The Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks on Israel left children living near the Gaza border with significant emotional baggage — whether they themselves were kidnapped, had a loved one taken hostage or killed, or had to evacuate their home — and their parents and caregivers tasked with helping them regain hope and resilience.

Lishay Miran Lavi, whose husband, Omri Miran, was held hostage by Hamas in Gaza for 738 days, sought to help children deal with loss and uncertainty related to Oct. 7 and beyond, with her new book, Mojo’s Return: A Story of Resilience and Hope, which was published in Hebrew and English in November.

On Oct. 7, Miran, Miran Lavi and their daughters, then ages 6 months and 2, were in their home in Kibbutz Nahal Oz when Hamas terrorists attacked. Terrorists entered their home and forced a 17-year-old neighbor, under threat of death, to tell the Miran family to come out. The terrorists held the family and other hostages in a nearby home for several hours, broadcasting the scene on Facebook Live. They later kidnapped Miran and others to Gaza, leaving his wife and daughters on the kibbutz. Miran Lavi and her daughters, Roni and Alma, were rescued by IDF soldiers that evening and were evacuated to Kibbutz Kramim, near Beersheva, where they have lived ever since.

Miran Lavi began working on the book with her New York-based co-authors Melissa Stoller and Mary Millman about a year ago, with assistance from ANU – The Museum of the Jewish People in Tel Aviv, as a way to discuss what happened to her family with her two daughters, who were by then 4 and 2. 

Proceeds from the book will go to children’s resilience centers near the Gaza border.

“It’s a tool to reflect what happened for the girls and help them deal with the fact that their dad [was] not there,” Miran Lavi told Jewish Insider on Wednesday. “It’s for my girls and for everyone’s children who experienced Oct. 7 with a great loss, like a father or uncle who is not coming back because he was murdered, or fell in the war.” 

Mojo’s Return tells the story of a father, mother and two girls who were celebrating a holiday together when a storm hits their kibbutz. The storm upends the kibbutz, destroying many homes, and the father and the family’s dog, Mojo, disappear. Family, friends and strangers start hanging up signs with the father’s name and photo, and the girls would call out at night and say they love their father. Mojo makes his way back to the kibbutz, injured, but months pass and the father does not return. The mother and girls try to rebuild their lives and do fun things such as baking and going on picnics, and they draw pictures of what they did for their father to see when he comes home.

The story ends inconclusively, with the girls and mother sitting on their doorstep with Mojo, hoping that “a new day of sun will arrive.” 

The co-authors finished writing the book, which was also meant to bring awareness to the hostage crisis, when Miran was still held in Gaza, but it was published weeks after he was freed on Oct. 13, 2025.

Still, Miran Lavi chose to keep the open-ended conclusion to the story.

“The book came from my personal story and everyone’s story of Oct. 7, but it can be for anyone and anything, so any ending could happen. We got a happy ending, but that does not always happen,” she said.

Miran Lavi said that she and her daughters “lived with uncertainty for over two years and had to deal with it in different ways,” and the book addresses such situations.

Mojo was inspired by the Miran family’s real dog, also named Mojo, who like his eponymous book character went missing after the Oct. 7 attacks. Miran Lavi thought Mojo was lost or killed, but he was returned to the family days after the attack. He died in May.

“Mojo was really part of the family,” Miran Lavi said. “Mojo’s return gave us a lot of hope after the early days of chaos and unclear emotions. We didn’t know if Omri was alive or not, but it was very symbolic for us that Mojo was found. … It gave us hope.”

Miran Lavi and her co-authors wrote the book in Hebrew and English simultaneously, and released it in both languages.

“The story of Oct. 7 is not just for Israelis,” she said. “The book touches on so many things for children who experienced loss anywhere in the world.”

Miran Lavi has received videos from other families who read the book.

“It’s moving to see the response to something that I created. There are children who said it made them think about lost toys, or a dog that died, or an uncle or father who fell in the war. Everyone takes it to their own place,” she said.

The first person to read Mojo’s Return to Alma and Roni was Omri, after his return from captivity. Miran Lavi recounted that 2-year-old Alma’s reaction was: “But dad came back.” 

“It raised a conversation,” she said. “It also made them miss Mojo. We talked about how dad came back but Mojo died. We talked about Mojo and death.” 

Now that the Miran family is reunited, Miran Lavi said that “it is a great joy, a lot of fun, but it is not so simple. It’s not like Dad is back and everything is O.K. We have a long journey ahead.”

The Miran family is one of many hostages’ families who have started crowdfunding for support after their loved one’s return.

“The State of Israel is really giving us a lot in the area of rehabilitation and psychological aid, but we set up the crowdfunding to allow us to dedicate ourselves to his journey of rehabilitation and lift ourselves up again,” she said.

Meanwhile, the family of four is still living in Kibbutz Kramim, and has yet to decide whether to go back to Nahal Oz: “We’re still not in the right place to make that decision. We’re at the beginning of our journey, and it’s still open,” she said.

Lishay Miran also mentioned Ran Gvili, the final hostage whose body remains in Gaza.

“In all of these months that Omri is back, we still feel like we cannot move forward as long as one of us is left behind, and we call for his return,” she said.

Long before the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terror attacks, parents — especially Jewish parents — wondered and at times struggled with how to speak to their children about antisemitism.

In the midst of the antisemitism that exploded in the wake of the attack on southern Israel and continued to rise through the ensuing war between Israel and Hamas, journalists Bianna Golodryga and Yonit Levi found themselves navigating that challenge — and found no help to guide them.

“The fact that our kids are talking about it, [it’s] something I’m dealing and grappling with in New York City in 2023 at the time,” Golodryga, a CNN news anchor, told Jewish Insider in a recent interview. “I never thought that we’d be having to address [it] so directly. But there were no resources on this issue. I asked my kid’s school about it, [saying], ‘What are you doing to address antisemitism?’ And in a longly worded statement, it was clear that there were no resources. They weren’t really doing anything.” 

In Israel, Levi, an anchor on Israel’s Channel 12, was asked about antisemitism by her pre-teen son. “And I was sort of floored by it,” she told JI. “I didn’t even know how to begin answering because I wasn’t planning to answer that question, explaining and answering a lot of other questions that Oct. 7 brought to the table.”

As a result, Golodryga said, “Yonit and I decided to try to write the book we couldn’t find.” The result was their debut book, Don’t Feed the Lion, released on Tuesday.

After the Oct. 7 attacks, Golodryga and Levi spent much of their professional bandwidth reporting on the war. The weekly writing and brainstorming sessions for the book, Golodryga explained, were “cathartic” and provided an opportunity to “step aside and away from all of the breaking news and the heartache of the day.” For Levi, having that support system and the experience of writing the book amid so much turmoil at home was “like a ray of light inside this darkness of the last two years.”

Don’t Feed the Lion is a novel targeted to middle school students, but with lessons, scenarios and parables that anyone who has experienced or witnessed discrimination — in any of its forms — will recognize.

The book’s main plot point revolves around a pair of Jewish siblings in Chicago. The older of the two, Theo Kaplan, a soccer enthusiast and co-captain of his school’s team, is shaken when prominent soccer player Wes Mitchell goes on an antisemitic rant. Days later, the eighth grader’s teammates vandalize his gym locker with a swastika. Theo, who is weeks away from his bar mitzvah, faces inner turmoil as he grapples with the fallout of Mitchell’s comments and the responses to the incident by his friends, teammates and school administrators. (Spoiler alert: the school is more than happy to sweep the incident under the rug.)

Meanwhile, Theo’s younger sister, Annie, sneakily creates an account on a social media platform in an effort to get concert tickets, but ends up falling into a Reddit-esque black hole of antisemitic drivel, which she attempts to fight despite being far outnumbered by anonymous online trolls.

Theo finds himself an ally in Gabe, a new student who moved to Chicago after his mother’s death from COVID-19. Gabe, although an outside observer, becomes the readers’ eyes and ears into the Kaplan family when he is paired with Theo for a family heritage project that sees the two spotlight Theo’s grandparents, Ezra and Talia.

“It’s obviously a fictional book, but there are several real-life experiences that we’ve encountered, that I’ve encountered with some family members, going back several years ago, where antisemitism not only wasn’t really addressed, but when it was facing students and faculty members at schools, it wasn’t treated or given the prioritization that that other forms of hate were given,” Golodryga said.

But whereas many stories and fiction novels about Jewish families settle into tired tropes, Don’t Feed the Lion takes a more realistic approach to the American Jewish experience: Ezra and Talia are a mixed Ashkenazi-Mizrahi couple — a rarity in the world of Jewish literature. The family dynamic is challenging, with estrangement between Theo and Annie’s grandparents and their aunt’s family. And Theo faces the relatable social pressures that many young assimilated Jews encounter as they feel torn between spending Friday nights socializing with friends during a time traditionally set aside for Shabbat meals with family.

Beyond capturing the zeitgeist of the modern American Jewish family, Theo is a relatable protagonist — owing in part to Golodryga and Levi’s own children, who inspired elements of Theo’s personality, backstory and experiences. Golodryga recalled her son’s reaction to the response, in 2022, to antisemitic social media posts made by then-Brooklyn Nets star Kyrie Irving. 

“It seemed like everyone was apologizing for him but him, and he was allowed to play,” she explained. Irving was ultimately suspended for eight games, more than a week after the initial social media post, after repeated opportunities in which he had refused to distance himself from the content of the post. NBA heavyweights, including LeBron James and Jaylen Brown, a vice president in the NBA’s players’ union, defended Irving at the time.

Golodryga said her son didn’t know how to approach the situation. “As a New Yorker, he even said, ‘So can I not go to games? Or can that mean that I shouldn’t be a fan, or I can’t watch him anymore? He doesn’t want me to.’ So that’s always sat in the back of my mind.” 

Where art perhaps most imitates life is in how administrators in the story respond to the swastika incident — not by addressing it head-on, but by hoping to sweep it under the rug, thereby avoiding the need for disciplinary action that could keep Theo’s soccer team from advancing to the state-level competition. 

At the heart of the book, Levi said, is “that the kids really get what’s wrong and what’s right” — even when the adults in the room do not. “At the end of the day, it’s like the grown ups [in the book] and in reality too, sort of obfuscate … and say, ‘Maybe I shouldn’t stand up because it’s not good for my workplace, or it’s too much bureaucracy,’ or all the other things that are said in this book, and the kids at the end of the day, they know, they get what is wrong and what is right.”