9/11 must become America’s Tish’ah b’Av

The summer is an ironically somber time for Jews. While the weather reaches its height of annual jollity, the Jewish calendar reaches its nadir.

The fast of Tish’ah 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 Tishah B’Av. Nor the was the catalogue of woe limited to ancient times. During the time of the Spanish Inquisition, Tishah B’Av 1492 was the deadline for the Jews to leave the country or face death. And in 1914, Tishah 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.

But, not many weeks after Tish’ah b’Av, there comes another summer day of mourning: a Gregorian date which has held significance for far less time.

A quarter-century has passed (somehow) since the massacre of 9/11. I was not yet eight-years-old 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 & 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 Yiz’kor service of remembrance for an event of which I personally remember only fragments.

While the Jewish people as a whole have never been in danger of forgetting our exhaustive string of 9/11s, a large section of the events of the last 25 years have demonstrated that many Americans have indeed forgotten theirs.

Some of this amnesia, of course, has roots in one positive aspect of the American character. Unlike others, modern Americans have little talent for holding onto exterior grudges. Any hatred Italians bear for Austrians, or Poles for Russians, Englishmen for Frenchman, Croatians for Serbs is a passé, faraway concept in the American psyche. With human history checkerboarded 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. For Americans, unlike other peoples, have usually been good at forgiving—even if that grace is “cheap,” as 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)—actually a Muslim Brotherhood terrorist organization in its own right—brought President Bush to a mosque and instructed him that “Islam is peace.” The murderers who had just carried out the mass slaughter of 2,977 people suddenly were almost “forgiven”—and they suddenly had committed this act of ineffable evil for reasons different from their stated ones. Instead of letting the American people learn about the ideology which had flown men into buildings instead of to the Moon, the naïve, well-meaning Bush administration was successfully convinced that such a conversation was “hateful” and not worth having.

Words like “radicalism,” “fundamentalism,” and “extremism” substituted the proper name of the hijackers’ creed, blocking people from truly understanding the gravity of the ongoing 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 America’s history. By the Obama years, “Islamophobia”—a term imported from the British Muslim mobs who had 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 so wounded had gained in fashion.

American society never thought deeply about how to preserve the memory of 9/11 while it was still fresh, and then, distracted by controversial wars, economic recession, and the massive political chaos which followed in Obama’s wake, the country made good use of its ability to forget and seemed to be content with slowly “moving on.” With both Millennials and “Gen Z” generally having developed awash in the propaganda either of anti-American teachers’ unions or the wastes of “Podcastistan,” to them, 9/11 is often just a few images from the magnetic tape age, only of interest 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, too—in which support for strict adherence to Sharia 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 expressed deep hatred of Jews—never seem to have registered as sufficiently important. Islam is not a race and it was never racist to worry about how compatible certain beliefs were with a tolerant and diverse country’s system of constitutional rights. Now, in 2026, violence on the part of Muslim immigrants against Jewish and non-Jewish Americans alike has only become far more common than it was in 2001. Anti-American Muslim politicians have been elected to serve inside the very Capitol Building Flight 93 probably was meant to destroy, and CAIR, known to be a money-laundering front for Hamas, is organizing more than 200 similar candidates to run for state and local seats nationwide.

Today, our leaders and our culture’s irresponsibility has let national memory evaporate to such an extent that Zohran Mamdani—a Jew-hating, Muslim communist who appointed a lawyer who defended an al-Qaeda terrorist out of direct sympathy as his chief counsel—is 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 they, too, had forgotten 9/11. They voted for a man who said he wants to “globalize” Hamas’s anti-Jewish genocide and made arresting Prime Minister Netanyahu (an utterly illegal fantasy) a major campaign promise.

Jewish New Yorkers might like to know that the plot which 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 difficult, and “the majority of people who work in the World Trade Center are Jews,” Yousef told Yasin, the target was moved to Lower Manhattan. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11, was Yousef’s uncle, and 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, a maximum of around 400 Jews are estimated to have been murdered in all three strikes and all four planes.

At this perilous point, is there any conceivable salve for such suicidal absentmindedness?

The only possible answer would be for Americans to borrow a leaf from Jewish tradition. Though the First Temple was destroyed in 586 B.C.E. and the Second in 70 C.E., most Jews have never forgotten. Why? Because Jews understood these catastrophes as spiritual as well as historical events; that they had meaning for future generations; and that they were blaringly relevant for their relationship with God.

Jews never forgot the destruction of the Temples because the rabbis established the fast of Tish’ah b’Av, an integral part of an exiled nation’s liturgy which grounded it in the significance of calamity as both a wicked enemy’s cruelty on the outside but also its own failure within.

Yet, as the ArtScroll introduction continues, “The Sages teach that the Messiah will be born on Tishah 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 which mirrored Jews’ remembrance of the destructions of the Temples, America could begin turning towards its redemption. Understanding where the nation went wrong, but seeing the nation as a sacred thing which 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 little. That is how 2,977 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. “We do not forget our tragedies,” ArtScroll concludes, for “we retain our optimism, because ‘Had I not fallen, I could not have arisen; had I not sat in the darkness, God would not have been a light to me’ (Midrash Tehilim Ch. 22).”

A version of this article was also published in JNS. Used with permission.