All The Craze: October 8 Documentary Showcases Cool Fashion and Moral Depravity

Jeff Robbins on May 27, 2025

On Wednesday evening, Sarah Milgrim, 26, and Yaron Lischinsky, 30, went to a party in Washington, D.C. She was a Jewish woman from Prairie Village, Kansas; he was a Christian and a citizen of Israel. The couple worked in Israel's Embassy to the United States. They were scheduled to fly to Israel that weekend, where Yaron intended to propose marriage.

As they left the party, a gunman with a kaffiyeh blew their young lives away, executing them in cold blood. He shouted "Free, Free Palestine!" repeatedly, the banal mantra that has become quite the rage among celebrants of the massacre of 1,200 Jews dancing at a festival or sleeping in their villages in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Cheerleaders for Hamas, a fundamentalist Islamist entity funded and armed by other fundamentalist Islamist entities that is doctrinally and operationally committed to slaughtering as many Jews as possible, these celebrants densely populate academia, the left and other circles that proclaim themselves progressive.

The murders of Sarah and Yaron were shocking, but by this point unsurprising. The party at which they passed their last moments on earth was hosted by the American Jewish Committee. It was held at the Capital Jewish Museum. The murderer took his gun, went to the Jewish Museum and opened fire in order to kill Jews, because Jews are who he knew he would find there. From his perspective, a perspective twisted by what he had seen and heard from others similarly twisted since Oct. 7, he got lucky: he got to murder two people who worked for the Israeli government.

He is depraved, all right, but it is a depravity that has been modeled for him at places like Columbia and Harvard and other universities, at meetings of the Democratic Socialists of America and in other venues where the brutal slaughter of Jews on Oct. 7 -- a slaughter whose methods almost make those of the Nazi genocide look staid by comparison -- was met with exultation or, best case, a perverse kind of quiet.

It's been a quiet borne of fear, a fear borne of intimidation -- a fear that if one labeled the genocidal massacre of Israelis as an abomination, one risked charges of being, God forbid, a Zionist, that is, one who agrees that Jews no less than other peoples are entitled to a national homeland right smack dab in what was in fact their historic homeland.

The disgrace that followed Oct. 7 is the subject of the new movie "October 8," which documents the marriage of political fashion and moral decay. Its point is summarized early on by actress Debra Messing, one of the producers. "The second I understood the depravity of what happened and the barbarism," Messing recounts, "I thought the entire globe would be mourning. And not only was there silence. There was jubilation."

And though Hamas needed no encouragement to continue its relentless campaign to murder Israelis, it has received such encouragement, and not only from your standard neo-Nazis. On Oct. 7 itself, the very day of the slaughter, 34 Harvard organizations issued a statement blaming the massacre of Israelis ... on Israel. The slaughter, cried a Cornell professor to a cheering crowd, "was exhilarating. It was energizing." At Columbia, the leader of an anti-Israel group thundered that "Zionists don't deserve to live ... Be grateful that I'm not just going out murdering Zionists." His organization, Columbia University Apartheid Divest, proclaimed "We support liberation by any means necessary, including armed resistance ... Violence is the only path forward." For the last 18 months, speakers on American campuses have echoed what this one had to say on Oct. 8, 2023: "All of us standing here today are proud of what occurred yesterday."

There've been the signs: "We are Hamas!" "By all means necessary!" "Zionists not allowed!" "We don't want no two states; we want all of it!"

There've been the ripped down posters asking only that the desperate kidnapped souls pictured on them, tortured, starved and beaten in cages in Gazan tunnels be remembered and prayed for.

There's been the silence from women's groups when the evidence flooded in of the violently raped and dismembered Israeli women.

No, the murder of Sarah and Yaron was no surprise. It's another reminder of the rot afflicting some people, too in the tank, too clueless or too morally far gone to recognize it.

Jeff Robbins' latest book, "Notes From the Brink: A Collection of Columns about Policy at Home and Abroad," is available now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books and Google Play. Robbins, a former assistant United States attorney and United States delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, was chief counsel for the minority of the United States Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. An attorney specializing in the First Amendment, he is a longtime columnist for the Boston Herald, writing on politics, national security, human rights and the Mideast.