MIT President Moves Passover Event Amid New Unrest

“The cohesion that Passover has provided Jews for millennia is currently strained in ways I cannot remember and cannot fathom,” Daniel Osborn, a writer, educator, and the host of “Joy and Conversation,” a Jewish history and culture podcast, wrote in an op-ed over the weekend.

A new wave of protesters rallied at tent encampments set up at Yale, New York University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Tufts University, and Columbia, where New York City police last week arrested more than 100 pro-Palestinian demonstrators. The activists, many of whom are not students, blocked streets and demanded that the university divest any Israeli interests and reverse any suspensions or expulsions related to the months of protests. Monday morning, police also arrested several dozen protesters at Yale University who defied warnings to leave.

Administrators of the prestigious schools frantically trying to respond to protect the safety of all students expressed frustration and sadness about the volatile campus climate. In canceling in-person classes this week, Columbia President Minouche Shafik announced Monday that she hoped it would “deescalate the rancor” and “give us all a chance to consider next steps.”

To their detractors, however, the protesters’ escalation impacting Passover was a predictable response to what they view as weak university leadership. For months, Jewish students, faculty, and influential alumni have remonstrated against the leadership of Ivy League and prestigious college presidents who have passively allowed pro-Hamas protestors to repeatedly violate campus rules, threaten Jewish students and faculty, and spew antisemitic hate speech. 

The pro-Palestinian protests began in the wake of the Oct.7 attacks in southern Israel where Hamas militiamen slaughtered 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took some 250 hostages. In response, Israel’s counteroffensive has claimed the lives of more than 34,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, according to Hamas officials.

School administrators are under pressure from all sides. On Monday, numerous faculty and staff at Columbia University and its affiliated Barnard College walked out of class in solidarity with the pro-Palestinian students.

Also on Monday, Robert Kraft, the owner of the New England Patriots and a Columbia University alumnus, announced that has halted all support of the university “until corrective action is taken,” the protests are stopped, and administrators work to “earn back the trust of the many of us who have lost faith in the institution.”

“[Columbia] is no longer an institution I recognize,” Kraft said during a press conference outside of the university’s Jewish student center, which bears his name.

Over the last few days, several members of Congress, including Republican Reps. Virginia Foxx of North Carolina and Rep. Mike Lawler of New York, denounced the anti-Jewish activities playing out on college campuses and demanded that university leadership crack down on the protests.

In one particularly stark example, a pro-Hamas protester standing in front of a small group of students waving Israeli flags at Columbia held a sign declaring that the pro-Jewish protesters would be al-Qassam Brigades’ “next target.” (Al-Qassam is the military wing of Hamas, which is designated as a terrorist organization by the United States government.) The lawmakers threatened to pass measures stripping universities and colleges of funding if they allow the acts of hate and intimidation to continue, and accused Columbia of failing to deliver on prior commitments to keep Jewish students safe.

While the media focused much of their coverage on Columbia and Yale, MIT President Sally Kornbluth also came under renewed fire from Jewish alumni, professors, and students complaining about her lack of leadership that has repeatedly failed to stop hostilities toward Jewish students and faculty.

“This is what we told them was going to happen,” Eric Spitz, a tech and sports businessman and MIT alumnus, remarked in an X.com post. “Out of control, is out of control, especially for MIT. Is Sally really in it for MIT? How much does she care about the damage being done to the MIT brand?”

Kornbluth, who is Jewish, was the lone survivor of a tumultuous congressional hearing in December in which she and the presidents of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania all refused to explicitly say that calls for the genocide of Jewish people violate campus rules of harassment.

Penn President Liz Magill resigned within days of her testimony amid a backlash of intense criticism from donors and alums. A few weeks later, a plagiarism scandal engulfed Harvard President Claudine Gay, snowballing with outrage over her congressional performance to topple Gay from her post.

Kornbluth now faces a lawsuit filed on March 8 by several MIT students and the StandWithUs Center for Legal Justice. The GOP-led House Education and Workforce Committee in early March also launched an antisemitism investigation into MIT in addition to its probes into antisemitic activities at Columbia and other Ivy Leagues.

On Sunday, after pro-Palestinian activists set up a tent encampment near the Hillel Jewish student center on MIT’s campus, the university’s leading Jewish advocacy group, MIT Israel Alliance, pressed Kornbluth for action to prevent any disturbance in the students’ ability to celebrate the beginning of Passover.

The group, led by Talia Khan, also pressed Kornbluth to provide remote learning options to those who feel unsafe because of the encampment and to clear the encampment, step up campus security, and expel and suspend students who are breaking MIT rules by setting up tents in an unauthorized location and refusing to leave.

“…As evidenced by protests and other incidents over the past six months, inaction by the administration will not lead to de-escalation, but rather embolden the protestors, further heighten tensions, and accelerate external pressures on MIT,” Khan wrote in the letter to Kornbluth asking for a response by early Monday.

An email response shared with RealClearPolitics shows that a Kornbluth aide responded to Khan early Monday that “the matter has our full attention.” Kimberly Allen, a spokeswoman for Kornbluth, told RCP that MIT police have been on the scene through Sunday night and will continue to be present. “MIT officials are aware of the tents and are determining next steps, with a focus on ensuring campus is physically safe and still fully functioning,” Allen said.

Just a few hours later, university staff told Jewish students that they had moved the planned seder dinner and Passover celebrations from Hillel to a new location and would be requiring students to register for the event and bring their MIT IDs. Khan and other Jewish students and faculty quickly complained that the university was accommodating the encampment while moving the Jewish students to another location so they could safely celebrate Passover.

“This is crazy,” Khan tweeted.

Khan and others in MIT’s Jewish community circulated an X.com post that included a video of a student in an unidentified pro-Palestinian encampment wearing a keffiyeh and boasting that she and other protestors are now running the campuses and hold the power. “We’ve shown our administrator the power that we hold, and we can’t give it up,” the female student says in the video. “We are the ones who run this campus – who make campus what it is.”

The decision to move the Jewish Passover celebration and allow the Palestinian “solidarity” encampment to remain also did not sit well with MIT’s Jewish faculty, who have repeatedly argued that hostile conditions and antisemitic hatred are undermining the university’s core research and educational mission.

“It is obvious that MIT leadership and the president specifically has lost control,” Retsef Levi, an operations management MIT professor, told RCP Monday. “It seems like she is focused on her survival in the job and even hired a crisis management firm for that instead of leading MIT to pursue and focus on its mission!”

Moving the seder dinner is simply another capitulation to the pro-Palestinian forces, Levi said. In doing so, Kornbluth is engaging in politics and “legitimizing hate against Israelis and Israel,” he added.

Certainly Kornbluth, who is Jewish, is keenly aware of the dark symbolism of Jews being forced into hiding to safely celebrate a sacred holiday. The Jewish Passover celebrates the end of the Jewish people’s years spent wandering in the wilderness and the liberation of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt.

Osborn recalls in his Sunday piece that the Passover seder is a “moment when Jews open the doors to their homes as a symbolic gesture of openness to those who wander and need sanctuary.”

“This year, too many doors are closing,” he lamented.