WALL STREET JOURNAL
‘Stay Strong. Survive.’ The Mother Who Became the Face of Hostage Advocacy
Elizabeth Bernstein
February 20, 2024

Rachel Goldberg-Polin numbers her days. On Day Seven, she spoke to President Biden on a Zoom call. On Day 37, she was forced to wear her hair down for a TV interview after she lost her hair clip. On Day 88, a college student asked her a question no one else had thought to ask: “What can we do to ease your pain?” Day One was Oct. 7. That’s when her 23-year-old son, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, an American-Israeli, was severely injured in the attack on the Tribe of Nova music festival in Israel, then kidnapped and taken to the Gaza Strip. “My son was stolen,” she says. Rachel, who is 54, was a teacher and a mom when she woke up that morning, the kind who baked chocolate-chip cookies from scratch, then warmed them up individually when her children came home from school at different times. READ MORE

COMMENTARY How the Free World Is Failing the Hostages Nobody in the British government, MP Andrew Percy said to the House of Commons last week, “has any business [or] agency at all in telling the state of Israel where it is able to operate to seek to rescue hostages who are being raped by Islamic terrorists who hold them.” The clip of Percy’s speech—which included other noteworthy lines—quickly made the rounds on social media precisely because it stood out. But it shouldn’t have. Every politician in the free West should talk this way.