Rachel Goldberg-Polin — A Mother's Witness
Rachel Goldberg-Polin speaks about her son Hersh's captivity and death in Gaza, the global advocacy campaign she built, and what she learned about grief, resilience, and humanizing conflict.
Why we picked this
Rachel Goldberg-Polin became one of the most recognized faces of the Gaza hostage crisis — not as a political symbol but as a mother who refused to let the world look away, and who maintained that refusal even after the worst outcome.
For months, Rachel Goldberg-Polin wore a piece of tape on her chest marking the days her son Hersh had been held hostage in Gaza — a quiet, visible act that accompanied her constant public advocacy across news networks, the United Nations, and the Democratic National Convention. Hersh Goldberg-Polin was killed in August 2024 along with five other hostages. His mother has continued to speak.
In conversation at City Arts & Lectures, Goldberg-Polin reflects on what that year-and-a-half of public witness taught her — about sustaining hope under impossible circumstances, about navigating a conflict that reduces individuals to symbols, and about the strange, exhausting work of keeping one person’s story alive in a world with a limited capacity for attention.
This is not a political debate about the Middle East; it is a conversation about how grief becomes advocacy, and what it costs. Her ability to speak with warmth about the humanity on all sides of the conflict made her an unusual figure in one of the most divisive geopolitical moments in recent memory.