Summer is an ironically somber time for Jews. While the weather reaches pleasant highs, the Jewish calendar reaches its nadir.
The fast of Tisha B’Av commemorates what ArtScroll’s introduction to the book of Lamentations, read in the synagogue that evening, calls “the quintessential day of Jewish tragedy.”
It continues:
It was the day when the Jews in the Wilderness believed the libel of the Spies, and that generation lost its chance to enter the Land of Israel. Among other national calamities, both Temples were destroyed on Tisha B’Av. Nor was the catalogue of woe limited to ancient times. During the time of the Spanish Inquisition, Tisha B’Av 1492 was the deadline for the Jews to leave the country or face death. And in 1914, Tisha B’Av was the day when World War I was declared, thus ushering in the political and economic collapse that resulted in the Bolshevik Revolution and the Holocaust.
Not many weeks after Tisha B’Av, another day of mourning arrives: a Gregorian date that has held significance for a much shorter period.
A quarter-century has passed (somehow) since the massacre of Sept. 11, 2001. I was not yet eight and retain no memory of the day itself, but I do remember the aftermath: The late Bill Moyers speaking of the “smoking wound” in America’s heart; at least one animated PBS children’s show highlighting real children handing out pastries to surviving firefighters; and, of course, the trickle of trailers for searing, searching documentaries—the crowning masterpiece of which was Helen Whitney’s Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero.
Every year, I make a ritual of watching Whitney’s film and a small collection of others as my own sort of yizkor service of remembrance for an event of which I personally remember only fragments.
While the Jewish people have never been in danger of forgetting our exhaustive string of 9/11s, events over the last 25 years have demonstrated that many Americans have forgotten theirs.
Some of this amnesia has roots in a positive aspect of the American character. Unlike others, modern Americans have little talent for holding onto exterior grudges. Any hatred Italians bear for Austrians, Poles for Russians, Englishmen for Frenchmen or Croatians for Serbs is a faraway concept in the American psyche. With human history checkered with constant national and tribal feuding, the American preference for “moving on” and worrying about the newest iPhone can sometimes be more refreshing than troubling. Americans, unlike other peoples, have usually been good at forgiving; even if that grace is “cheap,” as Dietrich Bonhoeffer famously called it.
But amnesic forgiveness has cost America dear. Only six days after 9/11, Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR)— a Muslim Brotherhood organization—brought President George W. Bush to a mosque and instructed him that “Islam is peace.” The murderers who had just carried out the mass slaughter of 3,000 people were suddenly almost “forgiven,” as if they had committed an act of ineffable evil for reasons different from those they openly acknowledged. Instead of helping the American people learn about the ideology that had flown men into buildings, the naive, well-meaning Bush administration was convinced that such a conversation was “hateful” and not worth having.
Words like “radicalism,” “fundamentalism” and “extremism” substituted for the proper name of the hijackers’ creed, preventing people from understanding the gravity of the threat the country faced. Then, the failure to effectively justify the war in Afghanistan—let alone the project to “democratize” it—as a response to 9/11 made many lose interest. The Iraq War, despite the irrevocably abhorrent character of Saddam Hussein, also did very little, even before its popularity began to dissolve, to sanctify 9/11 as a pivotal part of American history.
Today, our leaders’ and our culture’s irresponsibility has allowed national memory to evaporate.
By the Obama years, “Islamophobia”—a term imported from the British Muslim mobs who supported Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie in 1989—achieved an importance it did not have before, and a decidedly “self-critical” attitude to the America 9/11 had so wounded became fashionable.
American society never thought deeply about how to preserve the memory of 9/11 while it was still fresh. Then, distracted by controversial wars, economic recession and the massive political chaos that followed in Obama’s wake, the country made good use of its ability to forget and seemed to be content with “moving on.”
To both Millennials and Gen Z, having grown up awash in the propaganda of anti-American teachers’ unions and the podcast wasteland, 9/11 is often just a few images from the magnetic tape age. It is of interest only as a vessel of conspiratorial nonsense. Not surprisingly, by 2025, a Harvard Political Review poll found that only 41% of young Americans were proud of their country, and 29% agreed that they were “embarrassed to be American.”
Concerns about immigration from the Muslim world never registered as important. This, even though support for strict adherence to sharia law hovered at a mean of 56.8% in a 2013 Pew study and, according to a 2014 ADL poll, 74% of Muslims in the Middle East and North Africa harbor deep hatred of Jews.
Now, in 2026, violence on the part of Muslim immigrants against Jewish and non-Jewish Americans alike is far more common than it was in 2001. Anti-American Muslim politicians have been elected to serve inside the very Capitol Building that Flight 93 was probably meant to destroy. CAIR is organizing more than 200 similar candidates to run for state and local offices nationwide.
Today, our leaders’ and our culture’s irresponsibility has allowed national memory to evaporate to such an extent that Zohran Mamdani—a Jew-hating, Muslim communist who appointed a lawyer who defended an al-Qaeda terrorist as his chief counsel—has become the mayor of New York City. Seduced by absurd promises of free buses and groceries, hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers voted for a man who blamed FBI surveillance for Al-Qaeda imam Anwar al-Awlaki’s decision to join the organization and took $100,000 in campaign donations from CAIR.
Even worse, some 33% of Jewish New Yorkers proved that they, too, had forgotten 9/11. They voted for Mamdani, even though he said he wants to “globalize” the intifada and made arresting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (an utterly illegal fantasy) a major campaign promise.
Jewish New Yorkers might like to know that the plot that eventually became 9/11 originated as a plot to massacre Jews. As 1993 World Trade Center bombing conspirator Abdul Rahman Yasin admitted to CBS News in 2002, chief bomber Ramzi Yousef “told me, ‘I want to blow up Jewish neighborhoods in Brooklyn.’”
Since bombing Crown Heights and Williamsburg proved too challenging and considering—according to Yousef—“the majority of people who work in the World Trade Center are Jews,” the target was relocated to Lower Manhattan. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11, was Yousef’s uncle, and he vowed to complete the atrocity his nephew had left unfinished. In the end, despite Hezbollah’s lie that no Jews went to work that day, around 400 Jews are estimated to have been murdered in all three strikes and on all four planes.
Understanding where the nation went wrong, but seeing the nation as a sacred thing that must be preserved to be restored.
At this perilous point, is there any conceivable salve for such suicidal absentmindedness?
The only possible answer would be for Americans to borrow from Jewish tradition. Though the First Temple was destroyed in 586 BCE and the Second in 70 CE, most Jews have never forgotten. Why? Jews understood these catastrophes as both spiritual and historical events, recognizing their significance for future generations and their profound relevance to the Jews’ relationship with God.
Jews never forgot the destruction of the Temples because the rabbis established the fast of Tisha B’Av as an integral part of the tradition of an exiled nation. The fast serves as a reminder of the calamity that struck the nation, both as a result of the wicked cruelty of an external enemy and as a consequence of the nation’s own failures.
Yet, as the ArtScroll introduction states, “The sages teach that the Messiah will be born on Tisha B’Av, meaning that a proper understanding of and reflection upon the causes of destruction reveal that contained within are the seeds of redemption.”
If America were to develop a reverence for 9/11 that mirrored Jews’ remembrance of the destruction of the Temples, then it could begin turning toward its own redemption: understanding where the nation went wrong, but seeing the nation as a sacred thing that must be preserved to be restored.
Recognizing 9/11 as a perennial spiritual trauma to be healed is what Whitney’s extraordinary film does, and why it has aged so well. This is how 3,000 innocent people’s lives can be given sanctity.
America cannot defeat its enemies and renew its vigor if it places no value upon sacred memory. That is what Judaism can teach.
