‘Mind Infection’: Meet The MIT Linguistics Professor Who Begged To Teach An Anti-Israel Seminar

CAMBRIDGE — In a seminar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, linguistics professor Michel DeGraff argued that Jews have no connection to Israel and that Israeli textbooks “weaponize trauma of the Holocaust.”

“They grew up with this trauma that made them fear that their existence is in threat, by anyone who doesn’t believe in the superior position of the Jewish people in Israel,” DeGraff said of Israeli youth.  

The course’s full title is: “Language and linguistics for decolonization and liberation and for peace and community building from the river to the sea in Palestine and Israel to the mountaintops in Haiti and beyond.” DeGraff’s course was initially rejected by the university’s Linguistics department, citing his lack of qualifications. DeGraff specializes in Haiti and linguistics, not the Middle East. But DeGraff was permitted to teach the course as a not-for-credit speaker series beginning in the fall semester.

Wednesday’s lecture had just 20 attendees, one of whom was manning the camera. During the seminar, a keffiyeh-clad DeGraff covered a variety of topics during the seminar which spanned from what he believes “Zionism really means,” and why he believes the “on campus Israel lobby” is a wealthy foreign-funded industry, to the recent attack of Jews in Amsterdam.

Also in attendance were a few Jewish community members from MIT, there to make sure DeGraff did not use his position of power to attack a student.

Before DeGraff’s Wednesday class, he faced criticism after an MIT graduate student, Will Sussman, exposed the previous week’s seminar, which featured a speaker claiming that Jewish religious and student life groups like Hillel and Chabad promote Zionism and are “targeting critics of Israel.”

An @MIT professor posted extremely dangerous rhetoric about MIT Hillel, as well as @HillelIntl, @ChabadOnCampus, @israelcc, and other Jewish student life organizations. These groups represent the majority of Jews on campus, and he accuses them of funding a “mind infection.” pic.twitter.com/LbhUQjqdYR

— Will Sussman (@WillSussmanPhD) November 9, 2024

Sussman pointed to DeGraff’s public Instagram post, which included screenshots of the speaker’s slides, writing that the lecture “opened our eyes on the workings of Israeli education as settler-colonial Zionist ‘mind infection’ for the Nazification of Palestinians.”

Sussman shared DeGraff’s comments, describing them as “extremely dangerous rhetoric” about Jewish organizations on campus that “represent the majority of Jews at MIT.”

DeGraff responded to Sussman in two bizarre tweets, recommending he read the work of anti-Israel activists and claiming that the student groups were “acting against the interests of some Jewish students.” Sussman then sent a brief email to DeGraff, asking him to “please leave me alone.”

Instead of de-escalating, DeGraff launched into a tirade against Sussman, posting three additional tweets, one of which accused Sussman of triggering racist insults, plagiarism, anti-Semitism accusations, incitement to violence, and threats.

DeGraff also replied to Sussman’s email, copying additional recipients, repeating the same accusations, and requesting that Sussman start “ceasing and desisting as well,” though Sussman had not contacted the professor further after he asked to be left alone.

A heated email exchange involving DeGraff and several other MIT employees followed, during which DeGraff threatened to use Sussman as a “real-life case study” in his upcoming class.

A leader of the campus group for Israeli and Jewish community members, Professor Or Hen, came to Sussman’s defense, criticizing DeGraff for failing to leave the student alone and instead escalating the situation to a broad audience.

“There seems to be a significant power imbalance at play here,” Hen wrote. “You are a distinguished, tenured professor while Will is still a student, likely under considerable stress. He reached out to you privately with a simple request to end your exchange, yet his email has not been distributed broadly and is set to become a case study for the entire department.”

Hen said he was concerned about an MIT professor using his podium to discuss a negative interaction with a student.

But DeGraff continued to tweet about Sussman and mention him in the broader email chain, arguing against excluding discussion of Sussman in the seminar. He noted that Sussman had shared his views in high-profile publications such as The Wall Street Journal and National Review.

Ahead of Wednesday’s class, DeGraff was asked by MIT administrators to refrain from publicly attacking Sussman. 

Despite the public controversy, DeGraff began his seminar on Wednesday by acknowledging his exchange with Sussman, without using his name. 

“There was one student who, there was an exchange about the previous session and there was a debate over email and Twitter … I won’t mention his name but you probably know who he is. Let us not forget that as we engage in this academic exercise that there is a genocide going on,” DeGraff said. “Let’s try to think very deeply about that.”

At one point in the lecture, DeGraff discussed the attack on Israeli Jews in Amsterdam earlier this month after a soccer game. He insinuated that videos of a Palestinian flag being taken down and an offensive chant by the Israeli soccer fans caused the violence, despite authorities reporting that nearly 100 Arabs perpetrated a coordinated series of assaults that was described as a “Jew hunt” in the attacker’s group chats.

“The Israeli soccer supporters were engaged in quite violent attacks against Palestinian residents of Amsterdam,” he said.

Present in the classroom was Hen, the professor who criticized DeGraff’s handling of the situation. DeGraff was rattled by Hen’s presence, repeatedly referencing that there were Israelis and Jews present, and made a point of noting that Hen — who was sitting quietly, observing — had served in the IDF.

At the end of the lecture, as Hen was leaving, DeGraff asked him if he had any questions, to which Hen said he did not, but told DeGraff he thought his lecture was biased and detached from reality. 

“Almost everything you said was incorrect in the sense that it is very dangerous to take anecdotes and single events and pretend they’re representative,” Hen said while leaving the room. “I think a lot of what was presented here did not provide a balanced perspective.”

DeGraff defended his qualifications to teach the seminar in a lengthy email to The Daily Wire, where he accused this reporter of saying that his “national origin causes lack of expertise and lack of scholarly competence in research about Judaism.”

“Are you (seemingly) implying that there’s a particular ‘Jewish’ gene that’s indispensable for research into Judaism?” DeGraff asked, before implying that this reporter lacks “expertise and scholarly competence about Judaism.”

DeGraff claimed that this reporter’s posts on X about his seminar “exemplify the consequences of the ‘mind infection’ that’s caused by the weaponization of the trauma of the Holocaust in Israeli textbooks.”

In the process of seeking approval to teach the class under the authority of his department, DeGraff had public clashes with department head Danny Fox. In a Zoom meeting between the two, DeGraff kept using charged language including describing the Israeli offensive in Gaza as a “genocide.” DeGraff told the Chronicle that, Fox responded by saying, “You’re f***ing out of your mind.”

After DeGraff’s course was officially rejected in May, he aired his grievances in emails that included many non-involved MIT faculty and students, social media, and the campus paper. In The Tech, DeGraff highlighted Fox’s Israeli nationality, criticized his political views, and defended the anti-Israel student encampment which he described as standing up to MIT’s complicity in “Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.”

DeGraff was often present at the encampment, where a Jewish student required a police escort to enter. He refused to leave the encampment after MIT president Sally Kornbluth ordered the protesters to clear the public space or face suspension.

In July, nine senior faculty members from the Linguistics Department published a response to DeGraff’s article, voicing their support for Fox and criticizing DeGraff for suggesting that his course was rejected as a personal attack or due to Fox’s nationality or political beliefs.

In one part of the lecture, DeGraff put several screenshots of critical tweets against him and attempted to rebut them. One of them, from a former Hillel leader, stated that Jewish students want to be connected to Israel. DeGraff responded by claiming that “connection to Israel” is not an “essential part of Judaism.”

“It is not true that there is not a uniqueness of preference for Jews to have a connection to Israel,” DeGraffe said, with a slide next to him giving statistics that state 42% of Jews do not believe Israel was “literally given by God to the Jews.” 

His slides did not mention that the Pew Research poll he cited found that the majority of Jews are “emotionally attached to Israel” and that eight in 10 Jews say “Israel is an important or essential part of what being Jewish means to them.” DeGraff told The Daily Wire that he is aware of this particular statistic in the survey.

DeGraff went on to claim that Zionism isn’t necessarily strong among Orthodox Jews because some visibly anti-Israel Orthodox Jews were present on campus during a protest, referring to a fringe group that is often shunned in mainstream Orthodox circles.

In a follow-up email to The Daily Wire, DeGraff doubled down on his claim, expanding it to questioning Judaism’s connection to the land of Israel.

“The point we discussed in the seminar has to do with the question whether Judaism necessarily include [sic], as an essential tenet, a connection to the land in the Middle East that became the country of Israel in 1948. As we explained in the seminar, there has been many branches of Judaism, before and after 1948, that have categorically rejected this connection to the land of Israel (i.e., settler-colonial Zionism) as “an essential part of Judaism,” he wrote.

DeGraff also doubled down on his attacks on Jewish student life, claiming that the groups’ funding “make them become agents of Zionism” and has led to free speech repression.

“There cannot be free speech if there’s such repression going on because of funding coming from outside of the country.”

DeGraff has been embroiled in several controversies since Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel, including sending a letter to the then president of the University of Pennsylvania, Liz Magill, accusing her of being afraid of “losing access to the checkbooks of Jewish donors.”

In December, DeGraff took to Instagram to share a “courageous question” about whether Israel’s war in Gaza could be compared to the Holocaust. 

“One courageous question that might help break the Zionist genocidal propaganda machine: Was the Holocaust really truly a singular historical event — not to be compared with, say, the ongoing genocide in Gaza?” he posted, according to Canary Mission.

Other posts include him justifying Hamas’ attack and pushing the genocidal slogan “from the river to the sea” which calls for the elimination of Israel.

MIT did not respond to a request for comment.