Deena Margolies, staff litigation attorney at the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, plans to testify before the House Subcommittee on Health, Employment, Labor and Pensions on Wednesday that some healthcare unions have engaged in “antisemitic and anti-Zionist campaigns.”
“There’s a real problem with antisemitism in healthcare,” she told JNS on Tuesday. “It doesn’t just stop with one union. It doesn’t just stop with one doctor. It starts to then become normalized.”
Margolies is one of four scheduled to testify at the hearing, titled Bad Medicine: Politics, Unions, and Antisemitism in Health Care. The cardiology fellow Dr. Jacob Agronin, Bend the Arc chief executive officer Jamie Beran and Eveline Shekhman, CEO of the American Jewish Medical Association, are also slated to address the subcommittee.
Bend the Arc is a progressive Jewish organization that is anti-Israel.
Healthcare unions that engage in antisemitic and anti-Israel campaigns affect patient care, according to Margolies.
“When you’re in an examination room, when you’re getting surgery or at a hospital, you’re feeling vulnerable. You don’t really want to come in and be faced with politics,” she told JNS. “It has no place there.”
One of the examples in the written testimony that Margolies plans to give, which she shared with JNS, is the Service Employees International Union affiliate, the Committee of Interns and Residents.
The behavior of union representatives at the affiliate, which represents more than 40,000 resident physicians and fellows, is “encouraging coworkers to ostracize Jewish and Israeli doctors because of their perceived Zionist identity and support for Israel,” per the prepared testimony.
The Committee of Interns and Residents has passed resolutions supporting the movement to boycott Israel and calling for the end of U.S. military aid to the Jewish state, according to the planned testimony.
It also issued a statement about the alleged selling of “unconsented bodies to train foreign military,” a reference to Israel’s use of cadavers in medical training as “bodies” within a “broader claims of occupation, apartheid and genocide,” Margolies writes in her testimony.
That evokes historic blood libel accusations against Jews, she adds. (JNS sought comment from the union.)
Margolies told JNS that the union’s statement was about the University of Southern California selling medical cadavers to the Israeli military, a “common practice,” she said.
“In medical school, you work on cadavers. They are consented bodies, who give their bodies to science,” she said. “This is a practice that goes on in medical schools, in armies for training all over the world, and yet when Israel does it, it’s blood libel.”
Margolies also plans to testify that leaders and members of the National Union of Healthcare Workers told a union member that “Jews are not indigenous to Israel” and that Jews “are not marginalized people, because they are white colonizers.”
She told JNS that the union member was told that the union didn’t need to have training on Jew-hatred, because “you’re not an oppressed minority.” The union member subsequently felt it necessary to avoid identifying publicly as Jewish at work.
Sal Rosselli, president emeritus of the National Union of Healthcare Workers, told JNS that it disputes that the union said that Jews aren’t an oppressed minority and that the union doesn’t need to have Jew-hatred training.
Margolies intends to call on Congress to investigate how healthcare unions are using their resources to promote Jew-hatred and anti-Zionist campaigns.
She also plans to ask the House panel to probe whether current labor and civil rights laws protect Jewish and Israeli healthcare workers adequately.
Congress should require U.S. agencies to specify that antisemitic discrimination and harassment is against the law and make sure that Jewish and Israeli healthcare workers’ claims of discrimination are addressed appropriately, she plans to tell the House subcommittee.
