Can what is torn be made whole again? The question can be asked of many things: friendships, intimate relationships, communities, nations, even a single human heart. A documentary film project with which I became involved two years ago touches upon all of these things, though it appears to be about only one: the poster war that erupted in New York City in the aftermath of the barbaric Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023, and the kidnapping of hundreds of Israelis and foreign nationals into Gaza that day.

Like many people in New York City, I have direct connections to Israel. My closest non-biological family lives there. Every eruption of terror in that land reverberates through me. On Oct. 7, that took on a whole new meaning. That meaning then became bound up and grotesquely distorted in New York City’s 2025 mayoral election.

In the immediate aftermath of Oct. 7, I joined others in my neighborhood and beyond who put up posters of the kidnapped on lampposts, walls, and elsewhere, trying to call attention to the plight of the hostages. That effort triggered a hostile counter-response, and it is that tug of war, on the streets of New York City, that is documented in “Torn,” a film (now streaming on PBS and newly qualified for Oscar consideration) by director Nim Shapira, an Israeli-American who has lived and worked in the city for the past 13 years.

This fall, the trajectory of the street-level poster war came to be mirrored and then eclipsed by New York City’s........

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