Israeli Scholar Pushed Out of Prestigious Postdoctoral Appointment Washington, D.C. (September 17, 2025) – Today, the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law filed an amended complaint against the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) on behalf of Jewish students, researchers, and faculty, bringing forward a new victim and allegations that MIT has allowed an anti-Semitic climate to persist, denying Jewish and Israeli members equal access to education, research, and campus life. According to the complaint, the new victim was cornered in May 2024 in a campus parking lot by masked individuals calling for death to Israel and death to Zionists. He emailed MIT President Sally Kornbluth to say he no longer felt safe, but he received no response. A campaign of hostility inside his own lab followed. Graduate students interrogated him about his Jewish identity and connections to Israel, hurled slurs, denied Israel’s existence, and even spoke of sabotaging his relationship with his Jewish partner to prevent more Jewish children. Rather than intervening, his supervising professor publicly vilified him for being Israeli and Jewish, accepted that students refused to work with “his kind,” stripped him of his research responsibilities, told him to stop coming to the lab, isolated him with menial tasks, and ultimately terminated his contract. The researcher reported the matter to campus administration and no action was taken. The professor retaliated after the report of the abuse, maligning the researcher to colleagues and taking other retaliatory measures, including broadcasting the dismissal of the postdoc to colleagues and students and spreading career assassination-level defamatory claims. This severely harmed his mental health, forced him to conceal his Israeli and Jewish identity on campus, and has impacted future prospects for research and employment. These new claims build upon similar allegations from the June complaint filed by the Brandeis Center against MIT, which alleged that Jewish and Israeli students at MIT have experienced an onslaught of discrimination and harassment over the past several years. This harassment includes but is not limited to: students celebrating the murderous rampage of October 7, calling for violence against Jews worldwide, praising the terror group Hamas, interrupting classes with hateful anti-Semitic chants, and urinating on the Hillel building. At one point, “terror maps” were distributed that promoted violence at campus locations deemed Jewish. Through the spring and fall of 2024, a tenured linguistics professor publicly harassed a young Israeli researcher—posting his name, noting he served in the Israeli Defense Forces (as all Israelis do), sharing images, editing videos on social media, and even tagging Al Jazeera–putting the researcher at serious risk. The professor then published an article in a popular European newspaper, Le Monde, in which he further vilified him. As a result, the researcher was aggressively confronted by strangers in various locations, including his child’s daycare and the grocery store. The researcher emailed President Sally Kornbluth expressing fears for his safety and the safety of his family, and requested that the videos be taken down. President Kornbluth never responded, and no action was taken. The posts remain online today, and MIT took no action to discipline the professor – who continues to engage in harmful and discriminatory social media posting to this day. President Kornbluth’s silence emboldened that same professor to intensify his assault on Jews. In November of 2024, this professor relentlessly harassed a Jewish student in full view of President Kornbluth and top-level administrators. The professor issued a rapid-fire series of mass emails to his entire department, copying President Kornbluth and other administrators, accusing the student of having a Jewish “mind infection” and threatening to use him as a “real-life case study” in a class the professor was teaching. President Kornbluth and the other top-level administrators copied on the exchange remained silent while the professor continued to malign and threaten the Jewish student. That same day, flyers were slipped under doors in a dormitory where this student previously lived, targeting him specifically in white lettering on a green band, styled after Hamas headbands, advocating for violence against Jews. As a result of the ongoing harassment and complete lack of protection by MIT, the student was forced to leave MIT before completing his PhD program, abandoning a dream and a promising career in computer science. “Anti-Semitism continues to persist at MIT, ultimately allowing the abuse to escalate until a promising Israeli researcher was forced from his lab. This not only deeply impacts this individual, but an entire campus and the communities this researcher, and others like them, could help through their work over the course of their careers,” said Hon. Kenneth L. Marcus, chairman of the Brandeis Center and the former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education who ran the Office for Civil Rights, which investigates schools for civil rights violations, during two administrations. “MIT has had countless opportunities to stop this harassment and protect their Israeli and Jewish students and faculty. Instead, anti-Semitism has only worsened at MIT – an outcome made possible by the administration’s continued negligence.” White & Case and Brown Counsel are co-counsel on this lawsuit. “These incidents demonstrate what happens when anti-Semitism is allowed to flourish in the absence of leadership and accountability,” said Jonathan Polkes, Global Co-Chair of Litigation Practice at White & Case. “Through its inaction, MIT allowed a tenured professor to use his position of power to persecute Jews without consequence – breaking both federal and university laws in the process. Our clients are taking a courageous stand against injustice, and we are proud to represent them.” The Brandeis Center has also filed federal lawsuits against organizations at UCLA and Columbia that allegedly orchestrated the assaults, battery, and civil rights violations of Jews on university campuses. And in a precedent-setting agreement with Harvard earlier this year after allegations of anti-Semitism on campus, the university agreed to incorporate the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of anti-Semitism with its examples consistent with Harvard’s non-discrimination and anti-bullying policies, and to explicitly state that conduct that would violate school rules if targeting Jews or Israelis can also be a violation if directed toward Zionists.