FIRST ON FOX– A Jewish Israeli Ph.D. student at the University of California Berkeley (UCB) is suing her local United Auto Workers-affiliated union (UAW) over its alleged discrimination against Israeli and Jewish union members in order to advance an anti-Israel agenda on campus.
Karin Yaniv filed suit on Friday against her local UAW chapter, alleging she and other Israeli Jews were excluded from full union participation based on their ethnicity. The suit alleges union members acted in a hostile, discriminatory and antisemitic manner, which her lawyers say is a violation of the Civil Rights Act and California law.
“The union’s anti-Israel agenda has created a hostile work environment for many of us on campus,” Yaniv told Fox News Digital. “They discriminated against Israeli members, including myself, from union activities and on top of all of that, they’re going after our academic freedom. This targeted abuse based on our nationality and religion is antisemitic, and I want to hold them accountable in court for their actions.”
“The hostility and abuse was directed only at the Israeli members and was clearly targeted at or because of their national origin, race, and religious faith in violation of Title VII,” the federal lawsuit reads. “The Union’s support for, and participation in, these protests fostered an atmosphere of hostility and terror for Israeli Jews, such as Yaniv, who felt ostracized, targeted, and unsafe.”
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UAW, which officially stands for the International Union, United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers of America, is one of the largest unions in North America, with members in broad sectors of the economy, including academics. UC Berkeley has been a hotspot for anti-Israel sentiment and antisemitic demonstrations, especially following the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas terrorist attack. Yaniv’s lawyer said the lawsuit is an attempt to shine a light on the union’s alleged role in supporting anti-Israel campus protests.
In recent years, its members have been coordinating and supporting anti-Israel and antisemitic activity on campus, with union leaders allegedly encouraging members to attend anti-Israel rallies and walkouts.
The suit charges that the union shared resources with pro-Palestinian campus organizations to advance the “Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions” (BDS) agenda against Israel and allegedly regularly kept Yaniv and other Israeli Jews off of union communications, including activities related to BDS activities.
“Now they want to institutionalize that, they have a long-term solution to get us out of here,” Yaniv said.
As a Ph.D. student (or postdoc), Yaniv was represented by the union whether she was a dues-paying member or not. But, following Oct. 7, she said she decided to get more involved and become a paying member so she could engage in dialogue with leadership in the wake of the attack.
“The union released a statement within days after the October 7th atrocities that felt like a stab in the back for many of us,” she said. “They blame what happened on Israel, they did not condemn Hamas, they did not call for the release of the hostages. That was a painful moment for many of us in Jewish communities on campus.”
“We tried to engage in dialogue with them to change that statement or understand our point of view and how we can work together, but we failed, and this lawsuit is about ending my union’s antisemitic culture,” she added.
The statement from the union’s executive board criticized the “decades-long violent occupation of Palestine that has led to this escalation of horrific violence,” saying it mourned the deaths of Israelis and Palestinians while condemning Israel’s “far-right government.”
One Israeli member of the union, Yael Nidam, had family members who were kidnapped by Hamas in the Oct. 7 attack, and she says when she spoke out against the conduct of the union and the targeting of Israeli academics like herself, union members laughed, interrupted her and wrote “LMFAO [laughing my f—ing a– off]” in the meeting’s Zoom chat. Yaniv maintains that union officials did nothing to stop any of the abusive incidents.
“She [Nidam] was talking as a peace activist about how to bring us together, [but] people laughed at her,” Yaniv said. “This is not new to me. It happened when Israeli friends of mine spoke, people laughed. But when it happened to Yael, it just felt like this disrespect became a structural culture of antisemitism and discrimination.”
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“Union officials and members used certain slang like ‘LMFAO’ at Union meetings, and Yaniv believes that Union members and officials did so purposefully in an effort to mock the Israeli members through language they would not understand,” the lawsuit states.
In April 2024, as part of UCB’s infamous pro-Palestinian encampment, union leadership established its own “Union Village” in an attempt to legitimize the encampment in the eyes of university administrators, the lawsuit claims.
“The Gaza encampment prominently featured antisemitic symbolism and rhetoric on banners and signs, including the inverted red triangle that has been used by Hamas to identify military targets and was famously used during the Holocaust to mark political prisoners of concentration camps,” the lawsuit reads. “The Union did not condemn this antisemitic symbolism or rhetoric and, in fact, established the Union Village in the vicinity of the banners and signs.”
“Leadership of the university and administration wanted to portray this encampment as something [done by] outsiders and not really students,” Yaniv said. “But the union came to the rescue, put a union village there alongside the violent rhetoric … [and] violent signs that remind me of Hamas propaganda. It really felt unsafe.”
Yaniv also claimed the union shared information and resources with outside groups like the pro-Palestinian group, Bears for Palestine, which was responsible for shutting down a speaking event for an Israeli attorney and policy advocate, referring to him as a “genocidal murderer” spreading “Zionist propaganda,” according to the lawsuit.
Yaniv’s lawyer, Danielle Susanj, who serves as executive vice president of the nonprofit law firm the Fairness Center, told Fox News Digital that the lawsuit “makes clear that instead of condemning it [antisemitism] or even being neutral, the union is choosing a side, and it’s very clear what side they’re choosing.”
“Both federal civil rights law, the Civil Rights Act and California law prohibit discrimination on the basis of race or religion or nationality and so we think in this situation, the union has done all three,” she added.
The suit is seeking damages and attorney fees.
She said unions are accountable for how they treat members and that they are subject to the same laws as many employers, preventing them from discriminating based on race, religion or nationality. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act says it is unlawful for a “labor organization” to “discriminate against… any individual because of his race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.”
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“Karin bravely stepping forward and kind of shining a light on what’s going on here really has revealed, at least at UC Berkeley, how much support for a lot of what we saw happening on college campuses in the last year and a half, at least at Berkeley,” she said.
Yaniv said she and other postdocs tried to go to the administration about their experience in the hopes they would address the harassment, but the answer from the university was that their hands were tied when it comes to union activities.
“October 7th brought a lot of difficult emotions and I didn’t expect to see what I saw,” Yaniv said. “I did not expect to see the union align themselves with Hamas or against Israel’s existence. It was really unexpected, it was a stab in the back for a lot of us.”
Fox News Digital reached out to UAW’s national and local Berkeley chapters for comment. A university spokesperson said it was a legal dispute unrelated to the school.
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Fox News’ Chris Pandolfo and Ashley Economou contributed to this report.
