By BERNIE BELLAN Shai Davidai has established a reputation as a university professor who isn’t afraid to challenge what he perceives as unmitigated antisemitism – whether it’s coming from students, fellow professors or university administrators. A Management professor at Columbia University in New York City, Davidai, now 41, was in Winnipeg recently to speak to a crowd of around 300 at the Shaarey Zedek Synagogue on October 22.

Last year, Davidai gained renown for a video that was posted to Youtube on October 19 in which he railed against the administrators of major US universities, including Columbia, Harvard, and Stanford, for allowing anti-Israel protests to be held unchecked.

It was still in the early stages of what would eventually become a trend sweeping campuses across both the US and Canada, during which students (often joined by non-students) held rallies denouncing Israeli “genocide” in Gaza, almost always employing the usual epithets in describing Israel as “settler-colonialist,” guilty of “apartheid” and “ethnic cleansing.” Those rallies would soon transform into encampments, striking fear into the hearts of many Jewish students.

During his speech to Jewish students gathered in the Columbia University courtyard on October 19, 2023, Davidai denounced the hypocrisy of university administrators, saying: “they won’t allow a pro-ISIS rally or a pro-KKK rally, yet, when it comes to Israeli and Jewish lives, they allow a pro-terrorist Hamas=ISIS rally… US prestige universities allow pro-terror rallies on their campuses; will not call Hamas a terror organization…American parents, your kids are no longer safe on ANY university campus. Jewish students on any US campus are not safe because the undercurrent on US campus is anti-Semitic and the presidents of US campuses give a hand to bigotry-Antisemitism and allow terrorist Hamas supporters to rally for violence and terror.”

From that point on, Davidai became a symbol of hope for Jews as a professor who refused to remain silent in the face of university administrators who remained passive while antisemitism was being allowed to run rampant on university campuses – or who even abetted antisemitic behaviour in some cases.

Most recently, although he has not been fired (and Davdai noted that he does not have tenure), Columbia University is refusing to allow him to appear on campus in person.

Davidai’s talk in Winnipeg was facilitated by several organizations, most prominently one called “Tafsik,” about which you can read here: Tafsik

The evening got off to a rocky start, however, when the person who served as moderator – but who never introduced herself to the crowd, asked her son to come up to the podium and recite the standard acknowledgment that the Shaarey Zedek is situated on the “ancestral lands of” various indigenous groups. Unfortunately, her son said, he didn’t know the words – and neither did his mother. Fortunately, Shaarey Zedek Executive Director Rena Secter-Elbaze stepped up to the podium and read the acknowledgment herself.

After Amir Epstein, the founder of Tafsik, gave some remarks in which he explained how he came to start that organization, he introduced Shai Davidai. Epstein said he had no problem if anyone wanted to record Davidai’s remarks, but the person who was apparently the moderator immediately contradicted Epstein, insisting that no recordings would be allowed.

(In fact, aware of the prohibition on recording the event that had been included in emails sent out to attendees beforehand, I had contacted Epstein in advance, asking him whether I could be granted an exception to the rule. He responded that he had no problem with me recording Davidai’s remarks and, based on that, I did record Davidai’s entire speech. What you are about to read is taken verbatim from a transcript of Davidai’s remarks.)

Early on in his remarks Davidai explained that, until recently, he had never heard of Winnipeg but, when his son was born, he and his wife became involved in a “mom and daddy group,” among whose members was a former Winnipegger by the name of Marley Book.

Davidai said he asked Marley where she was from, and she answered “Canada.”

“I said, oh, are you from Toronto? No? Are you from Montreal? She said ‘no.’ I said, oh, are you from Vancouver? So now I’m like, running out of cities. And then she said, I’m from Winnie Peg.

“And I’ve never heard of Winnie Peg. And I said, ‘I’ve never heard of Winnie Peg.’ And – she said, ‘I’m Jewish.’ And I was like, we are literally everywhere…and throughout the years, she’s described to me what it’s like being Jewish in Winnie Peg and, and in a small community. But I never really got it until I showed up here.There’s something unique about a community where it feels like everybody knows everybody.”

Davidai went on to describe the exact moment when he and his wife were first informed about what was happening in Israel on October 7. He said that the last video he had on his phone before his wife received a WhatsApp message from her sister in Israel shortly after the attack began was a video in which he was saying to his wife that “our lives are boring.”

“I wish I can go back to having a boring life,” Davidai told the audience. “I wish we could all go back to having a boring life. But one thing I don’t wish for is going back to the way things were for many, many, many months…And now I say, never, we’re never going back to the way things were, because the way things were were not good.”

“The only difference between what’s happening now in universities and city streets and in Parliament and in the media and everywhere, is that the hatred (that) was underground, is now above the surface.”

Davidai explained to the audience how he went from being a passive observer of events to an activist who has now become a lighting rod, both for critics and defenders of Israel. It was while watching an angry group of kaffiayh-wearing students at Columbia University on October 12, 2023 who were gathered opposite a group of 50 Jewish students who were holding a silent vigil for the hostages who had been taken to Gaza, he said, that a fellow Israeli academic, “leaned over and whispers in my ear and says, this is the anti semitism that our parents and grandparents warned us about, the moment he said that something changed inside my mind. And once it changed, I can never go back to seeing things the way they were.”

“Now, I had an explanation of what I was seeing. This was Jew hatred.”

Soon after, Davidai said, he posted what he was feeling to Instagram – where, until that point, he had only 900 followers. That soon changed, however, as he explained: “The next day, I wake up and I notice that all of a sudden I have more than 900 followers, and none of them are academics. And people are sharing what I wrote, and people are texting me, thank you for writing. And people are saying, if you want to know what it feels like to be a Jew in North America right now, read this.”

As the days passed, and as Davidai became increasingly prominent on social media – for his Instagram posts and Youtube video of October 19 (to which he later added more videos), as much as Davidai was being lauded for how brave he was to confront the kind of antisemitism that was becoming thoroughly pervasive on so many university campuses, he admits now that he was “afraid” then and he’s still afraid, saying: “You may not see it. It may not seem like I’m afraid. I am very afraid. When I confront protesters – waving Hamas flags…I saw today in the Canadian news, with a Taliban flag being waved…My knees tremble, but I’m not a Jew who will let his trembling knees control him. And I think that that is where we all need to be. We are refusing to simply hide and let them slaughter us.”

So, how do we fight back, Davidai asked? He gave three suggestions:

“We all have to understand, including myself, none of us are doing enough.”

Secondly – “no one is coming to save us.”

As for his third suggestion, Davidai said it was more complicated because we have “outsourced our ability to protect ourselves” to Jewish “organizations.”

And, while he had nothing bad to say about Jewish organizations, especially their ability to raise massive amounts of money at a time of immediate peril to Israel, he noted that “Jewish organizations are built to fundraise They are built to lobby. They are built to teach and educate, and are built to deal with the media. And they have been doing that work amazing in the past year, in a few weeks,” yet what they are not built to do, Davidai suggested, is to “mobilize people.”

It’s up to us, Davidai insisted, “to get out in the streets. It’s our job to save ourselves.”

If you are “waiting for someone else,” he said, “do you really believe that someone else exists?”

“It’s not enough to write a letter or an email. It’s not enough to cite a petition. Those are good things, but they are not moving the needle. What we need to do is show up. Show up publicly….You need to be focusing on one thing today. Did I throw a pebble into the water or not? And that’s it.”

There was much more to Davidai’s talk, including not being afraid to be “publicly Jewish” by wearing, for instance, a Star of David, a kippah, or a dog tag since, as he insisted, “because when they come for us and tell us to hide, the best response is never hiding, because hiding has never worked for us in our history.”

“But the other thing we want to do is being there,” he added. “And it’s scary. Protesting. Protesting does not come natural to most people.”

Davidai suggested though, something he called the “rule of minyan” (ten). As he explained, “When there’s one person shouting, that person gets targeted. When there are ten people shouting, those people get heard.”

At the end of his remarks Davidai posed a series of questions to the audience: “We have people that are walking around and openly supporting terrorist organizations. And the decision that’s facing each and every one of us is a simple decision: Do you stand with the people that believe in democracy, or do you stand with the people that believe in terrorism?

“Do you stand with the victim, or do you stand with the rapist?

“Do you stand with Western values, or do you stand with those that want to burn it all down?

“That’s not a complicated decision. How we solve this problem is complex.

“There is no one silver bullet. But where you stand on this issue is very, very simple.

“That is the message that I want to send, not to all of you here because you get it.

“But that’s the message that I want to send to every non Jewish comedian, every non Jewish American and every non Jewish person around the world, show up one time to our rallies, show up one time to their protests.

“And you tell me, where, which world do you want your kids to grow up in?”