The past 18 months have marked an extraordinarily turbulent period for Jews worldwide, with a pogrom launched against communities in southern Israel soon yielding a major spike in antisemitic incidents. Veteran documentary filmmaker Wendy Sachs says she watched what transpired and began chronicling and connecting dots.
Sachs’ new film October 8 begins with the unprecedented Hamas attack a day earlier, then tracks the fallout over the course of the ensuing Gaza war, examining global anti-Israel protests along with increases in anti-Jewish rhetoric and violence.
The doc, which opened this past weekend, features a host of prominent figures, including advocates (the Anti-Defamation League’s Jonathan Greenblatt), academics (George Washington University’s Lorenzo Vidino), executives (Sheryl Sandberg), podcasters (Dan Senor), politicians (Ritchie Torres) and actor-activists Debra Messing (who executive produced the film) and the Israeli-American writer Noa Tishby (In Treatment, Nip/Tuck). Together they build an argument that what we are witnessing is simply old hatreds and stereotypes in new forms — and against an anti-Zionism they say is at heart a means of denying Jewish self-determination.
Sachs (she previously directed Showtime’s Surge, about feminist Congressional campaigns) also trains her lens on campus activists who are fighting back. She focuses particularly on a group of stalwart young women — including Barnard-turned-SIPA graduate student Noa Fay, MIT’s Talia Khan and UCSB’s Tessa Veksler — who have taken up pro-Jewish causes, often at notable risk to their safety.
The increase in antisemitism is not coincidental, Sachs posits, constructing a case in which Hamas began seeding anti-Jewish and anti-Israel hate as far back in the early 1990s with a meeting the FBI secretly recorded at a Philadelphia hotel. (A plan, she says, was hatched to cloak pro-jihadi agendas in the language of social justice.) This led to the formation of Students for Justice in Palestine, or SJP, which the film says is not a grassroots campaign of the well-meaning but part of a jihadi-coordinated attempt to discredit and destroy Israel.
Sachs began writing a treatment for her film just a few weeks after October 7, 2023 but was turned down by many financiers and sales agents, who she says told her they liked the film but feared its commercial potential was limited. She pressed ahead, relying on her early-career experience as a booker on Dateline to land and shoot some 80 subjects, about half of whom appear in the film. She locked the movie this past October, almost a year to the day from the October 7 attacks.
Her budget of nearly $2 million was financed entirely by donors and coordinated by the Hollywood producer-financier Teddy Schwarzman of Black Bear Pictures (The Imitation Game). With no streamer or network picking it up, the film found a home with Tom Ortenberg’s theatrical banner Briarcliff Entertainment. Over a long career that has included turns at Lionsgate and Open Road, Ortenberg has been willing to tackle films many thought risky — he released Bryan Fogel’s Jamal Khashoggi documentary The Dissident in 2020 when Saudi-sensitive streamers wouldn’t touch it, and took on Ali Abbasi’s Donald Trump-Roy Cohn drama The Apprentice in 2024 when many studios had cold feet. That film would garner Oscar nominations for Sebastian Stan and Jeremy Strong.
October 8, Ortenberg says, continues a tradition of forging ahead independently while other companies sit on the sidelines. “I don’t think we’ve really changed what we’re trying to do,” the L.A.-based executive tells The Hollywood Reporter. “I just think the timidity of a lot of other Hollywood companies has come into focus.”
The film has already begun to make inroads. In just a few days of release it has grossed more than $300,000 across 100 screens, including at AMC, Regal and independent venues. Its Monday grosses topped its Saturday receipts — unusual for any film and suggestive of the idea that the release is gaining strength.
Unashamedly pro-Israel, October 8 arrives as the self-distributed Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land — about the IDF’s forced displacement of a longstanding Palestinian community in the West Bank— has been gaining traction too, crossing $1 million in box office this past weekend. It would be reductive to say that the two movies are in opposition, but it would also be naive to say that the films aren’t vying for a sort of world-view supremacy. Focusing on Jewish and Palestinian self-determination, respectively, each movie tells a vigorous story of disenfranchisement rooted at once in fact and a particular point of view.
October 8 also comes as the headlines continue to be racked with news of the war in Gaza and reaction to it in the U.S. On Tuesday protesters appeared at Gal Gadot’s Hollywood Walk of Fame ceremony.
THR spoke to Sachs and Tishby over Zoom about the challenges posed by antisemitism and what their film seeks to accomplish.
You decided to make this movie almost immediately after October 7. What specifically spurred you?
SACHS Like so many people, I was gutted by what happened on October 7. I was visiting my daughter at the University of Wisconsin and watched everything that was happening in Israel. The next few days we started to see campus protests, a domino effect at Tulane and Columbia and Penn and a lot of other places where people were celebrating Hamas as freedom fighters rather than terrorists. I thought, “the world has lost its mind.” And in the next weeks, we saw silence from Hollywood; from Capitol Hill; from women’s rights groups. It all hit at such a cellular level. And so I started putting together a treatment.
So much had yet to happen, though. Did you know what the film was going to be?
SACHS I didn’t know. I just knew something was happening. I said, “I need to focus on what’s happening here, this is epic, this a modern-day Kristallnacht.” It was a generational trauma that unleashed a kind of awakening. One of the candidates I made Surge about (Illinois Democratic Congresswoman Lauren Underwood) didn’t vote for the House resolution [condemning universities for supporting Hamas]. I didn’t really want to see the antisemitism on the left before — I thought it was just coming from the right and far-right. Noa’s shaking her head—
TISHBY I mean, I’m not sure where to start. I’m a patriotic American, and since I got here 20 years ago, I saw the bias when I tell people I’m from Israel. I recognized it wasn’t political. It’s a kind of frown — a suspicion towards the world’s only Jewish state. I’ve been in a lot of progressive spaces here in Los Angeles, and over this time I’ve begun to see the shift in those spaces too. It sucks to have been so right but we’ve been talking about this for years. When I wrote my first book in 2011 (Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth) we also created an online advocacy rapid-response team because we saw what was starting to happen. So October 8 was an activation — a new moment in a war that had been waged against Israel really for the last 30 years. I’ve testified in front of Congress three times and I’ve said it there: The West has literally been groomed to believe Israel is the worst thing in the world using Soviet Union-style propaganda and centuries-old theological antisemitism. And it worked beyond the wildest dreams of the people who were doing it.
I want to pick up on this idea. You argue in the film that this isn’t isolated rhetoric but part of a coordinated effort, a kind of psy-ops. How much evidence do you have? A lot of people will look at protests and say it’s just well-meaning students or other citizens who don’t like Israel’s actions in Gaza.
SACHS In 1993, Hamas — which was not yet designated a terrorist organization by the U.S. government — met in a Marriott in Philadelphia. The FBI wiretapped the meeting. At the meeting they were asking, “How do we infiltrate American institutions; the media; college campuses?” And the answer was: on the left, you talk in the language of justice and apartheid, and on the right, in patriotism and the Founding Fathers. This was their plan. They knew how to message their way into American consciousness. And so when we saw on October 8 the release of a “toolkit” spread to SJP chapters around the country, it was just a continuation of that. The idea of “flooding” the streets, like the Al Aqsa Flood, or using the red triangle, which of course is what Hamas uses to target IDF soldiers. And it worked — we saw red triangles spray-painted on the Benjamin Franklin statue at Penn; we saw the same Hamas iconography at campuses around America. SJP says they’re just another student activist group. They’re not. This is not an accident. It’s sophisticated, well-funded and has been in the works for a long time. They’ve been playing the long game.
TISHBY I keep trying to shout, “You guys don’t understand. We are in a war.” Except one side knows they’re in a war and the other side is asleep. On October 8, we woke up. Well, some people woke up.
To the dangers of terrorism, you mean?
TISHBY Yes. But I don’t like the word terrorism. Terrorism is a tool. Terror — every parent terrorizes a child at some point. Terror isn’t always bad. What we’re dealing with here is jihadism. It’s a desire for Sharia law. So what we’re in is a fight against that — a fight for Western values. That needs to be explained.
You say “explained.” That conjures up the idea of “Hasbarah,” a Hebrew word for “explanation“‘“ and the Israeli concept of using media to cast Israeli actions in a more explainable light. It’s a loaded term, because it can read to some as propaganda. Do you see what you’re doing with this film as Hasbarah?
TISHBY It’s a problematic word because it focuses on the need to explain. Or defend. What I think we need to do is retell the story of the Jewish people and the State of Israel. These movements have convinced the young generation that Israel is a bastion of colonialism that needs to be taken down; that we were created in sin; that we’re the worst country in the world. And of course, none of that is true. Israel is not a perfect country but it’s not anything like that. It was a country created by refugees and is the only true home for Jews in the world. So we need something that isn’t a defensive posture but a more proactive message on the importance of Israel and its need to defend itself.
Wendy, was that your aim?
SACHS It was. There is a lot that people don’t know, especially young people. About Israel, about Jewish history. My kids went to public school in New Jersey. They were taught almost nothing about the Holocaust. So the long-term mission for this film is to get it into schools, into K-12. I want to create a curriculum so that kids are taught what happened on October 7 and the explosion of antisemitism on October 8. That the modern form of antisemitism is anti-Zionism, that the irrational obsessive hate of Israel is antisemitism. Criticizing the government or Bibi — that’s OK. But criticizing Israel as an illegitimate state — that’s what’s antisemitic.
TISHBY What antisemites have done is turn Israel into the Jew of the world.
How do you mean?
TISHBY In the olden days there was this idea of “you get rid of the Jews and everything will be fine.” This was genuinely the belief of a lot of people, and it’s why Jews have faced so much. You pin on the Jew whatever you think is bad in society. So they’re “vermin, they’re bloodthirsty, they’re capitalists, they’re Christ killers.” And now of course you can’t really do that in most places. So people say “you get rid of Israel and everything will be fine.” Today the worst thing you can be in society is a white-supremacist racist colonialist, and so Israel gets pinned with that. Israel is the bearer of all these things even though none of it is based in reality. In the past, it was blood libels. Now it’s whatever the Israeli army is doing. But it’s the same phenomenon.
SACHS And one of the biggest problems, and what we try to show in the film, is that these criticisms get the Good Housekeeping seal of approval from these international organizations, from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. These are good organizations that do good work elsewhere. But when they’re constantly targeting Israel and calling it a pariah state, that penetrates. You have NGO bias, which along with media bias, and academic bias, and social-media bias creates a perfect storm that has been seeding for decades. And that’s what’s coming to fruition now.
There are many young secular Jews who have been uncomfortable with Israel’s actions. Would you characterize them as carriers of this idea? What do you say to them when they say “no, we just legitimately disagree with what’s being done by our Jewish brothers and sisters in Israel?”
TISHBY Did you see the Hannah Gadsby special Nanette, on Netflix? It’s brilliant. There’s this very interesting sequence in it about this small town in Tasmania where people hadn’t any out gay people and so they say all these ignorant or hateful things. And people who were actually gay began to internalize them — they felt shame and guilt and felt that all those things were maybe true. I watched that and thought, “Oh my gosh, that’s the Jewish community.” We’ve been told that we’re terribly and greedy and untrustworthy for so long we began internalizing the hate. “The IDF is bloodthirsty, they’re terrible, they’re killing babies.” You hear this so much that you internalize it, you feel guilt and shame when it comes to Israel. Again, Israel is not a perfect country. But if you don’t know the actual facts about Israel you will take the hate, internalize it and have it come out in the shape of JVP (Jewish Voice for Peace). “As a Jew, I stand against.” As a Jew go to Israel and learn the facts. Go to Israel and understand why there’s no Palestine yet.
SACHS Look at the Washington Post review of the film. It’s bizarre. “Here’s a great film. But what they didn’t do was attack Israel’s government.” That’s basically the subtext of the review. “Really good film except it doesn’t go into the government and how oppressive and horrible they are in murdering Palestinians.” The media bias is so baked into what we’re reading for such a long time that it has seeped into American consciousness. You trust the NY Times and Washington Post because they’re good papers but there’s such an ideological point of view from journalists and reporters that Israel is an “apartheid state,” that they’re a “colonialist oppressive regime,” that people just start believing it.
Do you believe that bias is baked into Hollywood too? Or just news outlets?
SACHS Well, I have no representation. No agent would touch this film. The International Documentary Association wouldn’t give us inventory for our Oscar campaign this fall. I took it around town and from NBC to CNN, no one would touch it. No distributor would touch this film. That feels like bias.
In fairness, no distributor would touch No Other Land either. So is it bias or is it just cowardice — a fear of being involved with anything political right now, especially in the Middle East?
SACHS It’s true. People said, “This is great; thank you for making such an important film but we can’t touch it, because we can’t sell it. We can’t make money.” So there is a capitalist impulse involved. “We can’t take it to Netflix or Amazon or Hulu because no one’s going to touch a film like this.” But I really don’t think we’re being political. We’re documenting a moment: how did we get to this place where Hamas is being marked not as terrorists but celebrated as freedom fighters on the streets of America? It’s not about Israel. It’s about Islamic extremism vs. democracy. This is why I feel everybody needs to know the story we’re telling.
On the subject of Hollywood reluctance, I wanted to ask about the Holocaust movie A Real Pain.[Sachs stirs, seemingly uncomfortably.] We could go off the record if you like? But on the awards circuit this year Kieran Culkin—
SACHS No, I’ll stay on the record. Yeah, Kieran didn’t mention the Holocaust once. In any speech. Not once. It was enraging. It’s also outrageous to me that [writer-director] Jesse Eisenberg for the longest time was calling it a “WWII film.” He wouldn’t mention Jew or Holocaust ever.
TISHBY There’s a book [by Neal Gabler] called An Empire of Their Own: How Jews Invented Hollywood. And it tells of how at the time when we invented Hollywood we left out our own stories. The Jewish community has done so much for Hollywood — I mean even literally the idea of taking rooms and putting chairs in them and screening motion pictures, that was the idea of the early Jews in Hollywood. But as we were inventing Hollywood we left our own story aside. We didn’t take a seat at the table. It’s an epigenetic fear, I think. For generations, we were afraid of being literally rounded up. So we said, “We’re not going to make a fuss.” “We’re not going to take that seat at the table even when we invented the table.” I feel there’s finally a change within the Hollywood community that we’re willing to do that. Slowly. We’re willing to take a seat.
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