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Source: forward*com
After MIT professor’s killing, Jewish influencers spread unverified antisemitism claim
Nuno Loureiro’s death seemed to prove Jews everywhere were under attack. There was just one problem.

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Instagram users seized on an unverified claim that slain MIT professor Nuno Loureiro was Jewish.

Instagram users seized on an unverified claim that slain MIT professor Nuno Loureiro was Jewish. Screenshot of Instagram/Image by Louis Keene
Louis Keene

By Louis Keene December 17, 2025

There is no evidence that Nuno F.G. Loureiro, an M.I.T.-affiliated scientist who was fatally shot Monday at his home in Brookline, Mass., was killed in an antisemitic attack. It’s not even clear that he was Jewish.

But after news broke of his death, a rumor spread that Loureiro was Jewish — and targeted for his pro-Israel politics. In the wake of a mass killing at a Hanukkah celebration in Sydney, Australia, prominent Jewish social media influencers pointed to Loureiro’s death as proof that Jews all over the world were under attack.

The claim appeared to originate from Ira Stoll, the author of a conservative-leaning Substack newsletter called The Editors. In the newsletter and on X, Stoll reported Tuesday that Loureiro was Jewish. On Substack, Stoll attached a screenshot of a Threads post in which a user with that name defended Israel and criticized Hamas.

There was just one problem: The Threads account did not belong to the slain M.I.T. professor. But in an online information ecosystem that rewards virality, paranoia and hot takes — and whose most influential voices are rarely beholden to journalistic ethics — the unverified assertion took hold.
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“Loureiro has been reported to be Jewish with strong pro-Israel views,” the pro-Israel account StopAntisemites shared with more than 350,000 followers. Quoting that post, pro-Israel activist Eyal Yakoby wrote to his 250,000 followers on X, “Every Jew must arm themselves.”

Influencers who repeated Stoll’s claim stated it as fact, usually without stating their source of information. If they had, other uses might have seen that Stoll deleted the X post, and edited his Substack article to include a clarification that MIT had clarified the Threads account belonged to a different person.

Instead, the unverified claim spread to other platforms.

“It’s Jew-hunting season,” the pro-Israel food influencer Gabriel Boxer, who goes by Kosher Guru, and the Jewish account Community News told nearly 400,000 Instagram followers in a joint post. Marnie Perlstein, an Australian Jewish influencer, asked in a Reel why the media wasn’t talking about Loureiro’s Jewish heritage.
nuno loureiro mit jewish
No suspect has been publicly identified in the death of MIT professor Nuno Loureiro. Above, the MIT campus. Photo by Cassandra Klos/Bloomberg via Getty Images

There was a good reason legacy media that covered Loureiro’s death, among them the Associated Press and The New York Times, did not report that Loureiro was Jewish: It’s not yet clear whether he was. Indeed, some evidence suggests he wasn’t.

At around the same time as Yakoby’s post, a man named Joah Santos tried to shoot down the rumor, saying on X that Loureiro, a friend of his, was not Jewish and would have never spoken about Israel or Gaza.

In a phone interview, Santos said he initially met Loureiro through his cousin, who is a physics professor at Harvard, about 12 years ago. Neither Santos nor his cousin was aware of Loureiro being Jewish, Santos said. On the contrary, Santos said, Loureiro would fly home to Portugal to celebrate Christmas with his parents.

StopAntisemites’ post had been reposted nearly 2,500 times and received nearly 600,000 views as of this Wednesday evening, and remains visible on X. Santos’ opposing claim, meanwhile, has been seen only 150,000 times.

The idea that Loureiro was Jewish eventually found its way into Yeshiva World News and the Jerusalem Post, which called Loureiro “a Jewish and vocal pro-Israel nuclear scientist.”
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Authorities say Claudio Manuel Neves‑Valente, a person of interest in Loureiro’s death and in the Brown University shooting, was found dead in a New Hampshire storage facility. Funeral details for Loureiro have not been announced.

It’s possible that Loureiro was Jewish — neither the university that employed him nor his family has stated otherwise. But no one has been able to say definitively that he was.

The MIT media relations team told the Forward it could not comment on a staff member’s ethnicity or religion, and shared its public statement about Loureiro’s death. MIT Hillel did not respond to a voicemail left Wednesday evening.

Bruno Cappi, who described himself as a close friend of Loureiro’s in the MIT physics department, said in an interview that he had worked with the professor since 2016 and that his friend had never mentioned being Jewish during that time. Many of their colleagues in the department were Jewish, Cappi said, with last names typical for Jewish ancestry like Friedman and Rosen; if someone were attacking Jews, why would they go after someone whose Jewish identity was not widely known? “It’s all absurd,” he said.

More than 24 hours after Santos and others tried to correct the record, the articles from the Jerusalem Post and Yeshiva World News remained online. The posts by KosherGuru and Perlstein — none of whom responded to requests for comment prior to publication — also remain up as of Wednesday evening. (Some X posts have pending crowd-sourced Community Notes underneath stating he is not Jewish and linking to Santos’ post, but those notes are not currently being shown to all users.)

Additional evidence that Loureiro was pro-Israel was also thin: An X user claimed that a Google Street view image of the professor’s home showed a “Stand With Israel” sign. If the image did depict his building, it had been taken three years earlier; it also showed a multifamily building, and Loureiro — if he did live in the building at the time — did not necessarily live in the unit with that window.

Nevertheless, the claim continued to spread. Around 8 p.m. ET on Tuesday — several hours after the posts from Stoll and StopAntisemites — a Wikipedia article was created about Loureiro, which claimed he was born “to a Sephardic Jewish family.” That claim remained on the article for four hours before a different editor removed it.
forward.com/fast-forward/7… 😂🤣Dominus vobiscum. The Lord be with you.
Et cum spiritu tuo. And with your spirit.
Et cum spiritu tuo. which sounds like conspiritutu for conspirations
We need to put, Alexander Emerick Jones aka Alex Jones, on standby to expands on those theories below.⤵️
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Friday 19 December 2025: The World Clock — Worldwide timeanddate.com/worldclock/

Source:Grok @grok

Here are 3 speculative conspiracy theories about MIT Prof. Nuno Loureiro's shooting:

1. Assassinated by fossil fuel interests to halt his fusion energy research threatening oil dominance.

2. Targeted due to his reported Jewish heritage and pro-Israel views amid geopolitical tensions.

3. Part of a linked series of academic killings, including Brown Univ., possibly by foreign agents stealing tech.

Here is the corrected version of your text, focusing on grammar, punctuation, and syntax while keeping your original tone:

Dominus vobiscum. (The Lord be with you.) Et cum spiritu tuo. (And with your spirit.)

"Et cum spiritu tuo" sounds like "conspiritutu," suggesting conspiracies. We need to put Alexander Emerick Jones, aka Alex Jones, on standby to expand on these theories.

Friday, 19 December 2025: The World Clock — Worldwide timeanddate.com/worldclock/

Source: Grok @grok Here are three speculative conspiracy theories about the shooting of MIT Prof. Nuno Loureiro:

He was assassinated by fossil fuel interests to halt his fusion energy research, which threatened oil dominance.

He was targeted due to his reported Jewish heritage and pro-Israel views amid geopolitical tensions.

This was part of a linked series of academic killings, including those at Brown University, possibly carried out by foreign agents stealing technology.
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World-renowned MIT nuclear researcher was assassinated in his home in targeted attack by Iranian operative, Israel says dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1…