The New Yorker:

Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky were killed without regard for who they were, or what they believed.

By Emma Green

Sarah Milgrim was someone who knew “exactly what she wanted out of life,” according to people who knew her well. She was an idealist who invested herself in Jewish life, and in the future of Israel. At her high school, in the suburbs of Kansas City, she was a member of the Jewish Student Union; as a senior, she was interviewed by a local news station after someone spray-painted swastikas on a school building. “I worry about going to my synagogue,” she said. “And now I have to worry about safety at my school.”

Later, at the University of Kansas, she was on the board of her campus Hillel chapter and went on a Birthright trip to Israel. In graduate school at American University and the U.N.’s University for Peace, where she focussed on sustainable development, she got involved in Tech2Peace, an N.G.O. that brings together young Israelis and Palestinians for training in Israel’s high-tech industry. She later joined the American Jewish Committee’s young-professionals program. She considered working for U.S.A.I.D. Shortly after the October 7th attacks on Israel, though, she went to work for the Israeli Embassy in D.C. “She felt really strongly about improving the world and leaving it better than she found it,” Dana Walker, the director of the American Jewish Committee program, told me.

Milgrim’s boyfriend, Yaron Lischinsky, worked alongside her at the Israeli Embassy. He was idealistic, too, though his life had followed a different path. Lischinsky grew up in Israel and Germany. He was an Israeli citizen and he served in the Israel Defense Forces. His father was Jewish, his mother Christian. “Even though my parents had different beliefs, the internal struggles I faced mostly stemmed not from their cultural backgrounds or different religions, but from the tension between, on the one hand, growing up in a religious home and, on the other hand, living in a secular society,” he wrote on an application to a yearlong conservative liberal-arts program at the Argaman Institute, in Jerusalem. He hungered to understand the political and moral thought of the West. Lischinsky was Christian, not Jewish—“a man of belief,” Ronen Shoval, a political philosopher who has been one of the intellectual architects of Israel’s sharp turn toward right-wing Zionism, and who taught Lischinsky at Argaman, told me. Lischinsky “was willing to bond his future to the future of the Jewish state,” Shoval said. “This was a person who was willing to actually change his life.”

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