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Yitzhak Rabin was killed 30 years ago this week. Has the Jewish world forgotten?
You had to have been born in the 1980s or earlier to have a firsthand memory of the night Yitzhak Rabin was shot 30 years ago this week. For most young adults, Rabin’s assassination is something they learned about in history class, at a day school assembly or from their parents.
That gap — between an event as personal experience and an event as historical memory — is particularly pronounced this year. With the peace process that Rabin championed seemingly more remote than ever and with a ceasefire in Gaza barely holding, parents, teachers, artists and activists may be struggling to explain why the death of an Israeli prime minister in the Clinton years even matters.
“This is an event that cannot be something that only a generation remembers, but it has to be an event that is cemented not only Israeli history but in Jewish history,” said Barak Sella, 40, who served as spokesperson for the National Memorial Rally for Rabin in Israel and is a founder of the Stand for Democracy coalition, which promotes Rabin’s legacy in the United States.
Sella is also the editor of a newly translated collection of Hebrew poetry, “Class of 95,” that wrestles with the trauma of the assassination and its relevance to the moment. It and a new musical play being staged in Washington, D.C., “November 4,” use different media to convey a similar, pressing idea: Remembering Rabin and what he stood for in life and death is essential for closing festering wounds and imagining a way forward for Israel and its supporters.
“The Rabin assassination symbolizes a failing point of our democracy, and something that we need to turn into a symbol if we want to be able to have the ability to be a Jewish sovereign nation,” said Sella. “Jews have an ability to have very strong memories of events that happened very far in our past, even traumatic memories, and turn them into symbols of growth.”
Barak Sella is the editor of “Class of 95.” an anthology of Israeli poetry about the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. (Courtesy)
For the creators of the anthology and the play, Rabin’s killing at the hands of a Jewish extremist represents not only a mortal blow to peace between Israelis and Palestinians, but a shocking example of internal Jewish strife. And while these mostly left-leaning artists acknowledge the profound disagreements over Oslo, they say he represented the kind of inspired thinking Israel can use in the wake of Oct. 7.
“Rabin had vision and moral imagination — things in short supply today,” said Danny Paller, who wrote the music and lyrics for “November 4.” “That’s what makes this story relevant now. We need to ask: where do we get hope from? How can we build a future?”
Paller, who has lived in Jerusalem since 1986, recalls being at his office the night Rabin was killed — just five days after his first daughter was born. “It was this rush of joy, despair, anger, disbelief,” he said. “Our family changed that week. Our country changed that week.”
“November 4” premiered in 2022 in Israel in a stripped-down cabaret version translated from English to Hebrew. Four women played every role, occasionally stepping out of character to share their own memories of the assassination. “It was profoundly Israeli,” says Paller. “They felt they had just experienced something deeply personal — but in a very different artistic language.”
The new U.S. production, presented by Voices Festival Productions and running Nov. 1-Dec. 7 at Universalist National Memorial Church in Washington, includes characters playing Rabin, his wife Leah, and his assassin, Yigal Amir. Rabin, a hero of Israel’s war of independence who once threatened to “break the bones” of Palestinian rioters, shook hands with the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat on Sept. 13, 1993. The prospect of territorial compromise with the Palestinians after decades of bloody conflict enraged the Israeli right. Amir, a devout religious Zionist and ultranationalist, sings in the play, “We have a mission/To save our nation/That is the highest height.”
“I don’t have empathy for [Amir],” said Myra Noveck, the Jerusalem-based reporter and researcher for the New York Times who wrote the book for the musical. “But you have to understand the other side — even when they are wrong — without dismissing them as crazy or incompetent.”
By focusing on Israel’s bitter debate about the Oslo Accords and even on Rabin’s flaws as a politician who often dismissed the concerns and fears of his opponents, she said she wanted to retrieve the late prime minister from a “death cult” that treats him as a martyr while ignoring what he stood for.
“We have to preserve ideas, not just mourn people,” she said, lamenting a right-wing government that includes far-right figures like Itamar Ben-Gvir, a leader of the protests that some say inspired Rabin’s killer. “Rabin foresaw that holding onto the territories would infect the rest of Israel — that you can’t deny rights to others and still maintain a democracy. That’s what we’re seeing now.”
“We realized there was a straight line from Rabin’s moment to the crisis we are witnessing now,” said Paller, referring to the Oct. 7 attacks, the war that followed and the bloodshed Rabin was trying to avert. “The play reminds us that hope and moral courage are never irrelevant. They are urgently needed.”
The 40 poems in “Class of 95” offer an even wider lens on the assassination and the overheated political climate then and now. Ronny Someck’s “Kings of Israel Square, The Day After” was written on Nov. 6, 1995, and remembers the makeshift memorials put up by mourners at the site of the shooting. Yudit Shahat’s poem, “God’s Terrible Garden,” is dedicated to a Canadian-Palestinian physician whose daughters were killed in the Gaza War of January 2009. And in “Proper Rest,” Shoshana Karbasi imagines Rabin’s funeral as an occasion for national healing — “because there is one pain shared by all.”
Myra Noveck, far left, and Danny Paller are the co-creators of “November 4,” directed by Alexandra Aron. (Peggy Ryan)
When asked what he thinks may be lost in translation between Hebrew and English — and what Diaspora Jews may not understand about Israelis — Sella replied that in Israel the assassination remains an “open wound.”
“The trauma has not been processed,” said Sella. “Rabin’s assassination affected people’s self-confidence in our democracy and the ability to strive for peace. We don’t talk enough about the fact that Rabin was killed by an Israeli citizen, and that brings up the question of what we actually want as a people.”
Sella and the creators of “November 4” also insist on the power of art to open up conversations in a way that journalists and historians can’t.
“People don’t read op-eds if they don’t already agree with them,” said Noveck. “Theater talks to the gut. It lets you peel back the layers — the walls people build around themselves — and get to the onion.”
Yehuda Kurtzer, president of the Shalom Hartman Institute, makes a similar point in a foreword to the poetry collection, writing that trauma “needs poetry.” Kurtzer will be one of the speakers at a Rabin memorial event and book launch of “Class of 95” at Temple Emanu-El in New York on Tuesday.
The Emanu-El event is one of a number of programs marking the anniversary on Tuesday. UCLA’s Y&S Nazarian Center for Israel Studies is holding a webinar with Itamar Rabinovich, one of Rabin’s biographers. New Jewish Narrative will mark the anniversary with a webinar about how Rabin’s murder reshaped American Jewish politics, identity and engagement with Israel.
Like Sella, Kurtzer also warns that memories of Rabin and the hope he embodied are fading. He cites a poem in the collection by Daniel Baumgarten, which asks, “Dear students / please raise your hands / what does it feel like to have peace / within reach?” The answer is the poem’s title: “Silence.”
“I worry for American Jews that in forgetting him, all we see are the inevitabilities of what has gone wrong in Israel over the past several decades, and not the availabilities of alternative endings to this story that once presented themselves and could, with the benefit of our imagination, inspire us again,” Kurtzer writes.
Sella, who splits his time between Tel Aviv and Boston where he is a research fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School, was just 10 years old when Rabin was killed. Born in the United States and newly arrived in Israel, he experienced the assassination as a formative event. “In many ways, my parents came to Israel because Rabin came into power,” he recalled. “It seemed like a moment of hope. The assassination was a shock, but also an early lesson in what it meant to be part of Israeli society and to engage with its democracy.”
But he notes a worrying gap: The generation that did not live through the assassination lacks the tools and context to understand its meaning. “We’re at a moment where this is no longer personal memory but historical memory,” he said. “If we don’t create spaces for the next generation to engage with this event, they won’t have the language to talk about it, to understand its significance, or to see it as a lesson for the future.”
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In the depths of Tel Aviv’s bus station, a fragile refuge for those with nowhere else to go during war
(JTA) — TEL AVIV — Two floors underground, past dumpsters and oil-laden puddles, through a reinforced Cold War-era door, a bomb shelter is buried underneath Tel Aviv’s Central Bus Station.
Built in 1993 to accommodate more than 16,000 Israelis, the shelter found a new life during the Israel-Iran war as a public refuge for residents of Neve Shaanan, among Tel Aviv’s most diverse neighborhoods and one of its poorest, home mainly to asylum seekers and foreign workers.
With few other options for public shelters in south Tel Aviv, residents pitched tents in the squalor of a space that had fallen into disrepair — with pipes dripping and rats scurrying — for more than 38 days as Israel and Iran exchanged missile fire until a ceasefire that began on April 8 halted the fighting.
“It’s very difficult. Not just because of the war, but because of the conditions we’re living in,” Gloria Arca, who took refuge inside the shelter with her son, Noam, said in Spanish during an interview in April. “We’re protected from the missiles, but inside we’re not safe.”
For many Israelis, the bus station occupies a space that balances between nostalgia and revulsion. Until 2018, the station was a main node for travel into and out of Tel Aviv. Since then, ridership has dropped, and now the hulking structure is seen as little more than an eyesore. During Israel’s 12-day war with Iran last year, a short video by Israeli comedians went viral for sharing the station’s GPS coordinates in a video that jokingly urged Iran, “Please don’t bomb this bus station.”
Yet the station also offers a concrete window into Israel’s widening reliance on foreign workers, which has surged in the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks.
When there is no war on, the shelter functions as a community center, complete with a Filipino church, a refugee health clinic, and retailers catering to customers in more than a dozen languages.
During wartime, the station takes on a new and vitally important role as a shelter for those who have none in their homes or neighborhoods, no family in the country whose homes they can flee to and little ability to pay for temporary accommodations somewhere safer.
Arca, who came to Israel more than two decades ago from Colombia and is in the country legally, knew that it would take her and Noam more than 10 minutes to get to a shelter from their home — longer than Israel’s advanced missile warning system allows. So they decided to move into the bus station, pitching a tent alongside some of their neighbors.
Depending on the day, more than 200 residents spent their nights in the shelter during the war, according to Sigal Rozen, public policy coordinator at the Hotline for Refugees and Migrants.
“It’s not easy, especially with young children and families with special needs,” she said. “You can’t get up in the middle of the night and just run.”
The Hotline, with funding from the Tel Aviv Municipality, worked to improve conditions in the shelter, but the starting point was dire. During a visit in April, rats could be seen scurrying across newly installed artificial turf meant to brighten the space, and mosquitoes landed on visitors’ ankles before being chased off.
More than anything, Arca worries about safety in the shelter — but not from the war. “We’re protected from the missiles, but inside, we’re not safe,” she said. “Security is there, but they don’t do their job. Drug users come in and use the bathrooms. There are many children here, and we’re afraid.”
The challenging conditions were nothing new to many of the people who moved in, who represent an often unseen but growing sector of workers in Israel.
The category of “foreign worker,” a term used in Israel to describe non-citizen laborers, most of them from countries such as the Philippines, India, and Thailand, who enter the country on temporary work visas tied to a specific employer, has long been a fraught designation.
Dominant in some industries, such as home health care, where there are so many foreign workers that the role is known as “filipina” in Hebrew, foreign workers have taken on greater shares of other sectors in recent years, particularly after Israel banned Palestinian workers from Gaza and the West Bank after the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack. With Israelis increasingly reluctant to take low-paying manual labor jobs, the Israeli government has moved to fill the gap by permitting employers to hire more foreign workers.
Israel’s foreign worker population rose by 41% in 2024 alone to more than 156,000. By 2025, the total had reached 227,044. It is expected to grow even more in the coming years, as the government has set a ceiling of 300,000 workers.
For many Israelis, footage that circulated after the ceasefire showing long lines of foreign workers arriving at newly reopened government offices to renew their visas offered a stark illustration of the growing sector.
It is not uncommon around the world for people from impoverished countries to migrate to countries with more work and higher pay. For the workers, occupying a tenuous legal status can be worth it to be able to support their families, send their children to stronger schools and earn wages on a different scale than in their home countries.
Evelyn, a Filipina caregiver sheltering with her three children beneath the Central Bus Station, declined to give her last name out of fear of deportation. “In Israel, I can earn 10 times what I do in the Philippines. So I have money to send back to my family — not just taking care of my kids here, but my parents in Manila.”
But advocates for the workers say foreign worker status, and Israel’s increasing reliance on foreign workers, creates conditions that are ripe for abuse. Ohad Amar, executive director of Kav LaOved, a nonprofit that works to uphold equal labor rights for all workers in Israel, said the workers are “enduring conditions akin to modern slavery.”
Many foreign worker visas in Israel are tied to a specific employer and are non-transferable. Kav LaOved has documented numerous cases of delayed or unpaid wages, as well as workers who feel pressured to remain silent about abuse from their employers lest they lose their immigration status.
“Israel had not relied on migrant workers in the same way before. This is the first time at this scale,” Amar said. “Every day we are getting reports of workers’ rights violations, and we are completely overwhelmed.”
During wartime, foreign workers are frequently exposed to Israel’s unique dangers in extreme ways. On Oct. 7, as sirens blared, foreign workers were slaughtered in the fields of kibbutzes near Gaza. During the most recent war, videos circulated online of construction workers from China who filmed themselves stranded high in the air during missile barrages, afraid and without protection.
The first death in the latest round of fighting with Iran was Mary Anne Velasquez de Vera, a foreign worker in Israel from the Philippines. At the end of March, two other foreign workers were killed by a Hezbollah rocket while working in a field in northern Israel after they were unable to reach shelter.
Feeling physically vulnerable is an experience many foreign workers in Israel know well. Evelyn, a migrant from the Philippines who slept in the bus station with her children during the war, described how, in an industry as intimate as caregiving, working with elderly people who struggle to make it to a shelter, workers can feel pressured to stay in the building during an attack.
“They can’t exactly tell their employer they left grandma in the building during a missile attack, because they’ll get fired and lose their visa,” Amar said.
Some of the risks are much less visible. Evelyn was out of work as a housekeeper for the duration of the war, when her employer, an elderly woman, left the country. She lived on donations from community members and civil society organizations.
“Here is still better than back home,” she said. “But we are all struggling, and not just because of the shelter. If I can’t start working soon, I really don’t know what I will do.”
Workers like Evelyn who lack work visas must rely on informal employment, making them ineligible for compensation from Bituach Leumi, Israel’s national workers’ insurance, when they go unpaid. But having a visa did not solve the challenges of war, Rozen said.
The threat of losing their visa if they lose their employment hangs over the heads of the workers, forcing them into difficult decisions, like whether to leave their children with volunteers at the shelter or alone at home.
“Even those who still have work face a problem. If a single mother has children and there’s no school, where does she leave them? She can’t bring them along when there’s an alarm,” Rozen said. “So even when work exists, many can’t do it.”
She said the war had offered a glimpse into the as-yet-unaddressed challenges that come along with Israel’s increasing reliance on importing labor from abroad. The country’s labor market didn’t come to a standstill, as was the case in other countries in the region such as the United Arab Emirates where the vast majority of workers are migrants who tried to leave, but for Rozen, something new and troubling was laid bare.
“If you don’t want foreigners here, then don’t recruit them,” Rozen said. “But you can’t recruit them, triple their numbers, and then expect them to disappear when there’s a war.”
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Nearly half of young Americans view US relationship with Israel as a burden, survey finds
(JTA) — Nearly half of young Americans, 46%, believe that the United States’ relationship with Israel is mostly a burden to the United States, according to a new survey from the Institute of Politics at the Harvard Kennedy School.
The Harvard Youth Poll, which polled 2,018 Americans aged 18 to 29, found that just 16% of those surveyed described the U.S. relationship with Israel as mostly a benefit.
Respondents were asked about their view of other U.S. alliances, including Canada, which 53% saw as beneficial, and Ukraine, which 21% saw as beneficial. Israel received the lowest perceived benefit of any country tested.
The survey also found that 55% of young Americans believe the U.S. military action in Iran is not in the best interest of the American people.
It comes as attitudes about Israel among young Americans in recent years have grown sharply negative. Earlier this month, a Pew Research Center survey found that 70% of Americans aged 18 to 49 held a somewhat or very negative opinion of Israel. That view was split among partisan lines, with 84% of Democrats in that demographic holding a negative view of Israel, compared to 57% of Republicans.
The Harvard survey was conducted by Ipsos Public Affairs between March 26 and April 3 and had a margin of error of 2.74 percentage points.
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Long Island father and teen son arrested after investigation into swastika drawn in school bathroom
(JTA) — A father and his teenage son were arrested Wednesday after an investigation into swastika graffiti at the teen’s school led police to search their home, where authorities said they found chemicals used to make explosives.
The arrests stemmed from an investigation into swastika graffiti found in a boys’ bathroom at Syosset High School on Long Island. After police determined that a 15-year-old student had drawn the swastika, the Nassau County Police Department sent officers to his home.
There, the teen told the officers about the explosive materials, according to prosecutors. He said his father had purchased the chemicals for him to build rockets.
During the subsequent search of the home, police found “highly unstable” materials that had been combined to make explosives, including nitroglycerin, multiple acids, oxidizers and fuels. They began to evacuate people in adjacent homes, fearing an explosion.
The teen was not identified by police due to his age. Francisco Sanles, 48, who was arrested at the scene, has pleaded not guilty to seven criminal counts, including criminal possession of a weapon and endangering the welfare of a child. His son was charged with five counts, including criminal possession of a weapon, criminal mischief, aggravated harassment and making graffiti.
Swastika graffiti is relatively commonplace in schools, with the Anti-Defamation League reporting over 400 incidents in 2024: Syosset High School itself was hit by a spate of antisemitic graffiti, including swastikas, in 2017. But it is relatively rare that incidents result in arrests.
In an email to the school district Wednesday night, the Syosset School District — which enrolls a large number of Jewish students — said its investigation had identified the student for the police, and he would face “serious consequences pursuant to the District’s Code of Conduct.”
“Antisemitism and hate speech have no place in our communities or in our schools,” the district said. “Syosset has long been proud of being a welcoming, empathetic, and inclusive community and those values remain firm. We protect those values and this community by confronting and holding accountable those who traffic in any form of hate.”
In January, New York City Police arrested and charged two 15-year-old boys suspected of spraying dozens of swastikas on a playground in a heavily Jewish Brooklyn neighborhood with aggravated harassment and criminal mischief as a hate crime.
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