After reading the late Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s groundbreaking 1961 poem “Babi Yar”—about the massacre of over 33,000 Jews at the ravine of that name outside Kiev—the composer Dmitri Shostakovich was immediately moved to set it to music. But doing so risked raising the ire of a regime eager to repress memory of the Holocaust. Alex Ryvchin relates:

On December 20, a Palestinian waited in a wooded area near a Jewish village in northern Israel in the hope of encountering a victim. Soon enough he spotted Esther Horgan walking home from an evening jog and killed her by beating her with a rock. He later told the police that he did the deed to avenge the death of Kamal Abu Wa’er, a terrorist in Israeli custody. Itamar Marcus explains: