Signs at a short-lived UCSF pro-Palestinian encampment that was dismantled in May. (Instagram @ucsf4palestine)
Signs at a short-lived UCSF pro-Palestinian encampment that was dismantled in May. (Instagram @ucsf4palestine)

Special report: Pro-Palestinian activism puts Jewish UCSF patients and doctors on edge

By Gabe Stutman | August 7, 2024

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Amanda Morgan was in pain.

Sitting in triage as she waited to be admitted to UCSF’s Birth Center in Mission Bay in June, the contractions were coming faster and faster.

“I was already, like, give me the epidural. Where is it?” she recounted in a recent interview.

That’s when she spotted her nurse wearing a Palestinian flag pin on her nametag. “It made me a little bit extra nervous,” she said. “Thinking about, like, do they know that I’m Jewish?”

Morgan, 37, is Jewish and her family is involved in the Jewish community in San Francisco. She has been a longtime patient at the University of California San Francisco, and her religion is listed in her medical chart. Although she had no issues during prenatal appointments, she was aware of anti-Israel and anti-Zionist activism among professionals at UCSF since the start of the Israel-Hamas war. 

About to give birth, suddenly she found herself face-to-face with a fraught conflict 7,000 miles away — a conflict deeply connected to her identity as a Jew.

One after another, Morgan met nurses wearing pro-Palestinian pins, including one who cared for her newborn son in what she described as a “moderately emergency-type situation” when he needed supplemental oxygen.

“It was right in my face,” she told J., her 2-month-old son asleep in her arms. “It was one of my most vulnerable and painful moments. The thing that I really don’t want to think about the most is the Israel-Gaza conflict, and [how it manifests in] San Francisco, and worrying about it at UCSF, because I have been worried about it for months.” 

Ultimately, she said, the pins made her fearful. 

“It seems like they’re supporting peace and understanding and standing against oppression and all that,” she said. “But they’re ignoring, or refusing to see, or actively supporting the major antisemitism behind the movement that they’re buying into,” she said. “And that is really scary to me.”

‘Inevitable escalation’

Morgan’s experience, related in late July in an exclusive interview with J., brought into sharp relief what previously had been secondhand and thirdhand reports about the pervasiveness of pro-Palestinian displays on medical floors at UCSF, widely considered one of the top hospital systems and medical schools in the United States. 

J. spoke with Morgan, as well as three Jewish doctors at UCSF on the condition of anonymity, about the extent to which a confrontational climate for Jewish, pro-Israel members of the UCSF community has increasingly leaked from social media and the campus quad into the hospital itself, emotionally impacting Jews and Israelis seeking care. The controversy has also thrust the university into the national headlines.

A pro-Palestinian display at UCSF’s Parnassus campus earlier this year.

For years, forms of political activism at UCSF have been encouraged, the doctors told J. It has been common, for example, for medical providers to express support for a political cause with badges or pins on their uniforms — from Pride flags to Black Lives Matter pins. But the prevalence of insignia supporting the Palestinian cause — the California Nurses Association said “hundreds” were wearing them at UCSF — has rattled some members of the Jewish community. The politics on display force some Jewish and Israeli patients and doctors to confront an intensely polarizing issue, one in which their caregivers and colleagues are openly taking a side.

“What’s going on now is kind of the inevitable escalation that we warned leadership about,” said a Jewish doctor and senior faculty member, who did not want to be identified because he worried about retaliation from his employer. He said he had been targeted on social media by pro-Palestinian activists affiliated with the university, and felt concern for his family’s safety and his own. “There are a number of UCSF faculty that are concerned with indoctrination of the trainees and learners into their political views. There’s no space for discussion or conversation about it. It’s unrelated to their primary duties as health care professionals. And it has been tolerated by the university.”

He described an emphasis on political activism at UCSF that long predates the outbreak of war after Oct. 7 which, in his view, set the groundwork for the current tensions.

“I think the reason that it’s happening at UCSF is because over the years, there has been a message that political advocacy is not only a large part of our roles as physicians, but maybe the most important part of our roles as physicians,” he said. “I’m not saying I agree with it. But when you look at the curriculum in the medical school, when you look at the curriculum and training programs, there’s a strong push toward political activism. And hand-in-hand with that there’s been an erosion of professionalism regarding our main duty, which is to take care of all patients, regardless of their race, religion and political beliefs.”

“I’m afraid that the push towards political activism has made people feel like their main role as a nurse is to wear a ‘From the river to the sea’ pin rather than to provide the Jewish patient with an environment where they feel as safe as a Muslim patient, or a Christian patient, or anyone else,” he added. 

In a statement emailed to J. in July, UCSF said that “ensuring that all members of our community feel safe and welcome” is an important part of the university’s mission, and that it “pursue[s] disciplinary actions if a legal or policy violation has occurred,” ranging from “censure to termination.”

“As a public institution, UCSF embraces the privileges and responsibilities of free speech, and we work hard to determine what is and is not protected under the First Amendment,” the statement said. “If we find that someone’s actions or words do not cross legal or policy thresholds, we take other steps to maintain an environment free of harassment and discrimination. This may include educating and counseling any individuals involved.”

Like universities across the country, the UCSF campus saw widespread activism on behalf of Palestinians and in opposition to Israel after the Oct. 7 Hamas rampage that started the ongoing war in Gaza. On May 13, medical students and staff pitched a tent encampment on the university’s Parnassus campus, accusing Israel of genocide and calling on the university to divest from companies they said were “aiding the occupation.” Protesters drew an inverted red triangle, a symbol popularized by Hamas, on a sculpture of a bear, the university’s mascot.

At graduation, student demonstrators shouted “Free, free, free Palestine!” and displayed a banner across the stage that said “Our taxes turn hospitals into mass graves” and “Healthcare workers demand: Free Palestine!”

Certain faculty members, too, have been extremely outspoken in support of the Palestinian cause and against Israel. One in particular emerged as an unsparing critic not only of Israel, but of “Zionism” and “Zionists.” Dr. Rupa Marya’s language crossed a line, many said, drawing allegations of antisemitism and a public rebuke by her university. Some well-known supporters of the Palestinian cause, including progressive broadcaster Mehdi Hasan, concurred with Marya’s critics when her statements went viral earlier this year.

Marya, a hospitalist and prominent figure on social media with tens of thousands of followers, wrote in a post on X in January that “the presence of Zionism in US medicine should be examined as a structural impediment to health equity.” Taking aim at so-called “Zionist doctors,” she said Zionism, the movement to establish a Jewish national home in Israel, “is a supremacist, racist ideology.” The statement about Zionism in medicine was widely condemned as antisemitic and drew comparisons to the Soviet-era “Doctors’ Plot,” an antisemitic conspiracy theory that a cabal of mostly Jewish doctors was secretly trying to kill Soviet leaders.

UCSF sharply criticized Marya’s statements as representing a “sweeping, baseless, and racist generalization” that was “as morally reprehensible as it is intellectually bankrupt.” Marya responded with a civil rights claim alleging UCSF was fostering “an anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab and Islamophobic hostile environment.” For its part, the anti-Zionist group Jewish Voice for Peace Bay Area defended Marya, calling her a “leading anti-racist doctor.”

Marya conducts political activism through the San Francisco-based Do No Harm Coalition, a left-wing group that has vocally supported campus pro-Palestinian protests. It released a scathing anti-Israel statement in October that did not mention the Oct. 7 attacks and accused Israel of genocide and a steady stream of “crimes against humanity” dating back to Israel’s founding in 1948.

Dr. Leigh Kimberg, a Jewish UCSF professor, is active in Do No Harm and, like Marya, has been outspoken against Israel since the start of the war. Kimberg maintains a social media account lamenting what she calls the “genocidal, fascist, lying machinery the US & Israel deploy” in support of militarism, writing that Israel is “systematically torturing” Palestinians and reposting statements calling the war in Gaza a “Holocaust” and “the most well-documented genocide in history.”

“When I started advocating for Palestinian liberation — my new Palestinian friends warned me — even as a Jewish person you will be called antisemitic,” she wrote in an X post on June 14.

Kimberg, listed as a professor of medicine on UCSF’s website, did not respond to an email seeking an interview. 

The university, as a public institution, has consistently stressed the free speech rights of its students and faculty. Still, it handled its protests quite differently from leadership at other universities across the country, including UC Berkeley and UCLA.

“The encampment and the protestors’ behavior were disruptive to our educational activities, faculty work, and, most significantly, the healing environment we promise to our patients,” Chancellor Sam Hawgood wrote in a May statement explaining the university’s decision to quickly “close” the encampment at the Parnassus campus within hours, with the help of police. Activists, meanwhile, said police “forcefully raided the peaceful encampment.” One person was arrested, they said.

Yet while the encampment was short-lived, the pro-Palestinian movement at UCSF has remained active and has found success drawing in university students, professors and medical staff. 

They’re ‘all over’

A Jewish pediatrician who also spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid retaliation from colleagues said pro-Palestinian accoutrements were commonplace, including in pediatrics.

“Since I got back from the holidays in January, everyone was wearing these watermelon pins,” she said, or ID-badge holders decorated as watermelons. She said that the people wearing them skewed younger, mostly nurses and pediatric residents. “In the pediatric ICU, the general floors, all over,” she said.

Personally, she said, she avoids wearing anything at work that could be construed as a political message. 

“If your kid’s in the hospital — not even in the ICU — it’s such a stressful situation,” she said. “To potentially add stress?”

In her view, the infusion of politics into the workplace has the potential to impact doctors, too.

A university shuttle bus passes in front of the emergency room at UCSF Parnassus in San Francisco. (Aaron Levy-Wolins/J. Staff)

“I feel uncomfortable by it,” she said. “I think I’m still making good medical decisions. But I don’t think it’s good for the team.”

Morgan felt that sense of discomfort herself at the Birth Center. Throughout her hospital stay, she said she found herself giving evasive answers when any of the nurses wearing pro-Palestinian regalia asked questions, such as whether she planned to circumcise her son. “I would just say, yeah, but not here,” Morgan said. 

“I didn’t feel comfortable asking for, you know, new nurses.” 

“I kept my mouth shut,” she said. “I didn’t want to make a scene.” 

Morgan said her behavior was contrary to oft-heard advice about advocating for oneself in medical settings.

“Some of my other Jewish friends — and lots of other people, say, in female empowerment communities — would say that if your nurse or doctor, if there’s something wrong, if you’re not comfortable with your care team, you should ask for somebody who supports you. In theory,” she added. “But in actuality, at no point was I going to do that. I was having contractions and I did not want to make the situation any more difficult or worse.” 

‘Pervasive’ harassment

Outspoken pro-Israel, Jewish doctors and staff members mobilized first in private, then in public, to sound the alarm about the climate on campus. 

On July 31, the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee announced an investigation into reports of “pervasive” antisemitic harassment at UCSF. The committee said “hundreds of complaints of antisemitism and/or a hostile work environment have been made by employees and patients” to the university’s Office for the Prevention of Harassment and Discrimination. The committee said as a recipient of federal funding, UCSF has “an obligation to comply with federal law” and to act to remedy the situation.

According to the House committee’s letter, patients seeking cancer treatment at the UCSF Mission Bay campus have had “to walk by antisemitic graffiti present near the cancer center.” UCSF confirmed antisemitic graffiti on two signs near the center, calling it “deeply concerning.”

UCSF Parnassus campus in San Francisco. (Aaron Levy-Wolins/J. Staff)

One doctor told J. that inverted red triangles — which Hamas used to mark military targets in propaganda videos, and have since become a symbol of Palestinian resistance to Israel — were visible at a resource fair, a flagship event for employees organized by UCSF’s Office of Diversity and Outreach. One UCSF staff member had a red triangle as a Zoom background, the doctor said, for a meeting on “climate and inclusion.”

The senior faculty member related more concerning accounts, some of which could not be independently corroborated by J. “One that comes to mind was one [patient] who actually lost family on Oct. 7, and when they came to UCSF to get their medical care, the nurse who was caring for them was wearing a pin ‘From the river to the sea,’” he said. Many interpret the slogan as a call to replace Israel with a Palestinian state.

“I’ve heard stories of people whose children are undergoing surgery, and when they’re meeting their child after surgery in the recovery room, the nurse who’s responsible for their child is wearing a watermelon pin, or a political pin,” he said.

The faculty member, who helped create a WhatsApp group of “concerned Jewish community members,” added that he’s been told about patients who have changed their religious affiliation from Jewish to “undisclosed,” or requested their identity be protected so that the people caring for them won’t easily identify them as Jewish.

UCSF response

In the July statement, in response to specific questions from J., UCSF said that its leaders “have held numerous meetings with individual faculty and groups of faculty members over the past months to address issues surrounding Gaza, including concerns over antisemitism.” 

“Chancellor Hawgood and his leadership team also have denounced acts of hatred and bigotry from the start of the war and have shared multiple messages with the UCSF community to condemn antisemitism and anti-Arab sentiment,” the statement said.

On the issue of dress code, “we ask staff to avoid wearing anything that our patients may find offensive or can interfere with our primary responsibility of providing excellent care and service. If a staff member refuses to comply, we follow appropriate HR policies to address the matter.”

Toward that end, it appears that wearing pro-Palestinian pins may run afoul of the policy in some instances. A nurse named Bridget Rochios was placed on administrative leave by the management of the Reproductive Health Center for wearing a watermelon pin and refusing to take it off, according to a flyer released by the union that represents nurses in the hospital system. In the spring, Rochios traveled to Gaza to volunteer at a maternity hospital, describing devastating conditions in an interview with Mother Jones in May.

We ask staff to avoid wearing anything that our patients may find offensive or can interfere with our primary responsibility of providing excellent care and service.

The union lashed out at UCSF, saying that Rochios’ treatment was arbitrary and punitive. “Hundreds of nurses are wearing Watermelon Pins across UCSF without retaliation,” the “UC Nurse Alert” flyer said. “The action threatens all union members who wish to show support for a movement or cause.”

UCSF has declined to provide details about how it is handling specific personnel issues, citing privacy rules. The university has voiced support for freedom of speech in public statements, as well as the university’s “rich history of student activism that has helped shift the conversation about racism and health equity.” 

“Learner activism is a vital part of UCSF’s success,” the university’s website says.

In March, after antisemitic graffiti was discovered near the UCSF cancer hospital, Hawgood published a statement saying “Antisemitism has no place at UCSF. It stands in stark contrast to our fundamental belief in accepting and respecting all people regardless of their identity, beliefs, and background.”

Political actors

Multiple UCSF staff members told J. that Marya is the animating force behind much of the pro-Palestinian, anti-Zionist movement at UCSF. Marya is a clinical professor in hospital medicine and co-author of a book called “Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice.” The book illuminates “the hidden relationships between our biological systems and the profound injustices of our political and economic systems.”

Marya is listed on the UCSF website as a “faculty director” and co-founder of the Do No Harm Coalition. The group formed in 2016 in response to police violence in San Francisco, and has since taken on causes from Native American issues to Black Lives Matter. The group views politics as inextricably linked to health care, with an emphasis on race and racial politics. Its “manifesto” says, “We demand universal access to decolonized, community-led, patient-centered, multimodal healing.”

In October, the coalition began to focus on the war in Gaza, Zionism and Zionists, releasing a statement calling Zionism a “settler colonial project” rooted in “colonialism and ethnic cleansing.”

The Do No Harm Coalition’s Instagram page directs visitors to a petition for UCSF to divest from Israel. “The silence by the UCSF administration is tantamount to complicity with genocide,” the petition says.

The UCSF Helen Diller Medical Center in San Francisco. (Aaron Levy-Wolins/J. Staff)

Marya has taken aim not only at “Zionist doctors” but also at Jewish philanthropists. In social media posts she has attacked the Helen Diller Family Foundation, a prominent Bay Area Jewish philanthropy and the largest donor to UCSF in the institution’s history. The Dillers have pledged over $1 billion to the hospital system, a major recipient of their largesse along with museums and with initiatives in Israel, including Ben-Gurion University and an Israeli Rhodes Scholarship program. 

In an X post on Aug. 1, Marya shared a rap song called “Killer Diller Dollar” that referred to the Diller family as “scumbags” and accused them without evidence of using their philanthropy to silence criticism of genocide. 

In an Instagram post on May 28, Marya claimed that the Diller Foundation funds “activities that leave millions of Palestinians unhoused,” and that UCSF’s new hospital “is built on those crushed lives.”

Sanford Diller, who died in 2018, was the son of Jewish immigrants from Vienna and made his fortune in real estate. In 2009, UCSF opened the Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Care Center in Mission Bay with help from a $35 million gift. In 2018, the Diller family pledged $500 million to build a state-of-the-art hospital in Parnassus Heights.

Marya’s criticisms appear to reference a controversy from that year, when it was revealed that the Diller family had given a $100,000 donation to Canary Mission, a group that compiles dossiers on pro-Palestinian activists. The foundation later said the grant would not be renewed. 

A spokesperson for the Dillers declined to comment for this story.

Multiple attempts by J. to reach Marya for comment were not successful, including an email to an address listed on her personal website, a direct message on Instagram and a direct message on Substack.

Jewish community response

Prominent Bay Area Jewish community leaders have tried to intervene with the hospital system. Representatives of the S.F.-based Jewish Community Federation and Endowment Fund, a multibillion-dollar philanthropy and anchor of the Bay Area Jewish community, met with leaders of UCSF with an eye toward educating them to “better understand the issue,” Federation CEO Joy Sisisky told J. in late June. (The Federation is a supporter of this publication.)

The ties between the Bay Area Jewish community and UCSF “really is across generations,” Sisisky said. “We have a lot of donors who are completely devoted to improving the lives of people in the Bay Area. This institution plays a really central role in that.”

“Given the extensive funding relationship that we have with UCSF over the years, it felt like a really critical moment to say something,” she added.

An ad for cancer treatment at UCSF Parnassus in San Francisco. (Aaron Levy-Wolins/J. Staff)

In a stark public statement released around the time of the interview with J., the Federation called on the university to take immediate action to address the alleged climate of anti-Zionism on campus, citing the mountain of support the Jewish community has given to UCSF in recent years. 

“For decades, the Federation has proudly supported the University of California, San Francisco with funding provided by local Jewish donors. In the last 15 years alone, more than $100 million has been granted to support critical programs,” the statement said. “We call on the institution to act decisively to ensure Jews feel safe and welcome at UCSF Health.”

Looking ahead

The Jewish senior faculty member said when the issue of pro-Palestinian pins first came up, the university sent out an institution-wide message reiterating UCSF’s dress code policy without specifically referencing the pro-Palestinian pins. He said in conversations he’s had with UCSF leadership, they have essentially said the policy is impossible to enforce using a “top down” approach.

“They’re putting it in the hands of the patient” to file complaints with UCSF, he said.

In his view, this approach places an undue responsibility on patients.

“Imagine if you’re coming to UCSF to get treatment for your cancer, are you going to tell your doctor or your nurse that you don’t appreciate their political pin?” he said. “I mean, that’s an outrageous, outrageous burden to put on the patient.”

For her part, when asked whether she had formally complained to UCSF after her experience in the maternity hospital, Morgan quipped, “It wasn’t on the top of my to-do list when coming home with a newborn.” She did receive a feedback form, but hesitated to fill it out.

“I thought, does the hospital even care? Am I going to waste my time completely? Or are they going to, like, put a mark on my record?”

She also wondered who would read or act on such a complaint. “Is the person reading this even going to care and understand? Or are they going to be, like, she’s a racist, Zionist b***h who supports genocide?”

Gabe Stutman
Gabe Stutman

Gabe Stutman is the news editor of J. Follow him on Twitter @jnewsgabe.