Authorities have charged one person with arson in a fire that badly damaged Beth Israel Congregation in Jackson, Miss., early Saturday morning. The Jackson Fire Department, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms & Explosives, and the FBI are investigating.

Zach Shemper, Beth Israel Congregation president, said he’s stunned.

“Crazy things happen all over the world and nothing really hits home until it actually hits directly home,” he told Mississippi Public Broadcasting. “When it hits home, it’s just hard. Honestly, I’m still trying to wrap my own head around it.”

Shemper also released a statement saying the synagogue and its 150 families are resilient.

“As Jackson’s only synagogue, Beth Israel is a beloved institution, and it is the fellowship of our neighbors and extended community that will see us through,” he said.

The congregation was founded in 1860, according to Beth Israel’s website. In 1967, local Ku Klux Klan members bombed the place of worship and the home of the rabbi at the time, who had spoken out against racism and segregation. No one was hurt in the civil rights-era bombings or Saturday’s fire.

Charles Felton, Jackson Fire Department chief of fire investigations, told NPR in an interview on Sunday that flames and smoke caused extensive damage and destroyed Beth Israel’s library, where he says the fire was started. The fire was reported to 911 just after 3 a.m.

“All contents in that library are destroyed. There’s not much that can be retrieved from the library area. The other portions of the building do not have actual fire damage, but they have damage as far as smoke and soot,” he said.

Shemper said the fire destroyed two Torahs, the Jewish sacred texts, and damaged five others. A Torah that survived the Holocaust was protected by a glass display case and was not damaged. The synagogue’s Tree of Life plaque honoring congregants’ meaningful occasions was destroyed. Shemper said the library, administrative offices and the lobby suffered the most damage.

Surveillance video shows a man wearing a hoodie and a mask pouring liquid from a can inside the synagogue, according to Shemper. Felton said Jackson Fire investigators later received information from an area hospital that led them to the suspect, who was arrested Saturday evening.

“There was a suspect possibly burned at a local hospital,” he told NPR. “They did go to the hospital at which point they interviewed the person of interest and that person did confess to having involvement in the fire.”

The Jackson Fire Department’s powers include the authority to charge suspects, according to Felton, who said the department has filed arson charges against the suspect, who authorities have not publicly named. He said federal authorities will make a determination on whether to pursue hate crime charges.

The FBI’s office in Jackson said in a statement that it was aware of the incident and was working with other law enforcement on the investigation.

Jackson Mayor John Horhn said the city stands with Beth Israel and the Jewish community.

“Acts of antisemitism, racism, and religious hatred are attacks on Jackson as a whole and will be treated as acts of terror against residents’ safety and freedom to worship,” said a statement from the mayor’s office.

Beth Israel is planning to immediately move forward.

“With support from our community, we will rebuild. Beth Israel Congregation has been the Jewish spiritual home in Jackson, Mississippi, for over 160 years,” said Shemper’s statement. “We are devastated but ready to rebuild.”

He said several local churches have offered temporary space for Beth Israel to continue services.

The attack comes after investigators say a father and son opened fire on Jewish people celebrating Hanukkah on Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia, last month. Fifteen people were killed and dozens were injured.

People have been taking to the streets nationwide this weekend to protest the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement tactics following the death of Renee Good in Minneapolis, a 37-year-old woman who was shot and killed by a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer this week.

At least 1,000 events across the U.S. were planned for Saturday and Sunday, according to Indivisible, a progressive grassroots coalition of activists helping coordinate the movement it calls “ICE Out For Good Weekend of Action.”

Leah Greenberg, a co-executive director of Indivisible, said people are coming together to “grieve, honor those we’ve lost, and demand accountability from a system that has operated with impunity for far too long.”

“Renee Nicole Good was a wife, a mother of three, and a member of her community. She, and the dozens of other sons, daughters, friends, siblings, parents, and community members who have been killed by ICE, should be alive today,” Greenberg said in a statement on Friday. “ICE’s violence is not a statistic, it has names, families, and futures attached to it, and we refuse to look away or stay silent.”

Large crowds of demonstrators carried signs and shouted “ICE out now!” as protests continued across Minneapolis on Saturday. One of those protestors, Cameron Kritikos, told NPR that he is worried that the presence of more ICE agents in the city could lead to more violence or another death.

“If more ICE officers are deployed to the streets, especially a place here where there’s very clear public opposition to the terrorizing of our neighborhoods, I’m nervous that there’s going to be more violence,” the 31-year grocery store worker said. “I’m nervous that there are going to be more clashes with law enforcement officials, and at the end of the day I think that’s not what anyone wants.”

Demonstrators in Minneapolis on Saturday, Jan. 10, 2026.

Sergio Martínez-Beltrán/NPR

hide caption

Advertisement

toggle caption

Sergio Martínez-Beltrán/NPR

The night before, hundreds of city and state police officers responded to a “noise protest” in downtown Minneapolis. An estimated 1,000 people gathered Friday night, according to Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara, and 29 people were arrested.

People demonstrated outside of hotels where ICE agents were believed to be staying. They chanted, played drums and banged pots. O’Hara said that a group of people split from the main protest and began damaging hotel windows. One police officer was injured from a chunk of ice that was hurled at officers, he added.

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey condemned the acts of violence but praised what he said was the “vast majority” of protesters who remained peaceful, during a morning news conference.

“To anyone who causes property damage or puts others in danger: you will be arrested. We are standing up to Donald Trump’s chaos not with our own brand of chaos, but with care and unity,” Frey wrote on social media.

Commenting on the protests, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin told NPR in a statement, “the First Amendment protects speech and peaceful assembly — not rioting, assault and destruction,” adding, “DHS is taking measures to uphold the rule of law and protect public safety and our officers.”

Good was fatally shot the day after DHS launched a large-scale immigration enforcement operation in Minnesota set to deploy 2,000 immigration officers to the state.

In Philadelphia, police estimated about 500 demonstrators “were cooperative and peaceful” at a march that began Saturday morning at City Hall, Philadelphia Police Department spokesperson Tanya Little told NPR in a statement. And no arrests were made.

In Portland, Ore., demonstrators rallied and lined the streets outside of a hospital on Saturday afternoon, where immigration enforcement agents bring detainees who are injured during an arrest, reported Oregon Public Broadcasting.

A man and woman were shot and injured by U.S. Border Patrol agents on Thursday in the city. DHS said the shooting happened during a targeted vehicle stop and identified the driver as Luis David Nino-Moncada, and the passenger as Yorlenys Betzabeth Zambrano-Contreras, both from Venezuela. As was the case in their assertion about Good’s fatal shooting, Homeland Security officials claimed the federal agent acted in self-defense after Nino-Moncada and Zambrano-Contreras “weaponized their vehicle.”

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

A friend sent a meme to a group chat last week that, like many internet memes before it, managed to implant itself deep into my brain and capture an idea in a way that more sophisticated, expansive prose does not always manage. Somewhat ironically, the meme was about the ills of the internet. 

“People in 1999 using the internet as an escape from reality,” the text read, over an often-used image from a TV series of a face looking out of a car window. Below it was another face looking out of a different car window overlaid with the text: “People in 2026 using reality as an escape from the internet.” 

Oof. So simple, yet so spot on. With AI-generated slop — sorry, content — now having overtaken human-generated words and images online, with social media use appearing to have peaked and with “dumb phones” being touted as this year’s status symbol, it does feel as if the tide is beginning to turn towards the general de-enshittification of life. 

And what could be a better way to resist the ever-swelling stream of mediocrity and nonsense on the internet, and to stick it to the avaricious behemoths of the “attention economy”, than to pick up a work of fiction (ideally not purchased on one of these behemoths’ platforms), with no goal other than sheer pleasure and the enrichment of our lives? But while the tide might have started to turn, we don’t seem to have quite got there yet on the reading front, if we are on our way there at all.

Two-fifths of Britons said last year that they had not read a single book in the previous 12 months, according to YouGov. And, as has been noted many times before on both sides of the Atlantic, it is men who are reading the least — just 53 per cent had read any book over the previous year, compared with 66 per cent of women — both in overall numbers and specifically when it comes to fiction.

Yet pointing this out, and lamenting the “disappearance of literary men”, has become somewhat contentious. A much-discussed Vox article last year asked: “Are men’s reading habits truly a national crisis?” suggesting that they were not and pointing out that women only read an average of seven minutes more fiction per day than men (while failing to note that this itself represents almost 60 per cent more reading time).

Meanwhile an UnHerd op-ed last year argued that “the literary man is not dead”, positing that there exists a subculture of male literature enthusiasts keeping the archetype alive and claiming that “podcasts are the new salons”. 

That’s all well and good, but the truth is that there is a gender gap between men and women when it comes to reading and engaging specifically with fiction, and it’s growing.

According to a 2022 survey by the US National Endowment for the Arts, 27.7 per cent of men had read a short story or novel over the previous year, down from 35.1 per cent a decade earlier. Women’s fiction-reading habits declined too, but more slowly and from a higher base: 54.6 per cent to 46.9 per cent, meaning that while women out-read men by 55 per cent in 2012 when it came to fiction, they did so by almost 70 per cent in 2022.

The divide is already apparent in young adulthood, and it has widened too: data from 2025 showed girls in England took an A-Level in English literature at an almost four-times-higher rate than boys, with that gap having grown from a rate of about three times higher just eight years earlier.

So the next question is: should we care and, if so, why? Those who argue that yes, we should, tend to give a few reasons. They point out that reading fiction fosters critical thinking, empathy and improves “emotional vocabulary”. They argue that novels often contain heroic figures and strong, virtuous representations of masculinity that can inspire and motivate modern men. They cite Andrew Tate, the titan of male toxicity, who once said that “reading books is for losers who are afraid to learn from life”, and that “books are a total waste of time”, as an example of whose advice not to follow. 

I agree with all of this — wholeheartedly, I might add. But I’m not sure how many of us, women or men, are picking up books in order to become more virtuous people. Perhaps the more compelling, or at least motivating, reason for reading fiction is simply that it offers a form of pleasure and attention that the modern world is steadily eroding. In a hyper-capitalist culture optimised for skimming and distraction, the ability to sit still with a novel is both subversive and truly gratifying. The real question, then, is why so many men are not picking one up.

jemima.kelly@ft.com