MIT to host music festival celebrating ‘Jewish joy’ this week

In recent weeks, as headlines have painted an increasingly grim picture of life for Jewish students on many American college campuses, a group of Boston-area Jewish students banded together to try to inject some positivity into that gloomy narrative. 

The result is a just-announced music festival taking place on Thursday at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, with a slew of artists who have been outspoken about their support for Israel and the Jewish community in recent months. The four-hour event will feature performances by the Israeli singer Idan Raichel; rapper and reggae artist Matisyahu and his son, LAIVY; singer-songwriter John Ondrasik of Five for Fighting; rapper Kosha Dillz; and a DJ from the Nova music festival. There will also be food trucks on-site, including kosher options.

“Through the power of music and rhythm, the event aims to unite attendees, honor those who have passed, and support those facing challenges while celebrating joyful Judaism,” reads the event description. Tickets are free for college students, and cost $36 for anyone else who wants to attend.

Called “We Will Dance Again,” the event came together in less than two weeks, after MIT graduate student Talia Khan, the co-president of the MIT Israel Alliance, created a GoFundMe with the support of MIT Chabad to raise money to organize the event and cover the cost of student tickets. As of Tuesday night, the campaign has raised $32,000. 

“We invite you to support and join us at ‘We Will Dance Again,’ a vibrant, student-led party,” inspired by the mantra used by survivors of the Nova music festival massacre, “which promises an unforgettable night of music, dance, and solidarity,” Khan wrote in the GoFundMe campaign. The festival is also being supported by several major Jewish nonprofits, including Boston’s Combined Jewish Philanthropies, Hillel International, the Anti-Defamation League and Jewish National Fund.

Organizers expect 1,500 people at the festival, which is taking place at Hockfield Court, a campus lawn just half a mile from where an anti-Israel encampment stood until a few days ago. MIT’s classes ended this week, but the school year is already over at some other local universities. 

“Security is always, of course, top of mind when we’re bringing large groups together right now on campuses,” said Leora Kimmel Greene, a Boston event planner who is producing the outdoor concert. “The idea of having to go inside because our event feels too political, or too pro-Israel or too Jewish, just feels so sad. While this event is outdoors and in a tent, we have built a perimeter around the area to ensure that only those with tickets can come in and out of the space.”

Rabbi Menachem Altein, director of MIT Chabad, offered a more positive twist: “As they say, haters gonna hate, but we’re proud and loud,” he said on Tuesday. “Being Jewish should invoke a feeling of gladness rather than the feeling of sadness and being a target.”

The organizers hope the event inspires Jewish students at other campuses. “My hope is that, while at Thursday’s event we’re aiming to amplify our message of unity and resilience at MIT, there’s other people on campuses around the country and beyond [who] see this as a model to replicate,” Greene said. “I strongly believe that Jewish college students going back to campus in the fall will need moments that are so focused on Jewish joy and being able to live loudly and proudly Jewish in a safe and meaningful way.”

Matisyahu has faced protests at many of his shows due to his support for Israel, and a handful of stops on his recent tour have been canceled. Ondrasik, who is not Jewish, has emerged as a strong voice against antisemitism since the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks in Israel. He released a single in January, “OK,” that calls out the silence of many leaders and activists in the aftermath of Oct. 7 and traveled to the Jewish state last month. 
“As MIT has created a climate of rampant antisemitism, I look forward to speaking and singing to the students who have been under siege, and telling them personally that people of conscience love and support them,” Ondrasik told Jewish Insider on Tuesday.

House committee requests documents from MIT for antisemitism probe

The House Committee on Education and the Workforce on Friday requested documents from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the fourth school to be drawn into the committee’s investigation of campus antisemitism.

In a letter to MIT President Sally Kornbluth and MIT Corporation Chair Mark Gorenberg, Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC), the committee chair, said the committee has “grave concerns regarding the inadequacy of MIT’s response to antisemitism on its campus.”

She referenced testimony by Kornbluth in December that “further called into question the Institute’s willingness to address antisemitism seriously” and raised concerns about the MIT Corporation’s continued endorsement of Kornbluth following that hearing.

Kornbluth is the only one of the three college presidents who testified at that December hearing who remains in her position.

The committee chair highlighted numerous incidents on MIT’s campus since Oct. 7, including disruptions of classes and campus events, blockades of buildings, harassment and assault of Jewish students and chants endorsing violence. She accused MIT of failing to enforce its suspension of a campus pro-Palestinian group that was punished for violating school rules.

Foxx’s letter also includes excerpts from a statement to the committee by MIT Israel Alliance President Talia Khan, who said that MIT’s lack of action “must not be regarded simply as inaction, but rather as a feckless, cowardly, hypocritical, entirely deliberate choice to remain silent.”

The letter requests documents relating to MIT’s responses to antisemitic incidents, disciplinary procedures, internal communications and meeting minutes and foreign donations that the school has received.

The committee previously requested similar documents from Harvard, Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania. Accusing Harvard of non-compliance, it issued a subpoena to the school, and declared this week that the university had still failed to properly cooperate.

It’s unclear yet whether Foxx plans to pursue subpoenas of other school leaders, or how it will respond to Harvard.

Jewish students recount a series of campus horror stories at congressional roundtable

For two hours on Wednesday, lawmakers heard from a parade of Jewish students, each delivering the same message: They do not feel safe on their college campuses.

Speaking to a roundtable organized by the House Committee on Education & the Workforce, Jewish students from Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Columbia, Rutgers, Stanford, Tulane, Cooper Union and University of California, Berkeley spoke about about the harassment, threats and violence they’ve faced on their campuses since the Oct. 7 attack on Israel.

The students’ accounts were all remarkably similar, despite coming from a range of locations and school types, including openly antisemitic taunts and harassment, angry mobs rampaging through campus and overtaking campus buildings, vandalism and in some cases threats of or actual incidents of violence, all going largely or completely unaddressed by university administrators and campus police, despite repeated and sustained pleas from the students for help and support. 

In some cases, the students said professors and administrators were complicit or actively involved in the antisemitic activity. Students said that they feared for their safety and even their lives.

The students, saying they felt abandoned by their universities and had no faith in them to act to protect them, pleaded for action from Congress. They said that they hoped their testimony could serve as a wakeup call to both Congress and the American public.

“As my friends from Harvard and UPenn can tell you, it doesn’t end simply because presidents are replaced. Systemic change is needed,” Kevin Feigelis, a Stanford student, said. “Universities have proven they have no intention of fixing themselves. It must be you, and it must be now.”

Shabbos Kestenbaum — a Harvard student who said he’d contacted the school’s antisemitism task force more than 40 times without a response and had been threatened in a video with a machete by a still-employed Harvard staff member — called Congress and the courts the students’ “last hope.”

Multiple students and lawmakers said that the current events on campus carry echoes of 1930s Germany or the pogroms in Russia.

Some suggested potential courses of action that Congress and other federal branches could take, including leveraging U.S. taxpayer funding or the schools’ tax-exempt statuses, placing third-party monitors on campus and enforcing diversity requirements in Middle East studies departments requiring them to include pro-Israel views.

Students from Harvard, Penn and MIT all said that little has changed on their campuses since last year’s blockbuster congressional hearing on campus antisemitism, which prompted the ouster of Harvard and Penn’s presidents.

Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC), the committee’s chair, vowed that she and her colleagues would not stop their efforts to tackle antisemitism on campus.

“I was very emotional,” Foxx told Jewish Insider, “I’m a mother and a grandmother. I have one grandchild who went to college and I’m not sure what I would have done if he had come home to say he felt threatened on his campus like these students feel threatened. No student on a college campus, in this country, in the year 2024, should feel threatened.”

Foxx said that the committee’s antisemitism investigation is proceeding deliberately, but that the schools will be held to account. The committee has already requested documents from Harvard, Penn and Columbia and has now subpoenaed Harvard. Foxx suggested that other schools whose students had appeared Thursday could be next.