Published by The Free Press on 08/20/2025 In the spring of 2022, Yael Nativ taught an Israeli contemporary dance class as a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley. It went so well, she said, that she was encouraged to come back in the future. In August 2023, she submitted an application to teach the same class in the 2024–25 academic year. Her application was rejected. “My dept cannot host you for a class next fall,” Nativ was told in a November 2023 WhatsApp message from SanSan Kwan, a Berkeley faculty member in the theater, dance, and performance studies department. “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.” The WhatsApp message appears in a lawsuit filed Wednesday in a California state court. The lawsuit alleges discrimination, claiming that Nativ’s application to return to Berkeley was denied because she is Israeli. She is represented by the Brandeis Center, a nonprofit group that focuses on fighting antisemitism. At Berkeley, as on many other college campuses across the United States, the Hamas massacre on October 7, 2023, unleashed a torrent of anti-Israel fervor, including walkouts, encampments, and protests that at times devolved into violence. During that time, Berkeley launched an internal investigation into whether Nativ was the victim of discrimination. Seven months later, in September 2024, she was told that Berkeley’s Office for the Prevention of Harassment and Discrimination had found that a “preponderance of the evidence” demonstrated that Berkeley had discriminated against Nativ on the basis of her national origin, the lawsuit says. Nativ was told that she could propose a remedy for the discrimination. But when she did, the lawsuit alleges, she never received a response. On Wednesday, Berkeley said that it hadn’t seen Nativ’s lawsuit but “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.” Kwan couldn’t be reached for comment. A description of Nativ’s class at Berkeley says it “explores contemporary dance in Israel (2000 and on) from social, political, and cultural perspectives. We will examine the ways in which dance in Israel embodies different aesthetics and cultural ideologies and how movement and choreography represent and manifest issues of identity, nationality, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. We will also address the effect of local and global powers on the development of contemporary Israeli dance.” Berkeley invited Nativ to teach the class through its Helen Diller Institute for Jewish Law and Israel Studies (HDI). She was returning to the social justice ecosystem she had once called home. In the early 1990s, Nativ was a graduate student at San Francisco State University. It was “the heyday of critical theories,” she wrote in a December 2023 article in Israeli newspaper Haaretz. “I discovered the possibility of establishing new orders of social relations and of profound shifts in attitudes toward disadvantaged minority groups.” The lawsuit alleges discrimination, claiming that her application to return to Berkeley was denied because she is Israeli. But, she wrote in the Haaretz article, Berkeley had turned “the tools of critical theory” into “a doctrine, a tool of disempowering, divisive, and threatening political control. A doctrine that dangerously organizes its world order, learning, teaching, and its organizational conduct.” Nativ’s lawsuit says Berkeley received emails from alumni after the article was published, and that it told the alumni in January 2024 that “administrators are now looking into the matter.” After Berkeley’s antidiscrimination office ruled in her favor, Nativ sent an email asking the school for an apology, an invitation to return as a visiting professor, and unspecified resources to help faculty and students “reflect and manage extreme conflictual situations on campus and in the classroom, with special attention and emphasis on issues of racism and antisemitism,” her lawsuit says. And then? Radio silence. More than two months passed before a Berkeley vice provost replied that the “matter is still currently under review.” After another three months, the same official wrote that she was “not able to provide a timeline right now,” according to the lawsuit. In May of this year, Nativ asked again how Berkeley plans to respond to its own finding of discrimination. Berkeley has told her nothing, the lawsuit says. The lawsuit seeks damages for reputational harm, and for the loss of an employment and educational opportunity that would have boosted Nativ’s career. It also seeks an order prohibiting Berkeley from discriminating against applicants or employees of Israeli national origin. Nativ says she never heard back from the Berkeley faculty member who told her that her application to return to Berkeley had been rejected. After she received that WhatsApp message, the lawsuit says, she replied: “The inability to make an effort for a complex discourse is astounding and appalling. This is not how I was educated embracing ideas of power structures and critical reflection. I know you are in a difficult position. Yet I hope, knowing how sharp you are and your high level of integrity, that you do make this effort with your students [and] colleagues.”