How to “Other” an Israeli

Last spring, UC Berkeley formally acknowledged the stream of antisemitic incidents on campus after October 7, 2023, which had resulted in the disruption of scheduled lectures and meetings, harassment of students and faculty, assaults, injuries, and property damage—not to speak of a pervasive atmosphere of menacing groupthink. This acknowledgement was part of a legal agreement that settled a suit by the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law and Jewish Americans for Fairness in Education. Berkeley also paid $1,000,000 to the Brandeis Center, listed programs the university had established or promised to establish, and the website it would update.

Tellingly, the acknowledgment didn’t identify any instance where a campus office charged with investigating discrimination and harassment—and there are a lot of them—had investigated antisemitic or anti-Israel behavior and issued a finding.As far as I know, there has only been one such investigation. That was the case of Yael (Yali) Nativ, a prominent Israeli scholar of dance and choreographer. In the spring of 2022, Nativ taught a course on Israeli dance and culture in Berkeley’s dance program as part of a visiting scholar arrangement sponsored by the campus’s Hellen Diller Institute for Jewish Law and Israel Studies. Nativ later hosted the chair of the program, San San Kwan, on a Diller-sponsored visit to contemporary dance programs in Israel and was invited to come back to Berkeley to teach her course again.

Then came the Hamas massacre on October 7, 2023, and the subsequent Gaza war. On November 17, Nativ received a WhatsApp textfrom Professor Kwan: “My dept cannot host you for a class next fall. Things are very hot right now and many of our grad students are angry.” She was under enormous pressure from these students as well as faculty, she said, not to bring in anybody from Israel. Nativ asked Kwan to reconsider but received no response.

When Nativ turned to Rebecca Golbert, Executive Director of the Diller Institute, which had already agreed to sponsor her return engagement, Golbert advised her not to rock the boat. After weeks of silence from Berkeley, Nativ decided to rock the boat. She published a piece in Ha’aretz chronicling her experience at Berkeley, from the students who “did everything they were supposed to do, except [speak] in class,” for fear of saying the wrong thing about Israel, to her now-silent program chair.

After I read Nativ’s article, I got in touch with Rebecca Golbert at the Diller Institute (with which I have long been affiliated) to learn about the case. Golbert criticized Nativ for “going public,” saying that she had “burned her bridges behind her.” It didn’t seem to occur to her that the dance program might be discriminating against Nativ or that, as Nativ’s sponsor, the institute might have some responsibility to speak up for her.

After the Ha’aretz article, Nativ didn’t hear from anyone at Berkeley, but she did get several sympathetic emails from alumni and others. Some of them told her they had written letters of protest to Bay Area elected officials and campus administrators. And someone—Nativ still doesn’t know whether it was one of them or a campus whistleblower—sent a letter that ended up at the campus Office for the Prevention of Harassment and Discrimination (OPHD). On February 15, 2024, Nativ received a notice informing her that the Office had received a complaint and would complete its investigation within ninety days.

210 days later, on September 19, 2024, Nativ finally received an email from Martha Phillips, the complaint resolution officer in OPHD, along with a forty-two-page report of her investigation. Phillips interviewed Nativ, Rebecca Golbert, Professor Kwan, Sara Guyer (the dean of the division of Arts and Humanities), and still others, and reviewed their relevant correspondence.

In the report, Golbert is quoted as saying that she was left “a bit in shock,” by the dance program’s decision not to reappoint Nativ but appreciates that Professor Kwan was put in a “difficult position.” Meanwhile, Kwan denied that her WhatsApp message had anything to do with the department’s decision; it was just “a comment on the situation, not a reason for not inviting her.” Dean Guyer, whom Kwan apparently consulted sometime after her message to Nativ, went to even greater lengths, rejecting the “false narrative peddled” by Nativ “that she was canceled and fired,” a claim that Nativ never actually made. The dean then went on to emphasize that the university prefers that classes be taught by “ladder-rank”—tenure or tenure track—faculty rather than lecturers. In fact, forty to fifty percent of all undergraduate classes at Berkeley are taught by graduate students and non-ladder rank lecturers.

In the conclusion to her report, Martha Phillips dismisses some of the arguments advanced by Kwan and the dean as disingenuous, and finds that the preponderance of the evidence supports Nativ’s claim of discrimination on the basis of “national origin in violation of the . . . Nondiscrimination Policy.” Her report provided no remedy, but in a follow-up communication, Nativ was encouraged to contact Victoria Plaut, the vice provost for faculty, to discuss one.

Nativ immediately wrote to Plaut, requesting an apology from Professor Kwan, a renewed invitation to teach, and a commitment from the university to devote more resources to help “manage extreme conflictual situations [and] . . . issues of racism and antisemitism.” Apart from a note informing her that the case was under review, Vice Provost Plaut didn’t respond to this email or to any of Nativ’s repeated follow-ups.

Over the next several months, Nativ didn’t hear from the dance program, the Diller Institute, Vice Chancellor Plaut or any other campus administrator. She also didn’t hear from Gregg Drinkwater, the director of the university’s recently established Antisemitism Education Initiative, who might have used her situation as a case study in the training materials it prepares. There was silence, too, from Professor Ethan Katz, chair of the Chancellor’s Advisory Committee on Jewish Life and Campus Climate. Professors Kenneth Bamberger and Ron Hasner, the academic directors of the Hellen Diller Institute, didn’t get in touch either.

Nativ also didn’t hear from anyone at the university’s massive Othering and Belonging Institute, whose mission is to advance “groundbreaking approaches to transforming structural marginalization and inequality.” With all this silence, one might almost have thought that at Berkeley, some “Others” belong more than others.

Ten months after OPHD’s finding, UC Berkeley Chancellor Rich Lyons piously told Congress that “I am the first to say that there is more work to do,” on campus antisemitism. Perhaps needless to say, Nativ still hadn’t heard from anyone at the university. Not long after that, though, the indefatigable Brandeis Center filed a suit demanding that the university enforce its own hearing officer’s ruling. After four more months of foot-dragging, in December 2025, the campus finally reached an agreement, seemingly granting Nativ more than she had asked for: Now she was to receive an apology from Chancellor Lyons himself, along with modest damages and lawyers’ fees, and a reinstatement of the invitation to come back to teach in the Berkeley dance program.

One might conclude from this story that although justice was delayed for Nativ, it was not denied. In fact, the delay, which continues as the fall semester here at Berkeley gets into gear, amounts to denial.

Each step in this protracted process shows how a powerful institution can ignore its own procedures and findings, trample on individuals (especially if they aren’t “ladder-rank” insiders), foster a reign of silence, and turn what might have been a modest success into a protracted humiliation. And not even this would have been possible if Ha’aretz hadn’t published Nativ’s unsolicited op-ed, probably inspiring someone to file a complaint with Berkeley’s OPHD—and if that complaint had not been taken up by Martha Phillips, the only Berkeley official in this whole sorry story who seems to have been uncowed by campus politics. And even then, the university would have blithely and illegally ignored its own findings and promises if the Brandeis Center hadn’t taken up Nativ’s cause.

In light of the mountain of documented violations and repeated delays and dissembling, Nativ’s case tells us a lot about the commitment of UC Berkeley to protecting the rights of Jews who are “othered” and made to understand by word and deed that they do not belong on campus. The mealy-mouthed defenses of outrageous treatment, protracted obfuscation, and, perhaps above all, the determined silence, all reveal the arrogance of campus administrators and the cravenness of campus organizations dependent upon their good will.

In February 2026, Chancelor Rich Lyons had a ten-minute video conference with Nativ in which he apologized. She had requested that the session be recorded and posted online. It wasn’t.

Last month, as the campus was preparing for the new academic year, I asked Nativ when she was coming back to Berkeley and what she was going to teach. Her legally binding settlement agreement with the university notwithstanding, she hadn’t heard from UC Berkeley’s dance program, its Diller Institute for Jewish Law and Israel Studies, Chancellor Lyons who had promised Congress to “do better,” the vice provost’s office or anyone else.

“I have no clue about their plans,” she said. “I have heard nothing and frankly, I don’t expect to.”