A short while ago, a very liberal Jewish acquaintance of mine took me aside at a party and told me how she had had to drop most of her friends. Their unshakable convictions about the virtue of Palestinians and the evil of Israel had only served to cancel out her own humanity in their eyes. They had all marched together for the usual progressive causes and oppressed groups, but when my acquaintance’s turn came, they abandoned her. It took a lot for her to admit it to me.
October 8, directed by Wendy Sachs and co-produced by actress Debra Messing, conveys a similarly doleful sense of betrayal. One of the initial scenes is of a flag—a Pride flag with an Israeli flag in its upper left corner–waving sadly amidst the destruction at Kibbutz Nir Or. It clearly is meant to symbolize the liberal virtue of the murdered. And indeed, the inhabitants of these kibbutzim near Gaza were disproportionately leftwing, bringing Arab kids from Gaza to Israeli hospitals and engaging in peace activism. The memorials to the victims on the grounds of the Nova festival where 250 young and carefree, would-be dancing Israelis and others were massacred, remind you that these young people were likely not the West Bank settlers loathed by leftists. As we are constantly reminded, they “just wanted to dance.”
The film rightly emphasizes that the protests against Israel sprang up worldwide as soon as the following day, a month before any IDF counterattacks on Gaza. Terrorist sympathizers celebrated the Hamas carnage in Times Square while terrorists were still inside Israel and occupying the Sderot police station in southern Israel. Instead of mourning the babies, children, grandparents, and innocents savagely killed, the woke world quickly blamed them for their own murders. The film uses Hamas’s own footage to document the savagery of 7 October, and the suspiciously instantaneous aftermath in which terrorist sympathizers, backed by socialist troublemakers, suddenly streamed onto college campuses through blue cities, largely untroubled by police. You will be reminded how all our civic institutions including the media that should have been defending civic norms of peaceful protest and engagement instead caved.
The visceral hatred of the mobs at elite universities needs to be seen, not left to abstractions in print. Watching the masked and furious mobs tearing down photos of hostages or shrieking threats through bullhorns, or trapping Jewish students in the library at Cooper Union will shock you into wondering what happened to America. Many if not most of the rioters look like foreign rent-a-mobs. The ghostly white female faces in their midst are caught up with the mob, finding a purpose with which to confront their bourgeois parents. Their eyes are glassy. Angry women tearing down posters of hostages can only curse and give the finger to those asking why they would do such a thing. Had the legacy media considered this footage important, everyone would know about it. You see the scene in the subway car where a mob of terrorist symps demanded to know if anyone was a Zionist, and if so, they should leave “now.” So thank goodness for Wendy Sachs and Debra Messing.
The student body president at UC Santa Barbara, Tessa Veksler, the daughter of Soviet Jewish refugees, was another victim of October 8th. Her Zionism exposed her to constant abuse and invective, culminating in a recall motion that failed by only one vote. She did not want her parents coming to her graduation, seeking to spare them reminders of the anti-Semitism they thought they had escaped.
You will also learn thanks to the excellent Lorenzo Vidino of the Director of the Program on Extremism at George Washington University that Hamas leaders met in Philadelphia in 1993 and as you hear on an FBI recording, plotted to infiltrate the universities, media, and other institutions to spread the word. Says Vidino, “The main thing they discussed was how to present what Hamas was doing and make it palatable to Americans.” One is also heartened by the testimony of the son of Hamas’s founder, and the good sense and thoughtfulness of Democrat Congressman Richie Torres, whose South Bronx district has few Jews.
But I wanted to love this film more. I wanted to go out on social media and urge people to see it. Yes, you should see it. And yet something seemed missing. By the last half hour of this 1 hour 40-minute documentary, I was done.
It was my husband, the ex-Democrat independent, who said to me, “did you notice how they didn’t even talk about all the Americans and the Christians who have supported Israel and Jews since October 7th?”
The filmmakers can’t ignore that the anti-semites and the Israel haters in this country are overwhelmingly Left. So to prove that anti-semitism also exists on the right, they dig up the footage of the 2017 Charlottesville “Unite the Right” marchers shouting “Jews will not replace us!’ and a presumably similarly dated clip of Congresswoman Marjory Taylor Greene, who made an ignorant comment about Jewish space lasers early in her House career.
The film presents an ostensibly “scientific” horseshoe diagram to show how the left and the right extremes both hate Israel. But it overlooks a salient point: the vast majority of the Right are pro-Israel and rarely anti-Semitic, and the vast majority of the Left are anti-Israel and often anti-semitic. These are not equally weighed horseshoe ends.
The horseshoe diagram is courtesy of interviewee Deborah Lipstadt, the Biden Administration’s Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism. Lipstadt, who has clearly had to enact her own horseshoe balancing act, spoke at my federal workplace in Spring 2024. Her speech focused on alleged Russian antisemitism, but spared Iran, with its record of having funded October 7 as well as the 1994 bombing of an Argentinian Jewish Center in which 85 were killed and hundreds wounded. She did not criticize the administration’s passivity against campus mobs and I do not recall her addressing the subject of campus violence directly. Since the election she has found her voice somewhat, turning down a position at Columbia so that her assent could not be used to “whitewash” Columbia’s abysmal record in its treatment of civil liberties of Jewish students.
The film has enough intellectual honesty to admit that Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) ideology on campuses and in other institutions is partly responsible for the unchecked antisemitic mobs. But it’s done quickly and delicately. DEI is all about oppressors and oppressed “identities,” and as Noa Fay, the lovely black Barnard Jewish student who gets a lot of film time says, “they cared a lot more about my identity as black person than my identity as a Jew.” You thought inclusivity included you, but guess what? It doesn’t. This is painful to admit for some.
The film-makers return to a hoary rhetorical feint that is clearly no longer works with the left, if it ever did: American Jews were on the side of the angels in the US civil rights movement, at least those who didn’t live in the South. The film shows newspaper photos of Michael Goodwin and Andrew Schwerner, killed by racists in Mississippi in 1964 alongside African-American James Cheney. Jews are shown marching in Selma in 1965. The message is “how can you hate us? We are oppressed like you. Why don’t you love us sixty years later?” But even if the campus savages knew US history, and acknowledged Jewish good motives, what difference would this make to those who adhere to the identity politics trope in 2025? White people are allowed to be “allies,” but can never be exonerated of their inherent racism, and Jews must reject their Zionism, which in effect is their Jewishness.
The pathos is increased when Michael Rapaport, a minor Hollywood figure (I did not know who he was), angrily asks why he was the most prominent celebrity to appear at the November 2023 rally in Washington. The celebrities and film makers—many of them Jewish—who shed tears for Ukraine, Native Americans, transgender people, and other minorities, did not dare to support this project. They are not so different from the Jewish producers in the 1920s and 1930s who strenuously sought to blend in and avoid Jewish themes in their movies. But if today’s Hollywood elite, after another hundred years of assimilation, won’t speak up for Israel, why should anyone else? When Sheryl Sandberg, one of the wealthiest women in the world, tells the camera that she asked her Gentile walking buddy whether she would “hide her,” you have to cringe a little (once Sandberg explained to the confused buddy what she was referring to, the friend fortunately agreed she would hide Sandberg).
The film ends in October 2024, a month before Donald Trump was re-elected to the Presidency. That timing makes for an uncertain end to the film, with no real closure. The off-screen denouement has only taken place since the election. Trump, with a Jewish daughter and grandchildren and who opened Mar-a-Lago to Jews and blacks despite the dismay of blue-haired Palm Beach doyens, has brought Biblical wrath to bear against the cowardly universities. His Administration is deporting foreigners who violated the terms of their visas by supporting terrorist groups and campus violence and antisemitism. Trump has emboldened Israel—not hampered it—to act on behalf of its national interest. He will not cosset Iran like his Obama-owned predecessor did, let alone permit it to develop a nuclear war capability. Today the American Jewish community can have some confidence that the US Government will protect its civil rights.
This coming turnaround is hinted at in the film but not explored when the female presidents of Columbia, MIT, and Penn are grilled in a hearing by Rep. Elise Stefanek (R-NY). All three disgraced their universities by their detached and wooden testimony. According to Harvard then-President Claudine Gay, threats to kill Jewish students did not necessarily violate Harvard’s code of conduct, because “context” is what matters. That Stefanek is a devoted Trump supporter, and no more liberal than Marjorie Taylor Greene, is not highlighted.
It is a shame that the filmmakers did not even ask whether the election results could or would make a difference in this orgy of hate. Simple curiosity would have helped round out the film—would it matter who would be president in 2025? What could the near future bring? But there was no way these filmmakers would have asked this question, which would have challenged their own liberal assumptions. Cognitive dissonance is real.
Go see this film, or watch it when it goes to streaming apps. Show support for this important—because unique–undertaking. Just be aware that its makers are not fully aware of their own blinders.
Paula Weiss is the author of The Antifan Girlfriend and The Deplorable Underground.