Matti Friedman
The Free Press, Sept. 1, 2024
“But as for the real person—the grinning raconteur from that dinner table—we heard nothing for months.”
Last September I had dinner with Hersh Goldberg-Polin at his home in Jerusalem, which isn’t far from mine. His parents are friends, Chicago natives who came years ago and stayed.
Over the preceding years I’d seen Hersh grow from a skinny kid with a funny grin into a youth with big curly hair, then a young man with a buzz cut as he persevered through his mandatory army service despite a thoroughly civilian personality, who then set off to Europe with the attitude of someone expecting the world to greet him with a smile.
The last version of Hersh that I remember, from that family dinner, was a wry traveler making us laugh with a deadpan account of working on a falafel truck at an electronic music festival in Italy. My teenagers were an admiring audience for his adventures. He, and we, were looking forward to his next one.
One morning a few weeks later Hersh disappeared, leaving only two text messages to his mother, Rachel: “I love you.” And: “I’m sorry.” It was October 7, 2023.
There was a music festival in southern Israel that weekend called Nova, a name now infamous but then unfamiliar to almost anyone over the age of 25. He was there with friends when an army of Palestinian terrorists came out of Gaza and engulfed the festival and the Israeli communities near the border, killing more than 1,200 people and kidnapping hundreds more. … [To read the full article, click here]
