MIT ‘embarrassed’ by new book on campus anti-Semitism, professor says

MASSACHUSETTS - After months of student protests related to the Gaza Strip war in 2023 and 2024, some prominent schools, such as Harvard University and Columbia University, appointed select committees to interview students and write painful public reports about bias on campus.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where some Jews on campus said protests created a hostile environment, did not publish a lengthy committee report on anti-Semitism.

So a professor began his own.

Yossi Sheffi, an MIT faculty member for the past 48 years, said he became so angry about how Jews and Israelis were treated on campus after the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct 7, 2023, that he wrote a book about anti-Semitism at MIT.

“For MIT, this book is the report,” said Sheffi, 78, the director of the university’s Center for Transportation and Logistics.

Now that his manuscript is ready to be published, Sheffi says MIT administrators are trying to minimise its impact by denying him access to money to promote the book.

“I think they are embarrassed by what will come out in the book and worried the Trump administration will use it to cut research funding to MIT,” Sheffi said of administrators.

A spokesperson for MIT, Kimberly Allen, declined to comment on Sheffi’s book, but said that “MIT encourages and expects independent thinking from all members of its community.”

In a statement, she said that “MIT leadership has in the strongest terms rejected antisemitism and taken thoughtful and steadfast action to prevent it”.

Sheffi’s center at MIT is funded through research contracts as well as agreements for building academic institutions around the world, he said. He said he has used leftover money from these projects to promote previous books.

After he submitted the expenses for his antisemitism project, he said MIT administrators ultimately approved expenses toward producing the book but declined expenses to promote it.

“The only difference is that this book is about anti-Semitism,” he said.

The Trump administration has seized on reports of campus anti-Semitism to pressure colleges with the loss of federal research grants. In anti-Semitism lawsuits filed this year against Harvard and the UCLA, the Trump administration used those schools’ anti-Semitism reports against them in its lawsuits.

Sheffi, a professor of engineering, acknowledged that he could bring new scrutiny from the federal government, but said colleagues still urged him to publish his book, titled Unsafe at M.I.T.: A Chronicle of a Campus War on the Jews.

The book will be self-published on July 7, he said.

In it, he is sharply critical of MIT leadership, chronicling reports of harassment and neglect toward Jews on campus after the Oct 7 Hamas attack.

“I wanted to create a historical record of what happened, so people later could not say that it was not so bad,” said Sheffi, who was born in Jerusalem.

Like many US universities, MIT saw intense student protests around the war in Gaza, including a pro-Palestinian tent encampment.

Protesters demanded that the university sever ties with Israel.

MIT asked the students to leave voluntarily but permitted the encampment protest to continue for about three weeks. MIT President Sally Kornbluth warned protesters that they would be suspended if they did not leave, and then had the encampment cleared by the police.

Kornbluth was one of three prominent college presidents who were called to testify about campus antisemitism before Congress in December 2023.

While MIT did not publish a lengthy formal report, the school has noted that it responded to complaints of antisemitism with a number of measures, including more security and training, updated policies on demonstrations, and disciplinary proceedings against rule breakers.

It also established a team to address reports of anti-Semitism and other forms of bias relating to the conflict in the Middle East, according to a statement on the MIT website.

Allen cited a 2026 MIT quality of life survey, in which 96 per cent of Jewish undergraduates who responded and 93 per cent of Jewish graduate students reported feeling satisfied at MIT, up from 84 per cent of Jewish undergrads and 75 per cent of Jewish graduate students in 2024.

Or Hen, an MIT professor of physics who is from Israel, said the climate for Jews and Israelis on campus “is very different from a few years back, when it was very vocal and in-your-face”.

But he is seeing a push at MIT and across the nation to avoid controversy by not collaborating with Israel, which he rejects.

A big change since late 2023, he said, is that the Jewish community on campus has become far more cohesive, which he credited to faculty-led efforts, such as ongoing weekly lunches.

Susan Silbey, a professor of sociology and anthropology, said that in all her years at MIT, “being Jewish was just not something relevant” to her experience there.

The Gaza protests were infused with “a great deal of energy,” she said, but “once the protests were over, it went away, with one or two exceptions here and there from people who like to make noise. It’s quieter than usual”.

Sheffi used interviews with MIT students and faculty to fashion a version of recent campus history. The book includes accounts from roughly 40 people, he said, as well as his own observations.

He will pay some US$20,000 (S$25,900) from his own pocket for a marketing firm to help promote the book, he said. He expects there will be additional expenses, such as travel to give book talks.

• This article originally appeared in The New York Times.