[Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”]
The usual nauseating tale: an Israeli professor of dance, Yael Nativ, had taught at UC Berkeley’s Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance in 2022. She discharged her task well, but when she applied to teach the subject again, she was turned down. The official in charge of hiring explained that her presence would have so upset anti-Israel students and faculty that it would likely lead to disruptions on campus, and naturally that had to be avoided at all costs. In the end, Dr. Nativ sued the school, and won, which means that the university will apologize to her, provide a reasonable settlement, and most important, it has committed to hiring her again. More on her original mistreatment and the satisfactory ending can be found here: “UC Berkeley Settles Lawsuit Brought by Israeli Professor Denied Teaching Position,” by Dion J. Pierre, Algemeiner, December 10, 2025:
The University of California, Berkeley has agreed to pay a five-figure sum to settle claims that it unlawfully denied a teaching position to a dance instructor because she is Israeli, both the victim’s legal counsel, provided by the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, and the school announced on Wednesday.
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, Dr. Yael Nativ, who taught in UC Berkeley’s Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies as a visiting professor in 2022, was denied another appointment in the department because a hiring official allegedly believed that her employment would be unpalatable to students and faculty in the aftermath of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, amid the ensuing Gaza war.
“My dept [sic] cannot host you for a class next fall,” the official allegedly told Nativ in a WhatsApp message. “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.”
Berkeley’s Office for the Prevention of Harassment and Discrimination (OPHD) later initiated an investigation into Nativ’s denial after the professor wrote an opinion essay which publicly accused the school of cowardice and violations of her civil rights. OPHD determined that a “preponderance of evidence” proved Nativ’s claim, but school officials went on to ignore the professor’s requests for an apology and other remedial measures, including sending her a renewed invitation to teach dance.
After nearly two years, the situation had remained unresolved, prompting Nativ to file suit and seek damages as well as the apology UC Berkeley refused to pronounce at the time. Now, just under four months after the filing of Nativ’s complaint, the two parties have reached an amiable settlement and disclosed its terms in a joint statement.
“As part of the settlement, UC Berkeley has agreed to continue to strictly enforce the University of California’s Anti-Discrimination Policy and ‘respond promptly and equitably to reports’ of prohibited conduct as defined in that policy,” the statement said. “Dr. Nativ will receive a personal apology from UC Berkeley’s Chancellor Rich Lyons and monetary damages in the amount of $60,000, a portion of which she has decided to donate to a charitable organization.”…
In July, the chancellor of UC Berkeley described a professor who cheered Hamas’s Oct. 7 atrocities as a “fine scholar” during a congressional hearing held at Capitol Hill.
Richard K. Lyons, who assumed the chancellorship in July 2024, issued the unmitigated praise while being questioned by members of the US House Committee on Education and the Workforce, which summoned him and the chief administrators of two other major universities to interrogate their handling of the campus antisemitism crisis.
Lyons stumbled into the statement while being questioned by Rep. Lisa McClain (R-MI), who asked the chancellor to describe the extent of his relationship and correspondence with Professor Ussama Makdisi, who tweeted in February 2024 that he “could have been one of those who broke through the siege on Oct. 7.”
The Hamas atrocities so delighted Professor Ussama Makdisi (pictured above) that he told Chancellor Lyons that if only he had been there in Gaza, he could have been one of those who took part in the attack. Such a ghastly admission of sympathy for the Hamas devils apparently didn’t bother Chancellor Lyons. He didn’t choose to disagree with Makdisi; his silence signaled sympathetic understanding.
Richard Lyons has been chancellor at UC Berkeley since July 1, 2024. He has just made clear that far from reprimanding Ussama Makdisi for expressing a desire to join Hamas in committing what decent people recognize as atrocities, he’s got no problems with him. Makdisi, he told a Congressional committee, “is a fine scholar.” Really? Has Lyons actually read what Makdisi has published? Here are a few example of Makdisi’s anti-Israel animus; it’s everywhere in his publications and speeches. On March 8, 2015, Makdisi in an interview described “the Israeli doctrine that any form of resistance on the part of Palestinians has to be crushed violently, inhumanly and mercilessly.” He then described the “Israeli attempt at complete domination over Palestinians.” Makdisi wrote a piece on September 4, 2014 entitled “Gun Zionism,” in which he claimed that “long before Hamas was created, Zionist Israel was a settler-colonial enterprise. It remains one today.” And then he added this bit of dreamy misinformation: “Zionist forces systematically ethnically cleansed Palestinians during and following the Nakba of 1948.” In the spring of 2012, Makdisi published an article titled “Setting the Record Straight: The Arabs, Zionism, and the Holocaust.” In it, he described the “Zionist colonization of Palestine” as a process whereby “the indigenous Arab inhabitants of Palestine were uprooted and dispossessed to make way for a Jewish state.”
But Chancellor Lyons calls him “a fine scholar.”
Lyons’ fields are international finance, currency markets, and financial market microstructure. History and Morality, though, are not his strong suits.
