ART – From Gaza to Rome, the story of a hug

Tamar Herzig, an Israeli historian specializing in Renaissance history, has spent over a year publicly challenging the silence from some parts of the feminist movement, including in Italy, regarding the atrocities of October 7. She observes that there was “a profound silence” surrounding the reports of Israeli women raped by Hamas, adding that in Italy the hypocrisy on this issue appears “stronger than elsewhere.” Beyond her academic work, Herzig is the mother of a young man, her only child, who has spent weeks serving as a police investigator along the Gaza border. “The first twenty days after October 7 were filled with anguish; I was practically in a state of constant insomnia,” recounted Herzig, who received the Fiuggi History Europe Award in December 2023 for her research and “her commitment to defending women’s dignity and rights.”
A few weeks after the Hamas attacks, during one of the most intense days of the military incursion into Gaza, her son knocked on the door at home. Her anxiety gave way to tears of relief and an emotional mother-son embrace, captured in a photograph that Herzig shared with her Italian friend and colleague Michaela Valente. Valente, a professor at La Sapienza University in Rome, was among the few academics to openly show solidarity after October 7, a rare stance in these times, according to Herzig.
Valente went a step further, sharing the photograph with her mother, the artist Maria Rosaria Pistello, who recently created a small sculpture based on it. Herzig has yet to see it in person, but she plans to visit Pistello and Valente during her next trip to Rome. Likely, another embrace will open the meeting. “The horror around us can be overcome,” Herzig emphasizes, “also with positivity and love.”