New season of Netflix’s ‘The Diplomat’ offers hidden tribute to Hersh Goldberg-Polin

The fourth season of Netflix series “The Diplomat,” which premiered last week, paid a tribute to the late Hersh Goldberg-Polin, who was taken hostage by Hamas on October 7, 2023, and killed in captivity.

In the sixth episode, Frances Munning, the housekeeper at the US ambassador’s residence in London, tells Stuart Heyford, the ambassador’s right-hand man, about her affinity for Americans because of an American soldier named Hershel Polin.

Polin, says Munning, played by Penny Downie, battled next to her father as part of a joint British-American unit in the Allied advance through Belgium during World War II.

Polin, an American soldier, 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.

“He smashed it up and tossed it away, inches from his hand,” says Munning in her conversation with Heyford, played by Ato Essandoh.

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, the late Aner Shapira.

Goldberg-Polin and Shapira 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, Shapira 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. He managed to fashion and tie a tourniquet around his own wounded arm to slow the heavy bleeding before he was abducted to Gaza.

In August 2024, after eleven months of captivity, Goldberg-Polin was murdered in captivity alongside fellow hostages Carmel Gat, Eden Yerushalmi, Ori Danino, Alex Lubanov and Almog Sarusi.

“Several people told us about the episode yesterday, but we don’t watch TV, so we have not seen it,” said his mother, Rachel Goldberg-Polin. “It’s striking to know there are many people around the world trying to ensure the stories of the hostages are not whitewashed or erased.”

“The Diplomat,” starring Keri Russell, was created and written by Debora Cahn, a descendant of Holocaust survivors who has discussed how her Jewish heritage deeply influences her perspective on global affairs, storytelling, and international politics.