Boston Medical Center, a nonprofit hospital in the city’s South End neighborhood, gave a negative evaluation to an Israeli Jew, who is a permanent U.S. resident and was then a clinical intern at the center, after she reported a colleague for anti-Israel displays on his desk, according to a complaint lodged to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on Tuesday.
The complaint, filed by the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, accused the medical center of anti-Israel bias and subsequent retaliation and of violating Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which protects against bias based on categories like race and national origin, and section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act, which extends those protections to federally funded health programs.
The federal government has interpreted “shared ancestry” in Title VI to include bias based on religion.
The complaint, which JNS viewed, alleges that the Jewish woman, who was an intern at the medical center from May to September 2025, reported to the medical center that a staff clinician had anti-Israel posters, including those stating “they killed our babies” and “they stole our lands,” on his desk.
The intern, whose name is redacted in the copy of the complaint that JNS viewed, believed that the displays violated the center’s policies.
After returning from a trip to Israel on July 2, 2025, the intern found the displays were gone but began experiencing what she believed was retaliation for reporting the displays, according to the complaint.
The retaliation “came in the form of ostracization by her colleagues, so she was denied mentorship and opportunities, her location was moved so that she was specifically separated from the rest of the clinical team and excluded from routine professional interactions and informal professional opportunities as well,” Rebecca Harris, a litigation staff attorney at the Brandeis Center, told JNS.
“She complained about that kind of retaliation and ostracization, and that persisted throughout the rest of her internship there,” Harris said.
The discrimination “culminated in this final evaluation, which included some negative scoring and comments that blamed her for the environment that she was experiencing as a result of the ostracization from her colleagues,” she told JNS. “As a result of that negative evaluation, she hasn’t been able to list her BMC supervisors as references.”
According to the complaint, the Jewish woman received “overwhelmingly positive feedback” on her patient care, including “both portions of her final evaluation and in an earlier written review.”
The Jewish woman fears asking the medical center for a recommendation due to the negative evaluation she received and believes that it will hurt her chances for future employment, because she is looking to work in a “fairly niche field in mental health counseling,” according to the complaint.
Her internship at the medical center is the bulk of her work in that field to date, it adds.
The complaint lists a series of suggested remedies for the medical center to take, including removing the negative evaluation and providing her with a letter of recommendation to prospective employers, adopting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of Jew-hatred and revising its policies to ensure that students and interns who report violations of medical center policy and civil rights violations don’t face retaliation.
Harris thinks that the recommendation for enhanced training for medical center staff on retaliation is particularly important.
The Jewish woman wants the “minimal remedy for her own situation but also just to see if we can make any policy changes at BMC, so this doesn’t happen to any other Jewish or Israeli student or intern,” she told JNS.
The Brandeis Center has been “seeing a lot of antisemitism and anti-Israeli bias incidents happening” in the healthcare field, according to Harris.
“We’ve been getting reports from students and interns and practicing physicians, mental health professionals, patients in some cases, for a while now in various aspects of the health care field,” she told JNS. “It’s certainly been a recent area of focus.”
