Lynda Ben-Menashe, the president of the National Council of Jewish Women Australia, expressed an apt sentiment after yesterday’s terror attack at Bondi Beach: She said that she was “horrified and devastated” but, she added, “not shocked.”
Indeed, how could anyone be shocked? The act of terrorism, in which a father-and-son duo targeted Jews celebrating Hanukkah and killed at least 15, was the deadliest in Australia’s history. But events have been working up to it since October 7, 2023.

When Rob Reiner died violently alongside his wife, Michele Singer Reiner, yesterday, a familiar thing happened in American public life: a window opened.
It opened not because Reiner, a vocal liberal, was universally beloved or politically neutral, but because his work occupied shared cultural space.

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The president is the only person in the United States with the megaphone to speak to the nation and guide them through moments of tragedy.

On the first night of Hanukkah, I learned that Eli Schlanger, a rabbi I had known for decades, was gunned down at a Hanukkah celebration he had organized in Sydney, attended by roughly 1,000 people. When Eli and I were 16, we volunteered together at a summer camp for indigent Ukrainian boys in Odesa. The early mornings we spent watching the sun rise over the beach, as he spoke with quiet certainty about his dream of becoming a rabbi and building a Jewish community, are etched in my memory.

Updated at 6:30 p.m. ET on December 15, 2025
On October 9, 2023—two days after the Hamas attacks on Israeli villages adjacent to Gaza—protesters gathered in front of the Sydney Opera House to chant angrily about the Jews. The chant sounded to many like Gas the Jews.