Thinking about heroes

This is a scary time

Last weekend was a nightmare. First, the murders at Brown; someone walking onto a campus not so far from here, murdering two students, and injuring nine others. Quirky, sunny, happy Brown. And despite the FBI’s early announcement that the murderer had been caught, that murderer is still at liberty.

Then Bondi, where the targets were not young people but Jews of all ages. The father and son who chose to bond over murder are unspeakable. One is dead, the other nearly so, but how much better would it have been had they shot each other accidentally but lethally in their Islamic State training course.

We know that antisemitism — maybe it’s time to stop being so mealymouthed and say we know that Jew-hatred — is rising. Why do they hate us so? Who knows? And to some extent, who cares. But they do, and we have to pay attention to it.

And the very private although very public murders of Rob and Michele Singer Reiner. Their deaths are a loss to the world. The story is shockingly tragic — Shakespearean, really, although even Shakespeare didn’t showcase a loved, cared for, but ultimately beyond-redemption son who stabbed both his parents to death. Probably because these deaths, coming as they did at the end of the weekend, were intensely personalized as the others couldn’t be because Rob Reiner is a person who lived on our big and small screens for most of our lives (and whose own father created much of Jewish television comedy).

The Reiners were’t murdered because they were Jewish, but they were so very Jewish that it seems personal to us.

Meanwhile, Yair Rosenberg has a piece in the Atlantic about antisemitism. He says that not only is it rising, it’s generational. Young people are far more antisemitic than their parents, he says, quoting statistics that seem to make his case.

It’s a grim read.

But not to be all Pollyanna-ish about it, it’s not impossible. Although more young people are antisemitic than their parents, and far more than should be — that number should be zero — it’s still a minority.

And when we look at the murderers at Bondi Beach, we also should remember the heroes who risked their lives to save others. There is the story of Boris Gurman, who tried to take away one of the killers’ guns. He failed, and was murdered, and so was his wife, Sofia, but he tried.

And then there is the Syrian-born fruit seller, Ahmed al-Ahmed, who almost died trying to save Jews. “I’d do it again,” he said.

When they discuss Mr. al-Ahmed, newspaper stories often identify him as a bystander, but that is not only wrong but the opposite of the truth. Bystanders stand by. He did not. He jumped in. He threw himself in. He is an upstanding, outstanding hero.

We can’t all be heroes. We all hope to be lucky enough never to know if we could be heroic. But we all can be grateful for them, and we can do our best to do what they did, and what Rob and Michele Reiner did — make the world better when they leave it than it was when they entered it.

—JP