Leading California Hospitals Are Becoming a ‘Battlefield’ as Jewish Patients, Doctors Face Surging Antisemitism ‘The halls of medicine should be to treat humanity,’ one doctor tells the Sun, not fodder for political protest. M.J.Koch
Brazen acts of antisemitism are tearing apart one of the top hospitals in the nation at the University of California San Francisco, with Jewish doctors being bullied, cancer patients encountering antisemitic graffiti, and one pregnant Israeli woman reportedly being refused care.
The university has seen a surge in antisemitism at its sprawling network of seven Bay Area hospitals and on the social media posts of its most prominent doctors since Hamas’s October 7 attacks on Israel. Jewish doctors tell the Sun that they are “paranoid” about speaking out on the issue despite a growing number of complaints from patients regarding their providers’ views on the Israel-Hamas war.
Most recently, graffiti invoking the language of the Holocaust was found on two signs near UCSF’s cancer center at its Mission Bay campus. The chancellor of UCSF, Sam Hawgood, condemned the incident in a statement on Monday and said that the local police are investigating it.
In another striking instance, a whiteboard was wheeled out and positioned at the entrance to a UCSF cancer building. It bore the words “Free Palestine from Nazi Zionist Schwein,” invoking the German word meaning “pig.”
In a physician lounge was a sign that said “stop bombing hospitals,” one UCSF doctor, who asked for anonymity given the sensitive nature of the situation, tells the Sun. He also noticed that a UCSF resident had a phone case with a Palestinian flag on it and the words, “warning, you are on Palestinian land.”
In November, more than 100 healthcare employees at San Francisco General Hospital, which is within the UCSF system, held a protest outside the hospital to demand an end to Israel’s “war crimes” against the Palestinian people.
“Regardless of whatever your position may be on what’s going on, the halls of medicine should be to treat humanity,” a plastic surgeon at New York City who has been on the frontlines of combating antisemitism in the medical world since October 7, Yael Halaas, tells the Sun. “Taking the battlefield out on patients and colleagues is uncalled for.”
Yet many Jewish doctors feel they have no choice but to stay silent out of fear of being “doxxed” or “canceled.” Dr. Halaas feels free to speak about the antisemitism issue without challenging her colleagues. Most of the UCSF doctors she contacted for this story declined to speak with the Sun. “People are feeling bullied,” she says, “and incapable of taking the steps to remediate it.”
The recent incidents could be violating the university’s guidelines on the personal speech of its students, employees, and faculty, which says that “no member of the community may use UCSF facilities or resources (including time on the job) for political purposes, except as specifically permitted by University regulations.” That statement adds that “care should be taken to avoid creating any misperception of the University’s endorsement of a particular political position.”
An extreme example is a doctor and professor of internal medicine at the UCSF, a teaching hospital, Dr. Rupa Marya, who has taken to social media to argue in dozens of posts that “Zionist” doctors may be harming patients and should, therefore, be investigated. On Monday, she implored her more than 20,000 X followers to “Recognize white supremacy (Eurocentrism) in *all* of its forms. Right now the Ashkenazi form.”
Dr. Marya wrote in another post on X in early January that “the presence of Zionism in US medicine should be examined as a structural impediment to health equity.” That provoked backlash from a California state senator, Scott Weiner, who called her out for “attacking Jews.”
Dr. Mayra has said on X that she is “vehemently” opposed to “anti-Semitism and Islamophobia and any hate speech.” She says the suspension of doctors who are critical of “Zionism” amounts to “censorship.” Neither she nor UCSF immediately responded to the Sun’s requests for comment on the situation.
Dr. Marya and other doctors engaging in such political speech appear to be dismissing the recommendation by the vice chancellor of communications at UCSF, Won Ha, that employees on social media “consider the impact that words may have on a given patient’s belief that they will be safe as they seek care from us.”
“The number of patient complaints about social media posts by UCSF community members expressing their views of the Israel-Hamas war is increasing,” Mr. Ha warned in a statement in November. He said that while the public institution values the First Amendment rights of its community members, “there is no space at UCSF for antisemitism, Islamophobia, and xenophobia.”
More than 100 people have reported Dr. Marya to the university’s office for the prevention of harassment and discrimination, the anonymous UCSF doctor tells the Sun. Yet Dr. Marya is still working at the main UCSF hospital at Parnassus Heights. The hospital could share the fears of many other prominent institutions across the country that it might provoke backlash from the press if it institutes any disciplinary measures against her.
“I think you should be able to take a side on this issue, just not in the workplace, and it shouldn’t be making patients uncomfortable,” the UCSF doctor says. “We’re working as a team every day with other people. So if you’re less likely to communicate with a member of that team because they voiced something you find really inappropriate or offensive, that’s a problem.”
To push back against antisemitism within the medical world, Dr. Halaas says she and other doctors are spearheading curriculum for medical campuses designed to educate students on the pernicious ideology. “After October 7, we just started seeing such disarray and contention,” she says. “To see the divisiveness among medical professionals is just disheartening.”
Dr. Halaas has also launched the non-political organization of medical professionals, the American Jewish Medical Association, dedicated to “medicine without hate,” she says. This effort comes as America’s largest and most influential dermatology group is battling over diversity, equity, and inclusion policies that it says are “weaponizing” against Jews.
“We are supposed to be united by science for the betterment of all humanity. That is our job,” Dr. Halaas asserts. She paraphrases the oft-spoken quotation by the 20th century German pastor, Martin Niemöller, who expressed guilt about his own early complicity in Nazism: “What starts with the Jews doesn’t end with the Jews.”
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