For Rep. Greg Landsman (D-OH), the murder of two Israeli Embassy employees outside the Capital Jewish Museum last week brought to life fears he has harbored for months, amid rising extremism in anti-Israel demonstrations.

The Jewish Ohio congressman told Jewish Insider in an interview on Wednesday that days before the shooting, while attending a public event in downtown Cincinnati, he had a “really vivid image of being shot in the back of the head. What I saw was myself laying on the ground in the way in which you would be if you had been shot in the head … I wasn’t alive, I was dead.”

“And then, literally two or three days later, that’s what happened outside the Jewish museum. That’s what happened to these two innocent people,” Landsman continued. “When I saw it, I immediately thought, that’s where they are. They’re on the ground dead … It all then just felt so inevitable that this was going to happen.”

He said he feels the country has been on a “trajectory” toward such violence by anti-Israel agitators, and is worried that it will continue without a change in course. Landsman said that he and other members of the Jewish community, particularly fellow Jewish lawmakers, have had growing fears of violence akin to last week’s murders since the Oct. 7 attacks.

“It’s the way in which they get in your face and they speak to you and they’re saying these incredibly threatening things, like, ‘You’re going to pay for this,’” Landsman explained, referring to anti-Israel demonstrators. “That was a line I heard many, many times. Once in a Target parking lot with my children … This was what we were afraid of.”

A group of anti-Israel protesters also spent days camped outside Landsman’s house, including overnight, yards from his bedroom.

“This is the trajectory, incidentally, of all blood libels, when Jews are accused of murder, from the blood libel around Jesus to the blood libel around genocide,” he said.

Landsman said that, in the immediate aftermath of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terror attacks, he’d been able to have meaningful conversations with large groups of constituents about the attacks and the developing war in Gaza and about their differing positions on it.

But over time, he continued, “those groups have gotten smaller, but more intense. The numbers have shrunk but the rhetoric and the vitriol has grown, has worsened.”

Landsman issued a lengthy statement earlier this week outlining his fears, the links he sees between the shooting and “blood libels” spread about Israel and the Jewish community and the path forward to counter antisemitism.

He told JI he initially wrote the statement to make sense of the shooting and his thoughts around it, and to process what he and his family have been experiencing. He said he put it out in the hopes of helping people — even those who disagree with him about Israel policy — to think about their behavior and decisions and to lay out a “better path.”

“This is an incredibly complicated set of situations. The murders on Wednesday were just horrific and maddening,” Landsman said. “We’ve got to go down a different path and I tried to lay that out, and hopefully that’ll be part of the conversation. There is a difference between protest and chaos, there’s a difference between free speech and hate speech and violent rhetoric. And the more people know where those lines are, the better.”

Landsman argued that leaders at all levels have a responsibility to educate themselves and help their communities “understand where the lines are” between criticism of Israel and antisemitism. “There’s a way to speak out on whatever side that helps people get closer to solving a problem and doesn’t ever lead anyone to believe they should go pick up a gun and go kill Jews.”

He said that political leaders who have perpetuated narratives accusing Israel of genocide or turned a blind eye to violent rhetoric from anti-Israel demonstrators have fed into the milieu of “anti-Israel outbursts — I don’t want to call them protests” that culminated in last week’s shooting. 

“I don’t want to say that they contributed to what happened [last] Wednesday, although all of these roads ended up there,” Landsman said. “I think silence can be a contributing factor to something getting worse.”

He said there have also been failures to properly distinguish protected free speech from unprotected speech, and protests with proper permits adhering to relevant laws and the “chaos” that has characterized others. 

Landsman emphasized that he’s a strong advocate for protest and freedom of speech, but that anti-Israel protests like those outside his home have routinely breached relevant laws governing such demonstrations.

When protests cross a line into dangerous territory, Landsman said, “you can’t just sit there and say, ‘Oh, it’s free speech.’ And I think that has happened across the board. That’s what happened at Columbia. It’s what happened outside my house.”

He offered particular condemnation for professors at schools such as Columbia University for encouraging anti-Israel protesters. The students, he noted, in some cases faced strong punishment, while many of the faculty, having tenure, remain largely unaffected.

“They took these 18-, 19-, 20-year-old kids who needed guidance, gave them none, pushed them into the lion’s den, and then walked away,” Landsman said. “If you’re in a position of leadership, you’ve got to lead, and leading means engaging, and engaging means problem-solving and working through something.”

One of Landsman’s main recommendations for addressing antisemitism and trying to prevent further violence is passing the Antisemitism Awareness Act, which was derailed in the Senate by lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. He suggested that much of the discourse claiming the bill would silence freedom of speech is driven by a lack of understanding of the legislation and its use of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism.

Landsman said the legislation, and any issues around antisemitism and hatred, should not be politicized, noting that many lawmakers on both sides are guilty of doing so. He said that the strident opposition to the legislation from both sides shows the extent of antisemitism, and the ways that actors on the right and left are reluctant to grapple with the antisemitic nature of things they say or believe.

He added that the bill does not silence freedom of speech, but it does help clarify the ways that attacks on Israel and the Jewish community can be antisemitic and can help encourage training and education to “help everyone, not just Jewish students.”

Though the legislation focuses exclusively on campus issues, Landsman said that adopting the IHRA definition through the legislation will provide a signal and a tool for other communities and society at large to understand antisemitism, and would help tackle one of the epicenters of antisemitism nationwide.

“I do think helping college campuses do this better is a huge step in the right direction,” Landsman said. “It’s all connected … You get [the bill] passed and then you start applying that to big tech, you start applying it to … the medical field … I think it becomes a vehicle or similar bills become relevant for other spaces. But you’ve got to get this one done.”

He also encouraged individuals and institutions, like college campuses, to take the time to look at and utilize resources from nonpartisan Jewish community institutions like the American Jewish Committee and work with such groups to better understand antisemitism and the dangers of violent anti-Israel ideologies — and of ideologies seeking to eliminate Palestinians.

Landsman, characterizing the Trump administration’s rescinding of federal funds for universities and student visas as unproductive, also urged the administration to work with groups like AJC to put together plans to address the issue and work with universities to implement them. 

“It’s not TV stuff, it’s not headline-grabbing stuff. It’s a real plan where, over the course of the next couple of years, we’re going to make some changes that will help dramatically improve peoples lives,” Landsman said. “And to some extent, that’s what the bill calls for.”