Published by The Jewish News of Northern California (JWeekly) on 12/10/2025 UC Berkeley’s chancellor will apologize to an Israeli dance scholar who the university acknowledges was discriminated against when she was denied a job just weeks after Oct. 7, 2023, due to her nationality. The apology is part of a settlement announced Wednesday between UC Berkeley and Yael Nativ. The university will also invite Nativ back to teach. “UC Berkeley publicly acknowledges the violation of UC Berkeley’s policy against discrimination with regard to Dr. Nativ and commits to rigorously enforce this policy to prevent recurrence,” according to a statement prepared jointly by UC Berkeley and Nativ’s lawyers that was sent to J. As part of the settlement, UC Berkeley will also pay out $116,000, including $56,000 in attorneys’ fees and $60,000 to Nativ. A portion of the payment to Nativ will be donated to charity, according to her lawyers. Chancellor Rich Lyons will apologize to Nativ either in person, in a phone call or in a Zoom meeting within 30 days, under the settlement, which was shared with J. “I respect and appreciate Dr. Nativ’s decision to settle this case,” Lyons said in a statement sent to J. “She is owed the apology I will provide on behalf of our campus. We look forward to welcoming Dr. Nativ back to Berkeley to teach again.” Nativ was hired in a guest role and traveled from Israel to teach “Intersectional Perspectives on Contemporary Dance in Israel” during the spring semester 2022. “The course went well,” according to her complaint filed in August in Alameda County Superior Court, and Nativ was encouraged to reapply for the 2024-2025 school year. She did so, submitting application materials through the Helen Diller Institute for Jewish Law and Israel Studies in August 2023, the complaint stated. On Nov. 17, 2023, weeks after the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel and the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war, Nativ was told she would not be hired back, according to the complaint. SanSan Kwan, chair of the Department of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies, told Nativ in a WhatsApp message, per the complaint: “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.” Nativ wrote a revealing op-ed about her experience in Haaretz, an Israeli newspaper. She described the department chair as a “good friend” who “was under enormous pressure from the faculty, especially from the furious master’s degree students, not to bring anybody from Israel, and not to hold courses dealing with Israel.” The incident came amid increasing support for academic boycotts of Israel in U.S. universities following Oct. 7, 2023. At Cal, more than 170 faculty members have endorsed such a boycott, according to the Amcha Initiative, a group that tracks anti-Israel activism on college campuses. The UC system has said it opposes boycotts of and divestment from Israel. Such boycotts do not necessarily target individual Israelis, but Israeli scholars have been swept up in the political fervor. At Stanford, a visiting Israeli chemist filed a lawsuit this summer alleging that the university failed to adequately respond to discrimination from colleagues in his lab beginning in April 2024. At MIT, an Israeli researcher was publicly harassed by a tenured linguistics professor, according to a lawsuit filed earlier this year. Showing support for Israel has become an issue in some instances too. In the same month that Nativ was turned away, former Oakland City Council member Dan Kalb, an American Jew, was disinvited from giving a guest lecture on environmental policy at UC Berkeley when students perceived him as pro-Israel. Kalb told J. at the time that he is a liberal supporter of Israel and a “passionate supporter of Israel’s right to exist.” Under the terms of the settlement, Nativ must be invited back to teach the same course she had planned to teach during the 2024-2025 school year. Nativ was represented by the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law. Brandeis attorney Paul Eckles said he hopes the settlement will deter other universities and workplaces from discrimination. “In 2025 people shouldn’t be discriminated against based on where they’re from. That’s something you would have thought would have ended many, many decades ago,” Eckles told J. in a phone call. “The fact that an institution like UC Berkeley could still be engaging in that sort of discrimination is deeply troubling.”