October 8th
by Celeste Barber, UC, Santa Barbara Alumnus 1982
I don’t know how to write about this film. All I can do describe what it was like to sit in the near-empty movie theatre and witness our national shame paraded before my eyes. (Right now, stop reading and look up where October 8 is being shown in your community. Then go.)
This superb documentary opens with the sound of air raid sirens all too familiar to Israelis. Through Hamza’s cellphone footage, we are presented clips of the slaughter that took place in the early morning hours of October 7, 2023 just inside Israel’s southern border. The film then presents an eyewitness account, a woman who survived the attack by locking herself and family inside their home’s “safe room.” She details the hours they hid in darkness, crouched under a desk against the wall and hearing from outside the sounds of bullets. After her rescue late that night, she recalls looking around and asking, “Where is everyone?”
In another segment, the hastily assembled international press corps is brought to the attack sites – the kibbutz and the young people’s “Peace” music festival – and admonished to bear witness to the slaughter, just as nearly eighty years before, General Eisenhower had demanded upon the opening of the death camps. The filmmaker then cuts to the chase.
October 8. Reports of the attack had barely hit newsprint when the focus shifts. No longer was it about the murder of Israeli citizens at the hands of Hamas terrorists. Within short order, Palestinians become the story. (Many of those same Palestinians, neighbors killing Jews and still underreported to this day.) Gaza supplants the 1,200 and those taken hostage. Journalists turn from Truth to Propaganda, depicting Palestinians as oppressed, Israel as an oppressor nation. The protestors shout and journalists report words like “Apartheid,” “Racism,”“Colonialism,” and “Zionism” (as White Nationalism),overwhelming the reality of what had happened just hours before: that Hamas invaded a sovereign nation, and then tortured, raped, and murdered its citizens – including babies. The American Press Corps becomes complicit in the distribution of unsubstantiated anti-Semitic propaganda, notably through our legacy newspapers, TheNew York Times and The Washington Post.
Reinforced by news commentary, the film documentsmass protests against Israel. Celebrations erupt spontaneously at our premiere universities. Harvard. Columbia. Cornell. UCLA. George Mason. Santa Barbara. Jewish students on those campuses and other collegeswere terrorized. Near the end of October 8, a map of the Middle East and North Africa is displayed: regions where Jews no longer live. We learn that post-World War II, the Jewish population decreased by 98.9% throughout the Middle East. Read your Bible: historically documented homelands for the Jewish people. We are reminded that where Jews are no longer welcome, they leave. I wonder what percentage of them remain today in Prague, Vienna, Berlin, Budapest, and Warsaw following Hitler’s Final Solution?
The October 7, 2023 attack was yet another attempt to rid the world of Jews.
As I watched the film, I thought about what was missing on the screen. You and I. Our city leaders. Our teachers and our clergy. Where were we when Jewish students were hiding inside Hunter College library? Or when the UCSB Multi-Cultural Center hung fliers stating,“Jews Not Welcome”? Where were we when Columbia’s Jewish students formed a human wall to move the protesters from the central quad? Where are the Columbia faculty to stand in solidarity with those young people and against anti-Semitism? The university president? New York City’s mayor? Its governor and Congressional representatives? Where are the clergy? And where is the Press?
There are heroes presented in the documentary, noteworthy, the UCSB Student Body President, Tessa Veksler. Remember her name. Upon hearing the news of the October 7 attacks, Tessa went on Social Media and made a statement condemning the attack and expressing grief as a young Jewish woman. A simple statement. Within minutes, the hate postings flooded in, including death threats. A pro-Palestinian demonstration was held, one that took over Girvetz Hall on campus. The documentary covers the students’ recall campaign against Tessa and the hours-long student senate meeting that ultimately failed the recall – by one vote. Eleven students, her peers and friends, had voted to oust her for being, simply, a Jew.
Santa Barbara remembers the story. What I had not known before the documentary, was the Veksler family backstory. In Tessa’s interview, we learn that her parents were refugees from Russia, arriving in the United States with their young son. So ingrained were their memories of Russian anti-Semitism – the notorious word, Pogrom, is Russian in origin – that they continued to fear for their child’s safety even here in America. They enrolled him in Catholic schools and hid their Jewish identity for years. When Tessa was born, her parents decided that they could safely identify as Jews, something denied her brother, twenty years her senior. That is what assured the Vekslers:their belief that their daughter would be safe on an American college campus in the town that you and I call home.
I look over what I have written, and it’s not a movie review. It’s my takeaway on a documentary that exposes an ugliness still rampant in our country: anti-Semitism. I encourage you to see October 8. I hope that college campuses across the country will show this film. I want to see it again, next time in UCSB’s Campbell Hall at my Alma Mater. And I would hope, to a full and peacefulhouse.
In Santa Barbara County, October 8 is currently playing at Paseo Nuevo (7pm)
Celeste-Thank you for writing this. So important for people to see this film.
Thank you Celeste! Movie attendance in SB is a barometer of the godless and demonic forces dominant in our lovely city. The lack of attendance at the October 8 movie would fit perfectly with the fact that the other day, there were only 4 of us in the theater to see The Last Supper movie debut.
We should remember what happened to Lot as the consequences of his choice to live in an accomodate the messed up values of his lovely city played out. If you don’t know what city or who Lot was, search under “ pillar of salt”