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Key Takeaways
- UC Berkeley allegedly rejected professor Yael Nativ's application due to her Israeli heritage, citing potential backlash from students.
- The Brandeis Center has filed a lawsuit on Nativ's behalf, seeking an apology and recognition of discrimination, as well as improved anti-bias training at the university.
- UC Berkeley refrained from commenting on the specific case but emphasized its commitment to confronting discrimination and adhering to applicable laws.
The University of California Berkeley is under fire for allegedly rejecting a professor’s application due to her Israeli heritage.
The school told Professor Yael Nativ that many of its “grad students are angry” and that it would be putting her and the department “in a terrible position” if it hired her, according to the Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, which filed a lawsuit on the professor’s behalf.
The lawsuit asks the court to rule that Berkeley broke state law, block the university from future discrimination, and require it to properly apply its nondiscrimination policies to Israeli applicants and employees.
Rebecca Harris, a litigation attorney for the legal advocacy group, told The Fix via email Nativ is seeking “the quickest possible resolution” of her issue.
“In Dr. Nativ’s case, what she wants is very similar to what she wanted early on, which is an apology and recognition for the discrimination she faced, which she hasn’t gotten yet,” Harris said.
The attorney also told The Fix that UC Berkeley and other universities need to implement anti-bias offices and education on discrimination to combat this issue.
She said that education on what discrimination toward Jewish and Israeli students looks like “is going to be a big part of what UC Berkeley does to fight this issue.”
Harris also said that the Brandeis Center views this case as part of the “broader trend of discrimination against Israeli students and Jewish people.”
Similarly, Kenneth Marcus, the CEO of the center, said in a statement that the university’s actions are “not only distasteful” but “illegal.”
“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?” he stated.
Marcus also stated that since the Hamas attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, Jewish and Israeli academics, including Nativ, have faced unfair scrutiny of their work and threats to their livelihoods due to pervasive antisemitism on campuses.
Reached for comment, UC Berkeley spokesperson Dan Mogulof told The College Fix the school “will not comment on an individual case,” but it is “committed to confronting harassment and discrimination of all types, and to gaining compliance with all relevant state and federal statutes, and University policies.”
“When those laws and/or policies are violated, the university believes there should be appropriate consequences,” he said.
Meanwhile, StandWithUs Saidoff Law Director Yael Lerman told The Fix, “This incident is yet another example of the approach of far too many school administrations that claim to take allegations of antisemitism seriously but fail to take meaningful, concrete steps to address the problem.”
She said that StandWithUs has noticed and received more complaints in recent years regarding antisemitism in the workplace generally, and the pattern is strikingly similar to this case.
“We hope that in all such matters, employers are held accountable for failing to respond to antisemitic allegations wherever they manifest,” Lerman said.
Despite California’s robust anti-discrimination laws, UC Berkeley did not respond to Nativ’s inquiries prior to the lawsuit, according to the Brandeis Center.
Nativ, an Israeli dance researcher and sociologist, taught as a visiting professor at UC Berkeley in 2022, the Brandeis Center reported.
After a successful term, faculty at Berkeley’s Helen Diller Institute for Jewish Law and Israel Studies invited her to apply for a visiting professorship in the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies for the 2024–2025 academic year. This is when her application was denied.
This is not the first lawsuit of its kind against UC Berkeley, either. In November 2023, the Brandeis Center filed a lawsuit alleging a “longstanding, unchecked spread of anti-Semitism” at the school, according to the Jerusalem Post.
In April 2025, a district court judge allowed the lawsuit to advance alongside the new lawsuit filed on behalf of Nativ.
The legal advocacy group has also filed lawsuits against MIT, Stanford, and organizations at UCLA and Columbia on similar grounds.
