'On October 8, American Jews woke up': New documentary 'October H8TE' explains what's at stake

According to American filmmaker Wendy Sachs, Hamas is not just a threat to Israel, but also to the United States.

Sachs, who was recently in Israel to present October H8TE, her new documentary on the subject, explained that this was the premise behind the film, which involved interviewing some 80 students, academics and Jewish celebrities, encompassing 160 hours of footage.

“It’s not just another indie film: It’s my life’s work. It’s the most meaningful thing I’ve ever done,” she told The Jerusalem Post.

Sachs’ resume reads like an over-achieving superwoman. The author of Fearless and free – How smart women pivot and relaunch their careers and How she really does it: Secrets of successful stay-at-work moms, she’s also an Emmy award-winning network television producer, writer, former Capitol Hill press secretary, and media relations executive, and was named in 2017 on Forbes.com as a “40 Over 40 Woman to Watch.”

In 2019, she directed the documentary Surge, about the record number of first-time female candidates who ran, won, and upended politics in the historic, 2018 US midterm elections.

But October H8TE, originally called Primal Fear, has proven to be her crowning achievement.

Produced in conjunction with American actress and Israel advocate Debra Messing, the new documentary “unpacks how we got to this moment, where Hamas is celebrated as freedom fighters instead of as terrorists, and why some social justice activists have aligned themselves with a brutal, reactionary, and anti-Western movement,” according to the film’s press kit.

AMONG THE interviewees are Messing, Michael Rapaport, Noa Tishby, Scott Galloway, US Rep. Ritchie Torres, and US Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand.

Although the film doesn’t ignore the horrendous events of October 7, what was no less important to Sachs as a Jewish American was the hate that spilled out from every crevice on October 8.

Eight rhymes with hate, and the graphics represent that concept very well in the film’s title, where the A in the word hate has been replaced by a figure 8 – and in the publicity poster, the number 8 is shown replacing 7.

To emphasize the level of hatred, the graphics include a defaced Statue of Liberty on which graffiti crudely scrawled in large red letters reads: “Globalize the Intifada.”

It’s not known whether the perpetrator of this vandalism to an image of the famous statue was aware of the fact that the verse inscribed on the bronze plaque on its pedestal was written by New York born Jewish poet Emma Lazarus, who was deeply involved with helping refugees who had fled the antisemitic pogroms of Eastern Europe. Or perhaps the Statue of Liberty was chosen for the call for a global intifada precisely because Emma Lazarus was Jewish.

Sachs was always aware of the low-profile antisemitism that exists in America. She had seen it in various non-Jewish organizations with which she was engaged – but she never knew the level of the reality till October 8 and beyond.

She had been shocked, as were many of her interviewees – Christians as well as Jews. The people who took it the hardest were the Israelis living in the US – this was something they never expected to see in America.

Some of the people she interviewed had never personally experienced or witnessed antisemitism. On an intellectual level, they knew it existed, but it had never touched them.

“On October 8, American Jews woke up,” she says, adding that the antisemitism she saw in women’s organizations and among progressives is toxic.

Hamas has been operating in the US since the 1980s. In 1988, backed by the Islamic Brotherhood, it established the Palestine Committee, whose main goal was to increase financial and moral support for Hamas and to disseminate literature and slogans on what it termed the savagery of the Jews, through a sophisticated public relations policy with strategies that differ depending on the political character of the organizations that they wish to infiltrate and influence. 

This issue was discussed in 1993 at a meeting at the Marriott Hotel in Philadelphia, which was wire-tapped by the FBI. The wire-tapping and part of what was said at the meeting can be seen and heard in the documentary.

The more Sachs learned about Hamas propaganda tactics – and the more pro-Palestinian violence that she saw on the streets and university and college campuses of America – the more convinced she became that anti-Zionism is an updated form of antisemitism.

Sachs attributes the steep rise in antisemitism to social media, from where so many young people get news that has no validation.

October H8TE was screened on October 30 in Tel Aviv, and will have a range of viewings in the US over the next few months. The UJA Federation of New York is sponsoring the New York premiere of the film on November 11. To register, if there are any more seats, go to https://www.ujafedny.org/event/view/october-hate-premiere.