A University of Florida law student went viral online and became a campus pariah after classmates circulated two of his academic papers that argued in favor of white nationalist views — and amid the backlash he shared antisemitic messages on X.
But, as it turns out, the student has some Jewish ancestry.
Preston Damsky stoked outrage on campus — leading to at least two town halls during the spring semester — after penning an academic paper in the fall that argued that the Founding Fathers had conceived of the U.S. as white country and it should remain that way. Damsky questioned the constitutionality of certain amendments like those granting birthright citizenship and barring the government from denying anyone the right to vote based on race.
As students began circulating the paper and expressing outrage, Damsky shared scores of posts on X against Jewish people.
“Jews must be abolished by any means necessary,” he posted on X in March.
Damsky is the great-grandson of Jews who were labeled “Hebrew” by border control agents when they immigrated to the U.S. over a century ago. And he has grandparents buried in a Jewish cemetery in the Hollywood Hills. He said he is not Jewish and his ancestry isn’t relevant to his views.
Still, his most recent social media posts are littered with anti-Jewish tropes.
“To the Jew, the Gentile is at best a sheep to be shorn,” Damsky, 29, posted on X on May 24.
Damsky, in a telephone interview with NBC News, confirmed that he has Jewish ancestry on his father’s side.
“The positions I have taken don’t depend on who my paternal grandparents or great-grandparents were,” he said. “I never met my paternal grandfather. And I reject that who they were has any effect on my thinking as a matter of logic.”
Damsky said he was not raised Jewish. “In fact, I’ve never set foot in a synagogue,” he said.
Damsky also said he was quoted correctly when he told The New York Times that it “would not be manifestly wrong” to refer to him as a Nazi.
The law student first caught the eye of classmates during the fall semester when the draft of a paper he wrote for a legal class, which also argued that the Constitution was written exclusively for white people, began circulating among his classmates, according to published reports.
The same semester, Damsky took an originalism seminar, led by U.S. District Judge John Badalamenti, who had been appointed to the bench by President Donald Trump in June 2020. Originalism is a legal approach championed by conservatives that says questions about the Constitution should focus on its original meaning.
When the seminar concluded, some of Damsky’s classmates were outraged to learn from the law school website that he had been given a top academic honor called a “book award” for being the top student in the class and that more than half of his grade hinged on a paper he wrote titled “National Constitutionalism.”
In the paper, which was also posted on the school’s website, Damsky embraced the idea that the U.S. was conceived of as a white country and this literal interpretation should be followed today.
“If we abandon that principle while turning over America to a non-White majority, a majority that will not share a common, historic commitment to anything, what else shall we abandon along the way?” Damsky wrote.
But Damsky’s family history — culled from immigration and census records, newspaper notices, obituaries and various other documents collected by NBC News and the Ancestry genealogical website — shows he shares ancestry with some of the very people he spews hate speech about.
His great-grandfather Harry Damsky was a Jew from Lodz, a Polish city that was then part of Russia, who emigrated to Canada in 1910 before eventually settling in Port Chester, New York, according to U.S. census records, his draft card and obituary.
His great-grandmother Zelda was born in Kieff (Kyiv) in what was then Russia and emigrated to Canada in 1911, the records show.
They had two children, Henry and Sadie, according to Toronto birth records.
In April 1920, the Damsky family immigrated to the U.S. via Buffalo, New York, and were described as “Hebrew” on the official “List Or Manifest Of Alien Passengers Applying For Admission.”
After being widowed, Harry Damsky married Sarah Kuretz, who was born in Lithuania, according to U.S. census records. A tailor by profession, he also outlived his second wife and died in 1958 in the Bronx, according to his obituary.
Henry Damsky, who was Preston Damsky’s grandfather and Harry Damsky’s son, also lived for a time in Port Chester before migrating west to the Los Angeles area. He is buried at a Jewish cemetery in Los Angeles called Mount Sinai Hollywood Hills, according to the cemetery’s records.
His wife, Georgette Louise Boucher Damsky, was Preston Damsky’s paternal grandmother. She was born in Paris, France, and is also buried at Mount Sinai Hollywood Hills, according to cemetery records.
Damsky said his grandmother wasn’t Jewish. In 1949, she performed in a play at a Purim party that was produced by the Hebrew Ladies’ Benevolent Association, according to The Daily Item, a Port Chester newspaper.
“She wasn’t Jewish, she was a Catholic from France,” Damsky said. “She met my grandfather after the war, meaning World War II.”
Preston Damsky’s father, Howard Damsky, was just 54 when he died in 2015 at a hospital on Sunset Boulevard, records show.
“My dad wasn’t religious,” Damsky said. “He liked watching drag racing. That’s how he spent his Sundays. Saturdays were for baseball.”
Damsky’s mother, Laura, lives in a Los Angeles suburb and did not return a phone call for comment.
“I don’t know what specific liturgy she holds close to her heart,” Damsky said in a message exchanged via X. “It’s entirely irrelevant to my beliefs.”
Damsky remains enrolled at UF’s Levin College of Law, university spokesperson Cynthia Roldan said in an email to NBC News. But he’s not welcome on campus.
He was issued a trespass warning on April 3 that bars him from setting foot on the campus for three years, Roldan added.
Citing a state statute, Roldan said she could not say why Damsky was banished from the campus “in the interest of safety and security.”
Prior to the trespass warning, Damsky had been posting antisemitic screeds on his X account, though it’s not clear if those specific posts had anything to do with the school’s decision.
“The trespass order followed months of internal concern within the law school over Damsky’s rhetoric, which sharply escalated in late March over his social media accounts,” student newspaper The Independent Florida Alligator reported on April 21.
The University of Florida has the largest number of Jewish undergraduate students of any public university in the country, according to Hillel International.
Facing backlash from angry students, the law school’s interim dean, Merritt McAlister, held an April 9 town hall during which she “defended the law school’s commitment to upholding the First Amendment and maintaining institutional neutrality,” the student newspaper reported.
Badalamenti, 51, also found himself targeted by critics.
When asked why Badalamenti believed Damsky deserved the award, his spokesman referred to a statement released last week by McAlister, who said the judge “had no knowledge of this student’s history at the law school or his deeply held personal views.”
“The professor took the paper on its face — as a student paper attempting to use originalist methodology to reach a detestable and extreme position,” it said. “As abhorrent as the paper’s thesis may be, that work still falls within the bounds of academic freedom and the First Amendment, and, as such, was graded consistent with the grading standard for the course.”
McAlister’s statement appeared to echo the Feb. 10 email she sent to the UF law school staff in which she insisted that grading does not “involve an ideological litmus test” and defended Damsky’s First Amendment rights. That email was obtained by The Alligator.
Damsky insisted he was being persecuted for propagating unpopular ideas and vowed to fight any attempt by the university to expel him.
“You know,” he told the newspaper, “I’m not, like, a psychopathic ax murderer.”
