Shai Davidai – Columbia Business School Professor & A Leading Voice Combatting Jew-Hatred and Israel-Bashing

The One Way Ticket Show

Given Jew-hatred and virulent anti-Israel rhetoric spiraling out of control, particularly on college campuses, we’ve invited Shai Davidai to be our featured guest on this episode of the program.

Shai is Assistant Professor in the Management Division of Columbia University Business School. His research examines people’s everyday judgments of themselves, other people, and society as a whole.

Born and raised just outside Tel-Aviv, Shai received his Ph.D. from Cornell in 2015. Before joining Columbia Business School, Shai spent a year as a post-doctoral fellow at Princeton and 3 years as an Assistant Professor of Psychology at The New School for Social Research.

Following the barbaric October 7th 2023 terrorist attack on Israel, Shai has faced deplorable treatment from Columbia University for standing up for Israel and the rights of Jewish students on campus. Today, he’s a leading face and voice in the fight against Jew-hatred and Israel-bashing.

Our conversation begins with Shai sharing his one way ticket to the safety of his late Grandmother’s couch in Givatayim, just outside of Tel Aviv. While on weekend breaks from his university studies in Jerusalem, Shai would visit Savta (Grandmother) Lydia and talk, smoke, drink Turkish coffee and enjoy her signature Romanian cheesecake. And at some point, Shai would fall asleep on her couch.

Shai shares that Savta Lydia, who was from Bucharest, was studying to be a doctor. Aged 19 and after her first year of university, despite good grades, she was called into the Dean’s office and told she wouldn’t be able to continue her studies because the university met its quota of Jews. That, plus her being a woman, didn’t fit the university’s agenda. Realizing she had no future as a Jew in Romania, she packed up and traveled solo to Israel to chart a new course. Her biggest regret in life, Shai offers, is that she didn’t become a doctor.

We continue our chat with Shai highlighting:

1) How the first protests at Columbia supporting the October 7th attack (organizing began the evening of October 7th while terrorists were still in Israel!) took place at the university on October 12th before one IDF soldier set foot in Gaza and four days after Hezbollah’s unprovoked attack on Israel’s north. On the 12th, approximately 800 students, faculty and staff came out to celebrate “the historic day” (their words). They used slogans like “resistance by any means necessary” (which for them meant rape, murder and kidnapping civilians was “necessary”). For me, not sure what the need was for resistance since Israel had left Gaza 18 years before and thousands of Gazans would cross into Israel daily to work.

2) The Kafkaesque treatment he’s received from Columbia University, simply for speaking out, not against the protestors or their hatred, but against Columbia’s administration for allowing the hatred to fester and take root. For exercising his first amendment rights, he’s been banned from Columbia’s campus. This includes the Columbia Hillel.

3) His goal in speaking out is to push the message that we have a problem for support of anti-Jewish, anti-Israel and anti-American terrorism in academia.

4) How US professors openly support US designated terrorist groups, e.g., Hamas and the Houthis, but only ones that target Jews (you won’t see support for Boko Haram). How the same professors and others remained and remain silent on, for example, the October 7th attack and the burning of synagogues worldwide.

5) Jewish students being verbally and physically attacked on campuses and denied entry into their public campus spaces.

6) The silent, slanted and biased behavior of international aid organizations like the Red Cross (which to this day has not visited one single hostage), UNRWA, or Amnesty International which engages in historical revisionism.

7) How the anti-Israel and Jew-hating protests are in fact anti-democratic and also anti-American.

8) What starts with the Jews doesn’t end with the Jews.

This is a powerful episode to be heard more than once and shared widely.

For more from Shai, tune into his podcast: Here I Am With Shai Davidai.

Also, follow Shai on all social media: @shaidavidai