Unsafe at MIT

Dr. Yossi Sheffi is an unlikely candidate to write a chronicle of modern antisemitism. A globally renowned expert on supply chain management, based at MIT for the last 51 years, he is more often found in his office deep in research, or advising governments and Fortune 500 companies.

But after what he witnessed on campus since October 7, 2023 — as an Israeli Jew who flew for the Israeli Air Force in the Six-Day War and the Yom Kippur War — he felt he had no choice but to “create an oral history” of what happened.

“People are already saying it’s not that bad, it really didn’t happen, you know, people are exaggerating,” he told Aish.com from his office in a recent interview. “So I just wanted to document it.” Harvard produced a 311-page report on antisemitism at the university, “kind of like a truth commission,” in Sheffi’s words. MIT never did. Into that silence, Sheffi stepped forward to write a readable chronicle of what happened on his own campus in his just-published book, Unsafe at MIT: A Chronicle of a Campus War on the Jews.

Sunlight Is the Best Disinfectant

Sheffi’s book follows the experiences of Jewish, Israeli, and occasionally non-Jewish students and faculty from October 7, 2023 through 2025. He wrote it, he says, “as a fight for just the truth” — because the administration, in his telling, is “still trying to shove it under the carpet.”

“I’ve been at MIT 51 years. It’s my home.” He knows the book carries a cost. He faces pressure not to draw attention to this chapter, and the risk of backlash from an administration he calls vindictive. He is writing it anyway. “We always said sunlight is the best disinfectant,” he says. The world, he believes, needs to know what happened.

From Science to Slogans

At the root of Sheffi’s grievance is what he sees as the hijacking of MIT’s scientific mission by a small group of ideological extremists, and by an administration that would not act quickly or decisively to enforce its own rules.

“It’s not the MIT that I joined 51 years ago, which was about science and engineering,” he says.

He traces the shift back further than October 7. “After the [George] Floyd murder, at MIT, if you apply for a faculty position, you had to write an article on how you support DEI,” he says. “Not how good your science is, not how good your engineering is, not how good your innovative papers are. No. How good are you at supporting DEI? It was, to me, a watershed.”

The problem, as Sheffi sees it, was never diversity itself, but what the framework left out. “The DEI infrastructure really betrayed the Jews,” he says. “Because this is inclusion. The I is for inclusion. And this was DEI — but not including Jews.”

After October 7

When Hamas invaded Israel on October 7, MIT’s Jewish and Israeli students expected their university to close ranks around them. Instead, within days, some classmates and faculty were justifying the massacre as “resistance.”

Sheffi and a group of colleagues began holding regular lunches for some 150 shaken Jewish and Israeli students, a place to vent, to check in, to feel less alone. “There is a huge difference between Israelis and Americans,” he says. “We grew up in a country where we are the majority. We serve in the military. We are all much tougher than the Americans. The American Jews are afraid.” In this regard, he thinks in the future that American Jews need to learn from Israelis to keep their heads high, with a “much thicker skin” as opposed to abandon elite institutions like MIT.

If the campaign against Israel was about tearing down, Sheffi’s instinct was to build. He points to Kalaniyot, a faculty-led initiative that has spread from MIT to several universities.

“Kalaniyot was the response to the BDS,” he says. “And it’s going very well. It’s now in several universities and growing, bringing Israeli scientists and creating science collaboration with Israeli engineers and scientists.”

The Quiet War That Continues

The tent encampments and mass demonstrations have largely faded. What worries Sheffi now is quieter, and in some ways harder to fight. Social exclusion of Jews and Israelis.

“It’s still going on,” he says. “Students are uncomfortable working with each other, and this is really affecting them. They don’t want to talk with Israelis, with Jewish students. Get out of the group. Just throw them out.”

This is a serious issue at a place like MIT, where working in groups is key to scientific collaboration. “Today you develop an iPhone or a car or anything--- it’s a team of engineers. Working in teams is part of the MIT education. This actually hurts their education.”

The New Battlefield

Sheffi says he “proudly served in the Israeli Air Force during the Six-Day War, the Yom Kippur War, and multiple military operations in between.” When he left for Cambridge in 1975, he believed his fighting days were behind him.

They were not. “I found myself drawn into another conflict,” he writes, one “waged not with weapons, but with slogans, intimidation, and institutional cowardice.”

This last fight is being waged with the written word. It is the oldest Jewish response to those who would deny a people’s suffering — zachor, remember, and testify.