Who Really Needs to See "Screams Before Silence"?

Hint: it's not the Zionists

A promotional image featuring the film’s main character, Sheryl Sandberg

I recently attended a screening of “Screams Before Silence,” the documentary produced by American tech executive Sheryl Sandberg about the sexual assaults perpetrated by Hamas on October 7th. The screening took place at the main sanctuary of a local synagogue. It felt weird sitting in the same place one normally attends to pray only on major holidays (in my case anyway) to view a movie about terrorism. But the place was packed, and the clergy person running the event opened it by stating that viewing the film fulfilled our duty to “bear witness.”

As the film unfolded (it’s not more than an hour), many in the audience got visibly emotional, especially during the interviews of the Israeli women who experienced the assaults themselves. No doubt, many find discussion of sexual assault triggering, even if it’s from a stranger on a screen. The synagogue even arranged to have trained psychologists available in the back row for anyone who may have needed their services during or after the film.

But as I walked out of the screening, I felt this weird sense of nothingness. It’s not because I’m desensitized to what happened and what continues to happen in Israel and Gaza. Since October 7th, I have thought of little else every single day for nearly a year. I would even go as far to say that these events have completely changed me, for reasons that I have tried to articulate in other articles. Just last week I shed more tears than I have since the start of the war upon hearing about the death of Hersh Goldberg-Polin along with 5 other hostages.

But viewing this particular film was perhaps the first time that I had zero reaction to material related to the October 7th attacks. There are a few reasons for this:

• I had already seen most of the footage contained in the film, some scenes multiple times.

• Anyone who has closely followed the Israel-Hamas War in the last year already knows all of the information presented in the film. It didn’t teach me anything new about what happened.

• Why is Sheryl Sandberg an authority on this subject? She isn’t Israeli, she doesn’t speak Hebrew, and as far as I know she didn’t have any personal connection to the October 7th victims before making the film. Okay, so she’s Jewish and claims an “I help women” platform. But this wasn’t exactly an issue of helping women get a corner office at a tech company. There are entire blocks of the film where we see her viewing wreckage in-person or on someone’s phone, looking shocked, and getting upset. Who exactly was supposed to be the main character here?

Later I realized: it wasn’t me or anyone else in that audience at the synagogue who needed to see the film. The subject matter in “Screams Before Silence” is important for those who either do not know what happened, or deny that it happened at all. They include people in the following categories:

• Christian churchgoers whose clergy are preaching that Jesus was an indigenous Palestinian.

• People who do not remember the significance of October 7th and cannot identify its relationship to the current Israel-Hamas War.

• People who think that the IDF killed more Israelis on October 7th than Hamas did (yes, there are people who actually think this).

• Self-described feminists who deny that Hamas committed sexual assaults on October 7th, and even if they did, the victims of it had it coming.

Those in the categories above could perhaps benefit from seeing such a film, as they would probably find the author of Lean In more convincing than the actual victims. So, I propose that this movie be spread far and wide publicly, well beyond the Jews. Otherwise, Sheryl Sandberg is doing nothing more than preaching to the choir.