Kalaniyot, a faculty-led program that aims to strengthen US ties with Israeli researchers from diverse backgrounds while building more supportive campus communities, is “the opposite of an academic boycott,” said associate professor of physics Or Hen, who co-founded the organization last year.
Since then, MIT-Kalaniyot has inspired chapters at Harvard Medical School, the University of Pennsylvania, Dartmouth, and Columbia, with more in the works.
The MIT model serves as a “cookbook,” said co-founder Ernest Fraenkel, Grover M. Hermann Professor in the Department of Biological Engineering. The main recipe: “Get together a faculty board, make sure they’re diverse, and stay out of politics.”
Of course, it’s hard to avoid politics when talking about Israel. And while Kalaniyot positions itself as a nonpolitical academic program, it’s riding a wave of Israel-related initiatives gathering momentum on some of the same college campuses that attracted the ire of the federal government over pro-Palestinian protests.
The timing is “no coincidence,” says Maya Wind, the Jewish-Israeli author of “Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom.”
“To really understand Kalaniyot,” said Wind, “you must see it within the broader ecosystem of efforts by the Israeli state, Israeli universities, and Zionist faculty and organizations here in this country that have for decades been promoting these collaborations precisely to counter the growing popularity of the student-led movement for Palestinian liberation.”
Kalaniyot’s very existence defies the BDS movement, and three MIT Corporation members, including chair Mark Gorenberg, have made independent contributions to the MIT chapter. Meanwhile, tensions over MIT’s research ties to Israel are mounting as the death toll surpasses 60,000 in Gaza.
Hen, who grew up on a chicken farm near Jerusalem, estimates 3 percent of faculty are Israeli at MIT, where recent incidents have targeted Israelis, as well as a professor who did research in collaboration with the University of Haifa.
MIT-Kalaniyot is now welcoming its first official cohort of sabbatical scholars and postdoctoral fellows, and its co-founders hope their presence will “humanize” a society they believe is misunderstood.
Named for the crimson flower that blooms in southern Israel after winter, Kalaniyot invites graduates and faculty of Israel’s nine state-recognized universities to apply for the opportunity to collaborate and train at top American schools.
“Maybe it’s a naive view, but we really think science is a tool to bring humanity together,” said Naama Kanarek, a Harvard Medical School assistant professor of pathology and faculty leader of the HMS branch of the Kalaniyot chapter at Harvard.
She and co-chair Mark Poznansky, a professor of medicine, pointed to scientific breakthroughs made by Israelis, from water desalination to treatments for multiple sclerosis and emergency trauma.
Plenty of scientists from “political hotspots” have come together at Harvard with an apolitical mission, Poznansky said. “It would be a shame — and wrong — to deny any scientists their ability to contribute to improving the lot of humankind because of the political system they live under.“
Shai Zilberzwige-Tal was a combat paramedic with the Israel Defense Forces long before she started studying bacterial immune systems at the Broad Institute. She was here when Hamas attacked Israel Oct. 7, 2023, killing about 1,200 people and taking around 250 more hostage. But even as she mourned, she was called a murderer, she said, and as campus protests escalated, she debated removing her military service from her résumé.
“I had, for a few months, an identity crisis,” said the mother of two. “I even felt ashamed of being Israeli, and then found myself ashamed for feeling that way.”
Around this time, Hen and other Israeli faculty invited her to a weekly lunch for Jewish people on campus where “we could just be,” she said. Those lunches grew into MIT-Kalaniyot. Zilberzwige-Tal is now an honorary postdoc fellow.
Hen and Fraenkel seeded the idea for the program in response to the alienation they saw among many Israelis and Jewish Americans on campus in the wake of the war.
In spring 2024 they traveled to Israel with colleagues to visit the Nova music festival massacre site and hear from Jews, Muslims, Christians, and Druze affected by the conflict.
In addition to meeting with the heads of Israeli universities, they also spoke with Palestinian academics and administrators, said MIT computer science professor Daniel Jackson, who documented the trip in photographs.
The group returned to Cambridge with the need to do something “proactive,” said Fraenkel.
Other stakeholders are now doubling down on their commitment to US-Israel academic collaborations amid the Trump administration’s pressure campaign against elite universities over antisemitism allegations.
Harvard just announced an undergraduate study-abroad program with Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, in addition to the formation of HMS-Kalaniyot. “There was so much talk about the problem — the antisemitism at Harvard,” said Kanarek, “people are thirsty to hear, OK, so what are we going to do about it?”
Columbia’s chapter complements pre-existing programs with Israel, said its faculty chair, Jacob Fish. But following the school’s $220 million deal with the Trump administration to restore research funding that was cut in the name of fighting antisemitism, it also presents a bigger opportunity to “reestablish connection” with Jewish donors.
While each chapter does its own fundraising, the Kalaniyot Foundation matches donations. So far, they’ve raised over $15 million altogether, including pledges.
MIT Corporation member Eran Broshy, who is from Israel and grew up in Vienna, said he considers himself “a very strong Zionist” and saw MIT-Kalaniyot as “a fantastic opportunity” to counter anti-Israel bias and boycotts.
“I happen to be supporting this particular initiative because it aligns with my values and my background,” but not at the exclusion of any other group, he added.
The Global MIT At-Risk Fellows Program, Palestine also launched last fall with internal pilot funding and is fundraising now to support future scholars, said program director Kamal Youcef-Toumi, a professor of mechanical engineering.
They had been aiming to bring five scholars from Palestine in September, but “three of them are in Gaza,” and getting out has been difficult, said Haynes Miller, a mathematics professor emeritus who’s on the board of advisers. He’s hopeful the other two, in the West Bank, will make it.
Still, he said, there’s a “dramatic asymmetry” between the experiences of Palestinian and Israeli scholars who’ve been invited to MIT.
Sapir Bitton, an MIT-Kalaniyot postdoc fellow in electrical engineering and computer science, moved to Cambridge six months ago.
She lives a short bus ride away from campus, her 2-year-old son goes to daycare near her apartment, and she said she feels lucky, despite some challenges.
Bitton said she’s met people at MIT who stopped speaking to her when they learned she was Israeli, and she’s a little self-conscious about her “really bad English.”
Even so, “it’s difficult not to speak about Israel,” she said, “if people ask me about it.”
Brooke Hauser can be reached at brooke.hauser@globe.com. Follow her @brookehauser.