A Jewish Israeli clinical intern has come forward to accuse Boston Medical Center of antisemitic discrimination in a damning complaint filed with the US Department of Health and Human Services Office for Civil Rights (HHS OCR) on Tuesday, setting off the latest explosive controversy over anti-Jewish discrimination in healthcare.

According to the complaint, filed by the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, the intern’s workspace was flooded with prohibited anti-Zionist materials promoting inflammatory falsehoods about the Jewish state’s war with Hamas and its policies toward the Palestinians. After she reported them to the appropriate supervisor, she endured a prolonged period of retaliation, harassment, and fabricated complaints aimed at sabotaging her career before it had even formally begun.

Ultimately, Boston Medical Center staff — after refusing to let the intern withdraw and instead prompting her early exit from the program — assigned her a “negative evaluation” upon its completion, ensuring that she could neither include the experience on a resume nor receive credit for it.

She is now seeking the help of the federal government, which during the Trump administration has opened and resolved some cases of antisemitism in the private sector.

“The growth of antisemitism in the healthcare sector is a hazard not only for healthcare providers, trainees, and students, but for everyone who depends on the American healthcare system. The problem is not just that Jewish Americans are now facing exclusion, retaliation, and hostility because of their identity, especially if they have come from Israel,” Brandeis Center founder and chairman Kenneth L. Marcus said in a statement on Tuesday. “The broader problem is that Americans will be denied the best available healthcare if top young professionals are marginalized and excluded from health programs because of their Jewish background, as we saw a century ago.”

Marcus implored the HHS OCR to rule in the intern’s favor.

Antisemitism in academic medical centers located on college campuses is fostering noxious environments which deprive Jewish healthcare professionals of their civil right to work in spaces free from discrimination and hate, according to a study published in May by the Data & Analytics Department of StandWithUs, a pro-Israel advocacy organization.

“Academia today is increasingly cultivating an environment which is hostile to Jews, as well as members of other religious and ethnic groups,” StandWithUs director of data and analytics and study co-author Alexandra Fishman said in a statement at the time. “Academic institutions should be upholding the integrity of scholarship, prioritizing civil discourse, rather than allowing bias or personal agendas to guide academic culture.”

Titled “Antisemitism in American Healthcare: The Role of Workplace Environment,” the study includes survey data showing that 62.8 percent of Jewish healthcare professionals employed by campus-based medical centers reported experiencing antisemitism, a far higher rate than those working in private practice and community hospitals. Fueling the rise in hate, it added, were repeated failures of DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) initiatives to educate workers about antisemitism, increasing, the report said, the likelihood of antisemitic activity.

The study is not StandWithUs’s first contribution to the study of antisemitism in medicine. In Dec. 2024, the Data & Analytics Department published a study which found that nearly 40 percent of Jewish American healthcare professionals have encountered antisemitism in the workplace, either as witnesses or victims.

The study included a survey of 645 Jewish health workers, a substantial number of whom said they were subject to “social and professional isolation.” The problem left over one quarter of the survey cohort, 26.4 percent, “feeling unsafe or threatened.”

The issue is currently being investigated by the US House Committee on Education and the Workforce, with a focus on the University of California, Los Angeles’ (UCLA) David Geffen School of Medicine, the University of Illinois’ College of Medicine, and the University of California, San Francisco’s School of Medicine.

“This investigation will aid the committee in considering whether potential legislative changes, including legislation to specifically address antisemitism discrimination, are needed,” education committee chairman Rep. Tim Walberg (R-MI) wrote in a letter to Steven Dubinett, dean of UCLA’s Geffen School. “The committee has become aware that Jewish students and faculty have experienced hostility and fear at the hands of peers, colleagues, and administrators at UCLA Med, and it has not been demonstrated that the university has meaningfully responded to address and mitigate this problem.”