To paraphrase a Judith Viorst book title, December was a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad month.
Where to start?
On Dec. 13, a gunman fired into a study hall at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, killing two students and wounding nine others. This was the latest of around 75 school shootings in the United States in 2025. The body of the perpetrator was found five days after the shooting spree at Brown; authorities said that he died from a self-inflicted gunshot inside of a storage unit in New Hampshire.
In Minnesota, there have been at least 13 school shootings since 2008, according to CNN’s tally. I don’t know if the Annunciation Catholic Church mass shooting is included in the CNN count; the Aug. 27 shooting in south Minneapolis killed two young students, Fletcher Merkel and Harper Moyski, and wounded 30 other people, including 26 schoolchildren. A former Annunciation school student fired through the stained-glass windows of the church and then killed herself. Videos posted to YouTube by the 23-year-old perpetrator reportedly showed antisemitic, anti-Catholic and racist messages written on guns, along with the names of other mass shooters.
Gun violence has become commonplace in this country, which is awash in firearms, and we tend to forget the details of mass shootings over recent years. The high-profile mass shootings provide fodder for cable news shows, and coverage of the Brown University shooting continued for days.
“In the eight years between 2015 and 2022, over 19,000 people were shot and killed or wounded in the United States in a mass shooting,” according to the organization Everytown for Gun Safety. “The reach of each mass shooting stretches far beyond those killed and wounded, harming the well-being of survivors, their families, and entire communities.”
On Dec. 14, news coverage shifted to the massacre at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia, during a Hanuka celebration organized by the local Chabad affiliate. Two gunmen that authorities say were linked to the Islamic State (ISIS) killed 15 people, including Matilda, a 10-year-old child, the youngest victim of the attack.
The photo above (which appeared on Page 1 of the Jewish World’s January issue) shows people bringing balloons and flowers to the Dec. 18 funeral for Matilda. “I named her Matilda because she was our firstborn in Australia. And I thought that Matilda was the most Australian name that could ever exist,” her father Michael, a Jewish immigrant from Ukraine, said at a vigil earlier in the week, according to a JTA report. “So just remember — remember her name.”
Unlike in the U.S., mass shootings are not so common in Australia, which enacted strict gun laws after the 1996 massacre in Port Arthur, in which 35 people were murdered.
In the aftermath of the Bondi Beach massacre, various individuals and organizations sought to blame anti-Zionists or other culprits for the attack. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the attack was motivated by Australia’s recognition of a Palestinian state. Vice President JD Vance said, following the attack in Australia, that “the most significant single thing you could do to eliminate antisemitism and any other kind of ethnic hatred is to support our efforts to lower immigration and promote assimilation.”
Again, the Australian authorities have said that the gunmen, a father and son, had ties to ISIS, a nihilistic group that has killed many more Muslims than Jews.
As it happens, I’m in the newspaper business and watched too much news coverage on Dec. 14. Late in the evening, cable news outlets started reporting that two bodies were found in a home in the Bel Air neighborhood of Los Angeles. As it turned out, the victims of a stabbing attack were renowned actor, director and producer Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele Singer Reiner. The couple’s son, Nick Reiner, who has struggled with drug addiction, was charged for the murders. It was a heavy day.
On another topic, the Jewish World received two voicemail messages complaining about editorial and opinion content related to the Trump 2.0 administration and Israel. One caller canceled his subscription. I will venture a guess that the viewpoints expressed in the newspaper are fairly consonant with the political views held by readers. Jews overwhelmingly vote in the Democratic column, are appalled by the excesses of Trump and his gang of sycophants and are disturbed by Israel’s continuing assault on the people in Gaza, who have suffered through two years of devastation and carnage.
A Washington Post poll reported on Oct. 6 — about two years after the horrific Hamas attack on Israeli communities bordering Gaza that killed 1,200 people and took about 250 hostages — found that “American Jews sharply disapprove of Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza, with 61 percent saying Israel has committed war crimes and about 4 in 10 saying the country is guilty of genocide against the Palestinians.”
The Washington Post survey found that 68 percent of Jews give negative marks to Netanyahu’s leadership of Israel; “Jews also overwhelmingly blame Hamas, with 94 percent saying Hamas has committed war crimes against Israelis.”
The report on the poll noted: “The findings are striking given the long-standing ties between the U.S. Jewish community and Israel, suggesting the potential for a historic breach over the Gaza war.”
And I suggest that the organized Jewish community, locally and nationally, has failed Jewish Americans by not forthrightly acknowledging the anguish that we feel about what has transpired in Israel and Palestine. Apart from the humanitarian catastrophe Israel has created in Gaza, Israeli human rights monitors continually document the depredations by messianic Jewish settlers aided and abetted by IDF soldiers against Palestinians in the West Bank. This is abhorrent behavior and amounts to ethnic cleansing.
Hopefully, we will have better news to report in 2026.
Mordecai Specktor / editor [at] ajwnews [dot] com
(American Jewish World, January 2026)
