‘Reluctant Activist’ Steps Up for Jewish Students

Shai Davidai was transformed on the night of Oct. 18, 2023.

The 40-year-old Israeli, a tenure-track assistant professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Business, wasn’t looking to become a public figure.

Eleven days earlier, Hamas terrorists had breached fences separating Gaza from Israel and slaughtered some 1,200 men, women, and children in kibbutzim, towns, and at an outdoor music festival, and kidnapped 251 more (dead and alive) into Gaza.

So, on that Wednesday night, Davidai joined 30 or so Jewish and Israeli students gathered on the quad of Columbia’s campus in upper Manhattan in New York City. Some held lighted candles and posters of kidnapped Israelis.

“We were all in pain and shock and needed someone to be with,” Davidai writes in “American Intellectual Antisemitism: The Anti-Jewish Movement Tearing Through Our Universities” (Wicked Son/Post Hill Press).

Anti-Israel protestors occupied the Low Library steps that Jewish students had reserved in advance, but rather than provoke a confrontation, the Jewish gathering relocated to a grassy area in sight of the library.

Davidai already felt that the university had been lax in dealing with the escalating protests.

The Jewish students took turns giving voice to the pain in their hearts.

Even as he stepped forward, “I still had no idea what I was going to say, but it was too late to back out. I wanted to be seen, not as a Jew or an Israeli, but as a father to two young children who was terrified for their lives,” Davidai writes.

He asked the students to record a message to the parents of Jewish students at Columbia University and several other top-flight schools.

Raising his voice and gesturing emphatically, an emotional Davidai declared: “I’m speaking to you, as a dad. And I want you to know [that] we cannot protect your children from pro-terror student organizations” because the presidents of Columbia and other schools “will not speak out against pro-terror student organizations.”

At the time, Columbia had an estimated 3,500 Jewish students in its undergraduate and graduate programs, along with numerous Jewish faculty and staff.

“This was no longer a distant conflict happening back in Israel. It was here, on my own campus,” Davidai writes.

Davidai will discuss his struggles with Columbia University’s administration and the trend in higher education that he calls American Intellectual Antisemitism — those three words capitalized throughout the book — on Sunday, Nov. 15, at the Book Festival of the MJCCA (Marcus Jewish Community Center of Atlanta), in conversation with Roey Shoshan, MJCCA’s senior director for philanthropic engagement.

“At its core, American Intellectual Antisemitism employs the same three tactics that lie at the heart of every form of Jew-hatred: demonizing Jews, denying their legitimacy, and unmorally holding them to impossible double standards,” Davidai writes.

Within days, the 10-minute video of Davidai speaking to the Jewish students registered millions of views. The “reluctant activist,” as he has described himself, became a voice of Jewish resistance to anti-Israel protests that were expanding beyond university campuses, into public spaces.

As his profile grew, Davidai was asked if he was afraid or feared for his job, to which he responded: “I am not afraid to speak up. I am speaking up because I’m afraid.”

Protest leaders alleged that Davidai, by his public statements and online posts, was promoting hatred and, in February 2024, called on the university to sanction him.

Several months later, Columbia temporarily suspended his access to the campus after he allegedly “harassed and intimidated” university staff.

In July 2025, Davidai and Columbia University parted company, ending an acrimonious 17-month process that saw an investigation brought to a close “without issuing any findings or conclusions of wrongdoing, and without imposing any discipline or penalty on you.”

“My fight has never been about Columbia . . . and has always been for the soul of American higher education,” he writes.

“Allowing a dangerous pattern to emerge, university administrators taught protestors that by disrupting events and blocking access to buildings, they could pressure their schools to cancel talks under the pretext of ‘security concerns,’” Davidai contends.

“By staying silent, Columbia’s leaders weren’t just indifferent — they were complicit, burying their heads in the sand and hoping that the storm would blow over,” he writes. “But this storm wasn’t going anywhere.”

“Blaming the finger for pointing out the problem, Columbia’s leadership refused to confront the eruption of antisemitism on campus, burying their heads ever deeper in the sand. It was if they didn’t really care,” Davidai asserts.

He accuses leftist faculty of teaching students what to think, rather than how to think: “By normalizing the vilification of Jews under the guise of critical scholarship, these professors have cultivated an academic environment in which hatred flourishes unimpeded, allowing students, faculty, and staff to voice violent rhetoric and openly endorse acts of violence by terrorist organizations so long as the targets are Jews, Israelis, or those who support them.”

From his perspective, “entire fields of the humanities and social sciences had been shaped by Soviet-era propaganda that recast antisemitism into the more socially palatable guise of ‘anti-Zionism.’”

Among students, he observes, “As one’s views become the benchmark for social acceptance among their peers, hatred weaves itself into people’s sense of pride, purpose, and belonging.”

Davidai cuts little slack to “well-meaning, moderate professors” who “stayed mute in the face of anti-Jewish, anti-Israeli, and anti-American rhetoric, allowing extremists to dominate the conversation.”

He remains frustrated with the news media, writing that “many journalists distorted the moral landscape itself, equating the October 7 Massacre with Israel’s military response and collapsing cause and effect into a single, morally flattened narrative.”

The disruptions at Columbia and other campuses led to Congressional hearings, where university presidents were asked to explain their attitudes toward antisemitism and their handling of protests, as the White House threatened hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funds received by the schools.

“If the destructive path carved by extremist ideologies teaches us anything, it’s that the only way to truly counter fanaticism is through radical moderation,” he writes. “When faced with the choice between hope and hate, I know where I stand. I am a radical moderate.”

His own politics have tended toward the left. Davidai served as a medic in the Israeli navy rather than do his compulsory military service in the West Bank. “I had long advocated for Palestinian self-determination within a two-state solution . . . and consistently distinguished between the Palestinian people and terrorist groups that falsely claim to represent them,” he writes.

Davidai acknowledges a personal transformation.

“Before Oct. 7, 2023, my Jewish identity had always felt deeply personal, a private part of who I was and no one else’s business but my own,” he explains.

The anti-Israel/anti-Zionism protests at Columbia University and his battles with its administration changed this attitude: “My identity was no longer just a question of visibility. It was about being who I am rather than who others wanted me to be.”

At a time when Jewish students were removing or hiding signs of their religious identification, Davidai began wearing a black Magen David necklace, sharing that

“Putting on my Star of David each morning was a daily declaration of solidarity, a way to signal to others in my community that they were not alone.”

The role came with a cost. “Speaking out against American Intellectual Antisemitism had isolated me from my academic circles, pushed me off campus, and placed my tenure-track position at risk. I had lost friends, lost sleep, lost weight, and endured the isolating reality of standing up almost alone in a university of more than three thousand professors and ten thousand staff,” he writes.

“I spoke up because someone had to. Even if it hadn’t changed anything, I would do it all again a million times over.”

[Full disclosure: Davidai’s father-in-law was a colleague and is a friend of this reporter.]