My editor's letter from the print edition of @TheWeek, on the Gaza hostages and erasing Jewish suffering. We have now passed the one-month mark since Hamas kidnapped some 240 people from Israel, and time is not on their side. What seemed just a few weeks ago like an issue of international urgency has now descended into the ordinary course of events. In much of the discussion of the war in Gaza, the hostages are strangely absent. Around the world, there are calls for a cease-fire from protesters and government officials. Yet virtually none of those calls are accompanied by similar ones for the release of the hostages, something that Hamas could easily accomplish at any time. It’s very difficult to find a way to claim that kidnapping children after killing their parents is anything other than a war crime, so apologists for Hamas simply ignore the situation. And as time goes on, the urgency diminishes. Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit was held in Gaza for five years and traded for more than 1,000 Palestinians, including 280 sentenced to life for terror attacks. Hostages are valuable currency. The problem for backers of Hamas, though, is that hostages, especially children, can elicit sympathy. So, it’s useful to keep them but also to keep them out of view. And, indeed, across the U.S., people have torn down posters bearing images of the hostages. Sometimes they say the posters are Israeli propaganda. ­Occasionally they claim that the faces are not real. It’s hard to find a response—just as it’s hard to find a response to people who are convinced the Holocaust wasn’t real. But it’s notable that Jewish suffering seems particularly susceptible to denial and erasure. A few days ago, I was walking with my 10-year-old son and we saw posters with images of Palestinians killed in Gaza. My son, having seen the videos of people tearing down hostage posters, stayed back and started peeling one off. I was shocked, because we do not do that. As Jews, I told him, we do not deny other people’s suffering. But why so often do they deny ours?