Wendy Sachs, director of ‘October 8’, brings attention to campus antisemitism

Documentary filmmaker Wendy Sachs was with her daughter Lexi at the University of Wisconsin-Madison when she first learned of the October 7, 2023, Hamas terror attack in Israel. 

“The images coming out of Israel, babies and children, young people, grandparents being murdered. Their murders were being livestreamed, being put on Facebook. The videos from Telegram of Nova Festival, young people being taken hostage and kidnaped into Gaza,” Sachs recalled to Fox News Digital.

But when she saw the surge of antisemitism erupt on college campuses across the country in the following days, she knew she had to do something. 

“October 8, when I saw the protests in Times Square, and then I saw what was happening the next day on October 9, and at Harvard, where more than 30 student groups signed onto a letter blaming Israel on the attack on itself. And then we saw the same thing happen from campus after campus, from Columbia to NYU to Tulane to MIT, Cornell, Penn. It just felt like the world had lost its mind,” she said. “The silence, the dismissal, the denial.” 

“And so, by the end of October, I knew that I needed to document what was happening,” she added. “And that’s when I wrote a treatment for the film.”

What resulted was “October 8,” a documentary examining the disturbing rise in antisemitism against Jewish college students in our nation’s most elite universities, and the disturbing and nefarious forces driving this phenomenon.

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Sachs, an author and filmmaker whose previous works include the film “Surge” and the book “Fearless and Free: How Smart Women Pivot and Relaunch their Careers,” conducted 80 interviews with Oct. 7 survivors, college students, celebrities, and politicians for this film. Actress Debra Messing, Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.) and former Meta COO Sheryl Sandberg help try to unpack how so many ostensibly well-educated young people could go down the path of supporting the terrorist group Hamas. 

What Sachs found was a well-orchestrated campaign to delegitimize the Jewish state and stigmatize its supporters abroad. 

In one of the film’s most shocking revelations, senior “leaders of Hamas in America” are heard strategizing on how to infiltrate U.S. “media outlets, universities, and research centers” and coordinate their language to make Hamas most palatable to an American progressive audience.

“The Americans… we must address them from a position of rights and justice, and at the same time choose our words well,” an unidentified voice says in the recording.

Organizations like the United Nations, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have accused Israel of committing “apartheid” and “genocide” while downplaying or staying silent on Hamas atrocities on Oct. 7, according to Sachs. She said that the silence from these groups drove her to make this film. 

“In the weeks that followed October 7, there was so much silence from Hollywood and so much silence from women’s rights organizations and silence from politicians who I admire and I respect and who I’ve supported, and even among my own professional women’s networks.

“It was just crazy, the hypocrisy and the double standards that were happening when it came to Israel and to the fact that it was Jewish women who were raped and who were murdered and who were mutilated,” Sachs said. 

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Jewish students have felt under siege since the anti-Israel demonstrations began. 

The film highlighted several instances of antisemitism that occurred on college campuses, including mobs of anti-Israel activists hounding Jewish Cooper Union students who had to lock themselves in a library for protection, UCLA anti-Israel demonstrators creating zones on campus where “Zionists” were not permitted to walk through and Jewish students at Cornell being told not to leave their dorms due to threats on their physical safety.

Former UC Santa Barbara student body president Tessa Veksler was subject to a torrent of abuse and nearly recalled from her position because of her support for Israel.

“I remember I had to miss my final exams in person, I had to take all my exams online because campus was just not safe for me,” Veksler said in the film. 

Sachs and other Jewish artists were appalled at Hollywood for their silence in the wake of the October 7 attacks. Messing revealed she struggled to find signers for a letter calling on world governments to help bring the hostages home. 

“I felt completely betrayed by Hollywood,” Messing said in the film. 

The scene at a warehouse in Kfar Chabad, Israel on Oct. 7 after Hamas fired rockets on the one-year anniversary of the terrorist attack that launched the war in Gaza. 

Getting this movie produced was an uphill battle, Sachs confessed. She struggled to find distribution for the documentary, and even after having found a distributor, she was unable to get “October 8” placed in any major movie festival.

Sachs told Fox News Digital how film festivals like SXSW and Berlinale wouldn’t allow her documentary to show, but they would allow films about Palestinians. 

“There is something really insidious happening in the independent film community,” she said. 

“This is much bigger than the Jewish community. This is much bigger than the state of Israel. This is about all of us here in America. This is about the West. This is truly about Islamic jihadism, extremism versus democracy. So, that’s what the stakes are right now,” she added.

Sachs is hoping her film serves as an educational tool that schools can use in K-12 curriculum to help combat antisemitism. 

“October 8” is in theaters Friday, March 14.

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