The War on Hostage Posters: a Review of “Torn “
As we anxiously await news of a ceasefire and hostage return deal, Torn, a documentary directed by Nim Shapira, brings us back to the earliest days after October 7, depicting the hostage poster war that raged on the streets of New York in those fraught weeks.
In this film, Shapira stages a moving cinematic dialogue between those who found the posters to be a deeply meaningful way to humanize the hostages and those who were enraged by what they considered a propaganda campaign. “My aim was to humanize those caught in the emotional crossfire — to document not the slogans, but the consequences: the unintended and deeply human,” Shapira says.
To its credit, Shapira’s film asks as many questions as it answers and is an admirable exercise in empathy, even as it shows the toxic stew of antisemitism and misogyny that too often reared its head during the height of this proxy paper war.
The posters depicting the hostages were the brainchild of two Israeli street artists, Nitzan Mintz and Dede Bandaid, who were doing an art residency in New York when the massacre occurred. Devastated by the news coming out of Israel and moved by the Facebook posts of families desperate for news about their missing loved ones, they decided that they needed to hit the streets, their activist and aesthetic beat. Inspired by the missing children milk carton campaign, they designed the posters, printed 2000 copies, and then used social media to beg for distribution help. The posters quickly went viral, along with the controversies that erupted.
The posters themselves were designed to turn the abstract group of hostages into individuals with faces and stories. Several of the film’s talking heads were family members and friends of those missing, and they reported going through those initial days in shock, unable to function. For those directly affected as well as those who felt a bond of peoplehood with the hostages and with Israel, the posters gave them a mission, made them feel less alone and that people cared. One of the expert talking heads, a rabbi, points out that taking action and experiencing any sort of agency during a trauma lessens symptoms of PTSD.
However, as the war in Gaza intensified, these posters of Israeli victims became a flashpoint for pro-Palestinian protestors who saw tearing down such images as their mission. None of the objectors were willing to be filmed; however, some provided written statements that are read on camera, and many clips shared via social media are included in the film.
Shapira captures the diversity of voices that object to the posters. A Palestinian American poignantly addresses the question of representation and whose faces were missing: “My people have been getting slaughtered in Palestine for years; I haven’t seen a single poster about my people.”
Others see the posters as “perpetuating a completely false narrative” that puts the “spotlight on a specific demographic of people” and as “a piece of paper that hurt everyone and stood for nothing.” Such protestors gleefully rip images of the hostages to shreds, declaring “into the trash you go.”
Particularly bracing is footage of an Israeli jeweler in Manhattan who displayed posters outside of her shop each day, only to have protesters tear them down and then begin to harass her through direct messages. In response to such targeting, the police advised her to remove a star of David pendant from the window: that symbol of the Jewish people was deemed provocation. The shop owner refused. However, one day, a particularly large group of demonstrators congregated outside of her shop, banging on the windows and doors despite police presence. After that, she stopped displaying the hostage posters out of fear for the safety of her employees.
Some of the encounters shared on social media that made it into the film are rife with unveiled antisemitism and misogyny. A woman recording someone tearing down a poster is categorized as a Karen; when opposing sides meet in the street, a woman is called a “Zionist genocidal apartheid cunt” and told to “walk away, bitch.” Torn recounts that some of the poster destroyers were identified and sometimes fired by their employers. This spawns conspiracy theories. During one protest, Linda Sarsour, an organizer of the 2017 Women’s March who was accused of antisemitic comments at the time, cautions against ripping up “their little posters” since “there are provocateurs all across the city.” She has a “radar” for them, and they are “everywhere.”
But Torn documents more than the paranoia and discord that have marked the last two years. Shapira highlights those who can imagine “holding space for both people’s grief,” and one of the hostage family members recounts that, counter to all the vitriol, “Palestinian friends checked in on me.” Toward the end of the film, one activist who collects remnants of shredded posters (much like religious Jews strive to recover remnants of bodies that have been dismembered) imagines a different reality on the streets of New York: that people “share poles” and “put up images of our and their children.”
Shapira’s Torn implicitly implores us to recognize that if we dare to hope and work for an alternative to massacres, war, and war crimes in Israel and Gaza, then we must be able to manage peaceful coexistence and shared grief in New York City.
And if not now, when?
Helene Meyers is the author of Movie-Made Jews: An American Tradition