The Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law filed suit in federal court in Massachusetts on Wednesday on behalf of two Jewish students, alleging that the university and a tenured professor violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, including harassment on social media and in mass emails. 

“This is a textbook example of neglect and indifference,” Kenneth Marcus, founder and chairman of the Brandeis Center, said of the lawsuit, shared exclusively with Jewish Insider. “Not only were several antisemitic incidents conducted at the hands of a professor, but MIT’s administration refused to take action on every single occasion,” said Marcus, who served as U.S. assistant secretary of education in the Bush and Trump administrations. 

While the lawsuit, Sussman v. MIT, addresses several antisemitic incidents caused by students, a large portion of the 71-page complaint focuses on alleged antisemitic actions from Michel DeGraff, a tenured linguistics professor. 

The complaint states that through the spring and fall of 2024, DeGraff publicly harassed Lior Alon, an Israeli postdoctoral student, for serving in the Israel Defense Forces — posting Alon’s name and image on social media, and tagging Al Jazeera. The professor then published an article in European newspaper Le Monde in which he singled out the Alon by name, writing that the Israeli, “like many other Zionist counter-protesters, participate in well-rehearsed propaganda that erases the anti-Zionist Jewish students and misrepresents them.” 

As a result, Alon said he was confronted by strangers in various locations, including his child’s daycare and at the grocery store. Alon emailed MIT President Sally Kornbluth expressing fears for his safety and the safety of his family, and requested that the posts be taken down.

Kornbluth — who is the only one of the three college presidents who testified in a now-infamous December 2023 congressional hearing on campus antisemitism who remains in her position — never responded to Alon’s concerns, according to the lawsuit, and no action was taken.

In November 2024, the complaint states that DeGraff harassed another Jewish student by sending a series of mass emails to his entire department, copying 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. 

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 harassment, the student left MIT before completing his Ph.D. program.  

Other instances of antisemitic harassment detailed in the lawsuit include students occupying buildings and disrupting classes with antisemitic chants, students distributing “terror maps” promoting violence at campus locations deemed Jewish and an individual urinating on the Hillel building.

The Massachusetts school was among the 45 universities against which the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights opened Title VI investigations in March. 

Wednesday’s lawsuit comes at a time when many elite universities are acquiescing to the Trump administration’s demands to crack down on the rise of antisemitic activity on campus that began in the aftermath of the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attacks. MIT, however, joined a lawsuit last month challenging the federal government’s attempt to cut research funding from schools that the administration says have not adequately addressed antisemitism.