Keith Sonderling, acting U.S. labor secretary, didn’t feel out of place speaking to a room full of Jews this week. In fact, he told JNS, his passion has come from defending Jews from workplace discrimination.
“President Trump’s administration has made this a priority, to make sure that not just antisemitism is eliminated but all religious bias is eliminated,” said Sonderling, whom U.S. President Donald Trump nominated to fill the role on a permanent basis.
“For me, that’s personal,” the grandchild of Holocaust survivors told JNS on the sidelines of the Republican Jewish Coalition summit in Las Vegas.
Sonderling, who has attended the GOP Jewish gathering for years, including before his time in government, said that his grandparents came to New York with just $7 in their pockets after surviving concentration camps.
“They, like many other Holocaust survivors, faced bias in the workplace when they tried to start a new life here in the United States,” he told JNS. “Here we are, many years later, with some of the strongest civil rights protections in the world, and Jews, both at schools and in the workplaces, are still facing discrimination.”
A vice chair and member of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in U.S. President Donald Trump’s first term, Sonderling has performed legal work, specializing in employment and business litigation.
The Senate confirmed Sonderling in Trump’s second term as deputy labor secretary, and he was elevated to the acting top agency position after Lori Chavez-DeRemer resigned in April. He has also doubled, since June, as acting director of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics.
Sonderling, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lee Zeldin are the three Jewish members of Trump’s cabinet.
A big focus of Sonderling’s is incorporating artificial intelligence into hiring processes.
“If artificial intelligence is not designed properly or used carefully by employers, it can also exacerbate antisemitism as well,” he told JNS.
He noted misuse of AI can impact very broad populations, like if someone deploys artificial intelligence to identify Jewish applicants based on last names or publicly-listed affiliations with Jewish institutions.
“That could be used against us,” Sonderling told JNS.
He noted that there are documented biases against American Jews and Israelis in the job market.
“A lot of that in the workforce is based upon longstanding antisemitic beliefs, like ‘Jews have too much power,’ ‘Jews are all rich,’ ‘Jews control things, and we don’t need them in our workforce too,’” Sonderling said.
“Many hiring managers say that antisemitism is acceptable in the workplace, so AI can just make that potentially worse if we’re not raising the basic awareness of what antisemitism actually is in the workplace,” he told JNS.
That includes both overt discrimination, such as derogatory name-calling or denying religious attire to workers or schedule adjustments for religious holidays, and more subtle bias.
The Labor Department’s Center for Faith, under Trump, launched an interactive map, which allows users to see on a state-by-state basis what religious protections are available. It also lets them gather information to report Jew-hatred, Sonderling told JNS.
The department is also working on “cross-international origin bias,” he said.
“Just because you’re Jewish doesn’t mean you’re Israeli, and there’s been a lot of discrimination against Israeli-Americans,” he told JNS. “That gets blended with the religion, so even if somebody believes just because you’re Jewish, you’re also Israeli and wants to discriminate against you related to global issues, that is still a claim that we’re really trying to raise.”
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission reached a $21 million settlement with Columbia University, which marked the largest settlement of Jew-hatred in U.S. history, Sonderling said. He also drew the attention of JNS to other examples of prosecution of, and enforcement against, Jew-hatred.
“We’re really proud of the enforcement, but also we need to continue to raise awareness, because we want Jewish workers to feel safe and be able to know that they have the same rights as any other religious workers,” he said.
One of those hotspots is in labor unions, which critics say have become rife with antisemitism.
During a speech at the Republican Jewish Coalition summit on Monday, Sonderling mentioned the Association of Legal Aid Attorneys, a prominent labor union representing legal public defenders in New York City. After Oct. 7, the union approved a measure decrying Israel’s military response and calling for a boycott of the Jewish state.
Three Jewish union members, who spoke out against the resolution, faced hostility and retaliation, including being called “Zionist ghouls,” and union leaders sought to expel them. The union agreed to pay $315,000 to the aggrieved members after a lawsuit was filed, though leaders admitted to no wrongdoing.
“Unions are still employers under the laws too, and it’s just as important for us to educate the union leadership to make sure that their Jewish members are protected,” Sonderling told JNS.
“It’s raising awareness from union leadership, just like we’re trying to do with academic leadership, that your Jewish employees and all your religious employees have rights and they can come forward,” he said. “If they are discriminated against, if they are targeted by other groups, which we’ve seen in the universities, President Trump’s administration will be there to protect them.”
