The University of California, Berkeley rescinded a job offer to a visiting Israeli professor solely because of her national origin, according to a new lawsuit. Though the professor, Dr. Yael Nativ, taught a course at the school prior to Oct. 7, Berkeley’s theater department chair said campus was too “hot” following Hamas’s terrorist massacre.
Berkeley hired Nativ, an Israeli dance researcher and sociologist, in January 2022 to teach a course on Intersectional Perspectives on Contemporary Dance in Israel at Berkeley’s Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies. The course was well received, and Berkeley “expressed their hope that Dr. Nativ would return and teach again” in the 2024-25 academic year, according to a copy of the lawsuit reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon.
Just a month after Hamas’s Oct. 7 terror spree in Israel ignited anti-Semitic demonstrations at college campuses across America, however, Berkeley rescinded its offer to Nativ, citing her Israeli citizenship as the chief obstacle, the lawsuit alleges.
“[M]y dept cannot host you for a class next fall,” Dr. SanSan Kwan, the theater department’s chair, wrote in a Nov. 18 text message to Nativ included in the lawsuit. “Things are very hot here right now and many of our grad students are angry. I would be putting the dept and you in a terrible position if you taught here.”
The lawsuit, filed by the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law and Olivier & Schreiber PC, is the latest in a series of legal filings alleging widespread discrimination against Jewish staff and faculty at some of the country’s most renowned universities. At Berkeley, a separate November 2023 lawsuit alleged a “longstanding, unchecked spread of anti-Semitism” on campus that endangered Jewish students and faculty. Other lawsuits have targeted similar behavior at MIT, Stanford, UCLA, and Columbia.
In Nativ’s case, all appeared well with Berkeley until the Oct. 7 attacks turned campus into a hotbed of anti-Israel activity.
At the end of her first semester, Nativ “was asked to take part in an event for donors of Berkeley’s Helen Diller Institute for Jewish Law and Israel Studies (HDI),” according to the lawsuit. “She was thrilled when HDI invited her to apply for another semester.”
Both Kwan and Rebecca Golbert, HDI’s executive director, were “involved in selecting Dr. Nativ in 2022 and funding her course.” They both “expressed their hope that Dr. Nativ would return and teach again at Berkeley,” the lawsuit states.
That offer was reaffirmed in March 2023, when Kwan traveled to Israel on a HDI-funded trip that Nativ helped facilitate, according to the complaint. Several months later, HDI emailed Nativ to express “gratitude for her prior work” and urge her “to reapply for the 2024-2025 academic year.”
Nativ did so in August 2023, submitting application materials to HDI for a course similar to the one she taught in 2022.
By Nov. 9, “Golbert emailed Dr. Kwan to inform her that Dr. Nativ had submitted her application, as requested, to return to teach at Berkeley for the Fall 2024 semester.” Golbert further acknowledged that HDI “wanted to host Dr. Nativ again and hoped the TDPS Department felt the same way.”
Nativ’s application was formally rejected on Nov. 17, with Golbert allegedly stating that the “decision to reject Dr. Nativ’s application was because she is Israeli,” according to the lawsuit.
Golbert admitted in a text message from that day that she was “not very happy” with Kwan’s decision, “which I struggle to think is not politically tinged.”
Berkeley’s Office for the Prevention of Harassment and Discrimination ultimately opened an investigation into the matter after the Israeli newspaper Haaretz published an article by Nativ detailing the alleged discrimination.
“These are serious allegations which, if substantiated, would be wholly inconsistent with Berkeley’s values and practices,” Assistant Vice Chancellor Dan Mogulof wrote in a January 2024 email to alumni who raised the issue.
Following a nearly nine-month investigation, the school’s discrimination office concluded that Nativ “was discriminated against based on her national origin” in violation of Berkeley’s non-discrimination policy.
“A preponderance of the evidence therefore demonstrated that Dr. Kwan discriminated against Dr. Nativ on the basis of national origin in violation of Berkeley’s Nondiscrimination Policy,” the investigation found. “It was undisputed that her prior employment at Berkeley was successful.”
Since that time, the school has done little to rectify the situation, even though it repeatedly promised Nativ that some form of redress would be provided.
“To date,” the lawsuit noted, “Berkeley has not informed Dr. Nativ of any action it has taken or plans to take to remedy its discrimination against Dr. Nativ.”
Kenneth Marcus, chairman and CEO of the Brandeis Center, said Berkeley’s denial “of a respected professor simply because of her national origin is not only distasteful, it’s illegal.”
“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,” he said.
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