By Albert Stern / BJV Editor
October H8TE – The Fight for the Soul of America (October 8), a 2025 documentary directed by Wendy Sachs and co-produced by Sachs and the actress Debra Messing, will be screened on Monday, July 28 at 8 p.m. as part of the Berkshire Jewish Film Festival. Following the film, Kenneth S. Stern (director of the Bard Center for the Study of Hate and an attorney and award-winning author) will present a talkback discussion about the issues the film raises about the academic milieu from which much of the post-Oct. 7 2023 antisemitism emanated, a subject he explored in his 2020 book The Conflict Over the Conflict: The Israel/Palestine Campus Debate.
October 8 is a valuable film, as it not only focuses on the protests (ongoing and continuing to morph more explicitly into rank antisemitism), but also describes the cultural and institutional ecosystem from which it emerged. “If you want to look at the dynamic over Israel and Palestine, and how it has affected institutions on campus,” says Stern, “you could even go back to the political statement of the Weather Underground in 1974. Their take on what was happening in Israel and with the Palestinians was not all that different than the Students for Justice in Palestine’s position now.” Stern stresses the importance of recognizing that “it's not just this outside group that's somehow infiltrated [the universities]. There's a larger history.”
An ominous part of that larger history that October 8 portrays is a 1993 meet-up of 25 pro-Hamas operatives at a hotel in Philadelphia to discuss the development of a messaging strategy that will advance their goals. Captured by an FBI wiretap, one operative says: “In order to strengthen the Islamic activism for Palestine in North America, we must do two things – widen the Muslims’ circle of influence and reducing the Jews’ circle of influence. This can be achieved by infiltrating the American media outlets, universities, and research centers.” Another opines: “[For] the Americans…we must address them from a position of rights and justice and, at the same time, choose our words well.” Hamas had, by then, understood the value of participating in what has been termed “the long march through the institutions,” a neo-Marxist strategy from the 1960s to win over key institutions in order to influence the direction of the larger culture. Though I’m well-versed in the history, that pro-Hamas forces were so savvy and well-organized over 30 years ago still came as a surprise.
One of the film’s talking heads, Lorenzo Vidino of George Washington University, observes that the pro-Hamas elements were able to accomplish some of their goals by couching the Palestinian cause in terms of apartheid and racial oppression. The film shows how the Boycott, Divestment, & Sanctions (BDS) movement modeled its tactics on the global, righteous, and ultimately successful protests against South African apartheid, while the Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion (DEI) frameworks developed in the 21st century provided ready-made hierarchies of oppressors and victims based on race, economic status, gender, sexual preference, and other characteristics. As Vidino puts it, “What we are seeing today is the realization and implementation of that strategy” outlined by the Hamas operatives in 1993.
Kenneth Stern, however, does not see things quite that way. “One of the things that I find problematic is that people presume that all of the protesters are somehow dupes or Hamas operatives or Arabian-backed and Qatari-funded,” he says. “That's not, in fact, the case. There are a lot of students who are very concerned with the number of Palestinians that have been killed in the aftermath of October 7, and they may not be experts on the history of the Middle East, and some of them may not be chanting ‘from the river to the sea’ and don't even know which river and which sea it is. But that doesn't change the fact that there are a lot of students who are very concerned with the contemporary moment. And to add to the complexity, there are a lot of Jewish students who are in the pro-Palestinian camp, too.”
Stern says his study of behavioral psychology leads him to believe that the disputes on campus stem as much, if not more, from fundamental human nature as they do from the political issues at hand. Both people on the left and right desire “to see things in in very binary terms, good and evil, right and wrong, taking complicated things and making them simple. It gets supercharged when identity is tethered to an issue of perceived social justice or injustice…and so the other side is not just wrong, but potentially evil. The same human capacity to want to take complicated things and blend them into something simple also happens to be on the side that wants to fight what [a person] perceive[s] as hateful.” He adds his view that the larger Israeli vs. Palestinian conflict is at, its core, a clash between irreconcilable national narratives, and that “each group – not just Israelis and Palestinians, but people that have their identities tied to them – have this view of history and identity that sees the other side as a secondary aspect of the story, and mostly as an impediment to their trying to achieve control over their lives.”
One of the most effective segments comprises expressions of the betrayal felt by Jewish women at weak or nonexistent condemnations coming from women’s groups after the gruesome details of the sexual violence perpetrated by Hamas became known. One is a young student is shocked into understanding the true nature of antisemitism by what she terms the “failure of [her] Barnard sisterhood to support the women who had been raped.” Another is former Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s palpable disgust at UN Women’s refusal to do “their core job” – it took eight weeks (and the forceful lobbying efforts that Sandberg and her allies were able to bring to bear) before the group issued a statement condemning the sexual violence that did not take a “both sides” approach to the situation. It’s also hard not to notice that, in the footage presented by October 8, women seem to be overrepresented among the seething protestors. Stern says the data he is familiar with don’t generally bear out that disparity, however.
However. For me, the most disturbing scenes captured by October 8 were from the encampment on the campus of my alma mater, Columbia University. Wearing a surgical mask and keffiyeh, student activist Khymani James – who was suspended by the school after footage surfaced of him saying “Zionists don’t deserve to live” – stands on a platform in front of a throng of similarly adorned protesters. “We have Zionists,” shouts James. “WE HAVE ZIONISTS,” the crowd chants in unison. “Who have entered the camp,” James continues. “WHO HAVE ENTERED THE CAMP,” the protesters all repeat. “We are going to create a human chain…” “WE ARE GOING TO CREATE A HUMAN CHAIN…”
And so on. It reminded me of the memorable scene from Monty Python’s Life of Brian, in which the reluctant messiah confronts a huge crowd of ardent would-be followers by telling them: “You have to think for yourselves. You are all individuals!” “YES,” the crowd intones as one, “WE ARE ALL INDIVIDUALS!”
While that scene was played for laughs, the events portrayed in October 8 are no laughing matter, essentially for the concern voiced by journalist Bari Weiss near the end of the film. “What does it mean,” she asks, “that the future leaders of the most important democracy in the world are chanting for revolution and intifada? What is the country going to look like a decade from now?” To judge by the behavior of the young Ivy League students – combined with the “it depends on the context” attitude on display in the infamous congressional testimony given by the presidents of Columbia, MIT, and University of Pennsylvania (which the film also shows) – the future does not seem promising. Simply put, there does not seem to be a differently-minded cohort of mid-career academics sandwiched between the feckless upper echelon and the indoctrinated infantile Intifadaist Jew-hating whippersnappers that might have the will or ability to sweep out the stables.
Kenneth Stern is more sanguine on the power of education to right the ship, though. When he speaks to college administrators, among the things he stresses “is that the university is an ideal place to actually navigate issues like this. You don't want to have people disrupting classes and so forth, but I focus rather on ‘How are we going to educate at this moment? How do we educate around difficult decisions?...What do we do to get the other side to use education better?’ That’s what I want to encourage people to discuss in the aftermath of the film.”