Editor’s Note: I first spoke to Shai Davidai more than two years ago, while he was still at Columbia and in the middle of everything — the investigations, the death threats, the encampments yet to come. So when I heard he had a book on the way, I had to talk to him again. What I found was not the anger of those viral videos from Columbia, but a man who has come to terms with what he calls his "reluctant" activism. In our interview, we talk about everything from Columbia's century-old history of antisemitism to what it means to be a "radical moderate." His book, American Intellectual Antisemitism: The Anti-Jewish Movement Tearing Through Our Universities (Wicked Son, October 2026), is available now for preorder. — Howard Lovy
Howard Lovy: When we talked in early 2024, you were hesitant to call yourself an activist. But reading the book, that reluctance seems to have gone. What changed between then and now?
Shai Davidai: Wow, that’s an interesting thing. I started calling myself an accidental activist, then a reluctant activist. I think there was a part of me that felt this imposter syndrome, right? That the real activists are the people who are tying themselves to gates and saving whales, and all I’m doing is speaking up about a problem that’s right in front of my face. I’m not putting my life at risk. It doesn’t feel fitting to call myself an activist.
But then I started changing what I think about activism. I think of a lot of people as being potential everyday activists. It’s not something that you devote your entire career, entire life to, but just saying, “Hey, there’s a problem in my neighborhood. There’s a problem in my community, in my state, in my country, and I’m not going to wait for someone else to fix it.” Some of us are going to do it just by speaking up, others by organizing. I’ve been telling people all along, “Use your tools; you can become an activist.” Then I realized: wait, so this book is my activism, right? The shirts that I make that say “Zionist” are my activism. This is my way of trying to make a change in the world.
Howard Lovy: Well, before we go into the book, can you briefly walk us through your background? How did you land what you called your dream job at Columbia?
Shai Davidai: The path to Columbia for me started in 2018, when my wife and I were talking about maybe we should go back to Israel. There was a job at Tel Aviv University that opened up. At the time, Yardenne wasn’t in the headspace to move back to Israel. We had a young baby. So, we decided: you know what? I’m going to look for a different job. First, I’ll try in New York. It was two jobs: NYU and Columbia. I applied to both. NYU never got back to me. Columbia offered an interview, and I said: well, this is Columbia Business School. I’m going to take the interview, but I’m definitely not going to get the job. But I gave it my best and got the job. And I was like: oh wow, I’m in the big leagues all of a sudden.
Howard Lovy: And then things went south, I suppose, and we’ll talk about that. When we spoke a couple of years ago, you had recently gone viral with a video. It was an open letter to every parent in America, where you called out university presidents by name and said, “We cannot protect your children.” It was visceral, probably unplanned. Can you take us back to that moment, when you turned from a mild-mannered professor to an activist?
Shai Davidai: I was in a small vigil that the Israeli community organized—this was October 15—and everyone was in such pain, talking about the hostages and the survivors and the victims, and I thought: how is no one talking about what’s happening here? I just spoke up there, didn’t know anyone, and put it online. I was mostly addressing the president of Columbia, President Minouche Shafik.
Then, when we were at that vigil at Columbia, I got that same sense that we also have to name the problem. And the problem is not just Hamas and Hezbollah and the IRGC and all of that. But in addition, we also have a problem here in the U.S., here in New York City, and here at Columbia.
I think that’s the moment when I decided: here’s something nobody’s talking about, somebody has to say something, and why not me? That was the moment of the spark, which now I call activism.
Howard Lovy: So that was aimed directly at the university leadership and not the student activists.
Shai Davidai: It was aimed at two things. At the time, the administration not only allowed everything to be happening on campus, but refused to name Hamas. I was pushing them to first just name the evil as it is, just like you’ve named all other evils throughout history. In addition, I was saying: you refusing to name the evil and refusing to enforce the rules of time, place, and manner of protest is emboldening the pro-Hamas organizations.
When I first started talking, I didn’t even know who the leaders of those organizations were. I didn’t even know the characters. I was like: I don’t care about the students; it’s the organizations that are the problem. I still believe that if the university had listened back then, Columbia could have averted what happened on many other campuses.
Howard Lovy: Well, as you write in your book, though, it didn’t come from nowhere. Columbia’s mishandling of protests was just the latest example. You go back in history. What in the university’s history set the stage for this?
You could have killed the storm when it was just in a teacup, when the first and second protests happened. The indifference of the administration … led the universities to just give the storm time to build up until it was no longer contained on the campuses, and we see it everywhere.
Shai Davidai: I don’t know if there’s one silver bullet. We all want to find one and say, “If we’d only done this one thing, it could have changed.” I think there are a few things, which I outline in the book. The history of antisemitism at Columbia starts in the 1920s, with Columbia basically coming up with the quota system. Then comes Columbia’s warm relationship with the universities in Germany. This was after they’d already been taken over by the Nazi regime—after presidents loyal to the Nazi Party had been put in place, after Jewish professors and students had been purged.
Then we move forward to the ’70s and ’80s, where you start seeing the ideas that are the precursors of what we experience now on campuses. These ideas of postcolonialism, moral relativism, and Orientalism. So you get all of that, and with the creation in the ’90s and early 2000s of Students for Justice in Palestine on the West Coast, in Berkeley—but very quickly I show how it spread in the U.S. Obviously, it found a breeding ground at Columbia University.
In addition, you have a very, very ideologically skewed faculty body, not just at Columbia, at most of what people call elite universities. In addition, you have all these ideas of progressivism that entered culture through academia. You get the perfect storm.
But the point that I’m also trying to make in the book is, you got all the ingredients for a storm, but you could have killed the storm when it was just in a teacup, when the first and second protests happened. The indifference of the administration—“the client is always right,” and that client is the student—and the fearmongering against the federal government led the universities to just give the storm time to build up until it was no longer contained on the campuses, and we see it everywhere.
Howard Lovy: The question of support from Qatar in the universities. Is that as big of an influence as people say it is?
Shai Davidai: I talk about the unimaginable sums of money with Qatar, which has 330,000 citizens—so it’s basically a rounding error in the United States. They spend billions and billions of dollars on American education, on American media, in politics. In academia, it’s very problematic because we know many, many universities have failed to report hundreds of millions of dollars from Qatar and then retroactively had to do so when the heat was on.
In addition, many universities have opened overseas campuses in Qatar. They thought: we are exporting democracy. What they were actually doing is importing what Qatar is trying to push. And think about what education should be. I’d much rather live in a country where we pay for our own education and choose our own values, rather than someone else pays for our education, so we get nicer buildings, we get nicer dorms, but then some things you can’t say in class, or some professors are loyal to an idea more than to the truth.
Howard Lovy: This also turned intensely personal for you. Columbia investigated you. They deposed you for eight hours, demanded you sign a confession and a gag order, and you also lost friends and colleagues along the way. How did you find the strength to cope with all that?
Shai Davidai: The truth is that I didn’t always. I broke down quite a bit. Obviously, I’ve been more open about it than other people. But everybody who’s been fighting over the past three years—if it’s actual soldiers fighting on the ground in Gaza against Hamas terrorists, if it’s people fighting to release the hostages, and if it’s people fighting to push against this hatred on campuses—everyone has paid a price, and we’ve all broken down multiple times. The question is not how do you not break down; it’s how do you stand, how do you jump back up.
I think for me, it’s the community that I found—the strong Jewish community and many, many allies. Strangers on the street giving me a hug, sharing their experiences, and telling me how my videos inspired them to make a video of their own and how they have changed things. When someone tells me a story like that, that fills up the gas tank for two more weeks.
Yeah, and I think that’s, at the end of the day, what our ancestors taught us. I hope that we can hold on to this and remember that we don’t need tragedy, and we don’t need hatred toward us to figure out that our strength is inside.
Howard Lovy: The same thing is happening in the Jewish literary community, as your wife can probably tell you. We’ve been through the grief and anger phase, and now we’re all getting together.
Shai Davidai: Yeah, and I think that’s, at the end of the day, what our ancestors taught us. I hope that we can hold on to this and remember that we don’t need tragedy, and we don’t need hatred toward us to figure out that our strength is inside.
Howard Lovy: You held on through investigation, suspension, death threats, and then you finally quit your dream job. Was leaving defeat or liberation?
Shai Davidai: Both. It’s interesting that you ask if it was a defeat, because we don’t know yet. We’re fighting an ideological war, and an ideological war is fought over years or over ages. The other side started the ideological war three decades ago, four decades ago. We’re catching up, and we’re doing it really well. But we don’t know if the years 2023 and 2024 and some of 2025 on Columbia’s campus will end up being a footnote in history or the chapter where everything changes.
I personally left because I have lost all respect for my colleagues. And I’m talking not about my colleagues in general at Columbia, but literally the people in the next-door office at Columbia Business School, on the third floor, in the management division. These are people who were my friends. They were my colleagues. We worked together, we collaborated, and I just lost all respect for them. And I said: how can I go to work and model to my children going according to your values and truths, and then fake it? Why would I want to spend my time with people that failed me as people? So I left.
Howard Lovy: Well, let’s talk about solutions, and you’ve got a few in your book. Your book ends with a call to be a radical moderate, which sounds like a contradiction. What does it mean in practice? How can you convince people that moderation can be a fighting stance?
Shai Davidai: Not only do I want to convince people that moderation is a fighting stance, I would say that it’s the only stance worth fighting for. I think that we have, through no fault of our own, confused the extremity of the attitudes that people hold with the extremity of the action. Saying, “Well, extremists shout because they have extreme views, and moderates keep their mouths shut because they have moderate views.” No. I am a moderate in many, many things. I work hard on my moderation. I refuse to veer too much to the left or too much to the right. I refuse to create echo chambers for myself. And I refuse to let the extremists on the left or the extremists on the right fight against what I believe in. The only reason that in so many of the protests I raise my voice is because when I spoke gently, no one was listening.
Howard Lovy: Right. So, moderation doesn’t mean being quiet.
Shai Davidai: Exactly. And I urge people who are deterred by the volume to just read the transcripts of what I and people like me say. You can’t be more moderate, more compassionate, more logical—those are things that I truly believe in. But in order to break through that societal threshold of “we’ll pay attention to you,” you have to raise your voice. That’s what we need people to become: radical moderates. Raise their voice. That can be vocally, that could be writing op-eds, that could be organizing book clubs—whatever it is that you’re doing beyond just thinking this is a problem. That’s being a radical moderate. You’re putting your moderation into practice.
Howard Lovy: You place a lot of blame on indoctrination—professors teaching students what to think instead of how to think. So how should universities actually teach divisive subjects like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? What would that classroom look like?
Shai Davidai: First of all, I want to take a moment, because there’s an assumption here. Why should universities teach about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? They should, to the extent that that’s a real problem in the world, which I agree with. But we also have to ask ourselves: Why is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict so overly represented in teaching, whereas other conflicts that are as consequential, that are worse off in terms of death toll, in terms of ideologies, don’t get discussed? Part of the point that I’m making in the book is that the focus itself, that overfocus, is part of this new American intellectual antisemitism.
But given that I do believe we should also be teaching about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I think it should be taught from every direction possible—all of them, not just one of them. I want to hear a Palestinian voice, and I want to hear an Israeli voice, and I want to hear an American voice that has a stake—financial stake, political stake—and, by the way, there are other countries. What are the different views? Within the Israeli voice, I would want to hear a religious Zionist versus a liberal Zionist, and in the Palestinian world, I would want to hear from someone who supports Hamas to someone who supports a two-state solution.
The problem is—I just gave you, I’d say, seven different views, the more extreme and the less extreme—right now on campus, you basically hear one and a half voices. You hear the Hamas or Hamas-adjacent voice. They might not say Hamas, but they would say, “Resistance is justified for the oppressed over its oppressor,” and when they teach it as it relates to this, they paint it like it’s clear to everyone what they mean. There are no voices, or very few voices, that are Palestinian and about coexistence. And at least in Middle Eastern studies, no Zionists—forget liberal Zionists, no Zionist voices in Middle Eastern studies. If we do get a voice, it might be in Jewish studies or Israeli studies.
By the way, I think one of the reasons why these professors won’t let other voices in is because they know that they will be proven as frauds.
Howard Lovy: The same thing is true in the bookselling world. Only the anti-Zionist view is being displayed in libraries and in bookstores. There’s just silence from the pro-Zionist side because we’re not finding publishers. That’s one of the reasons why I’m doing what I’m doing.
Shai Davidai: When I started writing the book—I mean, it was a process—at some point I decided I want this book to get to every person. Not every Jew, not every American—every person who is impacted by this. I really want people to get to read it. And we sent it to, if I’m not mistaken, thirty-eight publishers. Thirty-six said no. “Not right now. We’re busy.” Some had good reasons—they had a similar book. A lot of them were either afraid to touch something that interrupted their flow, or outright told us they didn’t even want to read it because it was not from the side they were amplifying.
I got two yeses, and both of them were really incredible, very different, but Jewish publishers. So I ended up going with Wicked Son. It’s incredible that we have our own publishers, because part of the problem of fighting this American intellectual antisemitism is that it has infiltrated the centers of control of culture.
If we all buy en masse—if all of us, 10,000 Jews, go and buy one book by one Israeli the same week, we’re going to create our own table. We created big parts of Hollywood because of that. We’ll do the good things, and then people will come to us. We’re not going to go and ask for scraps from their table.
Howard Lovy: Wicked Son has been doing a great job, and there’s more publishing on the way. They have a new imprint for fiction, and then two more, including mine. Canary Publishing is about to launch to feature more Zionist voices. So help is on the way.
Shai Davidai: And this is where I tell readers that we need to also support Jewish writers, Israeli writers. Because at the end of the day, if we don’t read what the Jewish Zionist world is putting out—fiction and nonfiction—if we don’t go and see Israeli movies, then we can’t blame the world for not having us at the table.
If we all buy en masse—if all of us, 10,000 Jews, go and buy one book by one Israeli the same week, we’re going to create our own table. We created big parts of Hollywood because of that. We’ll do the good things, and then people will come to us. We’re not going to go and ask for scraps from their table.
Howard Lovy: That’s the idea. So let’s end this with the future. A new class of students is about to arrive on campus this fall. Are you hopeful? Are you not hopeful? And are you going to be a part of the conversation?
Shai Davidai: Let me start with the last one. If the question is, “Am I going to stop?” No. I am not going to keep my mouth shut. I’m working on a follow-up book. Once people really understand the problem of American intellectual antisemitism, I want to equip them with the tools of how to fight it, because this isn’t just a documentary of here’s what happened, but here’s what we need to do. So I’m working on a book right now that draws on my experience in social psychology, in teaching negotiations, in researching judgment and decision-making, persuasion—how to fight back. So I know what I’ll be doing.
Will I be part of the conversation? Will people be willing to engage? I can put myself out in the world and hope for the best. If it’s Jewish communities wanting to learn more and fight this thing, if it’s our non-Jewish allies that want to wake up en masse, and maybe it’s even the administrations saying, “Hey, maybe we should listen to this guy, or at least engage with him,” as I’ve tried. I choose to remain hopeful, because desperation is not a viable work plan.
Howard Lovy: Well, thank you, Shai. I really appreciate you taking the time to talk to us. Best of luck, and let’s stay in touch.
Shai Davidai: Thank you so much, and I wish you all the best. I think part of what you do in all the different types—in podcasting and writing—that’s important. That’s where I think we can create a Jewish revival in culture. I love seeing it happening.
Excellent interview. Both depressing and hopeful .
Thank you, both Howard and Shai for this important interview.