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Will MIT President Sally Kornbluth survive the campus antisemitism reckoning?

(JTA) – Sally Kornbluth is different from the other university presidents with whom she has been thrust into the antisemitism spotlight.

For one thing, the president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology still has her job. This week, Harvard University President Claudine Gay joined University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill in resigning following their participation, alongside Kornbluth, in a disastrous congressional hearing in December.

But Kornbluth, who has headed MIT since last January, is different in other ways, too. She’s Jewish; she comes with high marks from the Jewish community at the last university where she worked; and her school was already participating in a Hillel program to fight antisemitism when Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7. This week, as the last of the three presidents standing, she sent a new email outlining additional steps she planned to take to address antisemitism on campus.

Now, with opposition growing in the wake of momentum from Harvard across town, the question is whether those differences will be enough to save her, and MIT’s, reputation among Jews.

“I want to be clear: Change does not necessarily mean the resignation of President Kornbluth,” Matt Handel, a 1991 MIT alum and biotech executive, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. Handel co-founded a new group of Jewish alumni mobilizing around the school’s handling of the current crisis.

That group, MIT Jewish Alumni Alliance, was formed in the wake of the administration’s controversial handling of an anti-Israel campus protest in November. Kornbluth had announced that students who participated in the disruptive protest would be partially suspended, citing concerns that foreign students would have their visas revoked if they received full suspensions; Jewish critics of the decision said that punishment didn’t go far enough.

The Rogers Building at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass., is shown on Aug. 12, 2017. (Beyond My Ken via Creative Commons)

At the Dec. 5 congressional hearing, Kornbluth, Gay and Magill all said that “calls for the genocide of Jews” did not necessarily violate university codes of conduct, depending on their “context.” Afterward, the MIT Jewish Alumni Alliance circulated an open letter criticizing the university’s handling of the issue. More than 800 people, including current MIT faculty, signed it.

Now, the group is making demands and ratcheting up pressure on the university. This week, it launched a $1 donation campaign — modeled after similar Jewish alumni campaigns at Harvard, Columbia, Penn and Stanford — to apply pressure to the school by asking donors to reduce their annual giving to that sum. And on Wednesday, Handel saw further momentum — and affirmation — when a popular MIT professor announced on social media that he was leaving the university over its handling of antisemitism.

“During a time when the Jewish and Israeli students, staff and faculty were particularly vulnerable, instead of offering the support they needed, the broader MIT community exhibited open hostility towards them,” Mauricio Karchmer, a computer scientist whose doctorate is from Hebrew University in Jerusalem, wrote on LinkedIn. “Like many other college campuses nationwide, the institute clearly failed this test.”

Karchmer continued, “Some areas of study at MIT seem to prioritize promoting a specific worldview over teaching critical thinking skills. This seems to have been institutionalized in many of MIT’s departments and programs.” (Karchmer did not return a JTA request for comment.)

Yet the MIT Jewish Alumni Alliance is not advocating for Kornbluth’s resignation, even as other influential figures have called for her head, such as Jewish activist investor Bill Ackman, who lobbied for Gay’s ouster, and Republican Rep. Elise Stafanik, who grilled Kornbluth and the other presidents at the congressional hearing,.

“While there are individuals in our group who would be very happy to see her resign and really would like that to happen, as a group we have decided that we want to focus on working with the administration,” Handel said.

He instead said that the group wants Kornbluth to formally apologize for her testimony; more forcefully discipline “calls for Jewish genocide on MIT’s campus”; and “be very clear that antisemitism stands alone in this right now.”

Unlike Magill and Gay, Kornbluth did not issue an apology after testifying in Congress — though she did later attend a screening at MIT’s Chabad center of a 47-minute reel of Hamas’ atrocities, rejecting what she said was pressure for it not to be shown. (Israel’s envoy to the United Nations, Gilad Erdan, was a host of the screening and called for her resignation afterwards.)

This week, Kornbluth sent a new message to the campus community addressing antisemitism, in which she promised to improve the school’s handling of student misconduct allegations; make sure the school’s new Diversity, Equity and Inclusion director incorporates “antisemitism and Islamophobia” into their job; survey students with “targeted questions” about their experiences with antisemitism; and promote a new “shared understanding of the rights and responsibilities of free expression.”

The university’s speech conduct code was last revised in 2021 after a visiting professor compared university DEI programs to Nazi Germany in an op-ed, prompting campus outrage and the cancelation of his planned talk.

Even with her new plans, Kornbluth’s message failed, in Handel’s mind, because it also referenced Islamophobia on campus — which, he says, “hasn’t happened.” MIT’s communications department did not respond to JTA requests for comment.

Talia Khan, a current MIT student who is president of the MIT Israel Alliance and has been outspoken in her criticism of the university, also would not say whether she believes Kornbluth should resign.

Her group, she told JTA, is calling on the MIT Corporation — the school’s board of directors, which released a statement in support of Kornbluth days after her testimony — “to acknowledge the entrenched antisemitism” within MIT’s “senior administration and DEI infrastructure.” According to Khan, a newly initiated Department of Education Title VI civil rights investigation against MIT was also prompted by student antisemitism complaints. The probe had been shrouded in mystery, as neither the school nor the department would comment to JTA on its origins.

Animosity directed at Kornbluth from Jewish groups is an odd sight to Jews at Duke University, where Kornbluth worked from 1994 to 2022, including as provost. At Duke, Kornbluth was simply a beloved part of the Jewish community.

MIT President Sally Kornbluth laughs as she talks with her husband, Daniel Lew, at the conclusion of a press conference held to introduce her as MITs 18th president, Oct. 20, 2022. (Jessica Rinaldi/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)

“She was very attuned to the community here. She saw that this was her community, and we were not a prop for her,” Laura Lieber, until recently the chair of Duke’s Center for Jewish Studies, told JTA.

Kornbluth regularly participated in Jewish holiday celebrations on campus, and she and her husband donated to the local Jewish federation. At Hillel services, Lieber recalled, “the students could never quite get over the fact that the provost could just show up in a sweatshirt and jeans and just hang out with them.”

She added, “That was the Sally that I think a lot of people really miss. That’s why it’s really, especially hard to hear her commitment to Judaism questioned.”

Lieber said that, in her estimation, Kornbluth shouldn’t be judged on her congressional testimony alone. “In the wake of October 7 there was a lot of time needed just to process and to grieve,” she said, adding that Kornbluth “was not in the position to have any of that. She didn’t have any of that luxury.”

Prior to Hamas’ Oct. 7 terror attacks, Kornbluth appeared willing to proactively engage with the problem of antisemitism at MIT. The university is one of 13 members of the current cohort of Hillel International’s Campus Climate Initiative, a four-year-old program that educates university administrators on antisemitism issues. Kornbluth referenced the program during her congressional testimony — shortly before making the same heavily criticized comments as the other two presidents.

MIT’s participation in the program still counts for something, Hillel general counsel Mark Rotenberg told JTA last month. But, he said, it doesn’t mean change will come overnight.

“The CCI program is not premised on a helicopter parent-type model where we just fly in and do something and expect the world to change that afternoon,” Rotenberg said shortly after the congressional hearing. “We’re premised on the idea that serious change takes time.”

He added, “While the CCI program does many wonderful things for Jewish students on campuses across the United States, it does not prepare presidents for testimony.”

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The post Will MIT President Sally Kornbluth survive the campus antisemitism reckoning? appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

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The BBC Documentary That Paints Every Israeli as an Extremist

The Jewish community of Beit El in Judea and Samaria. Photo: Yaakov via Wikimedia Commons.

Louis Theroux first visited the West Bank in 2011 to film a documentary titled Louis and the Ultra-Zionists, part of his long-running series for the BBC. Back then, he at least seemed to possess a trace of journalistic curiosity. Even the title signaled a degree of editorial caution — framing his subjects as a small, ideological fringe rather than representative of Israeli society as a whole.

At the time, Theroux made an effort to clarify that he was profiling a narrow segment of Israelis. He showed legally purchased Jewish homes (sold by Arab landowners, no less) and acknowledged the regular — and at times deadly — terror attacks faced by Israeli civilians living in the area, often requiring military protection. There was condescension, certainly. But there was also context.

Fast-forward to 2024, and the curiosity is gone — though the bemused, slightly smug expression remains. His new BBC documentary, Louis and the Settlers, drops even the soft qualifiers. No “ultra.” No nuance. Just “settlers.” And with that, Theroux makes it clear: half a million Israelis living in the West Bank are one and the same — extremists who, we’re told, want every last Palestinian removed from the land.

This time, the documentary doesn’t begin with questions. It begins with conclusions. And Theroux uses a brief, unrepresentative snapshot of life in the West Bank to draw sweeping indictments of the entire Israeli state.

The message is unmistakable: Israel is the problem. Settlers are the villains. And Palestinians are passive, blameless victims of a colonial project.

Within the opening minutes, Theroux plants his ideological flag. He refers to the West Bank as “Palestinian territory” and describes every Israeli community within it as illegal under international law — a sharp departure from his more qualified approach 14 years earlier.

And while his personal views seep in throughout the film, they become crystal clear during one exchange at a checkpoint, where an Israeli soldier casually refers to their location as “Israel.” Theroux shoots back: “We’re not in Israel, are we?”

And just like that, the BBC and Louis Theroux have redrawn Israel’s borders. No Knesset debate needed.

Erasing History to Blame the Massacre

The timing of this return trip is no accident. The film comes in the shadow of the October 7 Hamas massacres — the day 1,200 Israelis were slaughtered, families were burned alive in their homes, and children were dragged into Gaza. And yet, Theroux barely mentions it.

The few passing references to October 7 serve not to inform the audience — but to imply that Israel may be exploiting its own dead to justify further expansion. It’s not an investigation. It’s an accusation. And it allows him to skip over thousands of years of Jewish history in order to frame the current war in Gaza as a convenient cover story for Israeli “aggression.”

Take Hebron, for example. Theroux tells viewers that “in 1968, the year after [the West Bank] was occupied by Israel, a community of Jewish settlers moved in illegally. They now number some 700.” He fails to mention that in 1895 — decades before the modern state of Israel existed — Hebron had a Jewish population of 1,429.

Jews have lived in Hebron since antiquity — it’s where, according to Jewish tradition, Abraham purchased the Cave of the Patriarchs. Modern records date the community back centuries, despite discrimination under Ottoman rule and bans on Jewish prayer at holy sites. In 1929, Arab rioters carried out a massacre, wiping out Hebron’s Jewish population. Dozens were murdered; the rest were expelled. Under Jordanian rule from 1948 to 1967, Jews were banned from the city entirely. When they returned after the Six-Day War — not as colonists, but as a displaced community coming home — Theroux picks up the story there and calls it “illegal.”

On the Six-Day War itself, Theroux offers no context. No mention of the Arab armies preparing to destroy Israel. No mention of Israel’s preemptive strike against an existential threat.

According to The Settlers, Israel simply “occupied” — full stop.

Palestinian Terrorism? Not Even a Footnote.

Theroux visits Evyatar, a small Jewish community near the Palestinian town of Beita, and uses it as a stand-in for the entire West Bank. Beita is depicted as a symbol of peaceful resistance: a proud, ancient Palestinian village standing firm against violent settlers backed by IDF soldiers.

It’s a neat story. Too neat. Because missing from the story are years of organized, violent riots from Beita — complete with Molotov cocktails, burning Stars of David, and Nazi swastikas. All carefully omitted to preserve the narrative: Palestinians peaceful, settlers aggressive. Facts that don’t fit? Left on the cutting room floor.

Meanwhile, Israeli nationalism is treated as something sinister and unsettling — a moral aberration to be examined. The notion that Jews might want sovereignty or security is met with thinly veiled suspicion. Yet Hamas’ goal of a Jew-free Palestine, explicitly laid out in its charter, is never mentioned. Nor is the Palestinian Authority’s “pay-for-slay” policy, which literally incentivizes terrorism by rewarding those who murder Israelis — including women and children.

These aren’t fringe details. They’re central to understanding the region. And Theroux knows it. He just doesn’t care.

The BBC’s Complicity

That The Settlers aired on the BBC — a publicly funded broadcaster once seen as a gold standard of global journalism — says plenty. Not just about Louis Theroux’s agenda, but about the institutional direction of the BBC itself. This wasn’t a rogue filmmaker sneaking bias past the editors. This was bias built into the foundation — signed off, packaged, and broadcast under the banner of credibility.

There is, of course, no problem with scrutinizing Israeli policy, and no issue with questioning the settlement enterprise or highlighting the tensions in the West Bank. But journalism — real journalism — demands context. It demands precision. It demands at least a passing familiarity with the full scope of the story.

Theroux offers none of that. He arrives with a predetermined script and casts his roles accordingly: Hero. Villain. Victim. Oppressor. And when reality refuses to cooperate? It’s left out.

Louis Theroux didn’t return to Israel to understand it. He returned to flatten it. To reduce its complexity to a morality play — and to ensure everyone knows the antagonist is.

The Settlers isn’t a documentary. It’s a hit piece. And the BBC handed him the camera — then applauded the performance.

The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.

The post The BBC Documentary That Paints Every Israeli as an Extremist first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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Indian Army Kills Islamist Terrorist Linked to 2002 Murder of Jewish-American Journalist Daniel Pearl

Jewish-American Wall Street Journal journalist Daniel Pearl was kidnapped and murdered by Islamist terrorists in Pakistan in 2002. Photo: Screenshot

The Indian government announced on Thursday that its military forces had killed “Pakistan’s most wanted terrorist,” who was connected to the 2002 murder of Jewish-American Wall Street Journal journalist Daniel Pearl.

On Wednesday, India launched “Operation Sindoor,” which the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) claims is targeted at dismantling “terrorist infrastructure” in Pakistan and Pakistan-administered Kashmir.

The operation came after Pakistani terrorists killed 26 Hindu tourists in Kashmir last month amid escalating tensions between the two countries.

In a post on X, the BJP confirmed that during this week’s operation, the Indian army killed Islamist terrorist Abdul Rauf Azhar, who was involved in numerous terrorism plots, including the 1999 hijacking of an Indian Airlines flight, the 2001 terror attack on the Indian Parliament, and the 2016 Pathankot Air Force base attack.

Azhar’s involvement in the 1999 hijacking led to the release of Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, a British-born al-Qaeda member with close ties to Pakistan’s intelligence services, who later was involved in the kidnapping and subsequent murder of 38-year-old Pearl, who was covering the war on terror as a journalist when he was abducted.

In a statement on X, Pearl’s father, Judea, addressed initial reports regarding Azhar’s death and his connection to his son’s murder.

“I want to clarify: Azhar was a Pakistani extremist and leader of the terrorist organization Jaish-e-Mohammed. While his group was not directly involved in the plot to abduct Danny, it was indirectly responsible. Azhar orchestrated the hijacking that led to the release of Omar Sheikh — the man who lured Danny into captivity,” he said.

In 2002, the Jewish-American journalist was abducted and killed by a group of Islamist terrorists connected to Azhar’s militant network, which had ties to al-Qaeda and Jaish-e-Mohammed, a terror group aiming to separate Kashmir from India and incorporate it into Pakistan.

On Jan. 27, 2002, an email was sent to several Pakistani and US media organizations, which included several photos, stating that Pearl was being held in “inhumane” conditions to protest the US treatment of Taliban and al Qaeda prisoners in Cuba. Photo: Screenshot

Originally stationed in New Delhi as the South Asia bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal, Pearl later moved to Pakistan to investigate terrorism following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New York City.

After kidnapping Pearl at a restaurant in Karachi, southern Pakistan, the Islamist terrorists, who identified themselves as the National Movement for the Restoration of Pakistani Sovereignty, accused him of being an Israeli spy and sent the United States a list of demands for his release.

However, Washington did not meet their demands, and Pearl was ultimately executed after being held captive for five weeks.

His wife, Mariane Pearl, gave birth to a baby boy, Adam D. Pearl, in Paris later that year. On the Daniel Pearl Foundation website, she said, “Adam’s birth rekindles the joy, love, and humanity that Danny radiated wherever he went.”

The post Indian Army Kills Islamist Terrorist Linked to 2002 Murder of Jewish-American Journalist Daniel Pearl first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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Jewish Jewelry Shop Owners Brutally Assaulted in Tunisia Days Before Annual Pilgrimage

A Jewish jewelry shop owner in Djerba, Tunisia, was brutally attacked by a man wielding a machete. Photo: Screenshot

A Jewish jewelry shop owner in Djerba, Tunisia, was brutally attacked by a man wielding a machete just days before the Tunisian island was set to host its annual Jewish pilgrimage, which is expected to draw thousands of visitors.

On Wednesday morning, two Jewish men — owners of a jewelry shop in the center of the island, located off Tunisia’s southeast coast — were physically assaulted by a man carrying a large knife.

Although the attack was halted when one of them screamed — alerting members of the local Jewish community who subdued the assailant — one of them was left severely injured.

According to local media reports, the attacker had surveyed the island the day before, visiting several stores to identify those owned by Jews. Local police arrested him shortly following the assault.

After the attack, one of the owners was admitted to the hospital with severe injuries. The 50-year-old Jewish man had his fingers severed during the assault and underwent surgery to reattach them.

Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar condemned the attack and expressed his wishes for a swift recovery to the victims.

“This attack comes two years after the previous deadly assault that claimed Jewish lives and the lives of security personnel during the Lag BaOmer celebration,” the top Israeli diplomat wrote in a post on X.

“I call on the Tunisian authorities to take all necessary measures to protect the Jewish community,” Saar continued.

Djerba is home to the majority of Tunisia’s Jewish community, numbering about 2,000 people, and is also where the renowned El Ghriba Synagogue, one of North Africa’s oldest synagogues, is located.

The attack comes just a week before Jewish pilgrims are expected to arrive on the island for the Lag B’Omer holiday, when thousands gather annually for three days of festivities. The annual pilgrimage to El Ghriba Synagogue, scheduled for May 15 and 16 this year, draws visitors from around the world.

The synagogue has been targeted in multiple terrorist attacks over the years, including in 1985, 2002, and 2023.

Two years ago, a shooting at the synagogue claimed the lives of two Jewish cousins and three police officers. Aviel Hadad, a 30-year-old Israeli goldsmith, and Ben Hadad, a 42-year-old Frenchman who had traveled to join the festivities, were among the victims.

The post Jewish Jewelry Shop Owners Brutally Assaulted in Tunisia Days Before Annual Pilgrimage first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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