Mimi Nichter (née Beeber) is a cultural and medical anthropologist, public speaker, and a professor emerita of anthropology at the University of Arizona. She is the author or coauthor of four anthropology-related books and the recipient of the Margaret Mead Award and the George Foster Practicing Medical Anthropology Award. Her book Hostage: A Memoir of Terrorism, Trauma, and Resilience (Potomac Books, 2026) was published in March.

On September 6, 1970, twenty-year-old Mimi Nichter was on a flight home to New York from a summer in Israel when armed members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine crash-landed her plane in a remote desert in Jordan. Passengers were held on board for six days in sweltering heat without flushable toilets or running water. Most were sent home, but Mimi—accused of being an Israeli soldier—and thirty-one others were held hostage in Amman, fearing for their lives as a violent civil war erupted around them. 

In Hostage: A Memoir of Terrorism, Trauma, and Resilience, Mimi recounts her survival of the hijacking of Trans World Airlines Flight 741, the first incident of international terrorism and one of the most significant events in aviation history. 

After her dramatic release, Mimi returned to college a different person. Plagued with terrifying memories, she silenced her experience. One year later, striving to live in the present, she backpacked across Africa and Asia with her boyfriend and in doing so found a path forward, but her buried trauma resurfaced each time a new global hostage crisis occurred. Mimi finally realizes that to fully heal, she must explore how this trauma, and her silence about it, has shaped her life. Told with courage and empathy, Hostage is the story of how one’s strength and humanity can flourish even in the most fearful and untenable circumstances.

Introduction

During the five decades that have passed since I was a hijack hostage in Jordan, I’ve rarely talked about the experience except to my closest friends. Even then, I would not tell the story in its entirety but would recount a shortened version, merely sharing that at age twenty I was on a hijacked plane and kept as a hostage. I didn’t talk about the bombing of Amman during the civil war, or how close I came to death. I left out the scary parts. When people asked about the hijackers, I mentioned the name of the group—the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine—but didn’t explain anything about who they were or what they wanted. 

Even talking in this truncated way was difficult. No listener response seemed appropriate; either the person felt sorry for me or thought the story was amazing and wanted to hear more. Afterward, I inevitably found myself reliving the hijacking. My head ached and my breath shortened, and for hours or even days afterward, I felt drained and saddened. Not telling the story seemed safer. And the less frequently I told it, the more difficult it became to tell. Within a few years, my secret was sealed. Even in therapy, I focused on current problems and did not mention the hijacking. 

In part, my inability and reluctance to tell the story reflected how I had grown up. In my conservative Jewish family, we shared little about our private lives with others. This was certainly not true for all Jewish families, but in our household, we didn’t talk about feelings. Whatever was outside the fuzzy boundaries of normal, I learned, was best hidden. 

In the immediate aftermath of the ordeal, when I returned to college shortly after my release, I felt untethered from my friends who, like me, were anti–Vietnam War activists. Some of them romanticized my experience with “real revolutionaries” as “far out.” Certain that no one could understand what it was like to be held in a war zone, I buried those weeks of my life. 

Eventually, I went on to not only survive but thrive, finding my footing as a cultural anthropologist, researching women’s health and development in the United States, India, and Indonesia. Focusing on the narratives of young women, I mostly forgot, or at least continued to silence, my own. 

I carried on with the story under wraps for decades until a former high school classmate requested an interview about the hijacking. He had become a political scientist and was writing a book on global terrorism. He had recognized my name in newspaper articles about the 1970 hijacking of four airplanes during “Black September.” 

My first response to his request was to equivocate. It had been years since I had last talked with anyone about the experience. But I was uncomfortable saying no outright, so I said I’d think about it. He had not explained how he would use my story or how he would retell it. What if the interview flung open a door to latent trauma and fear? 

Still, my unwillingness to be interviewed felt wrong—selfish, even. Most of my work as an anthropologist depended on people’s willingness to speak openly about themselves. How could I refuse to talk about my experience when I depended on others to talk about theirs? 

Maybe it was time for me to tell my story.