Last week, the mayor of Miami Beach threatened to shut down a movie theater showing the Israeli–Palestinian documentary No Other Land, the latest in a series of attacks on the film that have escalated since it won an Oscar earlier this month. On Tuesday, Mayor Steven Meiner sent a newsletter denouncing the film as “a false one-sided propaganda attack on the Jewish people,” and a few days later he introduced legislation to terminate the lease of South Beach’s O Cinema, which rents space in the former City Hall, and cancel an outstanding $40,000 in municipal grants. One city commissioner called the film, which was shot entirely in the Masafer Yatta region of the West Bank, “pro Hamas/terrorist propaganda,” while another labeled it “a propaganda-driven, one-sided narrative that falsely depicts Israel as the aggressor.”
Meanwhile, one mile away at the Regal South Beach, another documentary opened Friday without a hint of controversy. The Regal is one of more than 100 theaters in the U.S. showing October 8, director Wendy Sachs’ chronicle of the rise in antisemitism in the U.S. following the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, in which more than a thousand Israelis were killed and hundreds taken hostage. The movie, which took in more than $200,000 at the box office this weekend, offers devastating testimony from survivors of the now-abandoned Nir Oz kibbutz, which lost 41 of its 420 residents in the raid, plus many more who were killed in captivity, and upsetting reminders of incidents like the joint statement signed by nearly three dozen Harvard student groups that held “the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence” and neglected to so much as mention the hundreds of Israeli civilians who were killed, raped, and mutilated.
But October 8 is a movie not about the battles in Israel and Palestine; it’s about the culture war in the U.S. And despite the occasional token nod to alternative points of view, it’s far more nakedly propagandistic than No Other Land. Although its interview subjects are identified with fairly nondescript captions—Blake Flayton, a founder of the student group New Zionist Congress and a co-host of the podcast We Should All Be Zionists, is identified simply as “writer”—the movie’s ideological leanings become clear when the second talking head that pops up belongs to Shai Davidai, the assistant professor who was banned from the Columbia University campus for “repeatedly harass[ing] and intimid[ating] university employees.” Among other things, Davidai accused Columbia professor Rashid Khalidi, a Palestinian, of being “a spokesperson for Hamas.”
While podcaster and former Romney adviser Dan Senor allows that it is possible to criticize the conduct of Israel’s government without shading into antisemitism, the movie makes no effort to preserve that distinction. Phrases like “pro-Palestinian, pro-Hamas” and “pro-Hamas, pro-resistance” fly by so frequently and so quickly that you could almost be forgiven for losing sight of the difference, especially when there’s footage from American protests of people on Oct. 8, 2023, proclaiming: “All of us here are proud of what happened yesterday.” Sachs creates powerful emotional associations by, in one case, cutting from footage of Nazi death camps to a shot of charred bodies on Oct. 7, the deadliest single day for Jews since the Holocaust.
Those kinds of juxtapositions can be extremely effective on film, especially in a theater where there’s no opportunity to double-check their validity. But some of its claims are, at least, more complex than they are made out to be. Did an associate professor at Cornell who was suspended and then welcomed back to campus really say he was “exhilarated” by the Oct. 7 attacks? Not exactly, or at least not without also condemning violence and the targeting of civilians. A quick sequence featuring scenes of global terrorist attacks purports to show the spreading influence of Hamas, but at least one of them, the Paris attacks of November 2015, were openly denounced by the group. These might be fine distinctions, but the movie’s willingness to brush past them casts its overarching argument into doubt.
That argument emerges only slowly, through fleeting but telling references that expand the scope of its culture-war targets. Flayton appears just long enough to make the claim that “one of the greatest perpetrators of antisemitism is, if not officially DEI, the ideology of DEI,” without sticking around long enough to explain what that means, and historian Asaf Romirowsky says that the concept of intersectionality has “hijacked every underdog cause in the world.” But it’s not until perhaps an hour in that October 8 makes what turns out to be its pivotal point. Israeli actress and author Noa Tishby walks us through the historical evolution of antisemitism from an ideology based in religious hatred to one centered on racial extermination. But in the present, she argues, it takes a more insidious, even fashionable form, especially among campus leftists: anti-Zionism. As Tishby wrote shortly before the Oct. 7 attacks, she regards anti-Zionism as “antisemitism 2.0.”
And with that, October 8’s project snaps into focus, as does its place in a larger cultural and political context. Although some of the movie’s subjects note that criticizing the state of Israel’s conduct is not the same as questioning its right to exist, no criticisms of Israel’s conduct are raised. Protesters are characterized as unwitting terrorist dupes and overt sympathizers—the same McCarthyite logic that the Trump administration is using to deport lawful U.S. residents for being “pro-Hamas.” The movie’s tenuously related criticisms of DEI and intersectionality likewise find their way into Trump’s all-out assault on higher education, using a purported concern about antisemitism as the pretext for gutting the perceived havens of radical left-wing thought. (If the concern were more genuine, one might expect less appointing of conspiracy theorists with long histories of antisemitic statements to critical government positions.)
Those conflations and oversimplifications aren’t unique to one side. When the masked Columbia protesters in October 8 bar people from entering the campus with the words No Zionists Allowed, the difference between ideology and identity feels like an awfully flimsy one. But there are plenty of thoughtful critics of Zionism, among them No Other Land’s Jewish co-director Yuval Abraham, and excluding their voices and their place in political movements raises questions October 8 has no intention of answering. Still, the movie is hugely enlightening, if not solely for the reasons it means to be. While it’s convenient for the current administration to label as antisemites all pro-Palestine protesters, especially those with green cards or on student visas, it tends to make its case through brute-force assertion rather than laying out the argument in full. October 8 says it loud and clear.
