As the news and videos of hostages being released started coming in, I was surprised to find myself depressed. I thought I would feel a measure of, if not joy, then at least relief. Instead, I was transported back to the immediate hours and days after Oct. 7, filled with a sick sense of unease and unbearable sadness.
These past six weeks, sensing my own emotional limitations, I have avoided thinking too much about the hostages. But with their release, that was no longer possible. Seeing the elderly women, the sweet young children, the mothers tentatively make their way into Israeli hands, I was forced to confront where these people had been since Oct. 7.
I was forced to confront that innocent young children have been held captive by Hamas for six weeks — some not even knowing that they had become orphans.
Aside from confusion about what this exchange means for Israel’s security, I knew that the release of hostages would provide yet another arena for vile, anti-Israel rhetoric — and so it did. From grotesque posts on social media praising Hamas’ “care” for the hostages to the Irish premier Leo Varadkar referring to an Israeli-Irish girl as having been “lost” and “found,” as if she’d merely gone for a wander, not kidnapped and held in captivity by a terrorist state, as if no crime against humanity had been committed.
And, on the personal level, learning that my relative’s young relatives had been freed, but only partially, the young father still being held in captivity, despite Hamas “agreeing” not to separate families.
A reminder, not that I needed or wanted one, that we are dealing with evil, and people who seek to diminish or deny that are aligning themselves with evil.
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When three weeks passed with no response from the Denver Post to my open letter, I contacted it again, not least because in the ensuing weeks the bias continued with no coverage of how Denver’s Jewish and Israeli communities were coping with the crisis.
A Nov. 23 article about the JNF conference was the proverbial straw. This is what I wrote:
“Either you are comfortable with having taken a side or you are unwilling to confront your unconscious biases . . . If you seek to be honest . . . you might want to ask yourself why you haven’t spilled one dot of ink on an important global convention taking place locally until anti-Israel opposition emerged . . . What a sad state our world is in when I have to say that I am glad my grandfather Max Goldberg is no longer living to be heartbroken to see the paper he wrote for for so many decades disregard his community.
“Attitudes such as yours are exactly why I am looking forward to attending the JNF conference and standing together with my people. I will not allow any group — Palestinian, the Denver Post or otherwise — tell me, a fifth generation Coloradan, whose family came here to escape discrimination and pogroms, that I am ‘not welcome’ in Denver because I am a Zionist.”
Would the Post have quoted a white supremacist saying about an NAACP convention in Denver that the majority black attendees were “not welcome in Denver?”
The Post has rendered Jews the ugly objects of bigotry.
Shana Goldberg may be reached at shana@ijn.com
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