In December 2022, during the fall of my senior year at Wellesley College, I asked a friend what I thought was a simple question: “What are you doing over winter break?”
“I’ll be somewhere!” she joked.
“Home in New York? Taking a winter class on campus?” I asked.
“A secret third place,” she said.
“Okay,” I said. “What third place?”
“A third place!”
“But which one?”
“Promise you won’t cancel me?” she asked.
“I think I’m more cancelable than you are,” I told her.
“Yeah, you probably are.” She looked around the office we were sitting in to make sure no one else was within earshot. “Fine. Israel. Birthright. Don’t tell anyone!”
Many Americans were stunned by the degree to which antisemitism seemed to surface in American life—and on college campuses especially—after Hamas’ October 7, 2023, attack on Israel. And yet the fact that my Jewish friend felt the need to hide her winter break trip from her liberal peers 10 months earlier suggests that a latent hostility toward the Jewish state was already there, waiting to be activated.
Former Columbia University Business School professor Shai Davidai makes that case in his new book, American Intellectual Antisemitism: The Anti-Jewish Movement Tearing Through Our Universities, a mix of memoir and academic analysis.
A latent hostility toward the Jewish state was already there, waiting to be activated.
Columbia, of course, has been under fire since pro-Hamas protests broke out on campuses the week of the October 7th attack. The campus controversies came to a fever pitch in May 2025, when the Trump administration found that the university had violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act—which bars discrimination based on race, color, or national origin—through its “deliberate indifference” to the harassment of Jewish students after the Hamas attack. To be clear, harassment to the point of incurring a Title VI violation has to be extreme enough to effectively deny affected students opportunities available at an educational institution—Columbia managed to pull off this rather high bar by, among other violations, blocking Jewish students’ ability to cross the lawn through encampments and get to class.
But the hostility toward Jews on campus, Davidai argues, “did not erupt spontaneously after October 7, 2023, but had been simmering on campus for decades.”
Still, it took the campus’s jubilant response to the massacre for Davidai to see the rot. Five days after the attack, two groups of students gathered on Columbia’s lawns: on one side, a small group of Jewish students stood in silence; on the other, a much larger crowd chanted for an “intifada revolution.” An Israeli colleague, Davidai writes, leaned over and whispered to him: “This is the antisemitism that our parents and grandparents had warned us about.”
Davidai’s name for the ideology behind those chants is, per his book’s title, “American Intellectual Antisemitism,” which he defines as “a modern and insidious form of Jew-hatred that cloaks itself in progressive jargon and academic rhetoric.” Under this worldview, Jews are White settler-colonialists who “conspire to ethnically cleanse Palestine of its Black and Brown indigenous people in order to establish a Jewish supremacist ethnostate through dispossession, apartheid, and genocide.”
In many ways, this is the logical extension of woke ideology: if Whiteness is inherently evil, and Jews are White-coded, then hating Jews is justifiable, even morally righteous. As the spread of land acknowledgments since 2020 shows, woke ideology also implicitly holds that White people have no rightful claim to any land at all—so, of course, Jews have no claim to Israel. It’s an inherently conspiratorial worldview, one that Davidai traces back to “Soviet-era propaganda that recast antisemitism into the more socially palatable guise of ‘antizionism.’”
Davidai, for his part, refused to enable it. “I want this message to get to every parent who sent their kids to Columbia University, entrusted their kids and their children’s safety with us…. I’m speaking to you, as a dad,” he said at an October 18 vigil organized by Israeli students. “And I want you to know [that] we cannot protect your children from pro-terror student organizations. Because the president of Columbia University will not speak out against pro-terror student organizations.”
The video of his speech soon went viral, turning Davidai into an activist—a role he had never imagined for himself as “a bespectacled, skinny-black-jeans-wearing professor who, despite caring deeply about his country’s survival, had spent the lion’s share of his life reading books and writing academic articles.”
Unfortunately, his academic career soon came under attack. On February 7, 2024, an anonymous group of graduate students called on the Society for Personality and Social Psychology to censure him. The next day, Columbia’s Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action Office informed him that it was investigating his activism—beginning with his viral speech—as possible harassment based on “national origin and/or shared ancestry.”
Then, on October 7, 2024—exactly one year to the day after the massacre—Davidai was suspended from campus. In a Kafkaesque turn, Columbia initially claimed that Davidai had “endangered a Jewish student by bringing her close to an ‘anti-Israel’ protest”—inadvertently admitting “what it had spent an entire year denying: Rather than being peaceful, these protests were openly hostile anti-Israel events where Jewish students were unsafe.” Recognizing the implications of this allegation, the university quickly switched to accusing him of harassment and intimidation, without specifying whom he had harassed, despite multiple requests from his lawyers to do so, and even after he offered to review his own bodycam footage with administrators.
Anyone who wants to understand how antisemitism got so bad on American campuses, and why universities let it happen, should read it.
Columbia then demanded that he sign a confession of guilt, which he refused to do, and then that he complete three hours of sensitivity training, which he accepted as a compromise. But when the university tried to make him sign a gag order barring him from discussing the training, he refused again, insisting on his right to ask publicly: “Why was I singled out for suspension and forced to complete sensitivity training while none of the dozens of faculty members who participated in the pro-Hamas encampment faced any disciplinary measures?”
Ultimately, Davidai left Columbia, keeping his freedom to ask that question—and to answer it, among others, in this book. Anyone who wants to understand how antisemitism got so bad on American campuses, and why universities let it happen, should read it.
Neeraja Deshpande is a policy analyst at Independent Women (independentwomen.com) and a senior contributor to IW Features (iwfeatures.com).