Cary Nelson is a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, co-chair of the Third Narrative’s Academic Advisory Council, and the co-editor of The Case Against Academic Boycotts of Israel, scheduled for distribution by Wayne State University Press in October. He was president of the American Association of University Professors from 2006-2012.
Professor Russell Berman is a faculty member of Humanities at Stanford University. In 1982-83 he was a Mellon Faculty Fellow in the Humanities at Harvard, and in 1988-89 he held an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship in Berlin. In 1997 he was awarded the Bundesverdienstkreuz of the Federal Republic of Germany. Professor Berman is the editor of the journal Telos.
Our Voice of the Fortnight is from the Times of Israel's 'Wartime Diaries' podcast. In the immediate aftermath of October 7th, Shai Davidai – an Assistant Professor at Columbia University – became an unlikely public defender of Israel. And truthfully, even he was surprised by this turn of events: As a committed left-wing Israeli, he had spent years criticizing the government, and often took to the streets to demonstrate against its policies. But the atmosphere he witnessed on college campuses (and specifically on his own campus at Columbia), compelled him to speak up and speak out.