From the Community | I used to think my peers were antisemitic. Now, I’ve changed my mind.

Content warning: This article contains descriptions of violence.

“How many of you have heard about this before?” I ask the wide-eyed cluster of Stanford students in our hotel conference room. A few seconds of silence go by as eyes dart around the room. Finally, scattered hands go up — approximately half the room. 

The thing I was asking if they’d head about? Oct. 7. The massacre of roughly 1,300 people in Israel, in the small farming villages and at a music festival. The deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust. 

Earlier this year, I would have been surprised that half the Stanford students in the room had never heard about Oct. 7. But I was coming off the tail-end of dozens of interviews for a trip to visit the Nova Exhibition in L.A., where the typical answer to “What have you heard about Oct. 7?” was “to be honest, not much,” and sometimes even, “I hadn’t heard about it until I saw your email and googled it.”

“How is no one talking about this?” one non-Jewish girl asked me with genuine bewilderment. “It’s so weird that Stanford didn’t send out an email about this on its anniversary,” another girl said. The pain in her voice brought a lump to my throat. 

Our group was made up of 40 non-Jewish students who had dedicated their weekend to an overnight trip to visit the Nova Exhibition, an art installation that tells the stories of the 380 college-aged partygoers brutally murdered at a rave in southern Israel, making up about one-third of the total number of people murdered by Hamas on that day. 

“What you’re going to see isn’t like a Holocaust Museum… this is right now,” a friend who lost one of his close friends at the Nova massacre had said to our group during a prep session several days before. 

He recounted the terror of realizing that his friend had been at the same party that had been attacked, texting his friend to check in, and waiting for a reply that never came. As he spoke, the atmosphere of our prep session — which had been buzzing with excitement as we discussed our trip itinerary and where to go out on Halloween — suddenly shifted. You could almost hear the group think a collective, “Oh, shit.” 

On Oct. 7 at 5:39 pm PST, just hours after the attack, a fellow Stanford student posted, “every martyr that fought today and in every moment…. Is so deep in my heart.”

“Power to the people! Power to the resistance!” another peer posted on Oct. 9, with a picture of a banner in White Plaza that read “by any means necessary.” The vast majority of my friends stayed silent. 

How could the people around me paint grandmothers, babies, mothers and daughters as deserving of death? And how could everyone else just stay silent? Was it…antisemitism? 

As I paged through the 200 applications for the Nova Exhibition trip, I was forced to confront a reality that, in Jewish circles, we had entirely overlooked: Though it felt like those around us were ignoring the pain we had undergone on Oct. 7, many of them simply… hadn’t heard about it. The students I interviewed hadn’t seen the same graphic videos that had flooded my social media feeds. They hadn’t read the same news stories. Several of them were confused about where exactly the massacre had taken place. “I live in L.A., and I never heard about this massacre…I want to learn more about discrimination in my own home,” one student wrote. If they’d once had an idea that there had been an attack on Israel, it had quietly dimmed over time. 

While this realization should have been comforting, it strangely felt the opposite. The people around me weren’t antisemitic; they just didn’t know that something bad had happened to Jews. 

A few days later, we made it to L.A. As we pulled into the parking lot behind the exhibition, the therapist we’d hired gave our group some breathing techniques for if we ever felt “dysregulated.” The levity of breakfast earlier that morning dissipated. Our group soberly piled out of the bus and into the exhibition. 

The Nova Exhibition tells the story of the college-aged partygoers who went to a rave with friends and found themselves in a death trap, ambushed by Hamas terrorists on all sides. They were murdered while at the bar, on the dance floor, in the bathroom, in their cars, hidden between the bodies of their friends, while seeking refuge in a safe room. 

I broke down before I could get through the introduction video in the waiting room, which shows videos of young people dancing to trance music just hours before the party had turned into hell on Earth. “You just look people in the eye, and you see how happy they are, how much fun they’re having, and how they enjoy celebrating life,” said Tal Shimony, a Nova survivor. Then, security camera footage showed someone approaching the DJ. “Turn the music off; there are rockets,” they said. The crowd booed. The screen went black, and we were ushered into the next room. 

Suddenly, we entered the festival itself. The space was aglow with soft pink hues, and an ambient mix of techno music and party noises followed us everywhere. Each tent we walked by told its own story, cluttered with items donated to the Nova lost and found: lip gloss, a hoodie, a sea of iPhones displaying videos they had captured throughout the night. “This is crazy… we’re at a party, and we just heard sirens… nothing like this has happened to us at a festival before,” played on an iPhone lying on the floor, the visages of a girl and her sister flashing across the screen. The bar, dimly lit and lined with rows of vodka and tequila bottles, plastered with pictures of the smiling faces of the dozens of people murdered while ordering a drink. The safe room, where 40 people had instinctively squished into a room built for ten upon hearing rocket sirens, only to all be murdered with grenades. 

I expected my non-Jewish peers to see this as something distant, something that happened to “others.” But I couldn’t have been more wrong. They did see themselves on the screens. They saw themselves calling their mom, asking her to come save them. They saw themselves hugging their partner for dear life. They saw themselves in the Naked eyeshadow palette left behind. In the guy sending his girlfriend a selfie to comfort her and show her he was alright. And that’s when it hit me — this wasn’t something that happened to Jews. This is something that happened to humans. 

I made my way through the exhibition through choked sobs, hugs of comfort from my non-Jewish friend, and our therapist’s quiet tissue offerings. At one point, I noticed my friend standing before a taped phone conversation. 

“Dad, I’m calling from the phone of a Jew… I just killed her and her husband… open WhatsApp now and see all the murdered Jews…. Look how many I killed with my hands… I killed 10! your son just killed Jews, dad!” 

Her mouth is slightly agape, her eyes wide with tears. She turns to me: “I just don’t get it… how can someone be proud of murdering people?” her voice chokes. 

“We were a very happy family,” Yaira Gutman, the mother of Tamar Gutman, who was murdered at the festival, told our group when we sat down for a private testimony at the end of the exhibition. “… and I hope one day we will be happy again.” Yaira looked up in tears at a family photo on the screen they had taken just before the festival. Yaira had spent months tortured, not knowing if she was dead or taken hostage, until security footage had revealed the unthinkable: that Tamar had been murdered in cold blood as she ran toward a shelter. 

Ziv Abud and Maya Iz, two survivors of the Nova festival, told us their stories. Ziv, dressed casually in leggings and an athletic jacket, spoke softly. She had survived multiple grenades thrown into a small, cramped safe room, where she was wedged between the dead bodies of her niece and nephew and from where her fiance was dragged away into a truck and taken into Gaza. Ziv unzipped her jacket to show us a photo of her fiance pinned to her chest, which she never takes off. She’s still waiting for him to come home. Maya, who had been working at the festival as a bouncer, escaped by running for 14 miles, passing by dead bodies and narrowly dodging bullets. 

“I just bought tickets for a music festival this morning…. that could have been me,” one non-Jewish girl said, sobbing on our therapist’s shoulder in the exhibition’s “Healing Room.”

“HOW????” was written in bubble letters in the top left corner of our group’s reflection sheet. Below it, in cursive, is written “Our Thoughts & Feelings,” alongside an assortment of arrows and scrambled sentences. 

“Bullet holes in the toilets” 

“Unimaginable.” 

“Oh I own that too” 

“Hard to understand how humans can be evil… to that extent” 

 “Disassociation.”

“Realizing how life could be taken away in an instant.”

 “This is not history, this is now.”

“Tears came out of nowhere” 

“How do these survivors still have hope?” 

I wouldn’t be able to tell you whether these students walked away with a different perspective on the conflict in the Middle East — but that wasn’t the point. (“I’m so confused,” one student groaned with laughter and despair as our conversation veered into who controlled what land and when over dinner one night). If anything, students came out with far more questions — and that was the point. But one thing became crystal clear: What happened on Oct. 7 was an act of terrorism, evil and inhumanity. 

I know that the terror of Oct. 7 is one slice of the devastation that the broader, never-ending conflict has brought. But, as one of our trip leaders said during our Sunday morning reflection circle, “At the end of the day, it’s not about a flag… it’s about the people.” 

For the several students who self-identified as “Pro-Palestine” on our trip, coming was a way of ensuring they centered the people, not the slogans, in their activism. After all, seeing the human in everyone is the only way we can begin to move forward. 

Scribbled on the very bottom of the “Our Thoughts & Feelings” sheet was: “How is this ignored?” Four simple words that carry so much weight. To ignore evil is not just to forget the past, but to surrender the humanity that binds us to a better future.

Julia Segal ‘25

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