We're in this together: A professor at Columbia warns Israeli academics, "They're coming for you, too."
Shai Davidai, Assistant Professor at Columbia Business School, has been uncannily prophetic about what would happen to Jewish students at Columbia. Now, he's got a warning for Israeli scholars.
Chances are, you’ve already heard of Shai Davidai. He’s the Assistant Professor in the Management Division of Columbia Business School who gathered students on Columbia’s campus almost as soon as the war began and asked them to film him so they could pass on his message to their parents.
Davidai is Israeli, and did his undergraduate studies at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
We’ll come back to that message, but first, an explanation of why we’re focusing on Davidai today. It’s because a message that he posted on LinkedIn yesterday—addressed not to Americans but to Israeli academics—is getting a lot of attention and is generating a bit of heat on Israeli social media.
His warning to Israeli academics is that they, too, should be very worried—for themselves and their careers.
More on that, below.
First, for those who didn’t see or hear Davidai’s original speech on campus, it appears just below. And it’s well worth watching, even if you’ve seen it, to remind yourself of how utterly prescient Davidai was about what was coming down the pike.
Davidai’s message was simple, and even appears on the YouTube he posted: “I am begging you - Please help me protect your children.”
On October 19, less than two weeks after the Hamas slaughter, that warning might have sounded a bit over the top. What, after all, did Columbia students, half a world away, need to worry about?
Now, almost seven months later, we know very well.
If you know Columbia’s campus, you can see in the video that Davidai is standing in front of Butler Library. In other words, he is standing right where the anti-Israel encampment would be set up just a few months later.
It is, when you think about it, a bit uncanny.
He couldn’t have known it then, but Davidai’s speech outside Butler was just the beginning of his adversarial relationship with Columbia’s leadership. On April 17, just after Columbia University President Nemat Shafik’s visit to Capitol Hill, Davidai called her out for what he said were blatant lies:
As you listen to his video above, you will hear clearly that he is already defending himself against charges that he had harassed students. Whatever defense he offered on his own behalf didn’t do very much good, though, as headlines (this one from the Times of Israel) made clear a few days later:
Thus far, though, Columbia descent into anarchy and Davidai’s warning would not have been of interest to Israel from the Inside, because we’re focused on what’s happening inside Israel, and often in Hebrew. Davidai’s recent post on LinkedIn, in Hebrew, was about what is going to happen inside Israel, not in the US.
Thus, it matters to this conversation as well.
To all my friends who research and lecture in Israel,
It's hard for me to say this, but it's important for you to know. You are going to be the first to be hurt.
The processes are already in motion and even though you don't feel it yet, it is coming. Once it arrives, it will be too late to do anything.
It will start almost without you noticing.
Articles that will not be accepted for publication and lectures that will not be accepted for conferences.
Professional organizations that will vote for boycotts.
Seminar lectures that will not take place.
Sabbatical years that will be harder to find.
And research funds, of course.
Many of you are focused on the internal affairs of Israel. I totally understand that. If I was in Israel, I would probably be focused on it, too. But you have to understand something: almost no one if fighting on your behalf here, in the US academy.
We are here, and we are fighting, but it is not sufficient. They are many and we are few. That's why we need you—from all universities and colleges in Israel.
It may seem far away, but what happens here on the campuses will directly affect your life. Not for another ten years. Not for another five years. But very soon.
It's time to make some noise. Later, when we want to make noise, it is not clear that we will be able to.
(By the way, I am aware that many Israeli academics are not on Twitter. Therefore, I would appreciate it if you could share this via email / WhatsApp / any other media)
Davidai’s post—which he explicitly asked that we all share—generated many responses, on LinkedIn and beyond. Many were supportive, but some (also in Hebrew) were confident that things wouldn’t go south that way.
One struck me as particularly interesting, but also a bit ominous:
I am neither a researcher nor a lecturer. So there may be things I am not aware of in terms of procedures and processes in the academy. But, from a historical point of view, after we were exiled from the Land of Israel thousands of years ago, we were scattered in exile. There, the Jews were forbidden to work in important and respected professions at that time, for example in agriculture. So what did the Jews do? They started trading and lending money at interest and most importantly they didn't stop learning—with the book 😉
Little by little the world changed, and the professions that had in the past been considered respectable were no longer the most desired ones in the new era and suddenly the Jews were needed, since trade drives the economy and so does cash. What I am coming to say here: the hatred will not end, you will be hated all your life for being Jewish, you need to learn from the past and be focused on doing! Instead of trying to stop the trend, let's invest all our focus in new discoveries, groundbreaking research and second-life products. It's all interests, in the end when you have groundbreaking research, they will stand in line waiting for you, even if they hate you and you will be the one to choose who to boycott and who not!
Eivan’s socio-economic history gets a lot of it right, and there may be something to what he’s saying.
BUT — the story he tells (as he obviously knows well) is only part of the history. During the centuries that it took for “Jewish professions” to become desirable, Jewish lives were, to quote Hobbes, “poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” AND, as we were reminded yesterday on Yom HaShoah — even once the Jews had “made it” in the professional world, Germany and the Nazis offered us proof hat sometimes hatred trumps interests, that what the Jews might have to offer did not always save them.
It’s worth recalling that what animated many of Zionism’s most iconic authors was precisely the kind of shift to which we are witness in the United States today. As Hillel Halkin writes in his biography of Zeev Jabotinsky, Jabotinsky wrote:1
it became uncomfortable in Odessa. I had trouble recognizing our city, which only a short while ago had been so free and easy and good-natured. Now it was swept by a malice that, they say, had never previously affected our mild southern metropolis, created over the centuries through the loving and harmonious efforts of peaceful races. They’d always quarreled and cursed each other as rogues and idiots, and sometimes even fought; but in all my memory, there’d never been any ferocious, authentic hostility. Now all this had changed. . . .
Some of the early Zionists actually warned that America wouldn’t forever be the home that many thought it was. Bialik, for example, was certain that it was was not as different from Europe as American Jews wanted to believe. “The day will come,” Bialik wrote in 1926, when “economic structures in America will shift, and the Jews there will find themselves aside the broken trough. They will be cast out from all the high positions they have achieved, and without doubt, there will come terrible days which no one desires.”2
I was speaking with two of our students the other day, and they asked me if I thought there would soon be a wave of American Jewish aliyah. I told them, obviously, that I have no idea.
Interestingly, they both said the same thing. Israeli and the children of Israelis with no Anglo roots whatsoever, they both said—”Imagine that it did happen, though. Even if only a hundred or two hundred thousand came, with their commitment to democracy and classic liberal values, they would change everything here.”
Ie, they could save themselves and save us at the same time.
We’ll see.
But what is beyond doubt, as Shai Davidai reiterated in his post, is that while on the surface we are fighting very different battles, at the end of the day we are very much in this together.
Halkin, Hillel. Jabotinsky (Jewish Lives) (p. 39). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.
Gordis, Daniel. We Stand Divided (p. 187). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
This has already happened with writers not being accepted for publication or translation.
Ah yes, my late brother always said 'we need American aliya to civilize this place.'