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The country’s most urgent book right now is Hostage by Eli Sharabi of Kibbutz Be’eri. He was abducted on October 7, held in Gaza for more than a year, and only after his release learned that his wife Lianne and daughters Noiya and Yahel were murdered that morning. He wrote fast, on purpose. The point was not literary polish. It was to fix memory while it is still hot, and to fight for those who have not yet come home. The launch felt less like a book party and more like a public reckoning, the kind that crosses living rooms, WhatsApp groups, and barracks in days.
What gives the pages their force is the posture. Sharabi is careful with comparisons, including to the Holocaust. He speaks instead about choosing life, even inside tunnels, and about the discipline of acting ethically when the room gives you every excuse not to. It reads like steadiness, not performance. That steadiness is why the book jumped from testimony to vocabulary, and why it will travel in English as well.
Sharabi is not a politician or a professional activist. He is a Be’eri father whose ordinary life ended in a single morning. His brother Yossi was abducted too and later confirmed murdered, with his body still held in Gaza. The book reads as testimony but also as a manual for steadiness: short, disciplined scenes, a ledger of choices that kept him human when nothing around him was. “Because in those moments, as I am dragged along by the fence of my kibbutz, under the sun, in the smell of the fires, a bandana tied over my eyes and two terrorists hauling me by both arms, with the clear knowledge that I am being taken to Gaza while Lianne and the girls are left behind, I narrow my focus to one task: survival and getting back home. There is no ordinary Eli anymore. From now on, I am Eli the survivor,” Sharabi wrote in the beginning of Hostage.
Between chapters, he widens the frame to the families still waiting, treating the text as a working document for the living, a way to keep public pressure high and memory precise until the last person is home.
Sella-Meir's theory of publishing
Begin with Sharabi to understand Rotem Sella’s theory of the case. The founder and publisher of Sella Meir, a house that began on the margins a decade ago and now sits at the center of Israel’s nonfiction shelf, says the public has changed since October 7. Put the coalition math aside. Israelis on the left lost faith in old formulas, including the two-state reflex. Israelis on the right, what used to be called the Jewish camp, discovered the limits of their long alliance with the Haredi community. The result is not indifference. It is an opening. People feel disillusioned and angry, some even pessimistic, yet far more open-minded than our television panels suggest.
Sella thinks in timelines. He talks less about the next election and more about the stretch between 1974 and 1977, when a deeper realignment ripened in the public before it showed up on a ballot. Something similar is germinating now, he argues, and it needs a new language before it can become a new coalition.
Where does that language come from? In his view, not only from campaigns, but from books.
If that sounds counterintuitive in the age of swipes, consider Israel’s media metabolism. In a market this small, five or ten thousand copies can move the conversation. Twenty or forty thousand is a cultural event. The old gatekeepers have been replaced by thousands of independent voices that read, argue, and spread frameworks in real time. When a book hits, its ideas can jump from page to discourse in weeks, not years. “There are no twenty gatekeepers anymore,” Sella said. “There are five thousand, and it is meritocratic. Frameworks become part of the conversation not in years, but in weeks.”
“This is why a publishing house matters,” Sella told JPost Editor in Chief Zvika Klein at JPost Studios. “We optimize for units sold, yes. The real metric is impact.” He is blunt about the correlation. “Impact is book sold,” he said with a half smile, then added a publisher’s aside, “not all the people who buy a book read it.”
Sella Meir built for impact. The list started with translations that traditional Israeli publishers waved away. David P. Goldman’s How Civilizations Die put fertility collapse and faith on the table in ways that fit local arguments better than many expected. Tuvia Tenenbom’s undercover reporting in Catch the Jew punctured pieties on all sides and sold accordingly. Douglas Murray, unknown to many Israelis until Sella brought him over, now has multiple Hebrew titles and the kind of readership that means you are no longer just read, you are referenced.
Publishing here is not only curation. Sometimes it is logistics at commando speed. When Benjamin Netanyahu’s memoir was set to appear in English, Sella Meir aligned with the American release and turned around a Hebrew edition on a brutal timetable. “It was a commando project,” Sella said. “We had a very short window to translate and publish together with the American house. It became an operation with tens of people.” The point was not only commercial. A book, he likes to say, is the closest artifact to a person’s mind. It is one-way communication into the reader’s imagination, slower than video but more intimate and durable. If you buy a politician’s book and sit with it, you do more than sample a message. You enter a room with the author and stay there for hours.
Sharabi’s Hostage became the proof of concept. Forty-four days after his return, still in the thick of rehabilitation, he sat with the team and said he would do whatever it takes to tell the story. “He told us, ask me anything,” Sella recalled. “If there is something I did not write, ask. And then he said, I will do whatever it takes. We could not move slower than him.” Two months later, they launched. Sales raced through gold and platinum thresholds, but the more important number was time to conversation. “Publishers have been reactive and slow,” Sella said. “Readers did not disappear. If you move with the country’s heartbeat, books can lead, not lag.”
Speed, in this house, is editorial purpose. After October 7, Sella Meir expanded its in-house team because Israel needed long-form while events were still unfolding. “We felt the sentiment,” Sella said. “We needed to create discourse now, close to where it happens, so we built the capability inside.” That is the logic behind a newer imprint built for present-tense thinking, a platform for emerging public intellectuals and political actors who feel the ground has shifted and want to write now, not after the moment has cooled. The first test was blunt. Idan Roll, a former deputy foreign minister, left his party and published a programmatic book on the same day. It was not a stunt. It was a statement about how thought and action should meet. “People have the sentiment,” Sella said. “They feel reality. But they are waiting for leaders who give them paradigms. You need paradigms first.”
More titles are coming, including work by Dr. Einat Wilf, a former Labor Knesset member better known abroad than at home, who broke with the two-state catechism even before October and now argues for treating land the way Israel’s founders did, as a strategic asset rather than a mystical totem for either camp. It is an old idea reframed for a new map, which is often how real change begins. “The public knows when it is fake,” Sella said. “Grind the idea through the public. If it is true, it survives.”
None of this makes Sella provincial. Ask who he would love to publish, and he smiles at the impossibles, from the imagined inner voice of Ronald Reagan to a clear-eyed literary mind like Michel Houellebecq turning his gaze on Israeli society. He wonders what a truly rigorous, first-person account from Donald Trump would reveal about the riddle of his politics. The point is not name-dropping, but curiosity. He is looking for writers who cut through noise and describe what is actually there.