On the night of Yom Hazikaron — Israel's Memorial Day — Dan sat down with Rachel Goldberg-Polin at Temple Emanu-El in New York City for a live conversation in front of a full house. We recorded it. You should listen to it.
Rachel has a new book. It is called When We See You Again. She describes it as "a love story swaddled in pain, or maybe a pain story doused in love." She wrote it, she told the audience, "from underneath a semi-truck" — meaning while the weight of everything was still fully on top of her, with no distance, no perspective, no resolution. She said she didn't want to wait five years for perspective. "Why can't I give you my pain? Why can't you carry a molecule of my pain?"
There are things in this book that were not known publicly until now. One of them is this: when the Hamas propaganda video of Hirsch was released in 2024 — the one where he screams in Hebrew and you can see the stump of his left arm — that was not the first time Rachel and John had seen footage of Hirsch speaking to them. Weeks earlier, a private video had been smuggled out. Hirsch, arms at his sides, looking directly at the camera, said: "Mama, Dada, Libby and Orly — I hope, I hope, I hope, I hope, I hope that I see you again soon." Rachel and John told no one. They were terrified for the people who had taken the risk to get it to them. They watched it alone, and they sat with it alone, and they kept fighting.
That detail — the private video, the secret they carried — is the kind of thing that only surfaces when someone finally decides to stop acting. Rachel has a word for what she was doing during the 330 days Hirsch was in captivity: acting. Pretending to be human. Packing the pain into suitcases and sitting on the buckles. The book is what happens when she stops.
She also told the audience something about grief that we have been thinking about ever since. She was asked by a group of gap-year students to explain what grief is. She told them: picture someone you love so much you need them to breathe. Are they in this room? No? Do you not love them anymore? "That's grief," she said. "It's the price we pay for love." She calls herself, in the end, a tragic optimist. Not better. Stronger, she hopes. Strong enough to carry it more gracefully. Not yet, but working toward it.
Also this week on Inside Call Me Back: Nadav Eyal and Amit Segal returned to the hot seat together for the first time since our month-long Mossad series ended. The first question was from Michelle in Westchester: what did the Mossad actually promise Trump before the war? It was the question everyone in the room had been waiting to ask. Nadav had answers. So did Amit. They didn't entirely agree. That's the conversation.
Subscribe to Inside Call Me Back at arkmedia.org.
— The Call Me Back team