Rachel Goldberg, mother of killed US-Israeli hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin whose body was recovered with five other hostages in Gaza, speaks during his funeral in Jerusalem on Sept. 2, 2024. Photo: GIL COHEN-MAGEN/Pool via REUTERS

This month marks two years since Hersh Goldberg-Polin was murdered in a tunnel beneath Rafah.

Shortly before his yahrzeit, the Hebrew anniversary of his death, I sat in a room in Washington and listened to his parents, Rachel Goldberg-Polin and Jon Polin, talk about their son. It is difficult to describe hearing parents speak about a child whose captivity, and then murder, became known around the world. For nearly eleven months after Oct. 7, 2023, millions of people watched Rachel and Jon fight to bring Hersh home. Two years after his death, I watched them continue to figure out what it means to carry his life forward.

Hersh was 23 when Hamas terrorists attacked the Nova music festival. A grenade blew off part of his left arm before he was abducted into Gaza. For 330 days, his parents fought publicly and relentlessly for his release, addressing the United Nations, meeting with heads of state, and pleading with anyone who might have the power to help.

Then, on Aug. 31, 2024, Israeli forces recovered Hersh’s body along with those of five other hostages: Carmel Gat, Eden Yerushalmi, Alexander Lobanov, Almog Sarusi, and Ori Danino. Hamas had murdered them at close range as Israeli troops approached.

I cannot imagine how parents survive that, much less how they stand before a room full of young people two years later and talk about hope.

But that is what Rachel and Jon did.

Rachel has often said that “hope is mandatory.” It would be easy to hear that phrase stripped of its context and mistake it for something sentimental and meaningless. Sitting in front of her, shortly before the anniversary of Hersh’s murder, I heard something else entirely. Hope, as she described it, is not senseless optimism or an assumption that things will always turn out well. She knows better than almost anyone that sometimes they do not. Hope is deciding not to give up even during the darkest moments of your life.

I heard Rachel and Jon at the Israel on Campus Coalition’s National Leadership Summit, where hundreds of Jewish and pro-Israel student leaders had gathered before returning to universities around the country. We spent several days talking about campus organizing and advocacy, but as I prepare to return to the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, very little of the tactical advice has stayed with me.

Instead, I keep thinking about Rachel and Jon, and about another person who walked onto that stage.

Omer Shem Tov was abducted from the same music festival as Hersh. He spent 505 days in Gaza. For all but the first several weeks, he was alone in a tunnel, chained, starved, and cut off from the world before finally coming home in February 2025.

Listening to Omer describe captivity was almost disorienting because of the way he spoke about it. He did not ask the audience for pity. He talked about faith and gratitude, and about the small things that allowed him to preserve hope underground.

Sitting there, I found myself thinking about what awaited me back on campus.

Like Jewish students at universities across the country, students at UNC Charlotte have spent the years since Oct. 7 confronting a kind of hostility that would once have been difficult to imagine. We have watched rallies where terrorism is celebrated as resistance. Jewish students have wondered whether wearing a Star of David will invite confrontation. We have learned what it feels like to pass classmates who regard Zionism, and sometimes Jewish identity itself, as something shameful.

Those things matter. Antisemitism on campus should be confronted rather than minimized, and Jewish students should not have to accept intimidation as an ordinary part of university life.

But sitting in that room, I also understood the need for perspective.

I was about to return to a campus where I might encounter people who despise what I believe or who make me uncomfortable displaying who I am. Omer Shem Tov had spent hundreds of days chained underground because he was an Israeli Jew. Rachel and Jon Polin had spent 330 days trying to save their son and then had to bury him.

And there they were.

That comparison does not make campus antisemitism less serious. It makes my obligation to confront it clearer.

The answer cannot be to become smaller. I cannot control what someone writes on a protest sign or chants at a rally. I can decide whether fear of those things determines how openly I live as a Jew. I can wear my Star of David. I can say that I am a Zionist. I can tell the stories of the hostages and their families, not as political abstractions but as stories about actual human beings whose lives were interrupted or destroyed on Oct. 7.

Most importantly, I can refuse to confuse hope with confidence that everything will be easy.

That is what I misunderstood about Rachel Goldberg-Polin’s phrase before I heard her speak. “Hope is mandatory” does not mean believing that everything will work out. Hersh did not come home alive. It means refusing to surrender your sense of purpose even when the ending you prayed for never comes.

Two years after Hersh was murdered, his parents are still showing up. After 505 days in captivity, Omer Shem Tov is showing up too.

Soon, I will go back to campus. Compared with what they have been asked to endure, showing up as exactly who I am seems like a very small thing.

But it is my thing to do.

Hope is mandatory. And so is showing up.

Rachel Rubin is a rising junior at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, studying artificial intelligence with a minor in foreign policy. She serves as president of Students Supporting Israel UNCC and of the Turning Point USA chapter at UNC Charlotte.