Lawsuit: Elite university stood by while teacher ‘publicly harassed’ Jewish student

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) allegedly failed repeatedly to discipline a professor who harassed Jewish and Israeli students, a lawsuit filed Wednesday claims.

A tenured linguistics professor at the university in the spring of 2024 allegedly posted an Israeli student researcher’s name and Israeli military service on social media, leading to the student getting “aggressively confronted” by strangers in public, according to the lawsuit filed by the Brandeis Center. Despite the university being made aware on several occasions, “no action was taken,” the suit alleges.

Some of the harassment even occurred at grocery stores and at the student’s child’s daycare, the lawsuit said.

“This is a textbook example of neglect and indifference,” Hon. Kenneth L. Marcus, chairman of the Brandeis Center, said in a statement. “Not only were several anti-Semitic incidents conducted at the hands of a professor, but MIT’s administration refused to take action on every single occasion.”

In the fall of 2024, the same professor began teaching a course titled “Language and Linguistics … From the River to the Sea in Palestine,” the lawsuit states.

The professor also posted online about a “Jewish ‘mind infection,’” and when confronted by a Jewish student about this, the professor declared the student “to be a real-life example of the ‘mind infection’ in a relentless series of online posts and mass emails sent to the entire Linguistics and Philosophy Department and other distribution lists,” according to the lawsuit. Included on these email chains was the president of the university as well as several administrators, who did not respond or discipline the professor for his actions, the complaint claims.

MIT’s harassment and discrimination office allegedly refused to investigate the incidents when asked by the student, apparently referring to the complaint as “settler-colonial Zionist propaganda,” according to the lawsuit. The student was forced to abandon the university in the middle of his studies after being harassed by other students, including an incident in which students tracked down the Jewish student’s previous residence and slipped flyers under the door “advocating for violence against Jews.”

MIT did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

“The very people who are tasked with protecting students are not only failing them, but are the ones attacking them,” Marcus continued. “In order to eradicate hate from campuses, we must hold faculty and the university administration responsible for their participation in – and in this case, their proliferation of – anti-Semitism and abuse.”

In a more recent incident, students at the university allegedly handed out “terror maps” in April 2025 which marked buildings on campus that had “connections to the Jewish and Israeli communities and promoted violence against them,” the lawsuit states. No action was taken by the university, the lawsuit claims.

A similar incident happened just months earlier in August 2024, with students distributing flyers at an orientation event with a link to a “Mapping Project” targeting Jewish organizations, according to the lawsuit.

In 2023, MIT was put under a congressional investigation due to its response to antisemitism on campus. During a hearing in front of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, MIT President Sally Kornbluth refused to say whether antisemitic chants violated the school’s code of conduct.

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