The Department of Education sent a warning letter in March 2025 to Tufts and 59 other U.S. colleges and universities. The letter stated something straightforward yet unprecedented from a major federal department: the recipient schools were under investigation for “violations relating to antisemitic harassment and discrimination.”
In line with these accusations, the Anti-Defamation League’s (ADL) 2024 Antisemitism Report Card presented a bleak picture of Jewish life at Tufts, giving the university an “F” rating. In 2025, though, something changed, and the school’s rating was updated to a “C,” describing Jewish Life on Campus as “Excellent.” As of March 10, 2026, the ADL’s grade for Tufts has risen yet again, now to a “B.” For the first time since it began releasing antisemitism report cards, the organization says its concerns about campus conduct and climate at Tufts are “low to none,” signaling an apparent shift in campus culture over a short period.
Just recently, the Tufts campus was a hotbed of turmoil over the conflict in Gaza and Israel. Hamas’s terrorist attacks on civilian targets in Israel on October 7th, 2023, catalyzed the unrest. The attack killed nearly 1,200 people, injured 5,400, and led to the capture of over 200 Israeli hostages. The subsequent war in Gaza has claimed over 69,000 Palestinian lives as of March 2026, according to the British Red Cross.
Tension on campus was not unique to Tufts, spreading across America, driven by divisions over differing reactions to the conflict, and culminating in protests and counterprotests, encampments, student-life disruptions, and more. In addition to becoming a major hotspot for disagreement and sometimes harassment on campus, these campus protests also became a major flashpoint in the Trump administration’s pressure campaign on higher education.
Within our locales of student leadership, these tensions played out in a contentious March 2024 Tufts Community Union (TCU) Senate Meeting, where senators met to consider three resolutions demanding that the university recognize a genocide in Gaza and divest from Israeli companies. During the meeting, various Jewish students in attendance reported facing harassment and name-calling. The Tufts Tribune reached out to several of these students but did not receive a response.
According to Patrick Collins, Tufts’s executive director of media relations, the Department of Education’s accusations partly come from the alleged behavior at the 2024 meeting. “The Trump administration has signaled its intent to pursue the complaint, which stems from allegations pertaining to [the] Tufts Community Union Senate hearing,” Collins explained. “Tufts remains willing to engage meaningfully and in good faith with the government’s inquiry.”
Some universities, notably Harvard and Columbia, faced significant cuts in federal funding in the wake of accusations of similar behavior on their campuses. Although Tufts did not lose funding directly on account of these accusations, fallout from these incidents has taken other forms, including the retracted support of several Jewish donors.
The Tribune has received multiple anonymous reports of donors withdrawing their financial support of the school in response to its handling of pro-Palestinian encampments and incidents, such as at the 2024 TCU meeting. One such donor has cut all affiliations with the school, even refusing to be interviewed.
Despite these concerns, Collins emphasized that the retraction of financial support is limited to a handful of individual donors.
“Our alumni raise concerns to us from time to time, which we take very seriously,” he said. “However, we have not seen a marked difference in the level of alumni support, and we attribute that to alumni recognizing the university’s commitment to addressing this important topic.”
Some on the Tufts campus, however, do not think the issue of antisemitism has been resolved. Joel Trachtman, professor of international law emeritus at the Fletcher School, alleges that Tufts created an unwelcoming environment toward Jewish students—something he believes remains true today.
“Tufts has declined to do the work of really addressing antisemitism in a discrimination sense,” Trachtman said. “UC Berkeley is working more on that, Harvard is working more on that. But Tufts is avoiding the work.”
Trachtman accused Tufts of institutional shortcomings, claiming that the organizations put in place to deal with discrimination on campus are ineffective. “The Office of Equal Opportunity doesn’t know how to handle those issues,” he said, referring to cases of antisemitism. Trachtman recalled a meeting he had with a Tufts administrator involved in diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives who dismissed the issue of antisemitism, telling him, “The Jews, they’re not oppressed.”
Benjamin “Buzzie” Levine (‘28), the president of Tufts Friends of Israel (FOI), sees some Jewish donors’ withdrawal of support as an appropriate response to the tumult of 2023 and 2024. “Alumni of Tufts were shocked and disappointed by what happened on this campus during the encampments that school year,” Levine said. While on a gap year in Israel during the height of student protests, Levine “heard the firsthand experiences of Jews on this campus who just felt like the campus was taken over. It was very alienating.”
In November 2024, Tufts suspended Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), the primary organization leading the protests and encampments of 2024, from operating as a student organization after school administrators charged SJP with violating the Student Code of Conduct. Throughout this period, some protests included “flyers [calling for] globalizing the intifada and pictures of machine guns,” according to student Ben Handell (‘28).
For the most part, Levine has noticed a shift in campus attitude since the protests and encampments of 2024.
“There have still been difficulties, but things have really calmed down,” Levine explained. “Even compared to last year, this year has been really quiet. The Jewish community here definitely gives a lot of credit to the administration for . . . banning SJP.”
Handell, who is Jewish and involved in Hillel and Chabad on campus, told the Tribune that he has not “experienced antisemitic incidents directly.” Nevertheless, he has seen antagonism over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict continue to surface since he began at Tufts last year. One such instance took place at an event this past October.
“I had organized an event for Friends of Israel that was disrupted by the Coalition for Palestinian Liberation,” Handell told the Tribune. The Coalition for Palestinian Liberation (CPLT), according to Handell, contains former SJP members but is not directly affiliated with the suspended club. “Three masked individuals entered the room and started screaming. They attempted to disconnect the computer that our livestream was running on and shout over the speakers,” he said.
Nate Weiss (‘29), who was also in attendance, witnessed similar interruptions by protesters during the event. “[A] girl in front of me had a plate [of food] . . . she went back later to get seconds, and then at the end she gets up to ask [the speaker], ‘how much did the IDF pay you to say this?’”
The Tribune reached out to multiple pro-Palestinian student organization leaders on campus, but they declined to speak publicly. Many cited online doxxing on sites like Canary Mission and recent actions of the Trump administration in cases of Palestinian support—most notably with Rumeysa Ozturk—as reasons for not wanting to express their opinions in print.
Despite the incident between FOI and CPLT, Handell agrees that the incidence of behavior that could be considered antisemitic has declined. “Just in terms of campus presence, these types of events have decreased,” Handell explained.
Alex Friedman (‘27), a Tufts junior involved in the Jewish community on campus, agreed that while “antisemitism is a problem everywhere . . . I don’t think it’s the most pressing problem at Tufts,” and that he experienced the issue largely through a perceived loss of discourse. “As it obviously became more heated on campus, I did feel like I caught myself with certain people either staying silent about certain opinions or just not talking about it as much,” he explained.
One antidote has been the growing host of opportunities for dialogue on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict over the past year, which have attempted to engage students from a variety of backgrounds. Gesher, a Hillel-sponsored student-led fellowship, seeks to fill a gap in honest conversation on the violence in the Middle East.
Zoe Weiss (‘29), a first-year Jewish student, sees Gesher as a positive opportunity for engaging in dialogue about the Israeli-Palestinian situation. “All of the people in the [Gesher] . . . want to learn, listen, have an open mind, and aren’t speaking to change other people’s opinions; they’re just trying to share their own perspective,” she said.
With a growing polarization around the issue of conflict in the Middle East, Zoe emphasized the importance of honest conversations across differences. “You can try to have an open dialogue with someone, but if they have a closed mindset, it’s really difficult,” she said. After participating in the fellowship last semester, Zoe looks forward to being a teaching assistant for Gesher in the fall.
The university has also hosted several pro-Israel speakers, including Haviv Rettig Gur, a journalist for the Times of Israel who spoke at an event on February 4th hosted by the new Center for Expanding Viewpoints in Higher Education, and Yael Sternhell, an Israeli professor who spoke at a Tufts Fares Center event in 2024.
Polling suggests that some students feel that supporting Israel makes them a target on campus. In a 2024 report on campus antisemitism by Tufts political science professor Eitan Hersh, students were asked to respond to the following: “On my campus, Jewish students pay a social penalty for supporting the existence of Israel as a Jewish state.”
Across all of the colleges where students were polled, an average of 54% of students responded “yes” to this statement. However, at Tufts, nearly 79% agreed, making it one of the highest percentages in the study.
Other reports, like the one commissioned by the Harvard administration, concur that antisemitism on campus has risen notably, but also find a distinct increase in Islamophobia. In the report, nearly 35% of Muslim or North African students responded that they didn’t feel physically safe on campus, and nearly 80% expressed being uncomfortable sharing their political opinions on campus, both the most of any group surveyed.
Trachtman’s other major concern stems from the correlation between anti-Israel sentiment and antisemitism, both of which he believes to be widespread, not to mention the selfsame phenomenon.
“When you apply a double standard, or criticize the Jewish state in a way you wouldn’t criticize other states . . . that is . . . evidence of hatred of Jews,” Trachtman told the Tribune. “[This bias] can only be explained by fundamental antipathy towards Jewish people.”
Trachtman believes his own support for Israel comes at a social cost. “I would say [I feel] unwelcome, more than unsafe . . . I feel like an outsider because the discourse is very one-sided,” he said.
Not all Jewish community members, though, agree on what exactly constitutes antisemitism—especially when it comes to understanding the difference between antisemitism and anti-Zionism, making it at times difficult to gauge the prevalence of the issue.
“Anti-Zionism is not the same as antisemitism,” said Meirav Solomon (‘26), who is the national president of the organization J Street U and serves as the president of the J Street U chapter at Tufts. J Street U describes itself as a “pro-Israel, pro-peace, pro-democracy” student organization. “If I have tried to model anything throughout my time being a part of J Street U, it is that there are certainly ways to criticize Israel without being antisemitic,” Solomon explained.
Friedman, who is not himself a member of J Street U, vehemently agreed. “I shouldn’t even have to say this, but I don’t think that being anti-Israel or being anti-Zionist is antisemitic . . . Zionism is a political ideology, whereas Judaism is a religious and ethnic identity.” Friedman outlined another worry, the idea that Zionism itself lacks a “clear definition,” and having studied the issue in class, recapitulated that “even in the scholarly discourse, the definition of Zionism shifts depending on who you ask.” In tandem with this shifting definition, Friedman sees the rise of Zionism being used as a “negative buzzword across the board,” making it hard to have serious conversations about the subject.
Last spring, Solomon testified in front of the U.S. Senate about what she views as the weaponization of antisemitism by “right-wing groups and the Trump administration” used “to advance their campaign against immigrants and universities.”
During her testimony, Solomon expressed her concerns that accusations of antisemitism were being used to justify harm to other groups. “Antisemitism is real, and we must combat it, but we cannot protect Jewish students at the expense of the safety, dignity, and rights of all other students on campus,” she said in a statement to the Tribune. “At the end of the day, our futures and our lives are inextricably intertwined.”
Patrick Collins stressed the efforts of the university to provide spaces for Jewish life, something he believes helped boost the ADL’s score for Jewish life at Tufts.
“Tufts has consistently fostered a vibrant Jewish campus life in partnership with its robust interfaith community, including Hillel, Chabad, and a number of other student and community affinity groups, many lauded in the ADL’s recent report card,” Collins explained.
Responding to concerns about the effectiveness of Tufts’s antisemitism response, Collins noted that “the university will be sending a team of senior leaders to Brandeis to attend the 2026 Summer Institute on Antisemitism in Higher Education.” The Office of Equal Opportunity (OEO), which Trachtman expressed concerns about, has also “launched a Title VI/Title VII training for all employees this academic year to support education and awareness of discrimination,” Collins said.
As campus climate has cooled and many Jewish students feel more comfortable on campus now than they did in years prior, there is an increased hope that more civil discourse might emerge—a desire that transcends individuals’ varying political perspectives.
Friedman emphasized that conversations about both antisemitism and Islamophobia on campus need not be in opposition to one another: “In the same way that I think that it’s not antisemitic to criticize Israel, to criticize support for Israel, to criticize America’s involvement with Israel and the treatment of the Palestinian people . . . I think it’s also not anti-Palestinian or anti-Palestinian-rights or anti-Palestinian-liberation to have conversations about antisemitism.” He emphasized that the only way to move forward is to have those conversations.
Going forward, Handell remains “hopeful that there are more people willing to engage across differences and have dialogue,” something that he thinks has been missing from discourse in the past.
“Certain groups don’t believe in talking with people who disagree with them, but the vast majority of Tufts students are willing to engage,” he said. “So we should focus on those people and strike up conversations even when it might be uncomfortable.”
Artwork by Morgan Zhang