Propounding one specific pro-Israel, American Jewish point-of-view, the independently financed social-issue documentary “October 8” charts and laments the alarming increase in antisemitism — particularly on university campuses and in social media — following the Oct. 7 Hamas incursion into Israel that resulted in over 1,200 deaths and the taking of 251 hostages. To make her passionate, if not particularly nuanced argument, director Wendy Sachs assembles a large cast of talking heads, including well-known figures, academics, journalists, leaders of Jewish organizations and those who monitor extremism. More emotional and personal testimony comes from a survivor of the attack, as well as from U.S. college students whose public support for Israel earned them a deluge of online hate.
The informative film calls attention to an important issue, but viewers should recognize that the perspective is one-sided. Israel’s response to the attacks is mentioned only in passing and the interviewees don’t seem to want to accept that one man’s terrorist can be another man’s freedom fighter. Yet the film is worth seeing, if only to understand what antisemitism is, the privileges and limits of free speech, why the rhetoric against Jews became so filled with hate, why so many presidents of elite universities resigned or were fired from their positions in the aftermath of the pro-Palestine protests and the Trump administration’s current politicization of those protests and protesters.
More Jews were killed in the Hamas massacre in a single day than at any time since the Holocaust. As the killers live-streamed their atrocities on social media, their actions were celebrated in some quarters, including in a pro-Palestine gathering in New York’s Times Square and on college campuses. A Cornell professor even spoke of feeling “exhilarated and energized” by the murders. Moreover, 31 student groups at Harvard signed a letter saying that Israel was “entirely responsible” for the attack.
Why did progressive universities fail to condemn the attacks and allow demonstrations that made Jewish students and faculty feel unsafe? Sachs and her interviewees suggest that the young generation gets their information mostly online and is influenced by misinformation as well as news sources controlled by adversarial nations. Representative Richie Torres, a Democrat from New York, notes that social media platforms encourage indoctrination and certain ones create space for anti-Israeli, anti-Jewish sentiment, which can be expressed anonymously. Meanwhile, branches of Social Justice for Palestine (SJP) sprang into action on campuses with talking points and instructions for days of resistance that encouraged violence and questioned Israel’s right to exist.
The film alleges that the SJP is funded by charities affiliated with Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood. It discusses a meeting of Hamas officials in Philadelphia in 1993, which was monitored by the FBI, where the organization made a motion to frame what they were doing in terms of apartheid and racial oppression. They knew that these terms, already understood in American discourse, would draw positive press attention and public response.
The power and importance of the media echoes throughout the film. The decision of the Israelis to invite in journalists from around the world to witness the death and destruction wrought by Hamas is compared to Gen. Eisenhower bringing the press to see the German concentration camps. An Oct. 17 article by the New York Times that relied only on Hamas-supplied information to declare that Israel had bombed a hospital, an allegation later corrected, is decried.
Actor Debra Messing, an executive producer, expresses surprise that more people in Hollywood did not directly condemn the violence and speak out in support of the hostages. Her feelings of disappointment are echoed by actor Michael Rapoport, who finds it strange that he should be one of the top-billed celebrity speakers at a rally urging the release of the hostages.
Dense with sometimes repetitive information, the film’s briskly edited visuals mix the talking heads with news footage, internet videos and chat graphics. The propulsive sometimes ominous orchestral music score from Sharon Farber stresses the points being made.