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American Intellectual Antisemitism: The Anti-Jewish Movement Tearing Through Our Universities
In this firsthand exposé, a former Columbia Business School professor mounts a blistering indictment of how radical politics, ideological indoctrination, and institutional indifference have transformed campuses into incubators of anti-Jewish, anti-Israeli, and anti-American hatred.
American Intellectual Antisemitism tells the remarkable story of how one Columbia Business School professor helped sound the alarm on the rise of antisemitism and support for terrorism on America’s most elite campuses, emerging as one of the world’s most outspoken voices against anti-Jewish, anti-Israeli, and anti-American extremism.
In the wake of the October 7, 2023, Hamas massacre, Shai Davidai became an accidental activist. Almost overnight, he was organizing rallies, appearing on prime-time television, testifying before Congress, facing death threats, and being barred from teaching his award-winning course.
Beginning with the small vigil at Columbia that sparked his activism, Davidai chronicles how ideological extremism took root in elite institutions and how silence and fear fueled the most significant surge of antisemitism in North America since the Holocaust.
Blending a firsthand account with rigorous analysis, the book exposes the radical politics, ideological indoctrination, institutional indifference, leadership failures, and moral unraveling of American academia, revealing not only a crisis for Jews, but a broader warning about the fragility of democratic norms and the state of higher education.
Drawing on his years of conducting research on human behavior and experience teaching across multiple institutions of higher education, and guided by two principles—no hate, no lies—Davidai offers a bold and hopeful roadmap for confronting hate in an age of misinformation and moral confusion. Davidai’s message will leave readers with a deeper understanding of this moment and the clarity and courage to respond.
American Intellectual Antisemitism tells the remarkable story of how one Columbia Business School professor helped sound the alarm on the rise of antisemitism and support for terrorism on America’s most elite campuses, emerging as one of the world’s most outspoken voices against anti-Jewish, anti-Israeli, and anti-American extremism.
In the wake of the October 7, 2023, Hamas massacre, Shai Davidai became an accidental activist. Almost overnight, he was organizing rallies, appearing on prime-time television, testifying before Congress, facing death threats, and being barred from teaching his award-winning course.
Beginning with the small vigil at Columbia that sparked his activism, Davidai chronicles how ideological extremism took root in elite institutions and how silence and fear fueled the most significant surge of antisemitism in North America since the Holocaust.
Blending a firsthand account with rigorous analysis, the book exposes the radical politics, ideological indoctrination, institutional indifference, leadership failures, and moral unraveling of American academia, revealing not only a crisis for Jews, but a broader warning about the fragility of democratic norms and the state of higher education.
Drawing on his years of conducting research on human behavior and experience teaching across multiple institutions of higher education, and guided by two principles—no hate, no lies—Davidai offers a bold and hopeful roadmap for confronting hate in an age of misinformation and moral confusion. Davidai’s message will leave readers with a deeper understanding of this moment and the clarity and courage to respond.
352 pages, Hardcover
Published October 6, 2026
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
Review of advance copy
Eye-opening and heartbreaking
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
ARC from NetGalley
Oy vey. As a disclaimer, I am a Jewish alum of Columbia who was an enrolled student during the time period covered in this book. As such, I have the privilege very few readers do of actually having been witness to all the major events Davidai describes. With this knowledge, I want to warn readers that his descriptions range from misleading to outright false (as any discerning reader who lacks my home field advantage could probably surmise from the fact that at least half the endnote citations are of tweets and blog posts). The first inaccuracy begins just one paragraph in, as he claims that an Israeli vigil was displaced by an "unauthorized protest" rather than another vigil run by the Palestinian Student Union. (I know this to be true because I walked by both vigils on my way to and from dinner that night.)
His constant strawmanning of a bunch of twenty-year-old students would be hilarious if it weren't so dangerous. Rather than take seriously even for a moment that these students might be guided by a deep moral commitment to the sanctity of human life and the urgent need for justice, he moves backward from the conclusion that they are motivated by extremism, and thereby concludes that any accusations they level against Israel are the product of antisemitism rather than legitimate critiques. If accusations of, say, apartheid in the West Bank, or of individual politicians expressing genocidal intent, do not constitute the morally acceptable critiques of individual policies and governments, than what possibly could?
Similarly, attacks on fellow academics are misleading and unfounded. He objects to Edward Said's Orientalism being widely taught as part of a larger argument that Said is responsible for fomenting anti-Israel sentiment in academia. As anyone who has actually read Orientalism could tell you, its argument is largely unrelated to the issue of Palestine, and it is widely assigned because its analysis of the relationship between academic knowledge and power is relevant to a wide variety of fields. He claims Columbia anthropology professor Nadia Abu El-Haj's work has been "widely debunked," but his source for this assertion is the Middle East Forum's "Campus Watch" webpage, which I found leads to an article where an anthropology professor disagrees with the claims in Abu El-Haj's book but notes that it has been both lauded and criticized. A non-peer-reviewed article describing a single one of her book as receiving a mixed reception hardly constitutes evidence for such a strong claim as her work being "widely debunked." His pages-long excoriation of Mahmoud Khalil and Mohsen Mahdawi relies on exaggeration and careful wording that comes just short of outright defamation (like implying Khalil married his wife for a green card).
Further lies come in his depiction of the investigations against him for discrimination. He complains that he was accused of targeting Jewish students for simply comparing anti-Zionist Jews to people forced to collaborate with the Nazis in World War II. What a delicate way to say he called anti-Zionist Jewish students "kapos" who would be "on the last train to Auschwitz!" Similarly, he objects to being accused of harassing a student who was speaking about her experiences of sexual assault. His defense is that video footage shows he was facing away from her as he shouted over her, and she was speaking at a "pro-Hamas" protest anyway, so clearly it doesn't count. He was also accused of Islamophobia for posting a video sensationalizing a Jummah prayer on campus, and his defense is that his issue with the prayer was the man leading it, though he takes care to mention that it is gender segregated (interestingly, he describes going to a Chabad seder just a few pages earlier, and he has no critique of Chabad's own preference for gender segregation during prayer).
Even without the inside knowledge of these inaccuracies that I was fortunate enough to have, the arguments of the book are weak and petulant. Davidai excoriates BDS as exclusionary and wrong and derides student protesters for trying to disrupt Hillary Clinton, but he rails against Columbia for allowing the former president of Iran to speak on campus as part of the World Leaders Forum in 2007, invokes the history of Columbia's collaboration with German universities during Nazi rule, and of course, spends an entire chapter going after professors (mostly of Palestinian heritage) for their publications not aligning with his viewpoint. He complains about antisemitic tropes, but lectures us extensively on the dangers of billions of dollars in shadowy Qatari funding poisoning our universities without a shred of irony or self-awareness.
In all, this is by no means an actual account of either what happened on Columbia University from 2023 to 2025 or a coherent theory of the anti-Israel beliefs prevalent in academia. It is, however, a very helpful collection of tweets from that time period.
Oy vey. As a disclaimer, I am a Jewish alum of Columbia who was an enrolled student during the time period covered in this book. As such, I have the privilege very few readers do of actually having been witness to all the major events Davidai describes. With this knowledge, I want to warn readers that his descriptions range from misleading to outright false (as any discerning reader who lacks my home field advantage could probably surmise from the fact that at least half the endnote citations are of tweets and blog posts). The first inaccuracy begins just one paragraph in, as he claims that an Israeli vigil was displaced by an "unauthorized protest" rather than another vigil run by the Palestinian Student Union. (I know this to be true because I walked by both vigils on my way to and from dinner that night.)
His constant strawmanning of a bunch of twenty-year-old students would be hilarious if it weren't so dangerous. Rather than take seriously even for a moment that these students might be guided by a deep moral commitment to the sanctity of human life and the urgent need for justice, he moves backward from the conclusion that they are motivated by extremism, and thereby concludes that any accusations they level against Israel are the product of antisemitism rather than legitimate critiques. If accusations of, say, apartheid in the West Bank, or of individual politicians expressing genocidal intent, do not constitute the morally acceptable critiques of individual policies and governments, than what possibly could?
Similarly, attacks on fellow academics are misleading and unfounded. He objects to Edward Said's Orientalism being widely taught as part of a larger argument that Said is responsible for fomenting anti-Israel sentiment in academia. As anyone who has actually read Orientalism could tell you, its argument is largely unrelated to the issue of Palestine, and it is widely assigned because its analysis of the relationship between academic knowledge and power is relevant to a wide variety of fields. He claims Columbia anthropology professor Nadia Abu El-Haj's work has been "widely debunked," but his source for this assertion is the Middle East Forum's "Campus Watch" webpage, which I found leads to an article where an anthropology professor disagrees with the claims in Abu El-Haj's book but notes that it has been both lauded and criticized. A non-peer-reviewed article describing a single one of her book as receiving a mixed reception hardly constitutes evidence for such a strong claim as her work being "widely debunked." His pages-long excoriation of Mahmoud Khalil and Mohsen Mahdawi relies on exaggeration and careful wording that comes just short of outright defamation (like implying Khalil married his wife for a green card).
Further lies come in his depiction of the investigations against him for discrimination. He complains that he was accused of targeting Jewish students for simply comparing anti-Zionist Jews to people forced to collaborate with the Nazis in World War II. What a delicate way to say he called anti-Zionist Jewish students "kapos" who would be "on the last train to Auschwitz!" Similarly, he objects to being accused of harassing a student who was speaking about her experiences of sexual assault. His defense is that video footage shows he was facing away from her as he shouted over her, and she was speaking at a "pro-Hamas" protest anyway, so clearly it doesn't count. He was also accused of Islamophobia for posting a video sensationalizing a Jummah prayer on campus, and his defense is that his issue with the prayer was the man leading it, though he takes care to mention that it is gender segregated (interestingly, he describes going to a Chabad seder just a few pages earlier, and he has no critique of Chabad's own preference for gender segregation during prayer).
Even without the inside knowledge of these inaccuracies that I was fortunate enough to have, the arguments of the book are weak and petulant. Davidai excoriates BDS as exclusionary and wrong and derides student protesters for trying to disrupt Hillary Clinton, but he rails against Columbia for allowing the former president of Iran to speak on campus as part of the World Leaders Forum in 2007, invokes the history of Columbia's collaboration with German universities during Nazi rule, and of course, spends an entire chapter going after professors (mostly of Palestinian heritage) for their publications not aligning with his viewpoint. He complains about antisemitic tropes, but lectures us extensively on the dangers of billions of dollars in shadowy Qatari funding poisoning our universities without a shred of irony or self-awareness.
In all, this is by no means an actual account of either what happened on Columbia University from 2023 to 2025 or a coherent theory of the anti-Israel beliefs prevalent in academia. It is, however, a very helpful collection of tweets from that time period.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews