Illustrative: A pro-Hamas encampment at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US, May 6, 2024. Photo: Brian Snyder via Reuters Connect

A California-based Jewish advocacy organization has asked the US Supreme Court to hear a federal lawsuit which accused the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) of fostering antisemitism by allowing pro-Hamas activists to bully, harass, and discriminate against Jewish students over a period of months which followed the Palestinian terrorist group’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre in southern Israel.

“This case is about whether federal civil rights laws continue to protect students when discriminatory harassment is repackaged as political activism,” Carly Gammill, director of legal policy and litigation at StandWithUs Saidoff Law, said in a statement last week. “No person should lose their civil rights because a court decides that substantial harassment and lack of access to educational opportunities are acceptable so long as the perpetrators claim political motives.”

As previously reported by The Algemeiner, the complaint was filed in March 2024 by the StandWithUs Saidoff Law legal group. It alleged that high-level university officials refused to help when pro-Hamas activists called for a genocide of Jews in Israel and carried on perpetrating numerous other acts of harassment and intimidation, including chanting “globalize the intifada,” relieving themselves on properties administered by Jews, and distributing a “terror-map” on campus which highlighted buildings associated with Jews and Israelis.

The suit stutter-stepped in July 2024, however, when US District Court Judge Richard Gaylore Stearns — who served as a political operative for and special assistant to Israel critic and former Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern — dismissed it in a ruling which accused the Jewish plaintiffs of having expected MIT officials to be “clairvoyant” in anticipating a surge of antisemitism. Stearns also rejected the legal group’s contention that pro-Hamas demonstrators at MIT intentionally violated the civil rights of Jewish students through their actions.

The complaint was rebuffed again on appeal in December 2024, with the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit saying that the actions of anti-Zionists constitute protected expressive activity under the First Amendment and cannot be assessed as injuries under the section of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 cited by Saidoff Law. The court also rejected the argument that anti-Zionism is racist and violates Title VI of the Civil Rights Act — a keystone argument of Jewish civil rights groups fighting for laws and policies which secure for Jews the robust anti-discrimination protections afforded, for example, to African Americans in housing, the workplace, and employment.

“If allowed to stand, the decision could make it substantially harder for victims of racial harassment, ethnic discrimination, and other forms of hostile educational environments to obtain relief under federal civil rights laws,” Saidoff Law said on Tuesday, with Gammill adding that its petition “asks the court to provide clarity regarding the obligations of federally funded institutions and the protections available to students who experience discriminatory harassment.”

MIT’s alleged indifference to antisemitism has been described in harrowing testimony shared with US Congress, civil courts, social media, and this publication. Speaking to the House Committee on Education and the Workforce in December 2024, MIT student Talia Khan told members of Congress that attending the institution “traumatized” her, charging that it has “become overrun by terrorist supporters that directly threaten the lives of Jews on our campus.”

Khan went on to recount MIT’s alleged efforts to suppress expressions of solidarity with Israel after Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre, which included ordering Jewish students to remove Israeli flags from public display while allowing Palestinian flags to fly across campus. She described the double standard as a “scandal” alienating Jewish students, staff, and faculty, many of whom resigned from an allegedly farcical committee on antisemitism. Staff were ignored, Khan said, after expressing fear that their lives were at risk, following an incident in which a mob of anti-Zionists amassed in front of the MIT Israel Internship office and attempted to infiltrate it, banging on its doors while “screaming” that Jews are committing genocide.

In another explosive lawsuit filed in June 2025 by the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, MIT faced similar allegations involving faculty whom anti-Zionists professors harassed in person and stalked online.

MIT has consistently denied any wrongdoing, telling The Algemeiner in response to the Brandeis Center’s allegations that “MIT will defend itself in court regarding the allegations raised in the lawsuit. To be clear, MIT rejects antisemitism.”

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.