I was profoundly moved and shaken when I read Eli Sharabi’s book Hostages. Sharabi was taken hostage by Hamas on October 7. The book is a deeply disturbing chronicle of this time in Hamas captivity, and reveals the shocking extent of Hamas’s brutality and the evils of contemporary antisemitism. It is also a testament to Sharabi’s sheer strength in resilience. I urge everyone, and especially every high schooler in the United States, to read this book.

I wrote about it in the Washington Examiner:

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.

I’ve just read a book 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 every high school student in this country to read it, for it teaches heartrending lessons on justice and injustice, and on the horrors of which antisemitism is capable when it is unleashed and allowed to run wild.

The book I want everyone to read is called Hostage, 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.

Read the whole thing in the Washington Examiner.