An Israeli scientist who came to Stanford as a postdoctoral fellow is suing the university, alleging it failed to take seriously the extreme antisemitic discrimination he said he experienced while researching treatments for diabetes from April 2024 to February 2025.
The Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law and Los Angeles-based law firm Cohen Williams filed the suit on his behalf Thursday morning in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.
The lawsuit makes 17 allegations of discrimination, retaliation, harassment, defamation, withholding pay and breach of contract. The allegations include violations of both the federal Civil Rights Act and the state Unruh Civil Rights Act.
Shay Laps, a chemist from the Haifa area, said he faced hostility “from the moment of his arrival” in April 2024 at the Stanford Diabetes Research Center, which is part of Stanford’s School of Medicine. According to the lawsuit, as the months went on Laps was subjected to attempts at intimidation by his supervisor and efforts to remove him from the lab.
Despite filing multiple formal complaints at Stanford in September and forwarding his supervisor’s emails to administrators, Laps alleges that he never felt his situation was handled with the gravity it warranted. He resigned from his position in late February.
“Rather than stepping up to protect vulnerable students, the Stanford administration … ignored the vehement instances of anti-Semitism plaguing their campus,” Kenneth Marcus, CEO of the Washington, D.C.-based Brandeis Center, said in a press release. “Their failure to address this behavior … is gross negligence and utterly unacceptable.”
On his first day in the research center, Laps said, he introduced himself to an assistant who allegedly responded by telling him to “never speak to her in person,” the complaint said.
The assistant’s behavior went beyond social shunning, according to the complaint, and may have included sabotage of Laps’ research by delaying the ordering of lab equipment and materials.
According to Laps’ account, the assistant was active in the pro-Palestinian protests on Stanford’s campus during the 2023-24 school year. The complaint describes those activities in detail, arguing that the hostile environment that Laps experienced extended to the entire university, not just the medical school.
“It’s important to understand that this didn’t just happen in a vacuum,” Alyza Lewin, one of the Brandeis Center attorneys representing Laps, told J. “This happened because of this constant, relentless messaging to the community on campus that Israelis are evil.”
Laps said that he wrote to his supervisor about the assistant in July 2024 but that his concerns were not addressed. From that point forward, according to the lawsuit, the supervisor pressured Laps to resign. In October, the supervisor told the Israeli chemist that his expertise would be a “better fit at a different lab,” suggesting China or another country, the complaint said.
Laps sent discrimination complaints to three separate offices at Stanford in September, according to the complaint. Six weeks later, he was informed by Stanford Medical School Vice Dean Linda Boxer that an official investigation would be opened.
Stanford spokesperson Dee Mostofi said in an email to J. on Wednesday afternoon that the university had not yet received notice of the lawsuit. “Stanford takes any allegation of antisemitism very seriously,” Mostofi wrote. “In this instance and based on all the allegations that Laps reported directly to the institution, a thorough internal investigation found that they were unsubstantiated.”