The Honest Take

speaker-0: you And that's the real danger about this American intellectual antisemitism, that it disguises itself as a moral virtue, which is a very attractive thing, especially for a lost 20, 30, 40-something year old that wants to put some sense into this very chaotic world. At least I'll be on the right side of history.

speaker-1: Weeks after October 7th, something happened on American college campuses that shocked many people but surprised almost no one who had been paying attention. Students celebrated a massacre, and one of America's most prestigious universities spent 20 months investigating the faculty member who had the audacity to call it out. My guest today mapped the intellectual machinery that made all of this possible, a pipeline that runs from a single book published in 1978 through decades of academic radicalization to the protesters tearing down hostage posters and calling it resistance. He's a social psychologist, a former Columbia Business School professor, and the host of Here I Am with Shai Davide. His new book, American Intellectual Antisemitism, publishes this October 6th. This is Shai Davide. So Passover's next week, and in my research I found out that your grandfather helped capture Adolf Eichmann. What was it like at your Seder table growing up with that?

speaker-0: Well, he helped bring so so as you can probably imagine, if you look at me, ⁓ my grandfather was not like. We were fighters, but not physical fighters. So he was part of the strategies team of he worked for Elal. So the bringing of Eichmann to trial was so, so complicated because basically Israel kidnapped him from Argentina that was shielding him. So there was this whole story with an Elal flight. so my grandfather was in the story, you know, and honestly as as a kid, a teenager learning about these stories, I was like just happy that he was part of it. ⁓ Our Passover's were really interesting. We are very Israeli. We're a very Israeli family. ⁓ And what that means is we had a mixture of religious family members and completely anti-religious family members and everything in between. And we would all sit for Passover and, you know, After the second or third cup of wine, things got nicer and warmer, which I think is a brilliant part of the Passover Seder.

speaker-1: And now here you are, generations later, fighting, you know, a very different kind of anti-Semitism, but it's also kind of the same anti-Semitism on American campuses. Does that feel intentional to you, that generational thread?

speaker-0: book coming out on American intellectual antisemitism. It's coming out in October 2026. And in that book, there's a specific section about anti-Zionism and where it originates. And I wanted, as I was researching and doing all the history work and the psychology work and the theory work, I wanted to figure out what is my in? Like, how do I, where does that meet me? And I realized that the first time it meets me is actually not through my paternal grandfather, but through my maternal grandmother who was born and raised in Bucharest, Romania. She had no problem. She loved being Romanian. But when she was 19 and she went to university and after the first year she wanted to get into med school and they said, no, we have enough Jews. ⁓ Sorry. And basically kicked her out. And it was... then that she realized that she and the Jewish community have no future in Romania and packed up and left her parents, left her entire family ⁓ and moved to Israel in 1951. So for me, this new sort of antisemitism that's showing up on campus, and it is a new variety, but it's of the same... strain that has personally impacted my family and impacted millions and millions of Jews all over the world. so this isn't new, the kafias are new, but the hatred is all the same.

speaker-1: There is the famous video of you, the open letter to parents of you right after October 7th talking about the reaction on campus. rewatching it, there is a genuine shock and disbelief that really comes through the video.

speaker-0: terror student organization on campus here. My two year old daughter is a legitimate target of resistance. That is what they are selling. You are allowed to murder and kidnap my two year old daughter in the name of resistance. And none of the presidents of universities all around the country are willing to take a stand.

speaker-1: In retrospect, were the signs there before that? Or was this something that October 7th revealed that had been genuinely hidden?

speaker-0: You know, I don't watch that video because what you just described is exactly what was going through my mind, my heart, wherever, you know, emotions lie. It was a genuine shock, disbelief. It was like the world has dropped from underneath my feet. So at that moment and, you know, everything that led to that moment, that was genuine. I really had no idea. ⁓ There were signs that I was exposed to at the time, but like many in our world and I don't minimize it, I take responsibility. We kind of like downplayed the signs. We said, no, that's not a big deal. Or we would say, and you have to remember the context of the time, we would point to the extreme right and say, look, you Look at what's happening at the tree of life synagogue. Look at what's happening at the Chabad. Look at all the actual physical attacks on Jews. So we didn't prioritize it. I personally didn't prioritize it. When October 7th happens in Israel and I say, and then October 8th happened in the diaspora and everything exploded, all of a sudden you were no, it was no longer possible to downplay it. So I started delving and, and into the science and trying to figure out what did I miss? Not to blame other people, to blame myself. What signs were there that I didn't see or that I saw and didn't take seriously? And I realized that there were many, many, many signs. Some of them I completely missed, partially because I was not in the humanities and the revolutionary parts of the university. Part, some of them because I was just focused on my work and not going into a university to burn it all down. But then there were some stuff that I just, I saw the signs, I just didn't see the connecting thread. And as I was learning more and more about everything that was happening in the past few decades leading up to October 7, I had this vivid experience of almost like connecting the dots and realizing like, ⁓ wait, this draws something and realizing that what it draws is actually spells out, it spells out Jew hatred. But. at the time and I was just looking at separate dots, I really was genuinely shocked. ⁓ Now, of course, the anti-Semites helped us here in the sense that on October 8th, they felt so strengthened and emboldened by the violence that they just rose up. So they figuratively took off their masks, but literally put on masks to cover who they are as they showed us the real truth. ⁓ And that was easier to then- Battle.

speaker-1: Let's talk about Columbia specifically in the history of the intellectual anti-Semitism there. I mean, it's where Edward Said landed with Orientalism. Do you draw a straight line from Edward Said at Columbia in 1963 to our post-October 7th, whatever this is?

speaker-0: Yes, I draw a straight line, but that's only because the other side tells me here's the straight line that we're drawing. They refer to Edward Said as the intellectual father of this pro-Khamas movement. If you look at, there's been some studies on syllabi throughout the country and Orientalism, Edward Said's very, very highly debated work ⁓ is one of the most. ⁓ assigned reading in the entire U S like it's up there with Plato's the Republic. So, and it's, and it's way up. It's higher than, you know, any John Locke's writing or a Jean-Jacques Rousseau or, know, other people that obviously contributed much more, ⁓ Western society. And the other thing this research had unveiled was that not only is it one of the most highly assigned books in or writings in the

speaker-1: Wow.

speaker-0: in campuses, it's also very, very rarely, and I'm talking about like single digit percentages assigned with a work that rebutes it or criticizes it. And there are works like, ⁓ Austin Denton that came and said, well, you're doing the exact thing that you're blaming the West. So yes, there's definitely a theoretical straight line, but what worries me more is that there is also a, an operational straight line. Edward said to what we're seeing now, because he really popularized the idea of the professor as an activist blurring the line between, you know, your goal as a professor, as a researcher, as an academic, my goal has been and always will be seeking the truth. If I don't like the truth, well, I shouldn't have gone down that path. Right. Activists have a different goal. Activists have a vision of what they believe the world needs to be like, and then they move towards that goal. When you blend those two together, like Edward Said did famously, ⁓ he wrote, he was part of the people writing the Palestinian National Charter in 1964. He translated Yasser Arafat's addresses to the UN. He threw rocks at ⁓ Israeli soldiers. Blending that line between activist and academic, He was basically saying, it's okay not to search for the truth. It's okay to search for the world that you want to see, even if it's despicable, if it's unacceptable, even if it's not truthful. And that's what we're seeing today. We're seeing a lot of professors who are prioritizing their views of the world and their activism over the search for objective truth.

speaker-1: For those of us in the audience who don't who are unfamiliar with it. Can you give us 60 second book report on? On the book Orientalism and how that has impacted

speaker-0: Yes, so basically Edward Said came up with this idea that when the West and of course when we talk about the Western world, it's also Australia, New Zealand, but when the Western world looks at and studies the Middle East, it does so from a Western perspective. That's not a shocker, right? Everybody. And two, that's inherently racist. That's what his argument was. So. We see all everything we see through this Orientalist mindset. The things that come out of that is if you want to study the Middle East, you have to be from the Middle East. Right. Now, why this was so groundbreaking and problematic was that at the time, the most respected historian of Middle East history, Middle Eastern culture was a gentleman called Bernard Lewis at the University of Princeton. You know, Born and raised in the West, very highly educated man. But all of a sudden this person, Edward Said, comes and says, I don't care how meritocratic your views are. I don't care how much knowledge you have. I don't care how much expertise you are. You, because you're from the West, you're already suspect and therefore cannot study this. Now, the reason why this is so problematic again is this activist academic. When we're seeking the truth, doesn't matter who we are. Our identities don't matter. What we should be seeking is the truth. But when Edward Said came and said, no, no, no, no, no, you don't get to seek the truth because we have our truth and our truth is different from your truth. And everything is kind of like morally relative there. He just muddled the water and created really a racist view, unfortunately, of the West. Right? Basically saying, Everybody from the West when they look at that direction. They are racist. What is that? That's racism. So that that was his big thing now the reason why it was so influential for many many different reasons, but one of them is Edward Said Wrote his book about Jane Austen and about he was an English professor. He wrote about how ⁓ literature professors study, you know the West's with different looks and how he studied the quote, unquote, orient the Middle East. And by doing that, he was able to get his book, not just in Middle Eastern departments, but in English departments, in history department, all these different philosophy departments. often we talk about antisemitism as a virus that shapes, which shifts shapes. And this was a way to get it into all these different vessels that's been carried on.

speaker-1: You just answered one of my next questions, which was the moral relativism that has come out of the colonial, colonialist, ⁓ oppressed, oppressor construct. Was that from Said?

speaker-0: It was not just from Said. So the biggest name in this idea of moral relativism, at least in the 20th century, is Michel Foucault, right? Post-colonial, post-truth, post-moral absolutism views that was really influential in Western Europe and in the United States or North American universities. ⁓ Now, that's a historical perspective, but just from an idea perspective, I want people to understand how this infiltrated universities. It started off with a very positive and good ⁓ approach to the truth or to the studying of history and literature, which was let's hear other perspectives. For too long, we've been hearing the dominant, hegemonic, white, ⁓ heterosexual, Christian, male perspective of history. Let's amplify other voices. Let's amplify women's voices. That's right. Let's LGBTQ voices, non white voices, like non Christian voices, et cetera. That was perfect, right? Cause we need to hear every opinions and views. But then the next step was saying every perspective is equally valid. And that's a problem because basically it's saying the next step to that is there is no truth because every perspective is equally valid. Every perspective is weighted the same way. And therefore, there is no one perspective. Now, of course, that's total BS because some perspectives are based on facts, some are based on emotion, some are more ⁓ historically verifiable, some are lesser so. But when they did that, they basically created a campus culture where everything goes. And not only everything goes, but you can't tell me. that I am wrong because that's just quote, unquote, your truth and quote, unquote, my truth is different. so where does that show up in after October 7, for example, ⁓ take the worst of it. Rape is not necessarily wrong, according to the protesters. Why? We took something that used to be a moral absolute, at least in the West. Rape is wrong, period. No matter what, no ifs, no buts, no whens, no nothing. And then they added an asterisk and said, well, it depends of whether it's a Jewish woman and a Hamas terrorist, because then it's oppressor, oppressed. All of this moral relativism that was very vague and abstract entered society in a concrete way. And of course, this is just one minor example. But it allowed them to completely throw out everything that we hold dear and believe in in the West.

speaker-1: Do you think in that post-colonial framework, in the moral relativism, you know, it's all about your own truth, unless it's about Jews? ⁓ Or it seems that way. Is that a ⁓ bug or a feature of the frameworks?

speaker-0: So it's so first of all, it is a feature. It's a definite feature. It was not at least my reading of this was not in its intended target, meaning it's not just that Jews views and truths and beliefs don't matter. And unfortunately, they don't on most campuses. But it's the quote unquote separation of the world. And this is where the moral relativism meets postcolonial. ⁓ The separation of the world into oppressor and oppressed. And we can talk about who's oppressor and who's oppressed. But basically, in this view, the oppressor can do no right and the oppressed can do no wrong. Now, what does that mean? Again, if you are seen as oppressed and you go and sexually abuse your, quote, unquote, oppressor, I can't judge you now because from a moral relativistic perception, know, you acted on your truth. The same thing is If you are seen as the oppressor, right, if you're again, the white male Christian, ⁓ that's the prototypical, but then the Jews are seen as the oppressor. The global north sometimes they use different labels, etc, etc. The United States is the oppressor, Cuba is the oppressor, all those different separations that they have. And now the oppressor can do no right. If the oppressor tries to- fight the oppressed civilly, then they're just bringing in their skewed Western morals and the oppressor needs to lie down, lay down their weapon and die. And the oppressed needs to do everything impossible to get that. That's the view on campus. Now, one thing that's extremely weird about moral relativism is that every professor and student that kind of like propagates this moral relativism, they do take one thing to be an absolute truth. And that's moral relativism is the absolute truth, which is the ironic thing that then ends up the snake that ends up eating its own tail. If you go on campus and say, you I disagree. I think that it's not morally relative. Well, you can't say that. So you realize how it's, it's a, and a theory of it completely is standing on shoddy, ⁓ foundational work.

speaker-1: Do you think students who have been taught now by three generations of this activist scholar and post-colonial theory can even recognize their own anti-Semitism when it's framed as this liberation?

speaker-0: I honestly don't think that they can. And when I say that, I think there's two reasons why they can't. One is that we're all blind to our own biases, right? And this is a very, very deep bias. They don't want to see it, right? They come to campus, they see themselves as good people, both the students, the PhD students, the faculty, whoever. And they see themselves not only as good people, and this is a commonly known secret in academia. Professors think they're better than the average American. Students think they're better than their peers who go and they're 18 and go into the military or go to work. So they see themselves as intellectually and morally superior. And if you come and tell them, well, what you just said, what you just did, what is bigoted, their mental defense systems say, no, that's imponderable. So they can't see it. But the other reason why they can't see it is because they have been taught that it's a virtue. They've been taught that if you want to be a good person, then you have to go and scream, ⁓ from the river to the sea, Palestine will be Arab. Now, even if you wanted to see yourself, like ask yourself, well, am I anti-Semitic? Is this Jew hatred? You won't even realize it because you've been told throughout your education that no, that's what virtuous people do. And that's the real danger about this American intellectual antisemitism, that it disguises itself as a moral virtue, which is a very attractive thing, especially for a lost 20, 30, 40-something-year-old that wants to put some sense into this very chaotic world. At least I'll be on the right side of history. How do you get to be on the right side of history on campus? Put on a kaffir and go hate on the Jewish homeland.

speaker-1: You know, it's not only professors who have their own sense of being smarter and academia, but I mean, there's also as lay people, there is a halo effect that comes from listening to what a professor has said or written and academia in general. Does that academic dressing of this American intellectual antisemitism, does that make it more dangerous, do you think? You you'd said that it used to be from the beer halls and now it's from the lecture hall.

speaker-0: Yeah, definitely. do think that that is an intentional thing. I mean, it's not just that I think. 1993, when ⁓ Hamas had a secret, Hamas senior officials had a secret meeting outside of Philadelphia. They said we need to infiltrate universities, research centers and the media. Lo and behold, 30 years later, they infiltrated universities, research centers and the media. So this wasn't an accidental thing, but yes. Anti-Semitism, even when it starts in the, let's say the beer holes, in order to get a real grasp on society, it needs that stamp of approval. If you look at the Wannsee conference, the conference in the Nazi Germany, the final solution was decided upon. believe, don't catch me on their numbers, but I believe 60 % of those present had either PhDs or medical doctoral degrees. Right? That gave a stamp of approval. Like if the doctors and the professors are saying this, this might be right. Same thing on campus. You know, if, if professor Joseph Massad says that seeing the October 7 massacre gave him jubilation and all, and he's a professor, that must be right, right? If professor Rashid Khalidi, you know, is out there saying that Israel is this horrific, demonic settler colonial project or whatever, he must be right. And It helps when, you know, they speak in jargon where they speak in this elevated voice. Part of the things that have always annoyed me about academia, even before October 7, when I was a professor and I loved being a professor and that I was hoping to stay there for the rest of my life, was this disconnect from society. I would go and tell people like, people be like, wow, you have a PhD. I said, no, the only difference between you and I is that I sat for five years. and researched one specific thing and had the tenacity to do so while you sat for five years and had the tenacity to do something else. not, I may be more knowledgeable in certain things, but I'm not inherently smarter or more intellectual than other people. Now, of course you'd never hear the professors that are indoctrinating on campus say that, then they lose their power of indoctrination.

speaker-1: Yeah, it was fascinating learning how Nazism took root so early in the universities in Germany that, you know, some of the earliest and loudest converts were university students. And it's such an adumbration of what's going on right now. Back to, you you talked about the 1993 Hamas strategy meeting. How coordinated do you think it really is in terms of a what we're seeing now.

speaker-0: You know, it's really hard to answer that question. It's a question that I keep going back to. What's, is there anyone behind this or an organization or a network of organizations? And while I, you know, we all have this natural desire to see some intentional hands or hands behind this. The truth is that with the advent of social media ⁓ and email, Those two things created vast networks that sometimes if you just insert a horrible idea into the vast network, it will prosper even if there isn't a guiding hand. Now I'm not saying there isn't a guiding hand because for example, we know that on October 8th, 2023, the National Students for Justice in Palestine was already had a toolkit day of rage or something like that. showing here's how you post. Here's the images. They had images of paragliders like less than an hour, less than a day after they started attacking. Here are the hashtags, including the hashtag Al-Aqsa flood, which was the Hamas name for the massacre. So, so there was certain push. Now you can go back and say, okay, so where did national students justice for Palestine came from? Khatim Bazian was a professor student back then was a graduate student at Berkeley. Then that started just a few months after the Hamas. secret meeting. was also fundraising or speaking at fundraisers for terrorist factions in the West Bank and ⁓ in Gaza. So you start seeing certain figures and certain organizations. ⁓ CARE, C-A-R-R, were an unindicted ⁓ conspirator in the Holy Land ⁓ trial. you see that there are certain actors and individuals that are pushing and pushing and pushing this. certain hatred. But to be able to you know, they press the button and everything happened. That's more complicated. More complicated. I do hope that at some point, enough people in the US will wake up. There will be Senate hearings, you know, against specifically Students for Justice in Palestine, American Muslims for Palestine, CARE within our lifetime, all these organizations. looking for text messages, emails, because there is a coordination. We just don't know what is the level of coordination. And more dangerously, we don't know how much of that coordination comes from outside the United States.

speaker-1: And the reach is, you know, especially on campus seems pretty wild. What does Qad has? Is it Qad or Quad?

speaker-0: I don't care, honestly. It's Columbia University Apartheid and Divest, is, know, apartheid is a lie and divest is a foil. ⁓

speaker-1: They have 120 student groups as members. It's wild.

speaker-0: It is wild. ⁓ What's wild to me is not so much that so many student groups signed on at the beginning at the height when it was trendy. And maybe I'm willing to accept that some of them didn't understand what they were signing on to. What's wild to me is that it's been more than two years later. And to my knowledge, none have publicly disavowed the organization. I am all for, especially in college environment. letting people get it wrong and get it wrong. You can get it wrong twice, but when you get it wrong three times, that's you're no longer a 12 year old child. You're an adult. You don't get a third chance. And unfortunately, none have disavowed it. So it really shows not so much the depth of the Jew hatred on campus as the acceptance or the indifference to Jew hatred on campus.

speaker-1: Let's talk about JVP, Jewish Voice for Peace. It gives the anti-Zionist campus movement Jewish moral cover. How does that work? How do they work? As you were saying, they were putting out statements on October 8th. It just seems... You know, I don't even know what to say about it.

speaker-0: So first of all, think it's important to look at statistics and numbers. In a recent study that everyone was up in arms about, ⁓ about 30 something percent of American Jews identify as Zionists. And a lot of people said, look, see Zionism is a minimum, blah, blah. People don't like Zionism, et cetera. But the truth is that if you look at the second question, which is, you believe Israel should exist as a Jewish democratic state? Almost 90 % of American Jews said yes. So they are Zionists, they're afraid to identify Zionists. So now let's look at the 10 % that didn't say yes. About 3 to 4 % say, we don't know. And I respect that because it's so complicated and you're scared and all these things happening. And about 7 % said, no, we do not believe that the state of Israel should exist as a Jewish and democratic homeland. So, and those 7 % are the anti-Zionists. So 7 % of American Jews are anti-Zionists. Now, if American Jews are half of the world's Jewry, and since this is a phenomenon that's very specific to North America, like if you go to Brazil, if you go to Argentina, if you go to France and you meet Jews, they'll tell you, yeah, we have the one anti-Zionist Jew. Well, you have to cut it in half and say like about 3.5, maybe 5 % of world Jewry is anti-Zionist. That's it. Which means that about 95 % believe that Israel has a right to exist. So that's a positive thing. Now, we have to ask ourselves, if there are only 5 % of the world of the Jewish diaspora, why are they getting 50 % of the airtime? And that was the goal of JVP from the very first beginning. Right? Now, JVP attracts people that knowingly or unknowingly allow themselves to be tokenized in order to push this agenda. This anti-Jewish, anti-Israeli and anti-American agenda. Some of them do so because they believe that, again, they've been so brainwashed indoctrinated that it's the right thing to do. Some of them honestly do it because they're afraid. And they don't even realize it. They know that if you come on campus now and you say, I'm a Zionist, I believe in Israel's right to exist, it will be a really uphill battle for you socially, ⁓ educationally, if you want to study Middle Eastern studies or political science or in the humanities. And sometimes even financially, Because people are going to... boycott you, they're going to do everything they can to make your life difficult. But if you come in as a Jew who doesn't know what to do with her life and all of a people tell you, wear this kaffir, say these words, now you immediately have 800 new friends and not only that, now we're going to give you a platform, then that's an incredible thing for you. So a lot of these anti-Zionist Jews, for them it's a social decision, it's not a moral decision. It's not a factual decision, it's a social decision. Now I tell people, I ask people, know, why is there no Christian voice for peace or Muslim voice for peace? Are Jews really more caring about peace? No, of course not. We're all the same. But where are the Christian voice for peace? important, very in students for justice in Palestine. Where the Muslim voice for peace? They are in students for justice in Palestine. What is the one group that is forced to have its own entity, that's the Jews. So they don't even realize that the anti-Semitism of their own movement is putting them aside, just like in Soviet Russia, they had the Iveskhtia, which was a Jewish group in charge of fighting the Zionists in Soviet Russia. So that's a very long way of saying, JVP is a sham. ⁓ Now, if you look at who it attracts, one of my, I honestly have to say shocking, disheartening moments was I was tracking the people in their boards, the rabbis that they have. during Yom HaShoah Holocaust remembrance, I just wanted to see what do they say? Are we going to invert the Holocaust? Are we going to say that now it's Israel's fault, whatever it is. And I realize I was shocked to see that they don't even mention.

speaker-1: Yep, really. Okay.

speaker-0: And then I said, well, you know, I am not here to sell someone, whether they're Jewish or not as in the room, but as an organization, JVP is not very Jewish and obviously not for peace.

speaker-1: And you call your book American Intellectual Antisemitism. Is this an American phenomenon?

speaker-0: Um, so first I would say it's North American, mostly. Unfortunately, Canada has seen some of the worst, um, uh, instances of antisemitism in the past two and a half years. I think it's, it's not uniquely American in the sense of it only happens in the United States, but it is uniquely American in the sense of it. Only Americans know how to take ideas, brand them, market them, and then export them. the world so the world buys into them. And that's the American part of it. Well, it took the ideas like I said, the Michelle Foucault, the continental philosophy of Europe, ⁓ took the ideas of moral relativism, took the idea of orientalism, took the Soviets propaganda, took everything together, branded it, packaged it together, gave it a nice kaffir, gave it like, and then exported it to the world. It's not, by chance that everything exploded in the diaspora in the most elite American institutions, elite, I say with air quotes, Harvard, Columbia, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, you know, and when the world looks at those institutions, it doesn't say, ⁓ that's the American institutions. The world sees them as the beacons of lights for enlightenment, education, et cetera. So the American part is that, you know, it's like the anti-Semitism at the top of the hill that then goes to all the other countries. And unfortunately, then we see it spreading like wildfire.

speaker-1: In your book, you're looking at anti-Semitism going back before ⁓ the anti-Zionist sentiments. You know, one of the defenses is it's anti-Zionism, it's not anti-Semitism. But the history of Columbia, what does that show?

speaker-0: The history of Columbia is unfortunately peppered with antisemitism. Every few decades, Columbia likes playing around with antisemitism and seeing what happens. So in the early 1920s, when there were, quote unquote, too many Jews accepted at Columbia, they started saying, let's find ways to kick the Jews out. Now, of course, being nice American, people, they didn't say, let's not have Jews. But they came up with ways that they knew will minimize the number of Jews. They ⁓ started geographical diversity, which we now take for granted. Why did they start geographical diversity and that started at Columbia? Because they said, well, if we go to Connecticut and start getting students from there, we'll get fewer students from Brooklyn and the lower which was heavily Jewish. started rules of you start college when you're 18. It makes no sense. If you're 15 and brilliant, you should go to college. But why did they do that? Because Jewish students in Jewish high schoolers in the 1920s, partially because they're Jewish, partially because they're immigrants, would graduate early and top of their class. So how do we keep them away? They started diversity state, personal statements. They started asking for pictures. Think about it, you're being admitted to college, what does it matter what you look like? Well, if we're trying to figure out if you look Jewish, then they need an image of you. And so that was the 1920s. Fast forward about 50, and the Jewish rate on campus dropped substantially. Fast forward a decade and a half, 1930s, and you see Columbia, you see Harvard, you see all these other universities very, very closely aligned with universities in Germany. which were already taken over by the Nazi regime. They'd had student exchanges. They'd say dignitaries from Nazi universities to Colombia and back from Colombia to, let's say, Heidelberg's ⁓ 500th anniversary. They had ⁓ the ambassador of the Nazi ⁓ Germany invited on campus in 1935. And you see that like all the way until November 1938, which is the Kristallnacht. So up until like they say, you know, we're okay with anti-Semitism until you start mass killing Jews. Then maybe Columbia said we're not that okay. Fast forward a decade later, you have the president of Barnard, ⁓ Virginia Gilsbury, who was against the partition plan, the UN partition plan to separate. the land of British mandate Palestine to a Jewish entity and a Palestinian or back when it was an Arab entity. Not only was she against it before it got ratified by the UN, she was against it after it was ratified and she was a small group of people trying to negate the existence of the state of Israel lamenting international Zionism. Fast forward to 1980s. We've already talked about Edward Said, but then You have ⁓ Black Power, Black Panther activists coming on campus talking about ⁓ Columbia University ⁓ or ⁓ international Zionism again. Fast forward to the 2000s, you have ⁓ President Lee Bollinger saying, you know, it's okay to have Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran, come and speak on campus. ⁓ While the dean that invited Ahmadinejad ⁓ said that if Hitler was alive, he would have invited Hitler as well. you get that every 15 to 20 years, you get Colombia playing around with antisemitism. And of course you have the more minor level of antisemitism that students have been so, and myself as well, guess, at some point, so accustomed to that it doesn't even ring a bell or an alarm. So this year, For the fourth or fifth year in a row, the graduation ceremony for Columbia Business School happens on Shabbat. Now, there are so many Jewish students on campus and especially at the Columbia Business School. How uncaring can you be? Now, what's their response? Well, we don't want to do it on a Sunday. And my question is why? I have both days off.

speaker-1: Yeah. Right.

speaker-0: So you see that it really is a complicated history and a complicated present and unfortunately if we don't do something, a complicated future.

speaker-1: You've transformed these attacks against you and like a really terrible situation into maybe, and this is borrowing from something I heard you say in a different podcast, into something meaningful. Is that a silver lining in all this?

speaker-0: Um, is that a silver lining? Look, if I could go back and change one thing, it would be the October 7 massacre. Right? I would give up all of this, all of everything, all the personal growth that I've had in the past two and a half years. If that never happened. Um, so But given that that's the reality, guess it is a silver lining. It's something that actually was inspired by something that happened to me before October 7. So when I was in July 2023, I was in Israel, I was protesting ⁓ with, you know, almost 40 % of the country against the judicial reform, which, you know, Some people saw it necessary. Some people saw as an overreach and we were just protesting and I got punched in the face by an undercover cop. And that really affected me emotionally. mean, I was okay, but it really affected me emotionally. My sense of justice, right? Because when you get my, like my best friend said, when you get punched by a cop, can't push, you can't punch back. And the next day, my dad, wanted to sue. And other people are like, let's make him like notorious. And I realized that I seek no revenge. I have no specific anger on that specific cop. But when someone punches you in the face, it's like giving you a mic. Now the attention is on me. And what I use that mic for is my decision and can be for good. for bad or for indifference. On October 12th, 2023, when I was on campus and seeing the celebrations of the massacre on campus, I felt like I was being punched in the face over and over and over again. And I had that understanding again, ⁓ they're giving me a mic. Now, most professors on campus decided to hide and not use their mic. But I said, like, no, if I'm getting a mic, I'm going to use that mic. Not only am I going to use that mic, I'm going to use that mic now to amplify other people who may be, you know, who may have not gotten a mic. So I don't know if it's a silver lining or not, but I do think that, I mean, it's very trite, but we do choose how we respond. We don't choose what happens.

speaker-1: Shai, thank you so much for joining us today.

speaker-0: Thank you and thank you for all that you do in honest reporting.

speaker-1: If you liked what you heard here today, please give us a like and a follow. You can find tons more media analysis at honestreporting.com and follow us on Instagram, TikTok, and X at honestreporting. Thanks for listening.