Oct. 7 survivor advocates against antisemitism, extremism

Three years have passed since the morning of October 7, 2023, when Hamas launched coordinated attacks across Israel. Natalie Sanandaj was at the Nova music festival, in the southern part of the country, when the assault began. She survived what would become one of the deadliest days in Israeli history—a day that killed more than 1,200 people and set off a cascade of consequences that would reshape the region and reverberate through diaspora communities worldwide.

Sanandaj's survival came at a cost that extends beyond the immediate danger she faced that day. The experience of witnessing violence at scale, of being caught in an attack designed to terrorize, leaves marks that don't fade with time. Three years later, she has chosen not to retreat from public life but to move toward it—to use what she witnessed as a platform for speaking about the hatred that fueled the attack and the hatred that has followed in its wake.

Today, Sanandaj works as a public affairs officer at the Combat Antisemitism Movement, an organization dedicated to tracking, documenting, and countering antisemitic incidents and rhetoric. The role is not incidental to her survival story; it is a direct response to it. She has taken the weight of what she endured and transformed it into advocacy work, stepping into spaces where difficult conversations about prejudice, extremism, and violence need to happen.

When she speaks publicly about October 7, Sanandaj is not simply recounting a personal trauma. She is connecting that day to a broader pattern—the way violence against Jews has been met, in some quarters, not with universal condemnation but with justification, celebration, or erasure. The antisemitism that preceded the attacks did not end with them; in many cases, it intensified. Sanandaj's decision to speak, to name what she saw and what she has observed since, is an act of resistance against that tide.

Her work at the Combat Antisemitism Movement puts her in direct contact with the data and the stories behind it. She sees the incidents as they are reported—the vandalism, the harassment, the conspiracy theories, the social media posts that dehumanize Jewish people. She also sees the patterns: how crises become occasions for hatred to flourish, how misinformation spreads faster than correction, how silence from institutions and public figures can feel like complicity to those who are targeted.

The decision to go public with her story, to attach her name and her face to the work of combating antisemitism, carries its own risk. Survivors who speak out often become targets for those who wish to silence them or discredit their accounts. Sanandaj has made that choice anyway, understanding that her credibility as someone who was there, who lived through the attack, gives her testimony a weight that abstract arguments about prejudice cannot match.

Three years after October 7, the work of addressing antisemitism and extremism remains urgent and incomplete. Sanandaj's advocacy is one voice among many, but it is a voice grounded in direct experience and sustained commitment. She is not speaking from theory or from distance; she is speaking from the ground where violence occurred and from the ongoing landscape of hatred that followed. Her presence in these conversations, her willingness to name what she saw and what she continues to see, matters precisely because it refuses to let the story become abstract or historical. For Sanandaj, the work of building a world with less hatred is not a future project—it is the work of right now.