Top university knowingly rejected professor’s application for being Israeli, lawsuit alleges

The Brandeis Center filed a lawsuit against the University of California (UC) Berkeley for allegedly denying a professor’s job application because she is Israeli.

Dr. Yael Nativ was a visiting professor at UC Berkeley in 2022 and was invited by fellow professors at the university to apply for another visiting position for the 2024-2025 school year, the lawsuit stated. However, shortly after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, Nativ was explicitly told by the chair of the department she applied for that her application was rejected because of the potential backlash of hiring an Israeli professor.

“[M]y dept cannot host you for a class next fall,” the department chair allegedly told Nativ, according to the lawsuit. “Things are very hot here [on campus] right now, and many of our grad students are angry. I would be putting the department and you in a terrible position if you taught here.”

Following the incident, the university itself opened an investigation and found Nativ “was the victim of national origin discrimination in violation of Berkeley’s Nondiscrimination Policy,” according to the lawsuit. Despite the findings in September 2024, the university has not taken any further actions to remedy the situation, the lawsuit alleges.

“Well-respected institutions like Berkeley pride themselves on welcoming individuals, academics, and professors from around the globe, with varying backgrounds and expertise on every subject imaginable,” Kenneth L. Marcus, chairman and CEO of the Brandeis Center and the former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education, said in a statement. “Yet since the Hamas attacks on October 7th, Jewish and Israeli professors, researchers, and academics like Dr. Nativ have been unfairly targeted, their work questioned, and their livelihoods threatened because of the rampant anti-Semitism that has overtaken college campuses.”

Even before anti-Israel protests flooded college campuses in the wake of the Israel-Gaza war, UC Berkeley was put under investigation by the Biden administration for alleged antisemitism. In 2022, the Department of Education received a complaint that several student groups at the school had adopted anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions bylaws and banned pro-Israel speakers from their chapters.

“For a university to deny the invitation of a respected professor simply because of her national origin is not only distasteful, it’s illegal,” Marcus continued. “And if the campus administration doesn’t hold themselves up to the same accountability standards that they hold their students, what is stopping their students from acting on their own discriminatory beliefs? The vicious and illegal targeting of Israeli faculty and researchers is, unfortunately, a disturbing new trend we are seeing nationwide that must stop.”

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