High schoolers should read the book Hostage by Eli Sharabi because it shows us in simple terms how evil antisemitism can be.
A thinking person’s first impulse when he’s read a great book is to tell other people about it. In my case, I tell my wife, my children, and my good friends. “Read this.” I’ve been known to go on Amazon and order a bunch of copies.
that makes me want to go much further than that. I don’t just want to tell my loved ones to read it: I want to tell the world. At the very least, I’d like everystudent in this country to read it, for it teaches heartrending lessons on justice and injustice, and on the horrors of which, and it’s by Eli Sharabi, a 53-year-old Israeli who was the chief financial officer of Kibbutz Be’eri, one of the kibbutzim ravaged by Hamas on the morning of Oct. 7, 2023. Sharabi was abducted by armed terrorists from his simple little home, leaving behind his wife and two teenage daughters. “I’ll come back!” he shouted to them as he was taken away. He did come back: 491 days later. On his return, he found that his family had been killed shortly after his abduction. The book was published in Hebrew in May and in English translation on Oct. 7 — the second anniversary of the atrocities and murders committed and recorded by Hamas against 1,200 innocent people and the taking of 251 hostages into Gaza. is Sharabi’s account of the 70 weeks he spent as a prisoner in Gaza, nearly 63 of which were in tunnels deep underground. It is remarkable, and a testament to Sharabi’s strength and resilience, that he was able to write the book so quickly, even as he was coping with the hammer-blow of his family’s murder and recovering from the trauma of his own cruel, subterranean imprisonment. Why do I want high schoolers to read this book, ideally those who are 16 or older? Because it transports us away from abstractions and theories — away from the important but sometimes antiseptic assertions that antisemitism is evil, or that the Palestinian cause is just — into the heart of the horrors of which those who hate Jews are capable. People don’t understand that Jews choose “life.” They have offered a two-state solution many times, and the leaders of the Palestinians have rejected those offers. Islamists and terrorist groups like Hamas and others choose “death.” The writer Douglas Murray calls them “Death Cults.” For those who continue to deny that the atrocities took place despite GoPro camera footage recorded by the Hamas attackers and uploaded to the internet by them, the book illustrates the horrors inflicted by Hamas and other Gazans on the hostages. And it does so in ways that are dispassionate and objective, and also irrefutable — horrors that our young must be made aware of, horrors from which no one should turn away. We must all read about what happened to Sharabi and to the other hostages who were taken from Israel. For nearly 16 months, he ate little more than a piece of dry pita a day. His legs were shackled all that time. He lost so much weight that the shackles around his ankles grew loose. He saw no daylight; had no running water; got to bathe with small amounts of water, less than once a week. Sanitation was nonexistent, and he and six other Israeli prisoners were crammed into a small, fetid room that stank unbearably, had rats and roaches, and, eventually, became infested with worms. The captives were so physically weak that they learned to live with worms on their bodies, in their hair, on their toothbrushes. Through all of this, Sharabi taught himself and his fellow prisoners to survive. They learned how to cooperate: to share food, space, stories, prayers, and songs. They devised strategies together that helped them cope with their vicious captors. They gave their captors derisive nicknames in Hebrew as a way of boosting their own morale. In doing so, they came to exercise a small amount of power over their captors. If you can mock someone, you haven’t been truly defeated. I want high schoolers to read this book because it shows us in simple, clear, unadorned, and untheatrical language how evil antisemitism can be. It offers us an actual case study. An actual story of a family destroyed, of a family killed, a husband abducted. Sharabi entered one of his tunnels from a floor in the house of a Gaza civilian. After decades of brainwashing, everyone in Gaza was in on the evil enterprise. In the 50 days of his time in Gaza, before he was consigned to a tunnel, Sharabi was hidden in the house of a Gazan family, who were instructed never to let him be visible from the street outside. For if Gaza civilians had seen an Israeli, they’d have barged into the house and killed him on the spot. Let our high schoolers read all of this and learn from it. I’m certain that any young American who reads this book will learn a lesson that will last a lifetime: that antisemitism and Jew-hatred are unacceptable, and that there can never be excuses for it. Elliott Broidy is a philanthropist and the chairman and CEO of Broidy Capital Holdings. He is a co-founder of The Fund to End Antisemitism, Extremism, and Hate, which funds the work of the Auschwitz Research Center on Hate, Extremism, and Radicalization.
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