Someone Taught Him To Hate

(Times of Israel) Shai Davidai - I was walking to synagogue with my wife and our two children when a car slowed beside us. A man in the back seat shouted, "Are you that guy from Twitter?" I nodded. Then he screamed, "F--- Israel, baby killer, fascist, Nazi, scum." How did this man become so consumed by hatred that he could not hold it in any longer? How did we get to a point where screaming obscenities at strangers and their children has become acceptable behavior? Hatred, at its core, begins with ignorance. It begins with lies, repeated often enough to sound true. It begins with a preference for certainty over curiosity. Eventually, ignorance hardens into conviction. Conviction hardens into contempt. And contempt hardens into hatred. The man in the car did not invent the idea that Israel, as the homeland of the Jewish people, is uniquely evil. Nor did he invent the idea that violence against Jews and Israelis is morally justified or that Jews are responsible for everything wrong in the world. Someone taught him these things, normalized them, and made them seem righteous. Someone taught him how to hate. When my ten-year-old son asked me how some people can be so bad, I answered, "I do not think the man in the car was a bad person. I'm sure he loves his family, is kind to his friends, and believes in many of the things that we do." What made him the way he is was the ideas he had been taught to believe. If hatred can be taught, it can also be untaught. Education remains our most powerful defense against hatred - not teaching students what to think, but teaching them how to do so. We must demand that our institutions of higher education return to their most basic purpose and become places where curiosity, dialogue, and empirical evidence matter more than ideological conformity, dogma, and emotional reactions. They must become places where students learn to question assumptions, weigh evidence, and grapple with complexity - places where disagreement is treated as an opportunity for learning, and intellectual courage matters more than ideological certainty. We need institutions that cultivate curiosity rather than certainty, inquiry rather than indoctrination, and education rather than ignorance. The writer is an Israeli former assistant professor of business at Columbia Business School known for his advocacy for Israel and against pro-Palestinian campus protests. He is the author of American Intellectual Antisemitism: The Anti-Jewish Movement Tearing Through Our Universities (Oct. 2026).