Ripping Up Sympathy on the Streets

In the days following the October 7 massacre, it was difficult to know what to do. I remember spending too much time on Instagram responding to different people posting things that I thought were offensive, then feeling a tremendous wave of shame that what I was really doing was creating fights with bots. When I first saw the “Kidnapped” posters, I knew immediately that I wanted to put some up. The simple act of putting up a kidnapped poster for a person who was 5,700 miles away made me feel like I was doing something useful. The posters were visually arresting, and their faces moved me.

Nim Shapira’s brilliant new documentary, Torn, focuses on the posters and the wave of ripping them down. The act of putting up the posters was a way of making the victims real people, not just remote pawns in a distant political game. I remember watching in real time as posters would go up in New York City, be defaced, get torn down, and be replaced. I remember the agony I felt when I photographed this poster of a nine-year-old boy horribly defaced with particularly incendiary graffiti written on it.

Shapira focuses first on the people involved in the origins of the posters, Nitzan Mintz and Dede Bandaid, two street artists who moved to the United States shortly before the attacks. “Here we are in New York where life carries on as if it’s all normal,” they recalled, and their visceral response was to create some sort of public art that could commemorate the missing. They worked with graphic designer Tal Huber to create a simple, striking design that would humanize the faraway victims. If you lived in New York or any other major city, you certainly would have seen the Kidnapped posters. The documentary highlights several New Yorkers who put up posters around the city.

A few of the earliest posters were Alana and Lian Zeitchik, who were desperate to find out information about their cousins from the Alony and Cunio families. Student and artist Julia Simon put up posters of her childhood friend Omer Neutra, who grew up on Long Island. There’s writer Nina Mogilnik, a mother of an autistic child, who speaks movingly about her efforts to put posters up to honor Noya Dan, an autistic victim who was burned alive with her grandmother.

Another poster, Rabbi Yehuda Sarna from NYU, addressed how social media is poisoning young people and creates a “moral binary” that is echoed and enforced by online communities, a view he paraphrased from his colleague Jonathan Haidt. Sarna explained the binary as “whatever you see on social media, you either see the viewpoints that reinforce your viewpoint, or you see the most absurd version of the other side. No more gray.”

The tearing of the posters began almost immediately. Lian Zeitchik put up posters of his missing cousins across the street from his apartment, and they’d be ripped down by morning. He aimed a small recorder out of his window to see who was doing it, and filmed a man who brought a knife to cut down the posters. Zeitchik posted the video online, which went viral. The battle between putting up and ripping down began in earnest, a second attack on the paper versions of real people,

While we never hear directly from any of the people who ripped down the posters, you get a sense of their anger. Torn never tries to editorialize or discuss politics, and it doesn’t try to dehumanize the people who were intent on ripping the posters down. Many of them were caught on camera, chased off social media, and many of them were fired or suspended from school. I looked up a few of them. There was a dentist in Miami who is now working for himself. There’s an NYU student who is using her suspension to advocate very harshly, and perhaps at times illegally, for her beliefs. Since none of them agreed to appear in Torn, Shapira collected their online posts in a “letter from a poster ripper” and had Mogilnik read their thoughts. Their words are powerful in the way they discuss their pain about their own victims, and Mogilnik responds to their feelings of being overlooked and ignored with compassion.

It’s exceptionally rare to read or see news without being aware of the author. Shapira stays out of the frame. He doesn’t editorialize or impose his viewpoints. He lets his subjects speak and creates a space for the “rippers” to have their words heard. What this incredible documentary does best is provide a sense of why these posters became symbolic of the exhausting nature of everything related to this conflict. Chen Levy, an Israeli jeweler, had made it a daily habit to put up posters around her store. After weeks of attacks, she reaches the point of surrender. It was bad for her staff, bad for her store and bad for her, as she had to hide in her office during violent protests, hoping and praying the police would come to save her from people who were pounding on her windows. Ultimately, she couldn’t continue putting up the posters. Rabbi Sarna reaches a similar place. “It’s a hard thing to conclude,” he says with obvious pain.

Shapira doesn’t have any answers for how what it means that we live and die by what people can capture on a screenshot or on video. Mogilnik ultimately concludes that the poster campaign “succeeded because it did give the hostages a name and a face. But it didn’t solve our despair.”

Read the Q&A with the filmmaker below the trailer.

BFG: The Kidnapped posters always reminded me of the posters that appeared all over NYC right after 9/11. Is there a reason you did not mention the 9/11 posters?
Nim Shapira: Nitzan and Dede moved to New York in September 2023, and I’ve been here 13 years. We didn’t know about the missing-person posters that appeared after 9/11 until people started mentioning them to us once the hostage campaign was underway. Their direct visual reference was the missing children on milk cartons. Later, I also learned about poster campaigns for the desaparecidos in Latin America. Nitzan and Dede had no knowledge of those either – it just shows that great minds often arrive at the same idea when the goal is to make absence visible.

Why did none of the “poster rippers” agree to appear on camera? How did you get their written responses?
I reached out to dozens of people who had been filmed tearing down posters. Because many were doxxed, I was able to contact them through Instagram, email, LinkedIn, even GoFundMe pages. Some said they’d already spoken to the media and said everything there is to be said, others didn’t reply. That’s why I collected every written response I could and presented them collectively as a single “letter from a poster ripper.”

How did you decide to use the 60,000 number as the Palestinian death toll?
The 60,000 figure reflects the estimates cited at the time of editing, based on reports from the UN and major NGOs that relied on Gaza Hamas-run Health Ministry data. I wanted to ground the film in figures that were widely cited by international bodies.

Rabbi Sarna referenced Jonathan Haidt’s work on how social media reinforces a social binary. Do you think the posters helped blur these lines at all?
It really depended on who was looking. For some, the posters were symbols of grief and belonging — a plea to fellow New Yorkers to see their kidnapped family members as human beings. Others were shocked by the scale: 251 hostages of all ages, Hindus and Buddhists, Christians, Muslims and Jews, from over 40 nationalities. But some ripped the posters down without even looking at the faces, seeing only the red “KIDNAPPED” letters and reading it as propaganda. So the posters both blurred and hardened the binary.

Do you see any connection between the people who ripped down posters and the people who celebrated Kirk’s murder?
Ripping down the posters was not only ugly — it was also profoundly un-American, because it meant silencing someone else’s speech. It revealed a lack of empathy at the most basic level. And even though these are separate events (ripped down posters and the people who celebrated Kirk’s murder), both reflect what happens when empathy collapses. At one screening, someone reminded me of a rabbinic teaching: the night ends not when you can see the leaves on a tree, or the lines on your hand, but when you can look at the other’s face and recognize your own.