Why I Quit My Dream Job at MIT

As a computer scientist, I normally don’t have time for politics. But when Hamas invaded Israel on Saturday, October 7, brutally murdering 1,200 Israelis, I emailed the head of my department and urged her to issue a statement of support for Israelis and Jews. I assumed the reason was obvious. The university had sent statements before on various issues—such as a message condemning the murder of George Floyd in 2020 and another standing in solidarity with the Asian community amid a wave of hate crimes in 2021.

On Monday, the head of my department and its office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) sent out a message titled “A time for community support of each other.”

The message was riddled with equivocations, without mentioning the barbarity of Hamas’s attack, stating only that “we are deeply horrified by the violence against civilians and wish to express our deep concern for all those involved.” I was shocked that my institution—led by people who are meant to see the world rationally—could not simply condemn a brutal terrorist act.

That same day, the protests on campus started. Students chanted “Free Palestine” and “From the river to the sea” with fury and at times glee, like they were reciting catchy songs instead of slogans demanding the erasure of the Jewish people.

Even worse, faculty members started endorsing this behavior. One DEI officer at MIT liked an October 17 post on Twitter stating that “Israel doesn’t have a right to exist, it’s an illegitimate settler-colony like the US.” On October 18, a renowned faculty member in the neuroscience department accused Israel of committing “genocide” on Twitter. Then, the next day, she tweeted that her department was seeking a “diverse pool of candidates” for a tenure-track position in her department’s “inclusive community.” I remember thinking, with bitter irony, that Jewish academics need not apply.

The following month, our faculty newsletter was almost entirely dedicated to the protests, with several professors parroting anti-Israel propaganda. One professor wrote an anonymous editorial “Thanking the Protesting Students” for “reminding us that organizing and voicing dissent—even when it is loud or uncomfortable—is in fact one of our ‘essential activities.’ ” In another editorial called “Standing Together Against Hate: From the River to the Sea, From Gaza to MIT,” linguistics professor Michel DeGraff wrote that the protesters calling for intifada “have given me hope for the future.”

The only voices in the newsletter standing up for Jews were Jewish. But we are too few to fight this battle.

Though I cringed as I read these faculty letters, and shuddered as I walked by protests on campus, nothing has hurt more than watching the Israeli and Jewish students—who comprise fewer than 6 percent of the MIT student body—suffer.

On November 14, one of the Israeli PhD students in my department confided to me that he was taking a few weeks off from the semester to return to Israel—an active war zone—because he needed to escape the toxicity of MIT’s campus. This week, he told me he is considering leaving MIT without completing his PhD.

I am truly in awe of emerging leaders like Talia Khan, an MIT graduate student, who boldly spoke in front of Congress one month ago, explaining how her peers told her the young people murdered at the Nova music festival in Israel on October 7 “deserved to die because they were partying on stolen land.” She has served as a powerful voice for the Jewish community, particularly when so many others have been silent.

To the Israeli kids on campus, October 7 is not just some terrorist attack. Every single one of them knows a victim from that day—someone who was killed, or maimed, or had a loved one taken from them. They are now at the age where their friends back in Israel are fighting in Gaza. Meanwhile, their “peers” on MIT’s campus are labeling them “baby killers” responsible for “committing genocide.”