EDITORS' CORNER
The Los Angeles Review of Books has canceled a commissioned article that centered on an outspoken pro-Israel professor at Columbia University who helped highlight antisemitism on campus in the wake of the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks.
Shai Davidai, who left Columbia University in 2025 after making a name for himself strongly defending Israeli and Jewish students and staff at the Ivy League school amid aggressive pro-Palestinian protests, is making the rounds to promote his new book.
But LA Review senior editor Rob Latham “pulled the rug out from under freelancer Melissa Uchiyama after hiring her to interview Davidai ahead of his new book, ‘American Intellectual Antisemitism: The Anti-Jewish Movement Tearing Through Our Universities,'” according to the California Post, which obtained emails regarding the situation.
Latham “had a stunning change of heart after reading the 2,000-word piece, telling Uchiyama in an email that Davidai is ‘a toxic figure who pretends to want respectful exchange,'” the Post reported.
He went on to call Davidai a “controversial figure” whose views “need to be probed more rigorously” and wrote the piece “should never have green lit the piece at all,” according to the emails.
Uchiyama offered to rework the article to meet Latham’s approval, but he declined; this despite the fact that the LA Review “recently ran a fawning piece on controversial anti-Israel agitator Mahmoud Khalil,” the Post reported.
In a statement to the Post, Davidai said: “Ironically, part of the book concerns these exact distortions and erasures in the media.”
In 2024, Columbia suspended Davidai after he called a staffer “a useless administrator” during the Apartheid Divest’s walkout on campus Oct. 7.
“The only person that got suspended from campus is the Jewish professor speaking up against the protests,” Davidai said in response.
MORE: Columbia professor: University presidents ‘cowards’ for silence on ‘pro-terror’ protests
