The Los Angeles Review of Books spiked an interview it commissioned with Shai Davidai — the Israel-born professor who called out antisemitism on Columbia University’s campus — with an editor calling the outspoken academic “a toxic figure,” The Post has learned.
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,” emails showed.
He 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 prof is a “controversial figure” whose views “need to be probed more rigorously” than a standard interview allows, Latham wrote Uchiyama in emails seen by The Post.
Latham “should never have green lit the piece at all,” he added.
When Uchiyama offered to rework the article to salvage publication, the LA Review — which recently ran a fawning piece on controversial anti-Israel agitator Mahmoud Khalil – told her, no dice.
Latham wrote the dismayed scribe that her “best bet is to try and find a sympathetic venue” and offered her a $100 kill fee, which she declined.
“There was simply no way to have a quiet chat with him, and if you had challenged him forcefully, I expect it would’ve gotten ugly very fast,” Latham wrote.
Davidai said the spiking of the article looked like bitter proof of the kind of censorship he’s been fighting.
“Ironically, part of the book concerns these exact distortions and erasures in the media,” he told The Post.
“What’s most shocking is that they’re saying the quiet parts out loud,” he added, blasting “the double standard” at work.
“It was clear to me it wasn’t about her not asking the right questions, but about her asking the wrong person.”
It’s a fraught time for Jewish and pro-Israel authors dealing with “blacklists” and “boycotts,” and Davidai said that he was rejected by 36 out of 38 publishers before finding a home with Wicked Son, an imprint of Post Hill Press that is distributed by Simon & Schuster.
The new book, set for release Oct. 6, is a “blistering indictment of how radical politics, ideological indoctrination, and institutional indifference have transformed campuses into incubators of anti-Jewish, anti-Israeli, and anti-American hatred,” according to the publisher.
Uchiyama told The Post she was “very proud” of her “balanced” interview with Davidai.
“I knew my audience and their skepticism — it was not written for a Jewish outlet,” she said.
The spiked interview is the latest in a series of travails for Davidai, who made international headlines for standing up to anti-Israel protests at Columbia in the wake of Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 attacks.
The human behavior researcher went from celebrated staffer – who was regularly published in journals and mainstream outlets and collected awards like “best 40 under 40 MBA professors of 2023” – to being barred from the classroom and campus.
He finally left the poison Ivy last year after spurious charges against him were ultimately dropped. The New York-based academic went on to join the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy as a research fellow.
LARB and Latham did not immediately respond to The Post’s requests for comment.