‘The Diplomat’ creator confirms deliberate tribute to Hersh Goldberg-Polin

The creator of hit Netflix series “The Diplomat” confirms there was a deliberate tribute in the fourth season to Hersh Goldberg-Polin, who was taken hostage by Hamas on October 7, 2023, and killed in captivity.

“Yes. His mom Rachel called it a wink, and I liked that. Just a little note of what they went through,” showrunner and writer Debora Cahn tells Channel 12.

????Netflix’s ‘The Diplomat’ creator Debora Cahn has confirmed that the tribute to Hersh Goldberg-Polin in Season 3 was intentional.

In an exclusive interview with Israeli journalist Dudi Caspi for mako, Cahn explained the decision to include a character named Hershel Polin, from… pic.twitter.com/xlKjalZKSm

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In the sixth episode of the season, Frances Munning, the housekeeper at the US ambassador’s residence in London, talks about her affinity for Americans because of an American soldier named Hershel Polin.

Munning, played by Penny Downie, says that US soldier Polin fought alongside her father as part of a joint British-American unit in the Allied advance through Belgium during World War II.

Polin saved her father’s life by picking up and tossing a live grenade that had landed at her father’s feet, throwing it aside and losing his own limb in the process.

Munning tells Heyford that Polin was from Richmond, Virginia.

The anecdote retold in the show takes place during World War II, but it’s an unmistakable tribute to Goldberg-Polin, who lived in Richmond, Virginia as a young child with his family.

The story is also a salute to Goldberg-Polin’s friend, Staff Sgt. Aner Shapiro.

Goldberg-Polin and Shapiro were at the Nova music festival on October 7 and hid with others in a roadside shelter during the Hamas attack.

As terrorists began throwing grenades at the partygoers crowded into the shelter, off-duty soldier Shapiro caught and threw back seven grenades before the eighth killed him. At some point during the attack on the shelter, the lower part of Goldberg-Polin’s dominant left arm was blown off by a grenade.