By Steve Cherkassky
When laying the foundations for tackling an ancient hatred in the modern day, strength and consistent allyship go hand in hand. Columbia University Professor Shai Davidai made a stop at Congregation Beth El in Voorhees, New Jersey, on Nov. 26, to speak on the encroaching threat of antisemitism during these dark times since the tragedy of Oct. 7, 2023.
While the day lives in infamy within the Jewish community, American college campuses have done little to spurn the actions and violent messaging coming from some of their most radicalized students who advocate for the destruction of the state of Israel, and the Jewish people as a whole.
“The biggest issue that students have is not so much that we’re taking it personally or something like that, it’s that we are not taking it seriously enough,” Davidai told the Philadelphia Jewish Exponent, discussing the sometimes indifferent or often reasonably cautious ways that the hundreds of nonvocal Jewish and pro-Israel students at Columbia have not given much attention to the rise of pro-Hamas extremism on their campuses.
Davidai was quick to utter the foreboding statement, “I’m a bit concerned about students not realizing how big of a deal this is.” The mire of geopolitics has all but sullied the collegiate experience for many young Jews, who, understandably, find it easier to keep out of sight rather than join their activist colleagues, who are so few in number that it’s essentially a “drop in a bucket” as Davidai described.
After a gracious introduction from the Beth El Sisterhood Co-President Mira Aumiller, Davidai took the stage and uttered a humble remark of self-deprecation when Aumiller praised him as a hero. He spoke with a captivated audience, some of them professors themselves who later shared their horror stories. Others were parents and grandparents of Jewish college students that have felt the sting of anti-Jewish prejudice when all they wanted was to focus on their studies and contribute to a society that seems to be rejecting them outright.
Davidai, ensuring he wouldn’t sugarcoat anything and insult the intelligence of his audience, asked where their “Red Line” was when it came to tackling antisemitism at every turn instead of keeping one’s head down. The atmosphere after Oct. 7 was a horrific turning point for many. Relationships spanning years, sometimes decades, evaporated into thin air as misinformation on the internet continued to slowly and surreptitiously radicalize otherwise average human beings — the Banality of Evil, as Hannah Arendt called it.
Unfortunately, it is downright impossible to go back to a pre-Oct. 7 world. The goal, stressed Davidai, is a new normal that works for everyone. “If we go back to then, the only difference is that we try to put the genie back in the bottle, but the genie is still there, and we know that the genie will come out.”
It’s easy to feel alone as a Jew during times like these. During the Q&A portion, one student from Drexel described how his life has been so utterly affected by the growing hostility of his campus’ environment.
During his speech, Davidai maintained that universities do not exist in a vacuum. While it’s easy to view the campus protests from a lens of “out there,” the truth is that “universities are really the ground zero where everything starts,” said Davidai. One historical proof of that are the book burnings during the early 1930s in Post-WWI Germany. The Nazi-aligned German Student Union orchestrated campus protests that saw the works of Jewish authors, among many other so-called “undesirables” in the eyes of the growing fascist regime, thrown into bonfires en masse. The grave similarities to the current situation cannot be overstated, as every pro-Hamas student that graduates, after having been trained by these universities, will eventually blend into the local populace as doctors, teachers, therapists, etc.
Rabbi Nogah Marshall, educational director of Congregation Beth El, discussed her desire to instill Jewish pride in her children. “I know that I want to teach my young girls to be proud to be Jewish and not to be scared and stand up for what they believe in and to be proud of who they are, and Shai is an example of someone who’s doing that peacefully.”
“The opportunity to bring Shai here tonight, knowing that he’s got a big social media following, that he’s so outspoken, that, as he said tonight, that he fights for something not against something. [That] was probably the strongest statement he could’ve made and the strongest reason why we should be bringing people here together like this, like we do already, like we should be doing more often, on a regular basis, so people learn what it means to fight for, not against,” said Josh Laster, the executive director of Congregation Beth El, when asked what this event meant to the Jewish community of Voorhees and beyond.
While speaking positively of large pro-Jewish organizations and their philanthropic efforts post-Oct. 7, Davidai made a sobering point that Jews have long been outsourcing their fight as opposed to forming grassroots movements that are built for mobilization against an ideological and existential threat, whether in the street or online. “We always have an obligation to be fighting for whoever comes next,” said Davidai.
Steve Cherkassky is a freelance writer.
