Four Words Random House Would Rather Not Say

Towards the end of Dara Horn’s brilliant review of Rachel Goldberg-Polin’s memoir of hope and grief, she writes:

Part of the galvanizing appeal of the cause of the hostages for worldwide audiences was that the hostages fit into the category of the kind of Jews that non-Jewish (and Jewish diaspora) audiences are more comfortable with: Jews who are powerless. . . . Goldberg-Polin is a woman of unfathomable energy and courage, but this unexamined and unconscious attitude toward Jews was part of what made it possible to share her public grief on mainstream American media outlets like 60 Minutes.

When we were working on the piece last week, Dara and I discussed these sentences, which of course recap the central argument of her famous book People Love Dead Jews. Later, after we’d published the piece and it went viral (it really is the one review you should read if you haven’t yet), I picked Goldberg-Polin’s book back up and was looking at the jacket, when I was suddenly struck by how right Dara was about the attitude of mainstream American media. Here is Random House’s carefully crafted description of the book on the jacket flap:

On the morning of October 7th, 2023, Rachel Goldberg-Polin’s beloved twenty-three year old son Hersh was stolen from a music festival billed as a celebration of unity and love – and, in that moment, her life was forever separated into The Before and The After. Over the next eleven months, she and her husband Jon would work tirelessly – in public and behind the scenes – to secure the hostages’ release, to breathe some humanity into the situation while they were experiencing relentless emotional and psychological torment. The power of her raw and fervent pleas soon made her the face of the hostage crisis. And when Hersh and five other captives were executed after surviving 328 days of violence and cruelty, she would also become the face of its ultimate cost.

“There are days when I break completely,” she writes. “I have cried for an entire day straight. I didn’t think it was physically possible, but the weeping never let up. That is a very long time to cry. I kept hoping I would run out of tears. And then there are days when there is a whisper of sun. Not out there in the sky. In me. In us.”

In When We See You Again, Rachel pours her pain, love, and longing onto paper, giving voice to the broken among us, and reminding us that even when the world feels choked with darkness, light exists in a different way. How do we find it? Her own experience has been extreme, but at its essence, this is a universal story of trying to live with grief. It is a story of how we remember and how we persevere, of how we suffer and how we love.

Of course boilerplate is boilerplate, even of deeply moving and important books, but there are some words curiously missing in this description of a book by an Israeli woman expressing her deeply Jewish grief over the murder of her child by Palestinian terrorists. Here are four of them:

Israel, Gaza, Hamas, Jew.

The only hint in the jacket copy that Hersh’s death was a specifically Jewish Israeli tragedy is the note in the author bio that Goldberg-Polin lives in Jerusalem.

Buried in the third paragraph of that boilerplate is Random House’s marketing plan: “at its essence, this is a universal story of trying to live with grief. It is a story of how we remember and how we persevere, of how we suffer and how we love.” Which is true but utterly vacuous, and, worse, deliberately disingenuous. Hersh Goldberg-Polin lived a distinctive Jewish life and was kidnapped, tortured, and murdered because of it. And his mother’s cry is, as Horn writes, like Rachel our Mother “weeping for her children,” refusing to be comforted.

Those of us who share some part of Goldberg-Polin’s endless grief should read her book (and Horn’s review), while rejecting her publisher’s nervous euphemizing of her experience, and, to some extent, ours.