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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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Staunch Israel critic and Gaza trauma surgeon Adam Hamawy wins NJ-12 primary
(JTA) — Adam Hamawy, the staunch Israel critic who served as a trauma surgeon in Gaza, is expected to join Congress after winning the Democratic primary in New Jersey’s 12th district on Tuesday.
The political novice held a 12-point margin ahead of second-place candidate Brad Cohen with 86% of the vote in, even as he faced questions over his past ties to Omar Abdel-Rahman, the “Blind Sheikh” convicted on terrorism charges in 1995. Hamawy’s camp had called the questions “gross and bigoted” and said the attacks against him were “getting more desperate than ever.”
At a time when Israel is becoming increasingly unpopular among Democratic voters, Hamawy’s victory makes him the latest in a string of vocally pro-Palestinian progressives to win Democratic elections in blue districts in this year’s midterms, following fellow New Jersey candidate Analilia Mejia and Chris Rabb in Pennsylvania.
“The Democratic establishment just got a wake-up call!” wrote PAL PAC, a pro-Palestinian group that had endorsed Hamawy, on X. “This victory proves what we have known all along: Standing firmly and unapologetically for Palestinian freedom is a WINNING platform.”
Hamawy, who is credited with having saved Sen. Tammy Duckworth’s life during the Iraq War, was also boosted by $2 million in spending by American Priorities, a super PAC that aims to counterweight the pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC by installing pro-Palestinian progressives in Congress. He was endorsed by a slew of left-wing politicians and campaigned alongside the streamer Hasan Piker, who’s been accused of antisemitic rhetoric. He is set to succeed Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman, who is retiring at the end of her term.
As an opponent of Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system and a supporter of a complete arms embargo and the right of return for Palestinian refugees, Hamawy will become one of Congress’ sharpest Israel critics if he wins November’s general election, which he is expected to do in the deep-blue district.
Hamawy said that he finds antisemitism “abhorrent” and that he is “deeply worried about its continued rise” in a statement to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency last week.
“As a Muslim, I understand what it feels like to face bigotry, to feel unsafe in your community and to have your loyalty to this country questioned,” Hamawy said. “In this country, we have seen recent attacks at both synagogues and mosques. I see our safety as intertwined.”
Asked about Jewish constituents who disagree with his stance on Israel, Hamawy told JTA, “I hope we can still connect on shared values and goals, including peace, justice, safety and dignity.” He added that his door “will always be open.”
Ken Martin, chair of the Democratic National Committee, did not mention Hamawy’s pro-Palestinian advocacy in a statement congratulating him on his win.
“As a veteran, combat surgeon, and small business owner, Adam Hamawy has continually served his community and our country. He is a proven fighter for working families,” Martin said. “We look forward to welcoming him to Congress, where he will continue the fight to lower costs, expand access to healthcare, and make life more affordable for New Jersey families.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Scott Wiener wins spot in general election for San Francisco House seat as a Jewish critic of Israel
California State Sen. Scott Wiener advanced Tuesday as the frontrunner to succeed former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in Congress, in a contest closely watched in Jewish politics after Wiener called Israel’s actions in the Gaza War a genocide and called for a halt to arms sales to Israel.
Wiener, a 55-year-old progressive Democrat who is Jewish, advanced with the most votes, with 42% of the ballots with about half counted as of Wednesday morning in California’s top-two primary for the deep-blue San Francisco district Pelosi has represented for nearly four decades. In November’s general election he will face the runner-up Democrat, San Francisco Supervisor Connie Chan, who is backed by Pelosi.
In his victory speech, Wiener promised to fight the Trump administration’s “disaster of a regime” that has “commandeered this country, that is tearing down our democracy and the rule of law, that is getting us into disastrous wars.”
“I’m polite but not quiet,” he added. “I’m not going to wait my turn.”
Wiener’s possible arrival in Congress comes amid a broader reshaping of Jewish Democratic politics, as a more progressive and younger generation of Jewish candidates increasingly embraces a more critical approach toward Israel.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict became a key issue that defined his congressional campaign. In an interview with the Forward last year, after announcing his bid, Wiener said his approach reflects that of the “large majority of Democrats in Congress” who don’t want to sever ties with Israel but are critical of the policies of the right-wing government.
Wiener’s declaration in January accusing Israel of genocide caused an uproar among Jewish leaders and voters nationally and prompted his resignation as co-chair of the California Jewish Caucus.
For years, I’ve condemned Netanyahu and his extremist government and the devastation they’ve inflicted on Gaza. It’s why I’ve been clear I won’t support U.S. funding for the destruction of Palestinian communities. I’ve stopped short of calling it genocide, but I can’t anymore. pic.twitter.com/71nIt6K527
— Senator Scott Wiener (@Scott_Wiener) January 11, 2026
Wiener had already positioned himself as a progressive on Israel. He was an early supporter of a bilateral ceasefire, called the war “indefensible” and said he would back congressional measures to halt the sale of offensive weapons to Israel. But his declaration of genocide came under duress, after he faced widespread backlash from progressive voters when he refused during a candidate debate to say whether or not he believed Israel was committing genocide.
The episode reflected both the political pressures facing Jewish members of Congress and the changing landscape of Democratic leadership.
Wiener is running in the company of Massachusetts Rep. Seth Moulton, who is challenging incumbent Sen. Ed Markey in Massachusetts; Brad Lander, running against Rep. Dan Goldman in New York; and Daniel Biss, the Democratic nominee for the Illinois seat represented by retiring Rep. Jan Schakowsky, all of whom promised not to take contributions from the Israeli government-allied American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
These Jewish candidates remain supportive of Israel’s existence and reject efforts to isolate the Jewish state. But they are now more willing to embrace language that would have been politically unthinkable for mainstream Jewish elected officials just a decade ago, when figures such as retiring congressman Jerry Nadler and the late Reps. Nita Lowey and Eliot Engel, all of New York, were the faces of progressive Jewish politics. Pelosi, who often spoke of her pride in her Jewish grandchildren and her father’s early support for Israel’s founding, led a generation of Democrats for whom unwavering pro-Israel support was a given.
Wiener’s election would signal the start of a new era. Notably absent from Wiener’s remarks on Tuesday were references to Israel, antisemitism or his Jewish identity.
Other California races
Other high-profile California races saw progressive candidates outside the bubble as centrist and conservative candidates advanced in open primaries where the top two vote-getters advance to the general election.
In Los Angeles, with about half of votes counted, Republican ex-reality TV star Spencer Pratt (29.5% of the vote) appears poised to advance to the general election, along with incumbent Democratic Mayor Karen Bass (36.5%). Nithya Raman — a democratic socialist who once won a pro-Israel endorsement — lags well behind them with about half the votes counted. Billionaire Democrat (and former synagogue president) Adam Miller was a distant fourth, with 4% of the vote.
And with a slew of Democrats splitting votes in the governor’s race, Republican talk show host Steve Hilton led all candidates with 27% of the vote, closely trailed by Xavier Becerra (26%), who was the health and human services secretary under President Joe Biden. Billionaire progressive Tom Steyer had just under 20% of the vote with about half of the votes counted.
Rep. Brad Sherman of Los Angeles will advance to the general election, staving off a challenge from fellow Democrat Jake Levine, a former Biden administration official.
Rep. Ro Khanna had 57% of the vote in his Silicon Valley district, meaning he will most likely win the office without a runoff. Khanna is one of the most outspoken critics of Israel in Congress.
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At the Vatican with Chicago’s mayor, a rabbi gave Pope Leo a White Sox kippah
(JTA) — Lizzi Heydemann didn’t plan what she was going to say to Pope Leo XIV.
But when the Chicago rabbi found herself face-to-face with the new pontiff during a Vatican visit alongside a delegation of Chicago leaders, she thanked him for the way he has spoken about the war in Gaza.
“I said, you know, it’s been a hard time over these past two years to be a rabbi, but I want to thank you for, in the midst of conflict, holding the humanity of everyone involved in the conflict,” Heydemann recounted.
Leo, the first American pope and a native of Chicago’s South Side, repeatedly advocated after his election last year for the release of the Israeli hostages as well as a ceasefire in the war in Gaza, which he has referred to as “vengeance” and “barbarity.” The comments angered some Jewish leaders who have interpreted them as unfairly targeting Israel, but for others including Heydemann, they have offered a template for how to criticize the war.
“You may be anti-war, but I do not hear you denouncing or degrading people,” Heydemann said she told Leo. “Thank you for holding the humanity of Israelis and Palestinians in the same breath and the same thought. It’s not something that is modeled very often.”
She added, “He seemed grateful, and like he knew exactly what I was talking about.”
Heydemann, the founder and leader of Mishkan Chicago, an independent Jewish spiritual community, had been invited by Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson to join a delegation of civic, business and faith leaders traveling to Rome last week. (Johnson has been a vocal critic of Israel who has drawn criticism himself from some Jewish leaders in Chicago.) She said she was the only rabbi to take part in the trip.
As she waited for the pope to enter a room where the delegation was assembled on Thursday, Heydemann said she began weeping.
“What I reflected on is that he, maybe more than anyone in the world, is a religious leader with the world’s eyes on him,” Heydemann said. “He is beloved and critiqued constantly, and every rabbi in America has had a little taste over the last few years of that weight.”
While the interaction carried an unexpected emotional weight for Heydemann, it also came with a distinctive Jewish Chicago touch: a White Sox-themed kippah.
She said she included the kippah, which featured the Chicago White Sox logo on the exterior as well as a pomegranate on the inside, in a chest of Chicago-themed gifts presented to the pope on Thursday during the visit as a nod to his lifelong devotion to the baseball team.
“We thought that would be a sweet point connection between me and the pope,” Heydemann said, adding that the pontiff’s typical white zucchetto looks “awfully like a kippah.”
“It brings us all joy to imagine that after a long day at work wearing the cream-colored one that matches his robes, maybe at the end of the day he’ll switch it out for a jersey material, White Sox kippah, and thinks fondly of sweet home Chicago, and the Jewish spiritual community gave it to him,” Heydemann added.
A list of gifts that circulated in local media included another piece of Jewish paraphernalia: a tote bag with the words “Resisting tyrants since Pharaoh.” That’s a catchphrase from T’ruah, the rabbinic human rights group where Heydemann has been on the board. But the rabbi said the inclusion was an error: She was carrying the bag, not giving it to Leo.
Looking back on the meeting with the pope, Heydemann said her experience reflected a broader conviction about “building bridges, even in the presence of difference.”
“There’s too much at stake in our world for us to not be continuing to be in relationship with one another in the presence of differences,” Heydemann said.
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