Gemma Birnbaum: All We Have Standing Between Us is made possible thanks to the generous support of the Knapp Family Foundation. Additional funding provided by the Leon Levy Foundation, the Achelis and Bodman Foundation, the Atran Foundation, and Anonymous.
Visit the companion exhibition in New York City, on view now at the Center for Jewish History, through 2026.
Archival Audio – President George W. Bush Addresses the Nation on September 11, 2001
“Today our fellow citizens, our way of life, our very freedom, came under attack, in a series of deliberate and deadly terrorist acts. The victims were in airplanes, or in their offices. Secretaries, business men and women, military and federal workers, moms and dads, friends and neighbors. Thousands of lives were suddenly ended by evil, despicable acts of terror. The pictures of airplanes flying into buildings, fires burning, huge structures collapsing, have filled us with disbelief, terrible sadness, and a quiet, unyielding anger.”
Gemma Birnbaum: On September 11, 2001, New Yorkers on their morning commutes were stunned as a commercial jet flew into one of the towers of the World Trade Center. Seventeen minutes later, a second plane hit, as millions around the world watched. News of additional deliberate crashes at the Pentagon in Virginia, and a field in Pennsylvania, soon emerged. That evening, President George W. Bush addressed the nation in a brief statement, which he concluded by urging unity. The attacks and their aftermath ushered in an era of uncertainty, division, and rising extremism.
Welcome to All We Have Standing Between Us. I’m Gemma R. Birnbaum, executive director of the American Jewish Historical Society.
Today’s episode, The Overture of Now, begins on a warm, sunny morning in New York City.
Archival Audio – Sam Champion Gives the Morning Weather Report on ABC7-NY
Good morning, thanks for joining us on this Monday morning. Most of you sitting in the city with an inch and a quarter of rain. Inch and a quarter. That was the rainfall total for the park. Walk over to the wall, we’ll show you what it looks like. This shot showing you Lower Manhattan, and everything is actually in pretty good shape now as we work into clear, but for us, bright, sunny skies. 65 degrees at 7:00 in the morning, and sunny and pleasant for the rest of the day. 80 degrees. It’s kind of a guilty pleasure, as beautiful as this weather’s going to be.
Steve Israel: The memories are both vivid and haunting.
Gemma Birnbaum: Representative Steve Israel is a former Congressman from New York, who served from 2001 until 2017.
Steve Israel: I was at a breakfast meeting with Joe Lieberman at the Democratic National Committee, and left that meeting, was walking back to my office in the Cannon building from the DNC, which is on Ivy Street, which is about three blocks away from the Cannon House Office Building, and I remember stepping onto the elevator to get to the fifth floor. I was a freshman, so I was relegated to the fifth floor. And at that time, we had BlackBerrys, and my BlackBerry message from my chief of staff was, “A plane has hit the World Trade Center, likely deliberate. Come back.” He thought I was still at the breakfast. At that point, everybody’s beepers and pagers were going off.
Gemma Birnbaum: Representative Israel, whose district included the South Shore of New York’s Long Island, rushed to his office. He and his staff sat transfixed on the television; when a second plane hit, it became clear to the world that this was indeed a deliberate attack.
Steve Israel: We heard a booming voice, the booming voice of a Capitol Police officer running down the hall saying, “Leave the building. Leave the building.” There was a concern that we later learned that the flight that was headed to the Pentagon, might have been headed to the Capitol. Not that there’s any difference in the loss of life, but the Capitol Police wanted to evacuate the building. And so we left the Cannon building to the most unbelievable scene of members of Congress and senators and staffers and cafeteria workers and custodians just kind of milling around, not knowing where to go.
Gemma Birnbaum: Weaving their way through the disorder, Capitol Police began grabbing and escorting members of Congress to separate, undisclosed locations.
Steve Israel: My first location was surreal. It was in the Capitol Police headquarters, randomly with Senator Lieberman, Senator Byrd, a Republican member from Michigan, Jim Ramstad. And me. Just sitting in a room that, was probably used for interrogations, but they closed the door and locked us in. And Bob Byrd, at that point, pulls from his jacket pocket a dog-eared and rather frayed copy of the Constitution. We used to give out copies of the Constitution that you could put in your pocket. And he held it up and he said, “No matter what happens, we always have this.” I mean, I remember that so distinctly. No matter what. So he knew how grave this was.
I remember watching CNN in this location, watching a CNN reporter saying, “Members of Congress have been brought to an undisclosed location,” standing in front of the location where we’d been brought. And now we’re trying to figure out what to do. We were notified by the Sergeant at Arms. At this point, they had gathered most of the House of Representatives, and they notified us that the leadership had been taken to a separate loca- secure location, and that’s when they told us that there was a full-scale attack on the United States of America.
Gemma Birnbaum: As the hours ticked by, Representative Israel struggled to reach his family back in Long Island. Internet service was unstable, and cell towers were overloaded with people trying to contact loved ones across D.C. – as well as the tri-state area of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut.
Gavriel Rosenfeld: All our neighbors on our street started gathering around 5:00 PM, 6:00 PM.
Gemma Birnbaum: Gavriel Rosenfeld is President of the Center for Jewish History, and professor of history at Fairfield University.
Gavriel Rosenfeld: Because many of the husbands who worked in Lower Midtown, you know, they weren’t sure what was happening to them, and it wasn’t clear whether they were gonna come back.
Gemma Birnbaum: In response to the attacks, the Federal Emergency Management Agency – or FEMA – managed one of the largest search and rescue deployments in the agency’s history. More than 3,400 personnel across over 2 dozen task forces were activated to help coordinate victim rescue and recovery, as well as long-term disaster relief. The Red Cross needed to transport blood to New York, which had been collected from more than 1.5 million donors across the country; the Environmental Protection Agency had to monitor air quality; Army Corps was tasked with removing debris; telecom companies were working to get cell and internet service restored. The city also needed to provide emergency child care, migrating dust was impacting air quality in Queens – the list seemed endless, all as the enormity of what was lost sank in.
Steve Israel: Over the next few weeks and months, I’d been to more funerals than I ever thought was humanly possible, and memorial services, because my district was 35, 45 miles from Ground Zero. A lot of cops and firefighters were constituents. A lot of Wall Street financial services people. And so my whole approach, my thought models began to change just based on how I was spending my time. I had always been active and wanted to go to Congress to focus on national security issues, and that sealed it for me.
My schedule changed. We had this one-year plan when I was elected as a Democrat in a very deeply Republican district. And so we had come up with a schedule that was very strategic and, we just threw that out because everything that I had to do over the next few months was outreach to constituents who were struggling. Who lost either a member of the family or a friend, or knew somebody who lost a member of the family or friend. And so every single element of my time in Congress changed radically.
Archival Audio: News Footage of FEMA’s Report on the Tower Collapse
The Federal Emergency Management Agency blames the collapse of the Twin Towers on the subsequent fire. The House Science Committee held a hearing today focusing on the results of an investigation by FEMA and American Society of Civil Engineers. The report shows intense heat from the fire brought down towers one and two, not the sheer impact of the planes. The other buildings except for seven stood for as long as they did because the support
columns that were able to carry the load. FEMA says that’s one of the keys to avoiding future collapses. Also, better fireproofing and emergency exits as well as training of firefighters. But the agency concluded it may never be possible to build a structure that would survive such a catastrophic event.
Gemma Birnbaum: In the aftermath of the attacks, and as more information continued to be released to the public, a number of conspiracy theories began to emerge globally. Fueled by an increasingly online world, a number of false claims took hold quickly, including one particularly insidious rumor that the United States government orchestrated the attacks to justify starting a war in the Middle East.
Other conspiracy theorists claimed that Jews had received advanced warning and were told to stay home, and that the Israeli government and Mossad – Israel’s intelligence agency – were behind it. While damaging, many of these conspiracy theories remained on the fringes.
Gavriel Rosenfeld: I don’t really remember being deluged with antisemitic claims about the Mossad being behind 9/11 or Jews not going to work that day.
I certainly remember news coverage in the paper saying that in the Arab media, there were already rumors being circulated to that effect, maybe like in the same way that after the October 7th attacks by Hamas, right off the bat, people were claiming that Israel had launched a false flag operation.
Steve Israel: I did not confront any antisemitism in my own outreach to my district, which, you know, had a, shall we say, not an insignificant population of Jews. Not particularly significant, but not insignificant. Secondly, I made a decision to go to a mosque. And so we did a series of community rallies, forums. I remember going to Cow Harbor Park in Northport. There were like 3,000 people at that park where I was speaking, right? And so I’m, you know, was trying to g- get, go to as many places as possible just to give people a sense of safety and security, and let them know that, you know, we were gonna come out of this. And I made a deliberate decision to visit a mosque in Bay Shore, and spoke at that mosque. And it was just like any other event. Nobody questioned it. Nobody criticized it. Maybe they were criticizing it in their dining room, in, you know, in their kitchen tables at night.
Archival Audio – President George W. Bush Announces the War on Terror, September 20, 2001
Americans have known wars — but for the past 136 years, they have been wars on foreign soil, except for one Sunday in 1941. Americans have known the casualties of war — but not at the center of a great city on a peaceful morning. Americans have known surprise attacks — but never before on thousands of civilians. All of this was brought upon us in a single day — and night fell on a different world, a world where freedom itself is under attack.
Americans have many questions tonight. Americans are asking: Who attacked our country? The evidence we have gathered all points to a collection of loosely affiliated terrorist organizations known as al-Qaeda. They are the same murderers indicted for bombing American embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, and responsible for bombing the USS Cole.
Gemma Birnbaum: On September 20, 2001, in an 8-minute long address to the nation, President Bush declared a War on Terror, and named Osama bin Laden, founder of al-Qaeda, as the mastermind of the attacks.
Bin Laden, the son of Saudi billionaire construction magnate Muhammad bin Ladin, founded the terrorist organization in 1988 after his experience volunteering for Afghanistan during its decade-long war against the Soviet Union. It was during his service that he became radicalized.
Archival Audio – President George W. Bush Announces the War on Terror, September 20, 2001
The terrorists practice a fringe form of Islamic extremism that has been rejected by Muslim scholars and the vast majority of Muslim clerics — a fringe movement that perverts the peaceful teachings of Islam. The terrorists’ directive commands them to kill Christians and Jews, to kill all Americans, and make no distinctions among military and civilians, including women and children.
Gemma Birnbaum: In what would later be considered something of a rehearsal for the September 11th attack, in 1993, al-Qaeda claimed responsibility for a car bomb that was detonated in a parking garage located below the World Trade Center. The blast immediately cut off power to the Twin Towers, causing mass confusion as smoke filled darkened stairwells and hallways. In all, 6 people and an unborn child were killed, and over 1,000 were injured.
Gavriel Rosenfeld: So I suppose in some respects, this kind of rumor mongering is predictable after traumatic events. I do recall there being a pretty stark difference between the reaction to the 9/11 attacks and the reaction to the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, which of course was a real close call in terms of the catastrophe that might have happened but didn’t, for reasons we don’t have time to get into. But the reaction to that was very, very, fleeting, and didn’t make much of a dent in the relationship between Americans and Arab Americans.
But of course it did create, certainly in my mind and the minds of many others, the possibility that any major terrorist attack in the 1990s would’ve been logical to be seen as coming from the jihadist world, so that when the Oklahoma City bombing took place in 1995 and people didn’t know initially who was responsible, the obvious logical thought, which was later criticized, was that this is probably a jihadi bombing until it became clear that it was Timothy McVeigh, and white nationalists.
Gemma Birnbaum: In the weeks and months following the attacks, civil rights groups documented a sharp rise of hate crimes against Arabs, Muslims, and South Asians. The U.S. government created the Department of Homeland Security in 2002, launching state surveillance initiatives that prompted politicians and pundits across the political spectrum to raise concerns over the possible erosion of civil liberties. Others expressed concerns that this new program would disproportionately target Arab groups. Feelings of national unity in the wake of a devastating catastrophe soon morphed into a climate of fear, blame, and division.
Gavriel Rosenfeld: The backlash against Arab Americans lasted for many, many years thereafter, especially because of the war on terror that ensued right afterwards.
Gemma Birnbaum: As part of the ‘Global War on Terror,’ President Bush deployed American troops to Afghanistan, which was almost entirely under the Islamist fundamentalist Taliban, and later, Iraq. The president called upon America’s allies to join the fight in defense of ‘civilization,’ framing the Arab world as an existential threat to democratic nations.
Steve Israel: I called myself a ‘Scoop Jackson Democrat,’ right of center on national security, and left of center on domestic issues, social issues, investments in education, the environment, et cetera. So I was rather hawkish. And then experiencing an attack on the United States from 45 miles away where, you know, everywhere I went there was some casualty, made me even more intense. And so I happily voted for the war in Afghanistan, and had some doubts about the war in Iraq.
Gemma Birnbaum: In March 2003, the United States and its allies escalated the War on Terror and began an invasion of Iraq amid claims that its leader, Saddam Hussein, was in possession of weapons of mass destruction. In a Gallup poll of religious groups, 77% of American Jews answered that they believed the war in Iraq was a mistake.
Steve Israel: I was undecided on Iraq, and that’s a very dangerous position to be in, because that means you’re up for grabs by the people who are for it and against it. And suddenly I’m getting calls from President Bush, “I want you to come to the White House, I need the authorization.” And I’m a former town councilman, and now I’m sitting in these, in the Cabinet Room, in the Roosevelt Room, listening to the President of the United States, and the Vice President of United States, and the intel director try and persuade me to vote for this, to vote for the authorization. There was also, I will tell you, kind of a, an, a Jewish sensitivity to this, that the Middle East, and Saudi Arabia in particular, had demonstrated, that they were fundamentally opposed to the values of Western civilization, and our culture, and tolerance. And that contributed to my thinking that I should support the war in Iraq.
Gemma Birnbaum: As the campaign dubbed “shock and awe” pummeled the region with air strikes and casualties mounted, critics began to question the wisdom in instigating a long and brutal war, as well as the validity of the allegations of weapons of mass destruction.
Saddam Hussein was deposed and captured in 2003, and executed in 2006. The war in Iraq would not officially end until 2011, during the Obama administration, when the last American troops withdrew from the nation.
Earlier that same year, Navy Seals finally located Osama bin Laden, and raided his compound in Pakistan. He was killed in the raid, and buried at sea to prevent his grave from becoming a shrine. In 2021, under the Biden administration, the U.S. military left Afghanistan.
In 2016, after an historic career in Congress, Steve Israel announced he would not seek reelection. He continues to serve as a political commentator, and directs the Institute of Politics and Global Affairs at Cornell University, promoting civic engagement and bipartisan dialogue.
Steve Israel: What we’re seeing today, the abrogation of democratic norms, the anger on the left and the right, it began on September 11th, 2001. It gets where the American people suddenly for the first time feel vulnerable. They thought they were protected. They feel fear.
That was the opening to the kind of the overture to the anger that we’re experiencing now, 25 years later.
Gemma Birnbaum: From the American Jewish Historical Society, I’m Gemma R. Birnbaum. This episode was written by me. Recording, sound design, and mixing were done at Sound Lounge. Archival material is sourced from the American Jewish Historical Society and its archive of the Anti-Defamation League and Congressman Steve Israel, ABC7 Eyewitness News, NY1 News, the NBCUniversal Archive, and the George W. Bush Presidential Center.
For episode transcripts, additional resources, and links to the collections discussed in this episode, visit ajhs.org/democracy. If you enjoyed this episode, please rate and review us on your preferred podcast platform which helps others discover our series.
