The Message I Left for Hersh at the Airport

A few months ago, on the way back to New York from Israel, I wrote Hersh a message on the sign carrying his photo at the airport. “Hersh, I met your mom and she said to stay strong and survive.” He didn’t know me, but I felt that I knew him after those long 9 months. I knew he loved music, soccer, collecting National Geographic magazines and beer, similarly to my brother. I knew he was brave and saved fellow concert-goers during the massacre of October 7 by throwing grenades out of the shelter he had taken refuge in with his friend Aner Shapira. And I knew Hersh carried himself with an innate sense of dignity, surely passed down to him by his parents Rachel Goldberg and Jon Polin, when he was forced, by the savage monsters, onto that hellish pickup truck, nursing what remained of his arm. His left forearm had just been blown off.

I believe that he felt the piercing cry and prayer of Rachel, who three days ago, blasted into a megaphone on the border with Gaza: “It’s Mama, Hersh, it’s day 328, we’re all here, all the families of the remaining 107 hostages. Hersh, we are working day and night and we will never stop. I need you to know that I am giving you the blessing I give you every single morning when I pray for you and every Friday night…..”

I wonder what Hersh knew and what he felt.

I wonder if he knew that, on the streets of New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, his photo was posted everywhere. That stickers covered the neighborhood lamp posts on the blocks that I walked my daughter to school. That, all over America, which was also his home, people ordered their coffee using his name so that the barista would yell it across the crowded cafés. Some would perk up and acknowledge that Hersh was with us, in a strange way. Others didn’t know who he was, or what his name had come to signify. And others simply didn’t care.

But really, I wonder how we arrived at a time when everyone in America had not come, in the past painful months, to know Hersh’s name. After all, he was our fellow American. Whatever that means anymore.

I wasn’t born when more than 50 Americans were taken hostage in Iran in 1979 and held for 444 days. Did our fellow Americans know their names?

I didn’t, and ashamed of my ignorance, I just looked them up to learn their names and see their faces. While googling, I came upon this Time Magazine article from 1980. Yes, it was forty-four years ago and the parameters were different – though not the savage monster pulling the strings – but how could our national reaction have shifted so dramatically? I read closely:

“Khomeini thus poses to the U.S. a supreme test of both will and strategy. So far his hostage blackmail has produced a result he certainly did not intend: a surge of patriotism that has made the American people more united than they have been on any issue in two decades. The shock of seeing the U.S. flag burned on the streets of Tehran, or misused by embassy attackers to carry trash, has jolted the nation out of its self-doubting “Viet Nam syndrome.” Worries about America’s ability to influence events abroad are giving way to anger about impotence; the country now seems willing to exert its power. But how can that power be brought to bear against an opponent immune to the usual forms of diplomatic, economic and even military pressure, and how can it be refined to deal with others in the Third World who might rise to follow Khomeini’s example? That may be the central problem for U.S. foreign policy throughout the 1980s.”

I wonder where’s that “surge of patriotism” and “unification” now?

Where is the “shock of seeing the US flag burned” – and not in Tehran, but on our college campuses?

I wonder where is that “surge of patriotism” and “unification” now? Where is the “shock of seeing the US flag burned” – and not in Tehran, but on our own college campuses?

Where is the “jolt” for our nation to awaken from an era of “self-doubting”?

Where is our collective “anger about impotence” and why has a “willingness to exert power” not re-emerged in our Administration or in public opinion?

Fatigued then by Vietnam, now by Afghanistan and Iraq, where’s our collective sense of responsibility to certain American ideals and to our people?

Why have we not learned how to fight an opponent that is “immune to the usual forms of diplomatic, economic and even military pressure?” Or do we know how but prefer not to?

Why are we now such professionals in cowardice?

And I’ll add one that, I am certain, did not apply in 1980: how did it become “acceptable” for some to rip down Hersh’s photo?

Why must we witness the disgusting and spiteful act of those ripping down Hersh’s face – one that, to paraphrase Douglas Murray, even a lost puppy would not be subjected to?

In my head, I keep repeating Rachel’s words from the recent Democratic National Convention– “In the Jewish tradition, every person is an entire universe.”

In my head, I keep repeating Rachel’s words from the recent Democratic National Convention– “In the Jewish tradition, every person is an entire universe.”

If every person had heeded this message, learned his name, respected his photo, pressured officials and kept him and the hundred plus other hostages, at the forefront of our collective consciousness, perhaps together, we could have brought Hersh home.

Instead, today, we mourn.

Emily Hamilton is the Executive Director of Justice for Kurds and producer of three documentary films: “Why Ukraine,” “Slava Ukraini” and “Glory to the Heroes” by Bernard-Henri Lévy on the extraordinary resistance of Ukraine against the full-scale Russian invasion.