Kathleen Hayes
Jewish Journal, May 25, 2025
“But beyond the focus on Jews, this Manichean worldview declares entire classes of people reactionary and evil, and suggests they ultimately must be eliminated for the sake of human betterment.”
The cult has metastasized.
For 25 years, I belonged to a far-left, insular, authoritarian Trotskyist organization. Today I’d prefer not to write about myself and my bizarre past, but about the murders of two young people, Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Lynn Milgrim, outside a Jewish museum in Washington, D.C. last week. I’d like to simply express my shock and sorrow about the killings of these clearly beautiful souls, and my fear about what they bode for America, Israel and the West. And yet it’s impossible for me to write that kind of piece, because of who I am and where I’ve been. I’m gripped with the sense that the deranged sect I left behind is now everywhere, spawning toxic new cells scoring previously unimaginable victories.
I never met Elias Rodriguez, the accused murderer of Lischinsky and Milgrim, but I know his world. I’m quite familiar with the Party for Socialism and Liberation, the radical Maoist organization he once belonged to; my now-ex-comrades supported the PSL’s candidates in the 2024 presidential election and I had many encounters with its predecessor group, the Workers World Party. Before quitting my former group in 2016, I marched countless times in demonstrations organized by ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism), another activist group Rodriguez apparently belonged to. His beliefs and delusions were, broadly speaking, mine.
Today they’re shared by a wide swath of liberal society—people who would never shoot a young man and woman in cold blood, but who think there’s a context in which the shootings are, if not justifiable, then at least comprehensible as a response to Israel’s “genocide.” As Time magazine helpfully explains: “The shooting comes amid rising tensions over Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza, which has left an estimated at least 50,000 Palestinians dead and millions more displaced since Oct. 7, 2023.” With so much Palestinian suffering, they imply, what’s a couple of Israeli embassy staffers? … [To read the full article, click here]