Editor's Message

MARCH 1, 2026 ~ NM JEWISH JOURNAL ~ 12 ADAR 5786

New Mexico Jewish Journal

01 Mar 2026 — 7 min read

EDITOR'S MESSAGE: Key Questions for our Community. In the early hours of Saturday, February 28th, while most Americans were absorbed by the Epstein saga, the U.S. and Israel launched a joint strike against Iran. By Saturday afternoon, a heightened security alert had been issued to Jewish institutions nationwide by the Secure Communications Network, the Anti-Defamation League, Jewish Federations of North America and other security networks to observe protocols for increased security at events.

As the news has trickled in, it was confirmed that Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed Saturday morning in a compound in Tehran by an Israeli strike, along with much of the leadership. CIA intelligence that they were all going to be gathered in one place prompted a change in the launch time of the joint US-Israel attacks, as first reported by the New York Times.

Israel will inevitably bear the blame, and antisemitism in the Diaspora will rise. These are not predictions so much as patterns we know too well. And whatever enthusiasm surrounds this moment, the Middle East is more destabilized, not less.

Questions remain: How will this embolden Trump's autocratic impulses at home, especially with regard to the mid-term elections? And abroad, as a co-editor points out: He has alienated our European allies, played down NATO, and now attacked Venezuela and Iran. Given his problems at home, where else will he attack?

Which brings us to the questions this community has not yet fully answered, and must: How do we build a bigger tent — one with a positive outcome for all Jews in New Mexico? And how do we confront antisemitism without betraying our democratic principles?

Those tensions were visible in real time during our first Jewish Community Day at the Capitol in Santa Fe on February 4th. The photos tell the whole story, in all its complexity, in "We All Came to the Capitol, for One Reason or Another."

Our March 1st issue also offers some relief and richness. Two writers share very different experiences visiting the Neue Galerie in New York, where Austrian Jewish culture before the Nazis comes vividly alive. Scholar and author Ilan Stavans discusses the return of El Iluminado, his graphic novel of a crypto-Jew. And we're proud to introduce a new writer, Jonah Wald — fourteen years old — who explores Jewish life and culture before the Inquisition in "Flourish and Struggle," a reflection on his recent visit to Barcelona.

We also offer some help deciphering our state legislature, letters from our avid readers, and the beginnings of a Guide to Passover Seders at synagogues across New Mexico, which we will keep up on the website and add in the weeks ahead as a community resource.

And we cannot help but close with Yeats. Written in 1919, in the aftermath of World War I and amid the Irish War for Independence, The Second Coming has never felt far away. Netanyahu has dubbed the Israeli operation "Lion's Roar" — following last June's "Operation Rising Lion." The falcon cannot hear the falconer. — Best, Diane Joy Schmidt, Editor.

The Second Coming
By William Butler Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?