October 27, 2025
Sent to President Kornbluth and the MIT corporation calling for immediate institution of mandatory antisemitism training as a base requirement for good-standing as a member of the MIT community
Dear President Kornbluth,
There is no higher duty of a university than its obligation to ensure the safety and wellbeing of its academic community. For more than two years, MIT’s Jewish community has faced - at times daily - an unprecedented surge of antisemitic acts generated from all corners of the MIT campus. These bold and unapologetic acts of Jew-hatred have ranged from harassment and intimidation, to vandalism and malicious destruction of personal property. They include subjecting students to antisemitic slurs, verbal assaults, and direct and indirect threats.
Examples of this include:
painting swastikas on an Israeli-Jewish postdoc’s car
throwing an Israeli-Jewish postdoc’s computer into the toilet
harassing Jewish students on social media, including by a tenured MIT professor
directly targeting students by name using flyers styled after Hamas headbands, distributed in the student dormitory
disrupting classes with calls for violence that target a specific minority with shared history
blockading and physically preventing Jewish students from attending classes
defacing MIT property (the chalking of MIT property outside Stata) that if not with the intent, resulted in the effect of creating a threat to the Jewish MIT community
issuing threats to an MIT professor engaging in academic collaboration with Israeli science and technology companies
spreading Jewish libels, including one by an MIT DEI officer who claimed to a student seeking support and redress from harassment from such claims, that the organ harvesting libel stating that Israelis use Palestinians for organ harvesting is a “confimed report”.
imposing social pressures and direct threats of violence that result in the need for Jewish students to hide their Jewish identities
ostracizing Jewish and Jewish-Israeli students by marginalizing them, including an incident of eviction of a postdoctoral student from his academic research lab
targeting and profaning the campus Center for Jewish Life through a student’s visibly urinating on the wall of the Hillel building during an ongoing event held within
chanting “From the River to the Sea” and “Globalize the Intifada”, both phrases which - following the October 7 massacre of Jewish civilians, and with historical use by groups such as Hamas as a call for the destruction of Israel and annihilation of the Jewish people - are now held by many court rulings as calling for violence against Jews
These acts are often intertwined with extreme anti-Israel activism, both within and without the classroom, including through MIT faculty-led lectures, seminars, and social media posts.
While some of the incidents noted above are singular events, many persist and involve significant numbers - and members - of the MIT community, including faculty, staff, and those in leadership.
The need for MIT to mandate direct, assertive, and formal programmatic antisemitism-training is imperative and long-overdue. The acts outlined here represent violations of university policy and constitute only a fraction of the violations perpetrated against MIT’s Jewish community. These incidents expose an environment of extremism and intimidation flourishing within the MIT community that directly endangers Jewish students and violates Title VI standards.
On behalf of the MIT Jewish Alumni Alliance we call on MIT president Sally Kornbluth and on her leadership team to immediately institute mandatory antisemitism training as a base requirement for good-standing as a member of the MIT community.
There are resources readily available for this purpose. The Jewish United Fund and Project Shema are but two of several organizations that produce materials - including videos - for use by institutions of higher learning for this purpose. Members of the MIT Jewish Alumni Alliance stand ready to assist with development and with implementation.
Reassertion, by MIT’s leadership, of its current path of inaction will only intensify the risk to MIT’s Jewish population. Now is the time for MIT to assert its role as a leader, not only in science and technology, but in moral clarity.
The leadership of MIT JAA looks forward to your prompt and favorable reply.
Respectfully,
The Executive Committee of the Jewish Alumni Alliance