Where music turned to murder. London must now witness 7 October
After 700,000 people worldwide visited the Nova Exhibition, its creators say the UK's capital urgently needs the same unfiltered truth
On 7 October 2023, the world saw something unprecedented: the only massacre in human history broadcast live by its perpetrators. Not a battle, but a pogrom, executed with openly genocidal intent.
Over 1,400 innocent men, women and children were hunted, raped, tortured and murdered, while the killers streamed it with pride. And before the bodies were identified, while Jews were still being hunted in southern Israel, the lies began:
Israel killed its own. The numbers were exaggerated. No rapes. False flag. Staged. Only soldiers…
Holocaust denial 2.0, delivered at the speed of the algorithm.
It was the speed and ferocity of those lies that pushed me to make We Will Dance Again, a film about the Nova Festival massacre.
Nova struck the deepest nerve: a place of joy and freedom turned into a killing field. I believed that showing those 12 hours plainly, unfiltered, without caveat, might cut through the noise. This was an attack on the young and innocent. It could have been Glastonbury, Coachella, our own children, or anywhere.
The film travelled the world: BBC, Paramount, CBS, Europe, Australia, and Canada. It screened in over 200 cinemas, won festival awards, and won two Emmys.
And yet I still ask: did it reach the people who needed to see it? Not our community, but beyond it. Those whose worldviews have been shaped by the lies and dehumanisation pumped out since the massacre itself.
Honestly, I’m not sure. The people who most need the truth are the least likely to seek it and the quickest to dismiss it.
So, the question became: if this wasn’t enough, what would be? What could it be? And what hope do we have of making real change?
And then I walked into the Nova Exhibition in Los Angeles. I thought I was prepared.
I had watched every piece of footage available while making the film. I believed I had already seen the worst of humanity.
But nothing prepared me for that exhibition.
The burnt, bullet-riddled cars, blood-soaked clothing. The footage, the sounds, the screams, the music still playing. The survivors were walking beside me in silence.
For a moment, you are not remembering 7 October; you are inside it, and the impact is visceral, physical, suffocating and undeniable.
But what moved me the most wasn’t the material itself; it was the people standing next to me in attendance.
Because across Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Washington DC, Miami, Toronto and Berlin, over 700,000 people have attended the Nova Exhibition in person: elected officials, Prime Ministers, Governors, Mayors, diplomats, religious leaders, educators, celebrities, athletes and most importantly, entire school communities and university cohorts.
People who did not know the truth, who did not seek it, who would never click on a documentary or read a feature on the massacre. But who in that room, confronted by the physical reality, had no choice but to accept, understand and commit to making a change?
Those schoolchildren and university students are emblematic of the challenge we face, because the next generation does not want to be told; in fact, they won’t be told. They need to see it. They need to feel it. They need to breathe it.
And there is nowhere on earth that needs that more right now than London.
Antisemitism in Britain is rising at a rate we have never seen before. Our institutions – universities, arts bodies, unions, and the media – are buckling under a sickness of Jew-hate dressed up as political discourse.
Our children and teenagers feel it every day. Our students navigate campuses where the truth stands no chance. Our community whispers anxiously about whether we even have a future here.
We spend our Shabbat dinners debating the same questions: What can we do? Where will we go? What happens if it gets really bad?
Well, wake up; it is already that bad.
And no, bringing the Nova Exhibition to London will not magically fix the country. It will not reverse generations of anti-Jewish hatred unleashed with gleeful abandon after 7 October. It will most certainly not end antisemitism.
But it will move the needle, stem the tide, and drag the truth kicking and screaming into the light in a way that cannot be ignored, rewritten, softened or explained away.
And right now, given where we stand, that matters.
Because this is not just about honouring the dead; it is about protecting the living. It is about fighting for the dignity of our children and the choices of our grandchildren. It is about refusing to outsource our future to the goodwill of institutions that have already shown us what their “solidarity” is worth.
We owe it to the generations before us who fought to keep Jewish life alive in this country. We owe it to the generations coming after us who will look back and ask whether we did everything we could. We owe it to ourselves to stand up, to be counted, to act.
Los Angeles stepped up. New York stepped up. Chicago, DC, Miami, Toronto, and Berlin all stepped up.
Now it’s London’s turn. And as always, no one else is coming to do it for us.
- Leo Pearlman is a TV and film producer
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