FUTURE OF JEWISH
The Most Tragically Beautiful Book I’ve Ever Read
Adam Hummel
May 9, 2026

I stayed up late one night this week reading the book, “When We See You Again,” published last month and written by Rachel Goldberg-Polin — the mother of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, one of the Israeli hostages kidnapped on October 7th. It is the most tragically beautiful book I’ve ever read. Somewhere in the middle of the book, Rachel writes that she wants to parcel out the pain — to shove some of it under the bed in a pile. She describes how, when she went to summer camp as a child, her mom and family members used to write her so many letters that she started to give them out to other kids who had less, so that they also had something to read from home. She talked about parceling out her pain the same way she distributed her her mother’s letters at camp, for others to help her carry. READ MORE