After months of student protests related to the Gaza war in 2023 and 2024, some prominent schools, such as Harvard and Columbia, 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 antisemitism. So a professor began his own.
Yossi Sheffi, an M.I.T. 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 antisemitism at M.I.T.
“For M.I.T., this book is the report,” said Dr. Sheffi, 78, the director of the university’s Center for Transportation and Logistics.
Now that his manuscript is ready to be published, Dr. Sheffi says M.I.T. administrators are trying to minimize 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 M.I.T.,” Dr. Sheffi said of administrators.
A spokeswoman for M.I.T., Kimberly Allen, declined to comment on Dr. Sheffi’s book, but said that “M.I.T. encourages and expects independent thinking from all members of its community.” In a statement, she said that “M.I.T. leadership has in the strongest terms rejected antisemitism and taken thoughtful and steadfast action to prevent it.”
Dr. Sheffi’s center at M.I.T. 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 M.I.T. administrators ultimately approved expenses toward producing the book but declined expenses to promote it.
“The only difference is that this book is about antisemitism,” he said.
The Trump administration has seized on reports of campus antisemitism to pressure colleges with the loss of federal research grants. In antisemitism lawsuits filed this year against Harvard and the University of California, Los Angeles, the Trump administration used those schools’ antisemitism reports against them in its lawsuits.
Dr. 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 M.I.T. 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 Dr. Sheffi, who was born in Jerusalem.
Like many U.S. universities, M.I.T. saw intense student protests around the war in Gaza, including a pro-Palestinian tent encampment.
Protesters demanded that the university sever ties with Israel. M.I.T. asked the students to leave voluntarily but permitted the encampment protest to continue for about three weeks. M.I.T.’s president, Sally Kornbluth, warned protesters that they would be suspended if they did not leave, and then had the encampment cleared by the police. Dr. Kornbluth was one of three prominent college presidents who were called to testify about campus antisemitism before Congress in December 2023.
While M.I.T. 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 antisemitism and other forms of bias relating to the conflict in the Middle East, according to a statement on the M.I.T. website.
Ms. Allen, the university spokeswoman, cited a 2026 M.I.T. quality of life survey, in which 96 percent of Jewish undergraduates who responded and 93 percent of Jewish graduate students reported feeling satisfied at M.I.T., up from 84 percent of Jewish undergrads and 75 percent of Jewish graduate students in 2024.
Or Hen, an M.I.T. 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 M.I.T. 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 M.I.T., “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.”
Dr. Sheffi used interviews with M.I.T. 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 $20,000 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.
