Hanna Siegel and Mickey Bergman

Hanna Siegel and Mickey Bergman came together on Oct. 7 when the worst possible events unfolded. Bergman has spent his career negotiating the release of hostages and wrongful detainees around the world, operating in back channels, working across governments, and navigating the fraught space between leverage and humanity. Siegel watched her aunt and uncle, Aviva and Keith Siegel, taken from their home in Israel on Oct. 7 and held hostage in Gaza, and what began as traditional family advocacy quickly evolved into something far more consequential.

Bergman brings decades of experience as a hostage negotiator, including leadership at the Richardson Center for Global Engagement and serving as CEO of Global Reach, an organization dedicated to bringing Americans home. He teaches negotiation and emotional intelligence at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. He is the author of the book "In the Shadows: True Stories of High Stakes Negotiations to Free Americans Captured Abroad." He has spoken extensively about his work at forums around the world and in the media.

Siegel became the primary family advocate and a core member of the negotiating team, shaping strategy, directing messaging, navigating political and diplomatic fault lines, and sustaining the fragile conditions that ultimately made a deal possible. Aviva was held for 51 days and Keith for 484. Siegel brings a career in strategy, communications, policy, and public leadership. She is a partner at the ENSO Collaborative, previously led a national immigration reform nonprofit for a decade, worked in the New York City mayor's office under Michael Bloomberg, and began her career as a broadcast journalist with ABC News. After Oct. 7, she drew on that background — strategy, messaging, coalition building — in the most personal context imaginable. She speaks not only as a family member, but as someone who understands from lived experience what it means to help move a negotiation forward when the stakes are life and death. She has appeared on national television, written for national outlets, and regularly speaks to business and nonprofit executive audiences.

Together, Siegel and Bergman experienced the same crisis from two completely different vantage points: the career negotiator and the family member who became a negotiator herself. Their experience offers lessons about leadership, communication, emotional intelligence, leverage, moral clarity, and community, lessons that feel deeply relevant to Jewish communities grappling with how to show up effectively when members are in crisis, the right balance between advocacy and strategy, remaining united when emotions run high, and what moral leadership looks like when there are no clean options.

The program is designed as a joint keynote and moderated conversation, 60-90 minutes including Q&A, and is tailored to audiences, whether a synagogue community, federation gathering, leadership forum, or donor event. They also offer smaller sessions with boards or leadership teams focused on crisis decision-making, stakeholder alignment, and how to communicate under moral and emotional pressure.