The Latest Anti-Semitism Campus Canard
The Latest Anti-Semitism Campus Canard
Inside new attempts to replicate “DEI” tactics for the right on one elite college campus: the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The neocon oligarch Paul Singer’s fingerprints would seem to be all over it.
On June 25, 2025, the Louis Brandeis Center Coalition to Combat Antisemitism filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) along with two affected individuals—Lior Alon, an Israeli postdoctoral associate at MIT, and William Sussman, a Jewish former MIT Ph.D. student. They contended that, in the aftermath of the October 7 Hamas assault, MIT fostered a climate of hostility toward Jewish and Israeli members of its community; the complaint outlined several alleged antisemitic incidents directed at Alon, Sussman, and other Jewish students and faculty.
Open-source records suggest that the campaign against MIT and its president, Sally Kornbluth, is probably being orchestrated by billionaire Paul E. Singer, a major funder of neoconservative organizations and media efforts to combat the purported pandemic of campus-based antisemitism. Singer, major donor to the Washington Free Beacon and the financier behind the notorious “Steele Dossier” eventually weaponized in the debunked Russiagate conspiracy theory against President Donald J. Trump, remains a power player in Wall Street circles and in Republican quarters hoping for the return of Bush-style GOP politics after Trump’s days in the sun. Indeed, Trump had frequently praised the university, talking about his “great, brilliant genius, Dr John Trump at MIT,” who taught at the university for thirty-seven years. Like all elite academic institutions, MIT had succumbed to many elements of wokeness, but it had begun to reverse course by eliminating its DEI offices and requiring standardized tests.
However, the school has faced significant pushback from neoconservative elements on the right for not censoring Israel-skeptic speech under the guise of antisemitism.
This Brandeis lawsuit against MIT was filed by White & Case LLP, a law firm in a longstanding alliance with Singer. According to its webpage, White & Case represents Elliott Advisors—Singer’s UK-based affiliate—in “a range of confidential matters across the world.” Elliott Advisors is the European arm of Singer’s hedge fund dominion, managing investments and activist strategies throughout Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.
In 2020, White & Case represented Elliott Advisors in the acquisition of a €900 million portfolio of secured non-performing loans—including small business and SME loans backed by Greek real estate—from the National Bank of Greece. The transaction, known as “Project Symbol,” marked one of the largest sales of non-performing exposures by any Greek bank at the time.
White & Case has also advised Singer’s U.S.-based hedge fund Elliott Management in a range of high-profile matters. These include serving as counsel to Elliott as a debtor-in-possession (DIP) lender in the Chapter 11 restructuring of Avianca Holdings, representing Elliott in the bankruptcy of Windstream Holdings, advising on the corporate restructuring of FirstEnergy, and representing Elliott as the largest unsecured creditor in the Chapter 11 proceedings of Energy Future Intermediate Holding.
There are other noteworthy aspects about the Brandeis Center’s lawsuit against MIT.
First, although the Brandeis Center has initiated multiple legal actions and complaints against universities—including Columbia, Stanford, UCLA, Scripps College, and the University of Washington—for allegedly fostering environments of intimidation and harassment toward Jewish students, the MIT case is unique in its legal representation. It is the only case in which the Brandeis Center partnered with White & Case; all other lawsuits were filed through separate legal counsel.
The lawsuit also appears to be part of a broader Brandeis initiative to counteract the allegedly widespread scourge of antisemitism on American university campuses. This allegation is frequently repeated by establishment Republican politicians and elements of the Trump administration, often anchored in Marco Rubio’s State Department. (The hypocrisy of inflating racism concerns when the Democrats were just drummed out of power in part for such messages would appear to be lost on much of the Republican old guard.) On February 6, 2025, the Brandeis Center launched a new initiative called the Center for Legal Innovation (CLI), a public interest law firm to, in part, combat antisemitism on campus through litigation.
The launch of CLI appears to have been carefully timed. It followed just three days after the U.S. Department of Education (ED) February 3 announcement that it was initiating formal Title VI investigations into five universities—Columbia, Northwestern, Portland State, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Minnesota—for tolerating alleged widespread antisemitic harassment. The investigations were launched under the auspices of President Trump’s January 29 executive order to combat antisemitism in schools and postsecondary institutions.
These overlapping political and philanthropic circles make their connection widely recognized in conservative policymaking contexts. The close timing of CLI’s launch amid ED’s legal move suggests that the Brandeis Center may have mobilized its litigation vehicle opportunistically to capitalize on the federal lawsuits against universities.
The CLI initiative is also supported by a prominent advisory board that includes former U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr, who served under both Presidents George H. W. Bush and Donald Trump. Barr’s involvement is particularly notable, given his position as a trustee of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research (“Manhattan Institute”), a conservative think tank with prominent ties to Singer.
Until May 2025, Singer served as the Manhattan Institute’s chairman, shaping much of its strategic direction. Nonprofit tax records show that his Paul E. Singer Foundation has contributed more than $9.1 million to the Manhattan Institute since 2012, firmly establishing Singer as its most generous donor.
CLI’s other advisory board members include prominent legal and political figures such as the former Solicitor General Paul Clement, the campaign finance lawyer Jason Torchinsky, the First Amendment lawyer Erik Jaffe—and Jonathan Polkes, a senior litigation partner at White & Case, the firm representing Brandeis, Sussman, and Alon in the MIT lawsuit.
At least some evidence further suggests that the new CLI initiative is a litigation finance vehicle.
The presence on the board of David Perla, vice chair of Burford Capital, one of the world’s largest litigation finance firms, suggests that funders with a financial interest in high-profile antisemitism lawsuits may be backing this venture. Burford is known for underwriting legal costs in exchange for a portion of any settlement or award.
Combined with the involvement of Polkes from White & Case (who may have been tapped by Singer or his allies to file the MIT lawsuit), the law firm’s composition suggests potential harmony between ideological and financial interests, possibly leveraging litigation both to achieve policy outcomes and generate legal returns.
These connections are not the only point of interest in the MIT case. Of all the lawsuits listed on the Brandeis Center’s website, the case against MIT stands out as the only one filed by the newly created “Brandeis Center Coalition to Combat Antisemitism.” Like CLI, neither group existed prior to February 2025. Domain registration records show that the Coalition’s website, LDBCoalition.org, was registered on February 24, 2025.
That same week, the Trump administration’s Department of Justice announced on February 28 that its new Federal Task Force to Combat Antisemitism was launching investigations into 10 universities over alleged antisemitic incidents tied to pro-Palestinian protests. (Notably, MIT was not among the universities under federal investigation.)
Ties would seem to run deep. The joint Department of Education and Department of Justice investigation was led on the Education side by Craig Trainor, the acting assistant secretary for civil rights. Announcing the probe, Trainor proclaimed, “Today, the Department is putting universities, colleges, and K-12 schools on notice: this administration will not tolerate continued institutional indifference to the wellbeing of Jewish students on American campuses.”
Trainor previously served as special counsel to Congressman Jim Jordan (R-OH). Jordan was also closely affiliated with the Manhattan Institute earlier in his career. The Ohioan was a member of the syndicate’s Young Leaders Circle, an invitation-only network for rising political and policy professionals interested in shaping public policy. Trainor has also been a contributor to the Manhattan Institute’s flagship publication, City Journal, which profiles him as part of its editorial network.
Taken in context, the timing suggests that the new Brandeis initiatives were established to serve as a litigation vehicle aimed at selectively targeting campuses through private legal action. Moreover, the sequence of events—launching the Coalition to Combat Antisemitism and CLI just days after the federal task force announcement, coupled with the June filing of the MIT lawsuit—raises the possibility that the new initiatives were designed to exert external pressure on the Trump administration to widen the scope of its campus antisemitism investigations.
In this scenario, Brandeis’s high-profile MIT lawsuit may have been intended to steer media attention, galvanize donor and political networks, and ultimately influence federal investigators to prioritize MIT in future investigations or enforcement actions.
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Just three weeks before the Brandeis Center launched its CLI initiative, William Sussman, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit against MIT, left the university on January 16 to become a Manhattan Institute associate. “New York and the United States face great challenges, from illiberal education to union antisemitism. As of today, I have left @MIT to work on these issues as an associate at @ManhattanInstitute,” he posted on social media.
Since joining the Manhattan Institute as a fellow eight months ago, Sussman has published a mere two commentaries in City Journal: a piece titled “Columbia students should decertify their union,” and co-authored an op-ed: “Student radicals are hijacking the labor movement.”
One more vertical here: Minding the Campus is the webpage of the National Association of Scholars, an organization with the call to arms of favoring “civil and honest engagement of all ideas.” But, like many of the Singer-funded groups, it has focused on suppressing criticism of Israel using left-wing language like “academic freedom is not a shield for discrimination.”
Until 2017, Minding the Campus operated as a project of the Manhattan Institute. It was originally co-founded in 2007 by two Manhattan Institute senior fellows, John Leo and Herbert London. In 2015, the Manhattan Institute provided Leo with additional capital to sustain and grow the platform. Leo continued to oversee the site until his retirement in 2020, after which it was acquired by the National Association of Scholars (NAS).
In 2025, the NAS is led by Peter Wood—a former provost at the King’s College—who has served as NAS’ president since 2009.
Although the Paul E. Singer Foundation’s nonprofit tax disclosures do not list direct contributions to the NAS, the NAS’s own 2019 annual report identifies the Singer Foundation as one of its largest financial supporters. The inconsistency could stem from indirect funding mechanisms, such as contributions routed through donor-advised funds or loans.
In fact, the Paul E. Singer Foundation’s tax filings reveal that in 2018 and 2019, it extended a total of $500,000 in loans to a little-known entity named Pitkin Media Inc. Notably, the filings describe the recipient as a “publisher of educational journalism” but offer no further details about the company’s activities or affiliations.
Moreover, the address for Pitkin Media (4905 34th Street South, Ste. 234 in St. Petersburg, FL) is a UPS Store located in a strip mall.
Pitkin Media Inc. was incorporated in Delaware on April 10, 2018, and subsequently registered as a foreign corporation in New York in May 2018. Corporate records show that it was created by Max Neuberger, the founder of a media publishing company called Level Three Labs which publishes Jewish Insider (which has become a notorious administration brawler in the second Trump term, seeking to purge overly nationalist personnel) and eJewishPhilanthropy, among other publications. Neuberger also serves on the board of directors of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL).
It’s unclear whether Neuberger, Pitkin Media, or Level Three Labs is associated with NAS or Minding the Campus, but it’s noteworthy that Pitkin Media was founded at least five years after Neuberger founded Jewish Insider, suggesting that the corporation may have been established for another media venture such as Minding the Campus.
It is also potentially telling that the first media outlet to receive news of the MIT lawsuit from the Brandeis Center was, in fact, Jewish Insider.
On June 25, the same day the lawsuit was filed, Jewish Insider published a story framing it as an “exclusive” provided by the Brandeis Center. The article prominently quoted Kenneth Marcus, founder and chairman of the Brandeis Center, stating, “This is a textbook example of neglect and indifference,” while emphasizing that the lawsuit had been “shared exclusively with Jewish Insider.” Brandeis republished the exclusive coverage of the lawsuit by the publication.
Although Minding the Campus publicly states it was acquired by the NAS, its 2021 IRS Form 990 discloses that James Piereson (a Manhattan Institute senior fellow) served as chairman until at least 2021. Additionally, the site’s vice chairman, Mark Bauerlein, an English professor at Emory University, is a regular contributor to City Journal, the flagship publication of the Manhattan Institute.
Both the NAS and Minding the Campus have other connections to the Manhattan Institute as well. In the past two years, the website has published several articles and op-eds critical of MIT, some of which are by authors closely affiliated with the Manhattan Institute.
In March 2024, it re-published a Campus op-ed by a Manhattan Institute fellow titled “The Takeover.” It sounded the alarm that a dramatic rise in foreign student enrollment—especially from Arab and Muslim countries—had transformed elite U.S. campuses like MIT and Harvard into coliseums for unparalleled anti-Israel activism and antisemitic rhetoric.
The piece portrayed MIT leadership, in particular Kornbluth, as supine for failing to discipline protestors who had chanted what were termed as genocidal slogans or who were said to have overtly denied atrocities.
Two months later, in May 2024, the website published “Abolishing diversity statements is an empty gesture at MIT,” by Paul du Quenoy, the president of the Palm Beach Freedom Institute (PBFI). In 2024, du Quenoy’s PBFI sponsored the Manhattan Institute’s Fourth Annual Celebration of Ideas conference.
A year prior in December 2023, du Quenoy also published “Purging the Presidents” at the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal, examining how university leaders responded to campus unrest triggered by pro-Palestinian protests—especially at Harvard and MIT—by swiftly pushing out university presidents like Harvard’s Claudine Gay and Penn’s Liz Magill.
Du Quenoy is widely seen as a staunch ally of Ilya Shapiro, a senior fellow and director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute. In 2022, Shapiro was awarded the Paul du Quenoy Prize for his efforts to expose “absurd or unethical practices in academic institutions.”
In January 2024, Shapiro posted a social media tweet calling for Kornbluth’s removal.
“Two down, one more to go,” he posted to X. “Sally Kornbluth, call your office.”
Last but not least: Minding the Campus also appears to publish anti-MIT commentaries and op-eds by authors who use pseudonyms, an unusual and generally disparaged journalistic maneuver.
For example, on March 21, 2024, the website published an op-ed titled “Congress must defund MIT until it gets its house in order” by the pseudonymous “Mitt Castor.” Castor is described as the “pseudonym of an MIT educator who runs the Babbling Beaver website,” described as a satirical online magazine targeting “wokeness” published by alumni, faculty, staff, and students associated with MIT.
Mens et Manus (“Mind and Hand”) is the motto of MIT. At the very least, there appear to be some mind games and hidden hands at play at the world’s paramount technological academy, which is being diverted from its institutional purpose by politically-minded stunts. Certainly none of this is in service of this organization’s ostensible purpose of pursuing the “useful arts.”
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