When a former hostage walks onto a school stage in Israel today, the reaction looks more like a pop concert than a civics lesson. Teenagers scream, teachers wipe away tears, and phones rise in the air. On the microphone is not a famous singer. It is someone who spent weeks or months in Hamas tunnels, whose face Israelis first met on a yellow poster.
Every society builds its own pantheon of celebrities. In the West, it is usually a familiar mix of powerful politicians, movie and television stars, social media influencers, musicians, and the wealthy. Israel has had its version of that, too, from reality show winners and comic actors to rock bands, models, and lifestyle influencers.
Then came October 7, and the celebrity hierarchy turned upside down.
Israel after October 7 is not the same country it was before. That is true of politics, community, and security. It is also true of culture. Look at who fills our screens and feeds today, and an entirely different cast of stars appears.
Released hostages form a new social category of social influencer
One of the most unlikely heroes of this war was Daniel Hagari, the former IDF spokesperson who appeared on television multiple times a day in the first months of fighting. There are T-shirts with his face, memes, and pop songs about him. Our Eurovision representative, Nova survivor Yuval Raphael, carried an entire nation’s trauma onto a European stage and came home with a prestigious second place. A New York Times bestseller, “Hostage,” was written by released hostage Eli Sharabi, who lost his wife, two daughters, and brother, and still found the strength to turn 491 days of captivity into a book that Israelis and foreigners lined up to buy.
Our released hostages themselves have become celebrities. Some have large followings on social media. Others publish memoirs, sign with agents, or run sold-out lecture tours. Danielle Aloni, kidnapped from Nir Oz together with her daughter Emilia and freed after 49 days, is now represented by a speaker bureau. Her lecture “From Darkness to Light” is marketed under categories like motivation, inspiration, and Women’s Day, and she is booked alongside veteran TV commentators and motivational gurus.
Mia Shem, whose terrified face and bandaged arm stared at Israelis from the first Hamas video, now appears in fashion panels and photo shoots, her personal life chronicled by gossip sites. Jewelry designer Moran Stella Yanai has rebuilt her business, Yocheved Lifshitz has a photography exhibition at the Eretz Israel Museum, and Noa Argamani has addressed the UN Security Council and been named to TIME’s list of 100 most influential people.
Together they form a new social category, the survivor as influencer.
Around them has grown an ecosystem. Lecture bureaus build landing pages and handle fees. Fashion brands offer campaigns. Journalists compete for exclusive interviews. Families run online stores that sell freedom bracelets, bring them home pins, and even a gratitude journal created by the mother of a hostage, which promises to help buyers focus on the good while also supporting the struggle. A tragedy that began in burnt fields and underground cells has become, among many other things, a cultural and economic industry.
The commodification of emotion
From a sociological point of view, this is the commodification of emotion.
Trauma is packaged into inspirational content, accessories, and experiences. The story of the safe room and the tunnels becomes a 60-minute talk that fits neatly between the CEO’s keynote and the cocktail reception, or a carefully lit Instagram post with a caption about hope. And yet anyone who has sat in one of these lectures or scrolled through these posts knows it is not that simple.
The product they sell is also a way to stay alive. Taking control of the narrative is for many survivors a form of therapy and a form of revenge. Hamas tried to erase them. Standing on a stage and saying “this is what they did to me and this is why we must bring the others home” is the opposite of erasure.
Unlike in other Western countries, I find myself proud of these celebrities. They have meaning. They are not famous for being famous. Even Gal Gadot, our global Wonder Woman and this year’s Genesis Prize laureate, would probably agree that in today’s Israel, the real heroes are not the actors but those who fought for Israel, those who kept faith and even fasted on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, in Hamas captivity, although they were already starving, because they believe in God. The new celebrities carry tefillin bags and traumatized nervous systems, not just designer handbags.
This shift will affect politics, too. Many of these figures are deeply Jewish in ways that feel different from the secular, post-Zionist mood of parts of the pre-war elite. They are not necessarily right-wing or left-wing. They have seen the worst, and they are impatient with slogans. When they step into the public arena, and some already are, they bring a moral authority that no slick campaign can manufacture.
There is, of course, a darker side. The intense public hunger for any piece of news about the hostages created a perfect breeding ground for disinformation and exploitation. One grotesque example was a TikTok personality who fabricated breaking news about daring rescue operations and read out lists of supposed freed hostages, some alive and some dead. Within days, he had tens of thousands of followers and caused such panic that the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit was forced to issue repeated denials. Families rode an emotional roller coaster because someone discovered that nothing goes viral faster than a fake list of names.
The same platforms that give survivors a voice also expose them to trolling, conspiracy theories, and anonymous criticism. Turning hostages into public figures may be inevitable in a small, wired country where everyone knows someone who knows someone, but it requires new kinds of protection and ethics that Israeli society is only beginning to develop.
Looking back to Israel’s first vibrant community of trauma survivors
To understand how radical this moment is, it is worth looking back to modern-day Israel’s first vibrant community of trauma survivors, the Jews who came here after the Holocaust. When they arrived in the 1940s and 1950s, they were often received with discomfort and even contempt. The proud native-born Israelis of that generation preferred the image of the fighter who jumped off a boat with a rifle to that of the gaunt refugee who stumbled off a train. In early Israeli literature and memory, Holocaust survivors are sometimes described as Muselmänner, the camp slang for prisoners who were skeletal, silent, and on the verge of death. They were seen as fragile, broken, and not quite fitting the heroic ethos of the young state.
Compare that to the way Israelis have reacted to the men, women, and children who came back from Hamas captivity. From the moment they arrived at the hospital or at an air base, presidents and ministers lined up at their bedsides and called them national heroes. The daily papers ran headlines about their heroic struggle. Social media overflowed with messages of love and solidarity.
There is something deeply healthy in that. A people that immediately embraces its most wounded as heroes is one that has learned something from history. But there is also a risk. When every survivor is expected to be an icon of strength, there is less room for weakness, depression, or anger. When every story becomes a brand, those who cannot or do not want to turn their pain into a product may feel left behind.
The story of Israel’s new celebrities is, in the end, the story of a society that refuses to look away from its trauma, yet also cannot bear to stare at it directly for too long. So it dresses it in makeup, books it through an agent, and gives it a campaign for a fashion chain or a ribbon-cutting at a hospital fundraiser. It is both a coping mechanism and a business model.
Israel has stumbled into a very different kind of stardom. The most recognizable faces on the evening news belong to people who have seen hell and walked back out. The least Israelis can do is make sure that the society now applauding them is worthy of the courage that got them home.