E very attack on Jews is chilling. But there are aspects of the tragedy in Poway, California, that make it uniquely so. The first of these dawned on me when, in the car on the way to Shacharis that morning, I heard the report of the attack and after spending about a minute on this story, the newscaster moved on to other items.

The contrast with the tragedy in Pittsburgh exactly six months earlier, which dominated the news for days, was striking. It’s not merely that this one involved much less loss of life, but that, as the second such attack on Jews at prayer by an armed marauder, the terrifying newness, and hence, uniqueness, of the occurrence was gone, forever. Now, this happens. Here, in America. Or, as a Times of Israel headline put it, “Synagogue Shootings — Now a Thing.”

Chilling, too, was the fact that the attacker didn’t seem to fit the usual mass-shooter profile we’ve come to expect. He was neither a deranged loner nor a longtime white nationalist steeped in violence and Jew-hatred. Coming from an intact family, headed by a father who’s a high-school physics teacher and a church elder, the killer was an excellent student and an accomplished pianist, a church-going young man training to be a nurse.

Moreover, as National Review’s Rich Lowry wrote, the murderer was self-radicalized on a right-wing message board on the website 8chan, posting before he went on his rampage a thank-you to the board’s users: “What I’ve learned here is priceless.” The San Diego shooter attested to how quickly he’d been prepped for mass murder by 8chan, where white nationalists push one another to undertake acts of violence that they call “real-life effort-posting.” He said he never could have imagined killing even a few months ago, and that he planned the attack in four weeks.

And finally, it is chilling to observe the continuing politicization of these shootings, even by our own people. It happened back in October following the Pittsburgh attack, and it has happened again this time. Before the sun had even risen on the day after the attack, a former Israeli UN ambassador had written, “This anti-semitic cartoon appeared in @nytimes on Thursday. Two days later, a gunman opened fire on a Chabad Synagogue in San Diego…. Incitement causes violence.” And the head of the Zionist Organization of America urged “Congressional leaders to condemn this and Omar/Tlaib antisemitic remarks now.”

But to insinuate that a white nationalist foaming at the mouth with Jew-hatred was incited to this act by a vile cartoon two days prior, or to insist on the precise conditions under which others must condemn this murder is to instrumentalize the murder of Jews for the crassest political gain. It is outrageous, just as it was outrageous in October when some Jews decried the visit of the American president to the site of the Pittsburgh massacre.

This sort of manipulation of tragedy happens every time there’s another mass shooting in this country, with political hacks using them to score points about things like gun control. And now we Jews are going to do this to ourselves? We’re a small, very vulnerable minority that, by Hashem’s chesed, has found a hospitable haven on these shores, and we’ve got to resist the temptation of partisan point-scoring and preserve Jew-hatred as an issue that’s free of political pandering.

The Democratic House majority cowardly declined to condemn the anti-Semitic congresswoman from Minnesota (although individual congressional leaders did), while at AIPAC, Democratic leaders condemned leftist anti-Semites but Republicans failed to reciprocate regarding the right-wing variety (with Vice President Pence not even mentioning Pittsburgh). But we cannot allow others, on either side of the political divide, to turn us Jews into pawns in a cynical game of one-ups-man-ship. Not even one Jewish life is worth that price.

Hashem runs the world, but we have to make our hishtadlus to do what we can to put the demons of Jew-hatred that have now been released back into the bottle. And we can start by rejecting the politicization of Jewish tragedy.

Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 759. Eytan Kobre may be contacted directly at kobre@mishpacha.com