Emerson’s Department of Journalism hosted a screening of “October 8” to an audience of 20 Emerson College community members, most of whom were members of Hillel, an organization for Jewish students on campus.
The screening was followed by a panel discussion with journalist and documentary filmmaker Wendy Sachs and Hillel board members, Lily Minkoff and Arthur Mansavage, and was moderated by journalism professor Tim Riley.
“Nothing in my life has been as important and existential as making this film,” said Sachs.
Sachs has spent the past 16 months directing and producing the documentary, which explores the recent rise of antisemitism across the United States, and especially on college campuses following the Oct. 7 attack.
The film opens with a black screen, then, the chilling sounds of air-raid sirens blasted through the theater’s speakers, scenes of people running to the sound of gunshots, women dragged on the floor with bloodied pants, and a mother holding her two children under Hamas’ gunpoint run for seven minutes.
“We were gutted by what we were seeing,” Sachs said of the footage the world saw as news of the Hamas attack first spread. “We did not understand what was happening.”
On Oct. 7, thousands of Hamas militants crossed the Israeli border, killed about 1,200 residents, and kidnapped 250 before returning to the Gaza Strip. Following the attack, the Israeli military retaliated and killed approximately 48,000 Palestinians, injuring tens of thousands more to date.
The rest of the film focuses on the wave of pro-Palestine protests that washed over the U.S. immediately following the attack which have continued to this day. Its topics range from a historical overview of the pro-Palestine movement to the power of language and narrative and the increasing antisemitism across the country. According to the Crowd Counting Consortium at Harvard Kennedy School, data shows more than 3,700 days of pro-Palestine campus protest activities in more than 500 schools across the country, including at Emerson.
In one scene, hundreds of pro-Palestine protesters at Columbia University chanted “globalize the Intifada” and other slogans against Israel. Across the street, a few dozen counter protesters held Israeli flags and posters commemorating the hostages in silence. Columbia University professor Shai Davidai stood among the counter-protesters.
“I wasn’t seeing an ideological disagreement,” Davidai said in the film. “I was seeing hatred.”
Sachs finds a correlation between the popularity of pro-Palestine protests and the rise of hate speech against Jewish and Israeli people. According to the Anti-Defamation League, a pro-Israel organization that logs hate crimes, antisemitic activity hit a record high following Oct. 7. It has cited thousands of cases ranging from verbal slurs to vandalism and physical assaults in 2023 and 2024.
One of the scenes in the film shows a multicultural center at the University of California Santa Barbara with a sign that read “Zionists not allowed.”
“To me, saying Zionism is not allowed is saying Jews are not allowed,” Sachs said during the panel discussion. “Zionism is the empowerment of Jews for self-determination; it was a civil rights movement.”
Two weeks before, the Department of Journalism hosted a screening of the documentary “The Palestine Exception.” On the surface, the two films discuss the emergence of pro-Palestine protests on college campuses. But while “October 8” views these protests as a source of hate speech and misinformation, “The Palestine Exception” examines the protests through a free speech lens, arguing that shutting down the protests and using disciplinary actions against its participants is a violation of their First Amendment rights.
“It’s very difficult to bring these two groups together,” Mansavage, a panelist and Hillel board member (and also an editor at The Beacon), said during the panel. “The main part of that is because Students for Justice in Palestine think this kind of hate speech is acceptable.”
Emerson College collaborated with the ADL earlier this academic year to help create programming with the Center for Spiritual Life to “increase understanding through education and dialogue.”
Editor’s note: Arthur Mansavage is the photo editor and website editor for The Berkeley Beacon. He suggested the film to the Department of Journalism and participated as a panelist independently of The Beacon. Yogev Toby did not interview Mansavage for this story.
