Four months on from that second video, Columbia, in particular, and universities in general, are enveloped in tense calm ahead of another uncertain semester. Campus protests have ceded the headlines to the conflict with Iran and the presidential elections, but little has changed on the ground. The most significant development concerning Davidai is that his apparent nemesis, Columbia’s president Minouche Shafik, has recently resigned. But contrary to the narrative pushed by the media that this is a victory for pro-Israel voices, Davidai sees it as just another example of the impunity that still reigns in higher education. “Shafik moved on to a better job because it was financially advantageous for her, without apologizing or taking responsibility for what happened,” Davidai says.

Shai Davidai’s story is no tale of a liberal mugged by reality, and waking up a conservative. His epiphany doesn’t reach his politics. “I’m a lefty Israeli. I’m pro-Palestine. I’m pro-Israel. I’m anti-terror,” he says. But for this university professor who has decided that America’s elite institutions are too important to be abandoned — unlike the high-profile Jewish philanthropists who’ve washed their hands of America’s elite institutions — there’s a grim determination to hang on and punch back. “The best way to fight back is by being openly and publicly Jewish and showing them that we are not afraid.”

Limits of Liberalism

Savyon is a small, upper-middle-class enclave in central Israel. According to the latest census, just over 4,000 people live there, among them Shai Davidai’s parents, Eli and Zohara, well-known philanthropists who specialize in donations to Israel’s medical institutions. Eli’s father Binyamin Davidai was one of the founders of Israel’s national airline, El Al. That monied background has inevitably become a focus of the left-wing campaign in America against Davidai’s positions. Lurid headlines in campus newspapers about the Davidai dynasty’s supposed role inside the “Zionist” army are intended to delegitimize the Columbia professor’s activities. But all of that is a world away from Savyon: After months of public exposure during which both he and his family were targets of threats, nothing compares to the safety of one’s parents’ home.

“There were moments when we were afraid,” Davidai recalls. “There were moments when my wife and I had to go to the New York Police Department to show them some things from the Internet. When I was locked out of campus and saw the brainwashing that was happening inside, I was afraid. But it was always clear to me that what I’m really afraid for is the students. There are a lot of them, and they are the ones experiencing all the hate.”

Ensuring the safety of Jewish students goes beyond the typical duties of a university professor, but given what he has witnessed on campus since October 7, Davidai has taken on a responsibility he never anticipated. This role as a “guardian” has forced him to witness some truly abhorrent situations.

“First of all, we had instances of physical violence. Those were completely unacceptable, and yet, no one has faced consequences for them. There was the incident where, after a protest, a group of protesters cornered a Jewish student simply because he was wearing a yarmulke. And of course, there was the instance where protesters broke into a building like terrorists. They took a custodian hostage for a few hours before releasing him. There was actual violence. But for me, when we look at the bigger picture, the worst thing was when the students and professors started talking about Hamas not as ‘them’ but as ‘we.’ They would say ‘we are Hamas’ or ‘our rockets.’ And to me, that really showed that the lines between good and evil have blurred. Because at that moment, when you don’t see the difference between yourself and a terrorist organization, that’s the beginning of the end,” Davidai explained.

“When you actually call on Hamas to harm Jewish students on campus, that crosses the line from being pro-terror to actively engaging with terrorists,” says Davidai. “So, you are a terrorist. You’re pushing the terrorist ideology. You’re not doing it with a gun, you’re not doing it with a suicide-bomb belt, but you are doing it with pushing the ideology. Goebbels was a Nazi. He never held a gun.”

But while what he’s experiencing now is terrifying for any Jew, what deeply concerns Davidai is what these actions signal about the future of the United States.

“If you look at the processes that are happening, most of the leaders of the protesters are young, but in ten or fifteen years, they won’t be young anymore. They’ll be senators. They’ll be in Congress. And if we don’t stop this now, we know where we’re headed,” he warned.

For Davidai, who was educated at institutions like Cornell and Princeton, it’s no coincidence that we’ve seen the worst actions in institutions located in the so-called ‘blue states.’ “We see it more in the blue states because that’s where the bigger metropolitan cities are, and that’s where you generally have more riots, more discord, more crime, and less policing of it,” he explained. “So you have this idea of liberalism — and, by the way, I’m a very liberal person, but I also understand that to maintain a liberal point of view and a liberal life, you have to stop being liberal at some point. And I think American liberals don’t understand this. They don’t understand that if they are liberal about everything, liberalism will end.”

Firmly rooted on Israel’s left — Davidai made headlines last year when he was punched in the face by a policeman at an anti-government protest in Tel Aviv — he’s most worried by the rise of anti-Semitism on the American left. “A very problematic issue is that we are used to having a lot of anti-Semitism from the extreme right. And when they are anti-Semitic, they’re not ashamed of it. But from the extreme left, it’s a very intellectual anti-Semitism. It’s an anti-Semitism that makes the person feel like they’re doing something good, something moral, and you see that more in the intellectual hubs of the blue states.”

However, to find one of the root causes of the problem, Davidai suggests, we shouldn’t focus solely on the protesters, but rather on the content of what is being taught in the universities. In recent years, the curriculums at prestigious institutions have been altered with a clear intent to portray Jews and Israel as the villains of history.

“In some classes, it’s completely open lies, like when they teach about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But there are classes where it’s hard to find the logic. For example, there was a famous case in an architecture class. It had nothing to do with Israel, nothing to do with Palestine. But in a 12-week series of classes, one week, the discussion was about design, and they called it ‘the design of genocide,’ talking about Israel. They insert this into that kind of context. There was a case last week from the translation program, where they have a journal called Arab Literature, and they posted a map. So they put out, what do we call it? A new journal, and the cover was a map of Israel, and they called it Palestine. And they said, with the native languages, it is Arabic, right? So you can see that there are already lies, half-truths. Another example: a student told me they were in Rashid Khalidi’s class. He’s a very famous historian, and Rashid Khalidi, they said, doesn’t lie, he just tells you half the story. So I asked her, ‘What do you mean?’ She said, ‘He talks about 1936 and the land of Palestine, and the Grand Mufti was traveling in Europe. And then his students asked, ‘Where did he go in Europe?’ And he said, ‘It doesn’t matter.’ Well, he didn’t go to see the Olympics. He went to see Hitler in Germany! But when the professors teach you in a certain way, they don’t want to teach you how to think.”

Over the months, Professor Davidai has gained public exposure, and whenever possible, he has questioned not only Columbia’s behavior but also that of other elite universities. In this context, one might ask an obvious question: Given that Ivy League institutions seem to have embraced extreme radicalism, why doesn’t he go elsewhere? The answer is firm: “I feel responsible for the safety of Columbia’s 1,500 undergrad Jewish students. If you ask me personally, what’s best for me, of course, I want to leave. But if you ask me, what’s best for our community? I think we can’t leave. If all the Jews left Harvard and Columbia and Yale, where would we go? And then they tell us, ‘Why don’t you leave? Leave the United States! If it’s so bad, go to Israel.’ We deserve to be in these places. The anti-Semites want us to leave. Staying is our way of fighting.”

Newfound Unity

The decision to fight it out at Columbia — where others have preferred to move on from the elite schools — marks Shai Davidai’s often lonely path in activism. It’s not the only example of his heterodox nature. Many people assume that he’s right-wing and conservative, given his fierce stand for Israel. That couldn’t be further from the truth, as Davidai is a self-defined secular lefty.

“I grew up in what you’d call a ‘chiloni’ home. We didn’t keep Shabbat, but we did Kiddush every Friday. We observed all the holidays. Some of my family members fast on Yom Kippur; some don’t. But I also have religious people in my family, so we’re kind of a mix — we have very religious people, and very secular people. Growing up, and being here, taught me that you can treat religion as something to fight over, or you can treat it as a personal choice and something we can learn from each other. My goal in this fight right now in the United States is to unite all Jewish people. Because in New York City, where I’ve lived for seven years, anti-Jewish crime has been the number one hate crime for seven years — more than anti-African American crime, more than anti-Asian. And for me, it doesn’t matter if the victim is a secular Jew or a Satmar Chassid from Williamsburg, whether he is Orthodox or Conservative. For me, you are attacked as a Jew, and I am a Jew, so we’re all in this together.”

This realization — that many people hate us simply for being Jewish — spurred Davidai to use his newfound public recognition to start a podcast called “Here I Am”, (“Hineni”) with Shai Davidai.

According to Davidai, this quest for unity is the primary change he’s experienced in his personal life since October 7th. “I think I understand very deeply now that with hate and anger, you can’t solve anything. I really think that there’s a lot of hate in these protesters. And I think in Israel, in the pro-democracy rallies that I was part of, there was a lot of hate on both sides. And I think hate is very natural. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t fight. We need to fight, but you can’t fight out of hate.”

Lonely Path

Beyond the sense of idealism often associated with fighting for one’s beliefs, Davidai found that in the new, hostile environment of the American campus in the 21st century, becoming the face of a movement defending Israel can exact an extraordinarily high toll.

On February 7, 2024, a group of social psychology graduate students from the Society of Personality and Social Psychology, of which Davidai himself is a member, formally petitioned the academic society’s executive committee to sanction him. Their charge was severe: They claimed that Davidai “has intentionally targeted and put vulnerable students from multiple marginalized racial, ethnic, and religious backgrounds at risk through his actions.” The letter, authored by a faction calling themselves “SPSP Graduate Students Against Racism,” was submitted through a “representative” as the group, composed of individuals “from racially minoritized backgrounds, pro-Palestinian, and/or themselves Palestinian,” did not feel “safe disclosing their identities given Davidai’s targeting of individuals — especially Palestinians and students of color — who have expressed similar views.”

Their grievances centered on a series of comments Davidai had made on his X (formerly Twitter) account, which allegedly violated the SPSP’s code of conduct. For instance, Davidai had called for the expulsion of “peaceful and non-violent student protestors” and urged his followers to pressure Columbia’s administration into suspending groups like Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace. These groups, it should be noted, have engaged in overtly anti-Semitic activities on campus — but that detail seemed to be of little consequence.

Davidai denied the allegations, insisting he had never targeted any Columbia student. Nevertheless, the university launched an investigation into “alleged misconduct,” an inquiry that remains unresolved. The “witch hunt” against him inevitably evoked comparisons to the Dreyfus Affair — the infamous case in which a Jewish French military officer, Alfred Dreyfus, was falsely accused of treason. “I wanted to make it public because I truly believe that sunlight is the best disinfectant,” Davidai remarked. “Columbia needs to understand that many people are invested in this investigation, and they can’t just orchestrate a Dreyfus trial to get rid of me.”

A conversation with Davidai reveals how profoundly his life has changed in the wake of his fight for Jewish students on university campuses. Once firmly on the path to becoming a conventional academic, he now finds himself  an activist — an evolution that comes with a steep price, especially given the fact that Israel advocates have failed to match the fervor of the pro-Hamas mob and turn their advocacy into a mass movement across American campuses. “I expected more ‘Shai Davidais’ to emerge at other universities,” he admits. “I hoped that at every university there would be one, two, or three professors speaking up and fighting. It honestly broke my heart that so many people remained silent.” Despite this, Davidai acknowledges those who have spoken out, especially the students who have displayed courage in the face of adversity.

Davidai’s activism has cost him friendships. Colleagues who once were close now keep their distance, and some peers shun him outright.

“Shai acts like a 12-year-old in need of attention, desperately staging viral videos and demanding retweets at the direct expense of the community he’s supposed to be caring for,” remarked Lee Kovarsky, a law professor at the University of Texas.

The irony, Davidai observes, is that many of these same academics who now ostracize him for defending Israel would be barred from teaching in Islamic countries due to their gender, ideology, or religion. “What’s happening in the United States — and I think it’s beginning to happen in Israel — is that people are prioritizing identity over values. They decide, ‘I am a progressive, I am a Democrat, I am a Republican,’ and it becomes like rooting for a sports team — you put on the jersey, and it doesn’t matter what the team does.”

Exit Strategy

The campaign against Davidai did not remain confined to the digital sphere; by mid-April 2024, it had gained national attention.

On April 17, 2024, Minouche Shafik, then president of Columbia University, was summoned to testify before Congress regarding her administration’s failure to address anti-Semitic incidents on campus. Unlike her counterparts at Penn and Harvard, who had faced similar inquiries, Shafik had the advantage of time to prepare, having been out of the country when her peers were grilled by Congress. But there was one issue she couldn’t sidestep. During the session, Democratic Congresswoman Ilhan Omar explicitly named Shai Davidai, accusing him of harassing students who were peacefully protesting in support of Palestine. Shafik, visibly perturbed by Davidai’s relentless criticism of her leadership, tersely responded, “As president, I’m used to being attacked, but attacking our students is unacceptable.”

This moment made official what had been an open secret: Davidai was now the face of Jewish resistance on campus, and the prime target of pro-Hamas groups. And as such, he was marked for retribution.

Davidai’s response was swift and unambiguous. “The President of Columbia knows for a FACT that I’ve never attacked any of our students,” he wrote. “She knows I have been only speaking out against pro-Islamic Jihad organizations, their radical leaders, and terrorist-loving professors. She lied under oath.”

One might have expected the Shafik-Davidai confrontation to escalate, but many were caught off guard by what happened next.

Last week, Minouche Shafik resigned as president of Columbia University, and most media outlets portrayed her departure as a triumph for the pro-Israel movement. Shafik was seen as a “casualty” of the Jewish resistance that has gained momentum in response to the wave of harassment on university campuses in recent months. Her resignation followed that of Harvard’s Claudine Gay in January 2024 and Penn’s Liz Magill, who was the first to step down in December 2023. Shafik, who had failed to label Hamas as a terrorist organization and couldn’t ensure the safety of Jewish faculty and students at Columbia following the events of October 7, stated in her resignation letter that “This period has taken a considerable toll on my family, as it has for others in our community.”

If this was indeed a victory for the Jewish resistance, its architect would undoubtedly be Columbia’s own Professor Shai Davidai, the first to sound the alarm about the rise of anti-Semitism on university campuses, with Columbia being a particular focus. Yet, Davidai offers a perspective that challenges the prevailing narrative. “The reality is that they didn’t dismiss her. We didn’t fire her. She resigned. She left her job to take another, better position within the British government,” Davidai told Mishpacha following the announcement, referring to Shafik’s advisory role at the Foreign Office, an appointment that’s come under heavy criticism because of her role in the Columbia debacle. “It might seem like a small difference, but it’s actually quite significant because it reflects what’s been happening at Columbia all year — you can act with impunity, and there are no consequences. She essentially decided she wanted to leave. But no one told her, ‘You did wrong. You need to go.’ And at no point did she admit to any mistakes.”

Staying the Course

While the resistance movement may not have achieved its goals at the highest levels of university leadership, it has certainly struck a blow where it hurts academia the most — in the wallet. The universities’ failure to condemn antisemitism has been a wake-up call for many Jewish donors, who have realized that, unwittingly, they have been funding the indoctrination of future generations. Heavyweights like billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman and investor Mark Rowan, who have donated hundreds of millions of dollars to Ivy League schools, have frozen their contributions until the administrations firmly condemn the pro-Hamas demonstrators. Specifically, at Columbia, names like Robert Kraft, Leon Cooperman, and Leonard Blavatnik have made the same decision — a move that Davidai sees as very positive. In fact, last year, the university postponed its annual fundraising campaign, known as “Giving Day,” due to the backlash from donors over how the administration handled the aftermath of October 7th. In 2022, Columbia raised $30 million in just 24 hours. There was no campaign in 2023, and this year’s is theoretically scheduled for October 1st.

“That’s another way to fight,” Davidai asserted. “I think part of the battle is just being openly and proudly Jewish on campus, holding an Israeli flag, going to pro-Hamas protests and pushing back, showing them that we’re not afraid, we’re not going to leave. And it also means that people with money need to stop giving it to Columbia.”

But beyond the shifts in his social and more personal circle, the events that Davidai and his family have experienced since October 7th have made them uncertain about their future in the United States.

“I’m raising my two amazing kids in New York, and for the next two years, at least, I’m staying in the United States because I think I have a personal responsibility, but we also have a responsibility as a community to fight back here,” he explains. “In two years, we’ll have to see what’s happening in Israel, what’s happening in the world, and then make decisions based on the new facts.”

Like many in America’s vast Israeli diaspora, the October 7 attacks — and the depressing response of so many on the American left — have led Davidai to question what they’re doing in the land that offered so much to liberal high-achievers like him.

“You know, Israelis living in the United States never stop thinking about going back to Israel,” he says. “The question is, do you think about it every day, every week, or every month? In the beginning, I thought about it every day. I’ve been in the United States for 14 years, so my wife and I used to think about it every day, then every week, and after several years, once a month. But the truth is, after October 7th, that thought is back in my mind every day.”

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1025)