About the Book
Publication date: October 2025
Save 40% with code 6AS25.
Save 50% on orders of 10 or more copies of this title with code 6ROAD50.
The Road to October 7 examines what paved the way for the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel and its aftermath.
Part 1, “The Present,” documents the Hamas invasion, the rise of Hamas, the education of Palestinian Arab children to hate and kill, the diplomatic decisions that helped enable the attack, and the propagation of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish libels.
Part 2, “The Past,” analyzes how in both method and ideology, the Hamas assault echoed the pogroms in medieval Europe, Czarist Russia, and Ukraine; the Holocaust; and a century of Palestinian Arab terrorism. It also examines select American universities’ cultivation of friendly relations with Nazi Germany in the 1930s (the same universities that tolerated pro-Hamas protests after October 7) and October 7 as a turning point in the long history of antisemitism.
Readers will emerge with important insights on the Hamas attack, antisemitic education in Palestinian Arab society, pro-Hamas groups on U.S. campuses, the responses of women’s and human rights organizations to mass sexual violence, misconceptions and fabrications about Israel’s conduct in the ensuing war, and why October 7 needs to be viewed as one segment of both the century-long Palestinian Arab war and the centuries-old international war against the Jewish people.
Praise
“Compelling reading for anyone who believes in the security of the State of Israel.”—Seymour D. Reich, former chair of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations and past president of B’nai B’rith International
“I cannot imagine a more important book for the Jewish community and indeed all human rights advocates than this brilliant volume.”—Neil J. Kressel, author of Mass Hate: The Global Rise of Genocide and Terror
“A champion of Jewish memory and an expert on the Jews’ abandonment during the Holocaust, Rafael Medoff confronts the Hamas attack, the global explosion of antisemitism, and the historical lessons that can help guide the Jewish future.”—Walter Reich, former director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
“Even politically hostile readers will have a hard time contesting the conclusions in Rafael Medoff’s extensively researched, methodical, data-driven, and accessible volume. It should be read by everyone who wants to understand October 7 in historical context.”—Eunice G. Pollack, coeditor of the Encyclopedia of American Jewish History
Rafael Medoff
Rafael Medoff is founding director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies and coeditor of the institute’s online Encyclopedia of America’s Response to the Holocaust. He has written more than twenty books, including The Jews Should Keep Quiet: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Stephen S. Wise, and the Holocaust (JPS, 2019) and America and the Holocaust: A Documentary History (JPS, 2022).
