(Bloomberg) -- From the first few minutes of the screening on Sunday afternoon, light sobs could be heard from the hundreds of people packed into a Columbia University auditorium to watch Screams Before Silence, the film Sheryl Sandberg made to document evidence of sexual violence that occurred during Hamas’s attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
The event marked the start of a new campaign for the billionaire former Meta Platforms Inc. executive: to change the minds of college students.
Sandberg has mostly avoided talking publicly about the demonstrations that engulfed US colleges last year, or the controversial responses by administrators to accusations of antisemitism at their schools. Now, she’s bringing her film to more than 100 universities, hoping awareness of the brutality of Hamas, which killed 1,200 people and took another 250 hostage last year, will counter what she sees as extremist protesters who view Oct. 7 as a justified act of resistance against Israel.
“Politics are blinding us to something that should be completely obvious, which is that rape is never resistance and Hamas is a terrorist group,” Sandberg said in an interview ahead of the Sunday screening. “The antisemitism that’s happened in the last year has really shocked me. I was not prepared for this.”
The non-partisan National Opinion Research Center found that 61% of Jewish Americans had experienced at least one antisemitic incident in the past year. In New York City, which has the largest population of Jews outside of Israel, anti-Jewish incidents have fueled a 30% increase in investigations of bias cases this year, according to the NYPD.
Multiple bomb threats, which were later deemed not credible, were made at synagogues across New York during the Jewish New Year last week. The FBI issued a warning that the one-year mark of the Hamas attack “may be a motivating factor for violent extremists and hate crime perpetrators to engage in violence or threaten public safety.”
An outspoken advocate for advancing women, Sandberg is emblematic of progressives in the Jewish community who are alarmed by the rise in antisemitic incidents since the attacks and also dismayed by the ongoing violence in Gaza and now Lebanon. Israel’s retaliatory bombardment of Gaza has claimed 41,000 lives, according to Hamas, and fueled pro-Palestinian protests around the world.
“The conflict has been fraught for women for all these reasons,” Sandberg said.
The screening took place during a quiet moment on Columbia’s campus, which was the epicenter of a movement across US college campuses earlier this year. A few masked protesters briefly stood outside handing out leaflets, but didn’t stay long.
Dueling demonstrations and vigils took place Monday, with pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian protesters in the center of the main quad. The latter staged a walkout, calling for supporters to “bring the war home,” according to one of their Telegram channels. They then took to the streets of Manhattan, joining other protest groups.
It isn’t yet clear that yesterday’s screening, which was organized by mainly Jewish student groups, changed any minds.
“The worst case scenario is that we’re raising college kids and educating college kids in ways that they aren’t able to have open and real dialogue on the hardest problems,” Sandberg said. “College kids need to be educated, need to know what they’re doing, need to take responsibility for their actions.”
--With assistance from Magdalena Del Valle and Amanda Gordon.
©2024 Bloomberg L.P.
