Almost a year after Northwestern University agreed to a $75 million federal settlement over allegations of Jew-hatred, the private school in Evanston, Ill., will host a play on Oct. 6 based entirely on survivor accounts of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led terror attacks.
The Hillel at the school is slated to show the play “October 7,” presented by the Unreported Story Society and directed by Jeff Gurner, as a staged reading at its Cahn Auditorium. JNS spoke previously with Irish journalists Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney, who wrote the play using interviews that they conducted in Israel after the attacks.
“Hearing survivors’ testimony performed word-for-word turns Oct. 7 from an abstraction into human beings, and that’s something every student needs to encounter,” Noah Oxfeld, a senior at Northwestern, told JNS. “This is education at its most honest and its most necessary.”
Under a November 2025 settlement with the Trump administration, Northwestern agreed to pay $75 million and end an agreement it negotiated with anti-Israel encampment protesters in 2024. It admitted no wrongdoing.
Yali Koch, a student Northwestern, told JNS that the production is “a great medium for helping people understand the human impact of the atrocities committed on Oct. 7, presenting a more complete picture of the conflict and hopefully fostering more productive conversations.”
According to Koch, anti-Israel sentiment has been “normalized” among students, who are “left without the resources or context to form their own informed opinions.”
The production will also be staged at Cornell University in Ithica, N.Y., on Dec. 8. Jewish students at the private school told JNS recently that Cornell would be allowing an antisemitic student to return to campus.
At a recent event hosted by Cornell students featuring Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), student leaders from the university’s chapter of Young Democratic Socialists of America led the audience in a chant of “from the river to the sea” and praised the “student intifada.” Jewish organizations and leaders have long said that the first statement calls for Israel to be erased, and the second incites antisemitic violence.
Sofia Eliasi, a Cornell sophomore, told JNS that “from 30-second videos on social media to flashy campus protests and catchy chants, there is a lot of noise for the average college student to filter through and learn what truly happened on Oct. 7, 2023.”
Eliasi said that staging the play at Cornell “allows eyewitness experiences to circumvent editorializing and illuminate what really occurred that day.”
Another Cornell student, Davian Gekman, a senior, told JNS that it is “vital that my peers are exposed to the truth.”
“Never again can only hold true if people are educated,” he said.
