Shai Davidai on the October 7 Anniversary
[0:00]Welcome to Totally Booked! I'm Zibi Owens. I've interviewed more than 2,000
[0:06]authors on this show and learned endless amounts about storytelling,
[0:10]reinvention, and life itself because when you talk about books, you're really
[0:14]talking about life. So get ready to hear from today's best authors,
[0:18]the best-selling, and the not yet discovered. Come find your next great
[0:22]read and that the story behind it. Enjoy!
[0:27]Shai Davide is the author of American Intellectual Anti-Semitism, the anti-Jewish
[0:32]movement tearing through our universities. Considered one of the most outspoken
[0:36]academics against anti-Semitism on college campuses since October 7th, 2023,
[0:42]Shai Davide's activism has drawn more than a quarter million followers online,
[0:46]named one of the Jerusalem Post's 50 most influential Jews of 2024,
[0:50]poets and quans best 40 under 40 MBA professors of 2023,
[0:56]and the Association of Psychological Sciences 2020 Rising Star.
[1:00]Shai Davide has testified before Congress organized rallies appeared on
[1:04]prime-time television and leading podcasts and spoken 2,000
[1:08]of people across dozens of Jewish communities in North America.
[1:12]His podcast, here I am with Shai Davide, reaches thousands each week,
[1:16]and his work has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post,
[1:18]the New Yorker, the Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal, and many others.
[1:22]He holds a PhD in social psychology from Cornell University and has taught
[1:26]at Princeton, the New School, and Columbia Business School. He lives in
[1:30]New York City with his wife, author and translator,
[1:32]Yarr Dan Greenspan, and their two magnificent children.
[1:35]Welcome, Shai. Thank you so much for coming on totally bucked.
[1:38]I'm so excited to talk to you about all of your experience, pre and post
[1:42]October 7th, everything you put in your amazing, well-written, passionate,
[1:46]and also introspective, and just great book,
[1:52]for lack of a better word about everything that's been going on in the world.
[1:56]So welcome and congratulations.
[1:58]Thank you. Thank you so much.
[2:00]It's a real milestone to be speaking with you. Thank you.
[2:03]Oh, so nice. Why don't you explain?
[2:06]Give a little backdrop for people who might not know you the way I do,
[2:10]having followed you and having used you as sort of an inspiration
[2:15]for being able to feel comfortable speaking out.
[2:18]And I have to say, and maybe you could give you how you even ended up at Columbia.
[2:22]And I know a lot of this is in the book.
[2:24]But I just want to start with your very famous, at least to me,
[2:29]quote, that I think about all the time.
[2:32]Maybe you could just say it and why you said it at the time about speaking up not
[2:36]because, you know, I don't speak out because I'm not afraid to speak out.
[2:40]I speak out because I am afraid.
[2:42]Yeah. So if you have met me on October 6, 2023,
[2:46]you'd have seen a just a nerdy Columbia business school professor.
[2:51]I had scored my dream job a few years earlier.
[2:55]Let me interrupt. I do not think you present as nerdy.
[2:58]Not that there's anything wrong with that, but okay.
[3:00]Well, maybe maybe I don't know.
[3:02]That's that's that's my personal reviews of myself, of course,
[3:06]I understand that, you know,
[3:08]external loads of, you know, with tattoos and everything.
[3:12]But really like October 6, 2023,
[3:15]I was just, you know, a professor who loved spending my time reading research articles
[3:21]in books, doing research, you know, writing papers, teaching in classroom,
[3:26]just being a professor on my, on my way to becoming a tenure professor hopefully.
[3:31]And then obviously, October 7 massacre happened.
[3:35]And it threw a lot of us into a loop.
[3:38]And for me, you know, in addition to everything that I was experiencing and seeing from back home in Israel,
[3:46]and I should say, born and raised in Israel,
[3:49]moved here for graduate school when I was 27.
[3:52]All of a sudden, I stopped it in addition to that.
[3:55]Columbia University, the, my home away from home was engulfed in, in celebration of the massacre.
[4:04]And I felt like I had to do something.
[4:08]I didn't know what I didn't have the tools.
[4:11]I, I'm not, I wasn't an activist or an advocate or someone with platform.
[4:17]But I was someone with a lot of pain and a lot of frustration and a lot of fear.
[4:22]So I attended a vigil that some of my students organized on campus on October 18th.
[4:28]And I spoke up, I spoke up for about 10 minutes.
[4:31]And I basically said, you know, we have a problem.
[4:35]We have a problem here on campus where people are rationalizing,
[4:41]relishing and, and reviewing and attack on human life.
[4:46]Now, I refuse to make it about being Jewish or not Jewish or Israeli or not Israeli.
[4:51]This was just a problem about supporting terrorism on campus,
[4:55]especially, you know, in Columbia University.
[4:58]It was just a few miles away.
[5:00]from ground zero. And I was shocked by it. And I was equally shocked by the
[5:05]administration's inability to do anything about it. It seemed like the
[5:11]Columbia's administration was either unwilling or unable to do anything about it.
[5:16]So I just spoke up. It wasn't a prepared remarks. It was just like
[5:21]pain coming out of my heart and edited through my brain. And at some point, like you
[5:26]said, I don't even know how or why I said this, but people, you know, I said
[5:33]it. People have been asking me if I'm not afraid to speak up. And my answer is
[5:38]not that I'm afraid to speak up. I'm speaking up because I'm afraid. Because I'm
[5:43]afraid as a Jewish father, because I'm afraid as an Israeli father. And because I'm
[5:49]afraid as a resident of New York, the United States of America. And I'm afraid
[5:54]for what this tells us about who we are and where we're heading. That video ended up
[6:01]going viral beyond anyone's dreams or expectations or anything. You know, it was seen by
[6:08]millions of people. It really threw me into the spotlight of everything that was going on.
[6:14]Journalists started contacting me. I had alumni reaching out to me. I ended up being under
[6:21]investigation by Colombia for speaking up and ended up going testifying in front of Congress
[6:27]and really changed my life. So now I say, I'm no longer a nerdy professor, now a nerdy educator
[6:34]and advocate in activists. Well, take me back to October 7th here. And I know you write about it and
[6:41]everything. And the unique feeling of being Israeli, but here, away from home or something at home
[6:49]is happening that's like unspeakably terrible. The feeling of sort of powerlessness
[6:54]being so far away, but also being part of this American machinery of universities and everything else.
[7:01]And how you decided that you had, even a lot of people felt pain like you, but did not opt
[7:09]for external mobilization. So what happened in those early days to get you to October 18th when
[7:18]you spoke up really? So I got my, the reason I came to the US to get a PhD in social psychology
[7:30]at Cornell, I went to Princeton, taught at the new school before Colombia. And one of the main lessons
[7:36]of social psychology is that in times of turmoil and trauma, we experience helplessness. And that
[7:45]helplessness increases the trauma, increases the pain. And the way to deal with that is to regain
[7:51]agency. And the shot in trauma and turmoil of October 7th just through me, my wife, everyone
[8:01]there, we know into this abyss of like we need to regain some sort of agency. So my friends back
[8:08]home in Israel, they immediately jumped into any volunteer or donation opportunity that they could
[8:16]a lot of Jewish Americans, even if they didn't speak up like me, we're reaching out, how can I help?
[8:21]What, where can I send money or support, whatever can I can do? And including our allies,
[8:26]I'm just Jews. For us, it's started on October 8th when my wife, you're in Greenspan. She was reached
[8:35]out by two people when she translates to artists, meets on mints and dead a band-aid. And they
[8:41]had an idea of we need to shine a light on the hustle crisis. Now we kind of, maybe some people
[8:48]have forgotten, but on October 7th, 2003, Hamas terrorists abducted from their homes and from the
[8:56]the music festival, more than 250 hostages at the bodies of hostages, including Jews, Muslims,
[9:05]Christians, Buddhists, everyone. And so the, the first thing that we did was on October 8th,
[9:10]we were sitting on, you know, that room because we had the kid in each bed sleeping. And just
[9:17]on the phone, speakerphone like, how can we do anything? So they created this poster that people
[9:23]have seen all around the world and kidnapped was the picture. And we were there to help with
[9:28]what the test. So that's the first thing that we did. We helped them put that into action. We
[9:36]printed, you know, hundreds of posters. I was in charge of the upper west side of my wife was in
[9:40]charge of the upper east side. And we just regained our agency by doing something. Then the next few
[9:47]days, we spent our time volunteering by calling and talking with people in Israel, especially
[9:56]reserve the soldiers that were mobilized.
[10:00]to see if they need any protective gear, right?
[10:03]We didn't deal with any offensive gear,
[10:06]but you know, helmets, ceramic vest, shoes,
[10:09]things that people needed to just stay safe.
[10:12]And we were part of a machine
[10:15]but basically contact them.
[10:16]What do you need?
[10:18]How much, how many work can we help?
[10:20]Put that into an Excel sheet.
[10:22]And just, again, try to help as much as we can.
[10:25]And then October 12th came, October 12th
[10:29]was just five days after the massacre.
[10:31]There was still fighting inside a visual
[10:34]and there was a protest at Columbia's campus.
[10:38]And at first, I was very naive.
[10:40]I didn't understand why was very neat for a protest.
[10:43]At first, I thought it was us doing a problem.
[10:46]Like Jews and Israelis are allies
[10:48]because why would anyone protest?
[10:51]And then when it's, I realized,
[10:53]no, this is a protest against us
[10:55]and it's supportive of Hamas.
[10:58]I felt like this is my chance to help
[11:02]here in New York City.
[11:04]So I rushed to campus and I just stood there.
[11:08]I stood there thinking, again, naively,
[11:12]that I would be very just to protect the Jewish students.
[11:17]Just be as a first line of defense.
[11:20]And throughout these past three years,
[11:22]it was this regaining of agency to deal with the awfulness
[11:27]of the world with life has become part of my activism.
[11:32]Anyway, the book that I just read was a never way
[11:36]of gaining that agency and saying, hey,
[11:39]first or problem, what else can I do about this problem?
[11:43]Amazing.
[11:43]In the book, you have a different lens on the whole situation.
[11:47]And you really take us through American intellectualism
[11:50]and how this fits in with everything
[11:53]and how do we collectively understand this?
[11:56]And especially from a position in academia,
[11:58]can you just explain through the thesis behind it?
[12:01]Well, the main thesis is,
[12:04]I think people need to understand two states.
[12:07]One is what happened on October 8th,
[12:10]and I specifically call it say October 8th
[12:12]because in October 7th, Israel was attacked
[12:16]in October 8th, the Jewish Day Asparagus attack.
[12:19]So the first thing in the thesis is
[12:21]what happened on October 8th did not start on October 8th.
[12:25]This was a process decades in the making
[12:28]and intellectual process and operational process,
[12:32]a networking process, anything but spontaneous
[12:36]or grassroots.
[12:37]And the second thing I, the second point of the main thesis
[12:41]is that before we got to hatred taking over the streets,
[12:47]it took over the syllabus.
[12:50]And for this hateful ideology, this big ideology,
[12:54]which I call American intellectual antisemitism,
[12:57]the ground zero was American academia.
[13:00]It started off in courses in theoretic papers
[13:05]in the humanities that split the world into a press
[13:09]and a press which assigns roles without to Jews
[13:14]and non-Jews without even looking at context
[13:17]and history and understanding of nuances.
[13:20]And then goes to students who, when they graduate,
[13:25]become part of news desks in mainstream media,
[13:28]become part of the political establishment,
[13:31]become part of the political establishments and lawyers
[13:35]and in paralegals and social work and all that stuff,
[13:38]but really it starts in academia and spreads outward.
[13:43]And the reason I'd walk people to understand these two
[13:45]seconds, the one, this didn't start on October 8th
[13:50]and two, that this hatred captured the syllabus
[13:54]before it captured the streets,
[13:56]is not just to be an alarmist,
[13:59]but actually to raise an alarm and say,
[14:01]hey, here's the problem, it's there.
[14:05]It hasn't disappeared just because it's a personal
[14:08]or protest, but the good news is we can fight it out.
[14:12]There'll be understand where it is happening,
[14:15]why it's happening, who are the main perpetrators?
[14:18]And then, as I finished the book in last chapter,
[14:21]what we can do about it.
[14:22]Do you think it's possible to reverse all of this,
[14:27]the slow spread of this ideology that's pervaded
[14:32]the syllabus syllabi and classrooms
[14:35]and is the cat to add the bag at this point?
[14:39]Or is there hope for retraction?
[14:42]So first of all, I would never do what I do,
[14:46]in order to write this book, if I didn't think or so.
[14:50]Right, I am motivated by my deep desire
[14:55]and need entity so we can fight this and fight this effectively.
[15:00]Now I don't say that this can be put back in the bag and actually that's not my goal.
[15:05]I think that for many, many years this was in the bag. The cap was in the bag and the cap was
[15:11]getting angry and the cap was getting agitated and we didn't even know where was the cap there and
[15:16]then on October 8th, 2023 the cap burst out, claws and nails out. I think that once we know
[15:25]what's happening we now need to one fight where this hatred is being disseminated and I should
[15:34]say most people don't start with hatred. Most people don't wake up, almost all people who don't
[15:39]wake up with like just thinking I am going to hate someone today. It starts with ignorance.
[15:45]It starts with lack of knowledge which then is through indoctrination, become hatred. But I do think
[15:53]when we need to stop the dissemination and that's where I point on in the book on different
[15:59]chapters, the faculty, the administrative, administration, social media, traditional media,
[16:05]all the different points in the dissemination. But equally important, maybe some would say
[16:11]more important, are need to fight that by providing better ideas and spreading better ideas to
[16:20]more people and doing it in a more effective way. Because in the end of the day people want to
[16:30]understand the world. The world is messy. The world like what even does you just look at the
[16:35]Middle East and if we even focus in and zoom in and just look at Israel's southern border with
[16:40]Gaza or eastern border with the West and Bank, it's the world is complicated. And students
[16:49]well-being non-Jewish white kids from the Midwest Upper Middle-class families, they want to
[16:54]understand what's going on, they want to do good. When they get to campus they were told here's
[17:01]the reason why it's happening. It's happening because Israel is uniquely bad and here's what
[17:07]you can do about it, which is go and scream about it and alienate Israel, Israelis and Jews.
[17:15]What we should be doing is not just removing that indoctrination, but giving them a positive view
[17:22]of what's happening. Not one that lies, not one that glossers over, but one that says, you know,
[17:28]the world is messy. There are good people can do bad things, bad people can do good things.
[17:35]Let's understand how we got to this point and more important instead of adjudicating the past,
[17:41]how do we work for a better future? What do you say to yourself on the days where it feels like
[17:47]despite all of your advocacy, everyone's advocacy, bad things continue to happen? How do you pick
[17:53]yourself up emotionally on those days? I am a strong believer in community and in personal
[18:02]relationship and in familiar relationships. For me, a lot of the picking up is not by my boots
[18:09]jobs, but my wife, my children, my siblings, my parents, my clothes friends. I am very honest
[18:18]with the difficulties I've had because from that very extent, speaking up because I'm afraid,
[18:24]I don't have the answers. I have some of the answers. I have probably more answers than
[18:29]most people because I've been spending a lot of time on this, but I'm not uniquely important
[18:35]or heroic or any of those things. I'm just, if you're an adult who's concerned and it's trying
[18:43]to do whatever I can to make the world slightly better for his kids. That means that I do have
[18:50]moments where I break down. I do have moments where I am in pain and I'm open about it. I
[18:57]tell people about it. But I also, you know, I have incorporated a few ways of thinking about
[19:04]our issues and our problems. And one is I try to take a long view of history.
[19:11]Both Jews and Andrews have gone through extremely horrible things throughout our history
[19:17]and we've participated. I also try to look at the present and the things that give me hope in the
[19:24]present and especially young Jewish people and allies that are standing up with us. And you see
[19:33]that they really take pride in who they are. They're not defined by the negativity that's from the
[19:38]allies. They want to understand it, but they want to spread light. And then obviously I try to pick
[19:46]myself up. I'm thinking about the future. And nothing gives me more hope than Jewish babies.
[19:55]I just, my cousin just had a baby. My wife's cousin's
[20:00]just have a baby and babies, Jewish and non-Jewish babies are just, they're hopeful. They have
[20:06]not yet been infected by this mind marks. You know, they are still a quote unquote tab la rasa and
[20:17]by fighting the miseducation of the current generation, I am in a way hopeful because that next
[20:24]generation will not be misallocated. I love that. My gosh. I worked in high school on the new baby
[20:30]unit at Mount Sinai Hospital, like with all the babies every day. Now I'm like, that should be your
[20:36]internship because there is nothing but good feelings being surrounded by all of them. My gosh.
[20:41]What do you think you have gained and what do you think you've lost by becoming a public figure?
[20:47]I know that you didn't intend for it to go viral. You were suddenly thrust into the light and
[20:53]I know you continue to use your platform to speak up all the time, but it has shifted
[20:58]who you are in the world. How do you feel about that? I learned that I am more introverted than I
[21:03]say thought I was. I learned that I am more of a private person than I thought I was. I spent the
[21:09]first eight to 10 weeks after to be going viral and everything. I spent them trying to separate
[21:18]my public image from the message. I even spoke with a few high, high octane publicists asking
[21:26]me, like, how do I do this? Because I care about the message, the point I'm trying to get across,
[21:31]but I don't want to be the face of this. And unfortunately, all of them told me like
[21:38]it needs a face. The message needs a face and you are the face, whether you like it or not.
[21:43]In the beginning, I stayed away with low videos. That was not on TV. I was really just like
[21:49]verbal, just like words, words, words, not shine. And I try to still do that. And reason why
[21:55]the book, like it's so like the book, I don't know if it's not visual, but the podcast, but it's
[22:01]really just like, here's the book. The first, this isn't about shine. This is about the problem.
[22:06]Becoming a public figure comes with a lot of negative things. I have been screened at a
[22:13]constant, cursed on the streets and then did front of my children. People, you know, on the way
[22:19]to synagogue, if the car went starting, hey, are you that guy from Twitter and said, yeah,
[22:24]you know, kind of like, shine. And they started screaming at me, baby killer, you know, all those stuff.
[22:30]At the same time, and I should say they amount of love and support that I
[22:36]have received out numbers that hatred by a hundred to one. And so, you know, I feel conflicted.
[22:44]I feel conflicted about being a private, a public figure because on the one hand, it gives me
[22:50]the platform to do what I think is extremely important to do and raise awareness and solve a problem.
[22:56]On the other hand, verse that individual shine, who just wants to be anonymous with his
[23:02]wife and children and live my life. Unfortunately, this isn't a life that I was planning,
[23:09]but it's the life that I would be living and doing the best that I can't, doing us.
[23:14]That's amazing. What do you say to your kids? Like, how do you inspire them as we're recording this?
[23:20]It's, you know, Russia's China is starting tonight and this will come out shortly after,
[23:25]but like when you approach the new year and the holidays this year and just Jewish faith and
[23:32]heritage and everything in the face of moments like that where people are screaming on the street.
[23:36]Like, how do you take all of that hope and culture and tradition and instill it in the best way
[23:45]possible for your family and maybe for other families? So I would say, and this is the first
[23:50]version of the book was actually a letter to my son. That was like the first ever, you know,
[23:56]that I wrote and, you know, as books go, they evolved and it became something else, but really
[24:03]now it's a letter to the world, right? But for me, this is something that I learned from my graduate
[24:08]school advisor, Tom Gillard, this is Cornell University. And he would say, you can say whatever you
[24:14]want to your children, but they'll end up doing what you do. But how do you say? Right? So I try to
[24:20]embody what I want my children to be when they grow up right now in my own life. That means both
[24:28]being openly and publicly Jewish, Israeli Zionists and at the same time also being showing them
[24:35]what critical thinking looks like, what being a moderate looks like, what speaking with empathy,
[24:41]but then deciding what reason looks like. So for example, I gave you a totally new story of being
[24:47]screamed at in front of my kids on the way to synagogue. So at first, I responded to calmly,
[24:53]you know, I tried to engage with the person I asked them to stop cursing from children around,
[24:58]obviously they wouldn't.
[25:00]But then after they left my son asked me, he's 10, he asked me, he said,
[25:05]why are there such bad people in the world? And I immediately told them,
[25:10]I don't think that person's bad. I ensure that that person has, you know,
[25:15]people, maybe children, maybe siblings, maybe parents that he loves to be great.
[25:19]I ensure that him, you know, he does a good job in whatever job he does. I'm sure
[25:25]in most things, he is a good person. He has become hateful because of this ideology
[25:33]American intellectual anti-Semitism. I talk with my kids about it and explain to them.
[25:38]And we need to remember that. So I told my son all that. We went to synagogue.
[25:44]And then the moment we stepped out of synagogue, this is something that maybe your non-Jewish
[25:49]listeners are not really aware of. But the moment we stepped out of synagogue, this first
[25:53]thing we saw was an NYPD squad car. So I pointed to that squad car and I said, remember
[26:00]that guy been screaming that being, you know, he was not a bad person. At the same time,
[26:05]why are you going to remember? For the rest of your life, so long as we need police protection
[26:10]outside of the synagogues, that means that things are not okay. So I tried to just embody
[26:18]who I am to my kids. I don't know if it works. That's what every parent does, but you know,
[26:23]we try different strategies. And then 20 years into the future, we were safe success or failure.
[26:29]And, you know, I work under the assumption that I will pay for therapists because they have to
[26:34]complain about something. And they complain about that being too embodying of something, you know? But
[26:41]honestly, it's about being the person you want your kids to be. I love that. Well,
[26:47]I'm so happy that you chose to use your pain in this way and that when you took agency over
[26:55]the situation and acted, this is what came out of it because so much good has come as a result of
[27:00]all of your work and activism and the speeches you give and the passion and the standing up to
[27:06]institutions and all of the things that you do. It's really amazing and inspiring for whatever
[27:13]people out there are fighting for and to have such grace and generosity and lack of anger
[27:20]yourself is leading by example for all of us in such a good way. So anyway, that sounded hokey,
[27:25]but I mean it. So congratulations. Thank you for this book. Thank you for sharing your time today
[27:30]and really truly wishing you all the best. Thank you. And Shana Tova, and I really wish and hope
[27:38]that we won't need books like this in the future. But for now, I just urge people to read it.
[27:45]You don't have to buy it. You can ask from the library. You can just, I want to read the book and
[27:49]understand the problem. And let's find so good to make this book no longer needed in a few years
[27:55]time. Amazing. Thank you. Thank you so much, Shana Tova. Shana Tova. Bye bye. Thank you,
[28:02]Shana. Thank you for listening to totally booked with Zibi, formerly mom's time to read books.
[28:08]If you loved the show, tell a friend, leave a review, follow me on Instagram at Zibi Owens,
[28:14]and spread the word. Thanks so much. Oh, and buy the books.