‘October 8’ documentary probes the rise in U.S. antisemitism
“October 8” — 2.5 stars
The timely documentary “October 8” looks at the antisemitism that arose last year on college campuses amid student protests over the Israel-Gaza war. It arrives in theaters just as the Trump administration has announced plans to cancel roughly $400 million in federal contracts and grants to New York’s Columbia University, a hub of anti-Israel anger.
In a statement, Education Secretary Linda McMahon attributed that decision to Columbia’s failure to protect Jewish students who felt threatened by protesters in the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel by Hamas, in which some 1,200 Israelis were killed and 251 taken hostage, and to which Israel responded with the full force of its military might. Columbia’s campus, along with those of other schools around the country, became embroiled in sometimes-ugly words and actions.
Even now, fresh protests have broken out at the Manhattan campus.
Documentarian Wendy Sachs (“Surge”) wisely anchors her film with often-moving first-person student testimony. These interviews are interspersed with appearances by writers, politicians and other nonstudents. They include an interview with comedian Michael Rapaport, who in November 2023 spoke at the March for Israel, a D.C. rally that took place one month after the attack. In the film, Rapaport laments, with a mix of self-deprecating humor and outrage, that he was the biggest star willing to speak out in defense of Israel. Actress Debra Messing, an executive producer of “October 8,” also appears.
Among the many students interviewed for the film, Talia Khan of MIT, the daughter of a Jewish mother and an Afghan Muslim father, speaks most eloquently of her anguish over the draconian tenor of some of the pro-Palestinian protests. These protests often included the chant, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” a controversial slogan that for some — including interview subjects in “October 8” — suggests a call for the eradication of the state of Israel. Khan responds, quite reasonably, that the situation is “not an either-or.”
In the film’s press material, Sachs has described her documentary as nonpolitical. “We are not litigating the war in Gaza,” she explains, “or advocating that anyone be denied their land or statehood.” In a filmed interview, podcaster Dan Senor takes pains to remind viewers that there ought to be a distinction between “criticism of Israel and its government” and “questioning its right to exist.”
The latter, “October 8” argues, is an insidious form of antisemitism that, as another of the film’s subjects notes, “flattens” all the many complexities that exist in the Middle East.
While attempting to explore some of those complexities, “October 8” offers context for the protests. It presents evidence, for example, that Hamas may be behind Students for Justice in Palestine, a loose network of campus activist groups, while also noting the outsize influence of the social media platform TikTok — owned by a Chinese company, as the film notes — in stoking anti-Israel anger among the young. But in its stated effort to avoid politicization, the film sometimes threatens to flatten other, more significant complexity.
At the outset, the film forcefully rebuts the outrageous accusation that Israel, because of its own actions, was entirely responsible for the Hamas attack. Yet at the same time, greater effort could have been made to acknowledge — or at least to interrogate — the role of the Israeli government and its military, over many years, in creating a fertile soil for Palestinian anger.
For that level of inquiry, you’ll have to look elsewhere. “Understanding Palestine and Israel,” a new book by writer Phyllis Bennis, a fellow at D.C.’s Institute for Policy Studies, might be a useful primer.
Then there’s the superb and gut-wrenching “No Other Land.” That documentary, which just won an Oscar despite the lack of a U.S. distributor, looks at the efforts by residents of a cluster of Palestinian villages in the West Bank to resist destruction by Israeli bulldozers, after the land their homes were built on was designated a training ground for the Israel Defense Forces. The justification for that designation is questionable at best, if not morally indefensible.
Co-directed by four filmmakers — two Palestinians and two Israeli Jews — that film makes for an instructive and much more nuanced counterpoint to “October 8.” Without demonizing either side, it shows how Israel’s pattern of mistakes, if not arrogance, may have helped set a pot on the stove that is now boiling over with venom.
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In theaters. Unrated, but contains images of violence, brief crude language and shots of threatening social media posts. 100 minutes.