A group of Jewish professors, lecturers and staff members sent a letter on Monday calling on University President Sunil Kumar and Provost and Senior Vice President Caroline Genco to resist equating criticisms of Israel with antisemitism. The letter also urges Kumar and Genco to defend students with legal support, if necessary, and requests a meeting with Kumar himself.
The letter included signatories from a variety of schools and departments, ranging from history professors at the School of Arts and Sciences to scientists at the School of Medicine. Nathan Wolff, a professor of English at Tufts, organized the effort to send the letter.
“The Jewish community at Tufts, like the Jewish community in a broader context, can hold different opinions, can disagree, can come from different backgrounds; but [we’re] trying to urge people of conscience to say, ‘We do not want to see an undemocratic, violent crackdown on political speech in our name,’” Wolff told the Daily.
Following the arrest and detention of Columbia student Mahmoud Khalil, a group called “Concerned Jewish Faculty — Boston Area” published a letter on March 11 “denouncing, without equivocation, anyone who invokes our name — and cynical claims of antisemitism — to harass, expel, arrest, or deport members of our campus communities.” Over 3,000 academics signed the “Not in Our Name” letter, including all the signatories of the letter to Kumar.
“For me, it was a question of seeing that there were Tufts faculty who had signed that national ‘Not in our Name’ letter, and saying, ‘We should get together, and we should reach out to President Kumar to offer him support and advice on this tricky time when the university is under attack, and also to urge him to act decisively in support of Rümeysa [Öztürk] and in support of higher education and free speech,’” Wolff said.
Among five other actions and principles, the Monday letter urges Kumar and Genco to use “every available legal mechanism to fight these assaults on international students and freedom of academic speech and inquiry.”
The letter also calls on Kumar to condemn the actions of groups like Canary Mission, which publicly posted Öztürk’s information following her co-authorship of a 2024 Daily op-ed critical of Israel. It also calls on him to ignore the Anti-Defamation League’s ‘antisemitism report card’, calling it an effort to “erode university independence under the offensive pretext of ‘protect[ing] Jewish students.’”
Henry Wortis, a professor of immunology at the Tufts School of Medicine, is among the signatories. His family’s personal encounters with fascism inspired him to speak up.
“My parents moved to Vienna in the mid ’20s, and they lived there into the mid ’30s. So they were there during the rise of fascism in Germany and Austria,” Wortis said. “They came back in ’35, but that experience fundamentally shaped their ideology and political thinking … The need to fight fascism is something I grew up with, and it stuck with me.”
Steve Cohen, a senior lecturer in the Department of Education, also drew a connection between Ozturk’s detention and Nazism.
“When I saw that footage, I thought, ‘This is Berlin, 1933,’” Cohen said, referring to the widely-circulated video of federal agents detaining Öztürk on March 25. “I suspect that all who signed this letter, like all who went to the Powderhouse Square rally last week, are searching for ways to make their displeasure with what is happening known.”
Another signatory is Rachel Applebaum, a professor of history who felt it was her “duty to speak out,” especially following Öztürk’s detention.
“For me, that was an absolutely horrifying event, something that I could never have imagined would have happened in the place where I live, to a student at my university,” she said. “I really do not like having to leverage my identity. I think that’s something very personal, and usually not something that I bring into work. But in this particular case, I really felt like I couldn’t be silent.”
Wortis also condemned Öztürk’s arrest and detention.
“This is someone exercising their First Amendment rights, and not only was she illegally picked up, but carted away [with] no due process,” Wortis said. “It relates to the new definition of antisemitism, which is, in effect, to suggest that any form of criticism of Israel, Netanyahu, Gaza policies by the IDF are intrinsically antisemitic — and that’s unacceptable.”
Larry Feig, a professor of developmental, molecular and chemical biology at the School of Medicine, believes that ostensible efforts to combat antisemitism will end up having the opposite effect.
“I clearly am upset about antisemitism. It’s clearly on the rise, and what I’ve seen is that the approaches that are being used, I think, are going to be counterproductive,” Feig said. “A lot of innocent people are getting harmed.”
Cohen thinks universities should band together amid the actions of the Trump administration. “It is hard to stand up to intimidation. It is hard to stand up to bullying. It is hard to stand up to someone who controls the airwaves, but not to stand up would be shameful,” he said.
Wortis argued for supporting Kumar amid the pressure the university president faces.
“I think the president should feel that the letter implies support for the actions that he’s taken,” Wortis said. “So far, he’s stood up to the pressure, which is enormous, because as a small research based university, our absolute dependence on federal dollars for our survival is real … he’s faced with enormous problems, and I think we have to stand behind him.”
The letter ends with a request to meet with Kumar to “provide support” and help “strategize about Tufts’ response to these unprecedented attacks.”
“While I understand that President Kumar has an unimaginable amount on his plate, we’re really eager to speak with him, and we really hope that he takes up our call,” Wolff said. “He has an incredible opportunity to lead by example, to respond forcefully to Trump's assaults on our students and on higher ed, and we want to help him.”
Noting that “the eyes of the whole world are on Tufts right now,” Applebaum called for the administration to “be brave and stand up.”
“My sense is that their values are in the right place,” she said. “I would urge them to … defend academic freedom, defend freedom of speech, civil liberties — not just for American citizens, but for international students.”
