It’s easy not to watch.
It’s easier to ignore.
It’s easiest to forget.
Jews, however, are obligated to remember. During World War II, 6 million people were killed for the crime of being Jewish. Afterward, “Never Forget” became a collective mantra to ensure such slaughter never occurred again.
Then, October 7 happened.
That morning, Hamas attacked Israel. They killed the most Jews in a single day since the Holocaust. While terrorists struck multiple sites on Oct. 7, We Will Dance Again, premiering on Paramount+ on Sept. 24, focuses on the attack at the Nova Music Festival, where 400 people were killed or violently abducted.
“The human cost of the Hamas massacre in Israel and the war that followed in Gaza has been catastrophic for both Israelis and Palestinians,” the film opens with white letters stark against a black background. “Israel counts 1,200 Israelis murdered on Oct. 7th. It would trigger an Israeli military response that has claimed the lives of more than 40,000 Palestinians so far, according to the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry.”
Udi Bar Hanin/Israel Police/Paramount+
The 91-minute documentary has two dozen survivors reflect on that day, talking to an unseen and unheard interviewer. It weaves these raw reflections with personal cell phone videos. Recounting the worst of day of your life isn’t unique to this film, weaving it into a documentary with footage from Hamas’ bodycams is.
Initial images from the night before capture a mellow crowd, dancing and happy. The outdoor festival, in Israel, near Gaza, was dedicated to music, freedom, and peace. It was great fun, until the unthinkable happened.
There’s no sugarcoating this: We Will Dance Again is the most harrowing documentary I have ever seen.
As background, I wish I were more sheltered. I saw someone killed, from feet away, when I was in seventh grade. I write about documentaries as a journalist covering TV, and the brutality of this jangles me on a cellular level.
Watching as a man fires point-blank into someone’s head or as others shoot into a line of portable toilets is not just sobering; it is horrifying. Watching the terrorists celebrate those deaths pushes that horror to an even darker place.
Does that mean the film should be skipped? Absolutely not. Considering the amount of TV available, it’s easy to ignore. It becomes easier because we think we know the story. And it’s easiest because life can be so grim, why revisit such misery?
But everything that continues to happen–the senseless slaughter, the ongoing war, the bombings, the outbursts of anti-Semitism, the rage that has taken over streets and campuses–means that Oct. 7 continues to reverberate globally.
And because of that, we can’t ignore it. Instead, we need to know even more.
We Will Dance Again gives viewers a personal understanding of Oct. 7, and that’s crucial. We relate to individuals, but when numbers grow large, people become desensitized.
Just as the film begins with disclaimers–it does not purport to tell the whole story–I, too, have disclaimers. As a native New Yorker and a Jew, Oct. 7 is like Sept. 11 to me.
Both days have been etched with acid into my soul. And yet, as I obsessively followed the news when each happened, I could not begin to grasp the entirety. I never will. What I understand most is that some mothers’ children did not come home.
What more does anyone need to know?
And so, I divide the world into before and after those dates. On Sept. 10, 2001, my son began preschool in our synagogue. On Sept. 11, my Sophie’s Choice was which kid to pick up first–the toddler in a temple or the second grader in a public school? I thought my son was in graver danger, so I rushed to the preschool. His teacher’s husband worked at the World Trade Center. While driving to pick up my daughter, I thought of her classmates’ parents. A quarter of them worked there, as well.
Oct. 7 is like that for Jews. If you do not directly know someone who was killed when Hamas attacked Israel from Gaza, you know someone connected to the dead. It is that small of a world, both in population and land. The battles over Israel, roughly the size of New Jersey, have no beginning and seemingly no end. For the record, Jews are 0.2 percent of the world’s population.
Just as that Sept. 10 brings sweet memories, last Oct. 6 was a favorite day spent in Manhattan. I met one of my oldest and dearest friends at the Met, and we saw the Degas/Chagall exhibit. She is the daughter of two Holocaust survivors, and I mention this because this is what it is like to be a Jew of a certain age right now. We carry the trauma of our parents and grandparents who escaped The Holocaust and pogroms.
And now we carry an ongoing tragedy.
Certainly, Oct. 7 is fated to be marked annually with candles, tears, speeches, and prayers. I recently signed up to attend a memorial service commemorating the one-year anniversary. Attendees have agreed not to mention the location until the ceremony has concluded and everyone has safely left. This is how we live now.
We Will Dance Again steers clear of trying to analyze the geopolitical situation. It begins by wisely warning viewers that the violence is graphic.
It is the stuff of nightmares.
Even if you have been following the news, you cannot know all of what unfolds in this documentary. Filmmaker Yariv Mozer, who won an Israeli Film Academy Award for Epilogue, a documentary about David Ben-Gurion, allows the survivors to tell the story, their stories.
Think about who camps out at a music festival for a few days. These are young people, ready to party. More than a few were tripping on ecstasy. When rockets started to streak across the sky, many thought they were fireworks. But these young adults are also Israelis, reared to be on alert. They all too quickly realized that the trails of flames in the sky were not fireworks. They were under siege.
UAMG Content/Sipur Studios/Bitachon365/Paramount+
It began at 6:29 a.m. Everyone called authorities to report gunfire. Festivalgoers tried to take cover, but there was nowhere to go. This was the desert, and it became the proverbial shooting fish in a barrel. Terrorists aim, and they don’t even need to be good shots.
They shoot into a dumpster where people cower under bags of trash. They pluck off drivers and passengers in cars. Anyone walking or running is shot.
Around 3,500 people attended the festival; 400 did not return.
Among those at the festival was Hersh Goldberg-Polin, 23, whose parents, Jon Polin and Rachel Goldberg, spoke at the Democratic National Convention. One of Goldberg-Polin’s friends recalls he asked how she told her parents that she was attending Nova; he hadn’t told his.
After the attack, a gravely injured Goldberg-Polin was taken hostage by Hamas. The Israel Defense Forces recovered his body on Aug. 31. He had just been executed.
We know about Goldberg-Polin, but most don’t know about Aner Shapira. The British Israeli was among 27 people who sought refuge in a doorless, 5-by-8-foot cement bomb shelter.
Shapira was a hero. The 22-year-old, a rapper who composed and produced five songs, went to the festival with a group that included his best friend, Goldberg-Polin.
When Hamas began tossing in grenades, Shapira lobbed them back. Seven times. The eighth exploded in his hands. It killed him and blew off Goldberg-Polin’s hand and forearm. Another young man, Eitan (no last name was given), took up where Shapira left off, throwing the live explosives back at the attackers.
While it was chaos as terrorists attacked from all sides, festival attendees banded together. Strangers helped one another; they picked up each other, huddled under bushes, piled into cars, and drove like maniacs to escape.
More than one survivor likened the violent carnage to Squid Games.
Except this was real. The footage in the film feels hideously intimate as we see the attack from the survivors’ vantage. Hiding in a large cooler, Elinor, 24, is determined to live for her son, 8. She had the presence of mind to videotape this as she controls her breathing so terrorists won’t hear her.
Scenes from Hamas’ bodycams show young men on motorcycles, gleeful as they let loose automatic rounds of gunfire into cars until the cars crash. There isn’t much footage from the terrorists’ perspective, but what is shared is chilling. Heavily armed men surround civilians, and mock those they execute.
The film goes on like this for an hour and a half, as Nova survivors tell of how they escaped, who they lost. They relay how that day went from being a time to dance under the stars with friends to one that changed them and the world forever.
These kids–some were still teens–talk about making life-or-death choices. Do I stay put and try to hide? Do I run across an open area? One moment, they were dancing. The next, they were targets.
The ground is strewn with human hair, bloodied glasses, and broken bodies. The ambient noise is gunshots. The ugliest sound is the terrorists’ laughter.
The film features no written narrative. Mozer has made an extraordinary documentary, one that will haunt. But he has done something even more important. He has helped survivors bear witness.
“Nothing prepared me for the harsh images I saw in the remains of the massacre at the Nova Music Festival just a few days after October 7th,” he said in a statement. “The claims that the tragedy at the Nova Music Festival never occurred began to circulate even before the echoes of the screams faded into the abyss. In a world inundated with fake news, this horrific tale is at risk of being washed away in a torrent of falsehoods.”
In a world of “alternate facts” and Holocaust deniers, my hope is simply that people watch. If they do, it’s impossible to remain unaffected.
The beauty of such a painful film is that it reminds us of the promise of joy. And it reveals the depths of inhumanity. Incidentally, it matters that this streams on Paramount+ and isn’t relegated to making the rounds at Jewish Community Centers to much smaller audiences.
It would be lovely if awards were bestowed for the importance of subject matter and how uniquely a film is done. If so, this would rake in statues.
As the first anniversary nears, those of us who have thought about the attacks every day since are more anxious than usual. The residual hatred it unleashed continues to erupt.
Writing this from the Seward Park Library on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, I wonder if my grandparents borrowed books from this branch. All four fled pogroms in different parts of Eastern Europe.
I found a seat facing a poster of one of my favorite writers, Isaac Bashevis Singer, who had been a patron here. Sometimes, happenstance is wonderful. Being on deadline, this was the closest library branch to where I was, so I settled in. His old-world ways remind me of long-dead relatives, quietly brave but likely inwardly terrified. And I compare that to today’s Jewish Israelis, who swagger.
Moments earlier, I left an Israeli who lived with my family in New Jersey. I proudly call Tal my adoptive daughter; she calls me her American mom. We met for breakfast at (where else?) Russ & Daughters. We FaceTimed her son in Tel Aviv. Not yet 2, and he has the swagger.
The only time I ever danced in a field until 2:30 a.m. was six years ago, at Tal’s wedding in Israel.
I live for that day when we will dance again.
