Rabin’s legacy matters more than ever, our amnesia is putting us at risk - opinion

I was 10 years old on November 4, 1995. My family had recently moved back to Israel after over a decade in the US. My parents decided to return, believing that under Rabin, peace, and maybe even normalcy, were within reach. That night, as my parents watched the news, I lay in bed crying, realizing for the first time that the home we returned to could break from within.

For many Israelis of my generation, Rabin’s assassination marked the end of political innocence. I grew up in a “post-Rabin” Israel. His death shaped my identity. I spent years educating youth about peace and democracy, eventually becoming a spokesperson for the national Rabin memorial rally.

It’s hard to imagine, but the initial American Jewish response was extraordinary, matching October 7 in intensity and pain. A week after the assassination, Carnegie Hall overflowed with mourners. A month later, Jewish institutions filled Madison Square Garden for “Shalom Chaver” (“Goodbye, friend”), a vigil uniting religious and secular, liberal and conservative Jews.

Schools integrated the event into curricula. Leaders discussed democratic values and the costs of hatred. American Jews had to confront an impossible reality: Jews could murder Jews over politics.

Yet, within two years, the commemorations were gone. The question haunts me: Why did American Jews forget Rabin?

PART OF the answer lies in timing. Rabin’s assassination coincided with a shift in American Jewish priorities. The 1990 National Jewish Population Study had triggered panic over assimilation, estimating the intermarriage rate at 52%. Synagogue attendance was dropping. The community turned inward, launching moonshot initiatives like Birthright to tackle what became known as the “continuity crisis.”

Then came politics. Netanyahu’s election in 1996, immediately after the assassination, complicated American Jewish relationships with Israeli leadership. Unlike Holocaust Remembrance Day or Independence Day, no unified commemoration emerged. Israeli society itself was too conflicted about Rabin’s legacy to provide clear guidance. Orthodox-secular and Left-Right divisions deepened. As Oslo collapsed into bloodshed, Rabin’s name became synonymous with failed idealism.

The forgetting was gradual but thorough. Abraham Foxman, then ADL director, told me that in the years immediately following the assassination, he would take visitors to Rabin’s memorial in Tel Aviv. “But after a few years,” he recalled, “we stopped talking about the assassination and started talking about Israel, the Start-Up Nation.” By the mid-2000s, most Jewish institutions had quietly dropped Rabin Memorial Day from their calendars, replacing difficult conversations about political violence with safer narratives about innovation and advocacy.

Still, there’s a deeper reason for this amnesia. Both Rabin’s assassination and October 7 tore the fabric of Jewish life – first from within, then from without. Both forced us to confront uncomfortable truths about violence and the limits of Jewish unity. What’s the difference? October 7 brought forth moral clarity and a unified response, at least initially; Rabin’s assassination implicated us in our own tragedy, revealing the cancer within.

This is why remembering Rabin is so urgent. His assassination wasn’t just an Israeli trauma: It was a rupture in modern Jewish history. Jews have long lived between the particular and the universal, sovereignty and diaspora. Rabin’s murder challenged our ability to govern ourselves. October 7 wasn’t just an intelligence failure – it came amid profound internal tensions within Israel and between Israel and world Jewry. Israel has succeeded militarily since, but at a steep internal cost.

Remembering Rabin isn’t about Oslo nostalgia: It is about moral clarity. Rabin’s legacy – his insistence that peace and security must coexist, that democracy demands courage, that Jewish peoplehood cannot survive hatred from within – has never been more urgent.

The deeper tragedy is not only that Rabin was murdered, but that his assassination was a warning unheeded. The same forces of incitement, religious extremism, and civic unrest that led to his death have only grown stronger. Israel’s democracy has been tested as never before, and American Jewry has grown increasingly polarized over its future.

MEMORY HOLDS sacred space in Jewish life, yet we’ve failed to transform Rabin’s assassination into the teaching moment it must become. Unlike Gedaliah ben Achikam, whose political murder 2,500 years ago we still commemorate, Rabin risks becoming a footnote. Creating shared memory requires more than op-eds and ceremonies – we need stories.

That’s why I edited and published Class of 95, a book of Israeli poems responding to Rabin’s assassination. It features voices old and new, offering poetry, art, and reflection. This new edition, for the 30th memorial, is a way for American Jews to re-enter Israeli cultural memory and to reckon with a legacy that feels newly urgent.

Remembering Rabin isn’t just about the past: It’s about our future. His assassination reminds us that democracy can die from silence, not just violence. October 7 demonstrated that even in the face of external threats, we cannot afford internal collapse. Healing must hold both truths.

In Jewish tradition, mourning is cyclical. We return each year to the same stories, not to reopen wounds, but to learn from them. Thirty years later, we must return to Rabin’s story as moral inheritors. His memory belongs to all Jews because the wound he left is one in our shared peoplehood.

As Rabin told American Jewish leaders in 1994: “We do not forget for a moment that whether you support our actions or oppose them, we are all brothers, we are all Jews, and we all share the same destiny.”

That quote opens Class of '95. It should guide us now. In a time of siege, on Israeli democracy, on Jewish unity, remembering Rabin is not nostalgia – it is an act of responsibility.