in recent months, including in March, when shots were fired at three Toronto-area synagogues. In 2025, there were 6,800 antisemitic incidents in Canada, marking a 9% rise from 2024, according to B’nai Brith’s annual audit of antisemitic incidents.
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