UC San Francisco Med School Prof Ousted for Anti-Semitism, Sues School

It does not take much courage to be an anti-Semite these days.

But Rupa Marya, MD, is portraying herself as quite the hero in her new federal lawsuit against the University of California San Francisco for ousting from her job as medical school professor for a torrent of anti-Semitic social media posts the Globe reported on that drew widespread condemnation even from otherwise super woke California State Senator Scott Wiener.

In fact, even as she denies being anti-Semitic in the lawsuit claiming the school violated her free speech rights, she has elsewhere been  blaming  her suspension on Weiner and other powerful Jews. The Jerusalem Post reports that in a radio appearance last week Marya said she was forced out due to  “pressure from pro-Israel forces and political allies like [California State] Senator Scott Wiener and billionaire donors such as the Diller family.”

Marya was fired from her job this May. But the lawsuit does not address the dismissal–only the suspension that took place last Fall after she suggested an Israeli student in her class should be harassed.

The lawsuit says “neither her views nor her posts are antisemitic” and that she was only speaking out against Israel’s alleged mistreatment of Palestineans in Gaza, which she calls “genocidal.”  It says that she was expressing “solidarity with the hospitals and healthcare workers that Israel was attacking in Gaza,” and that she  “felt an obligation to speak out and did so using her X account.”

“As a medical doctor, American citizen and as a person of South Asian descent raised in the Sikh religious tradition, Dr. Marya has long been concerned about American foreign policy, including in the Middle East and the issues surrounding the conflict between Israel and Palestine,” the complaint reads. “Her posts take aim at state policy and supremacist political ideologies, not at any religious or ethnic group.”

The lawsuit says the University “infringed her First Amendment right of free speech, both as to statements she made as a private citizen and others in the course of her duties.”

Marya had been at UCSF for 23 years but only began to attract attention in 2024 with her online onslaughts against “Zionists” and Israel.

On January 2, 2024 she wrote on Twitter or X that “There are so many Jewish doctors who don’t espouse an ideology of supremacism and justification of land theft, apartheid and genocide. They are not the issue here. The issue is Zionist doctors who will sit in an ‘antiracism task force’ meeting and try to stop brown doctors who want to issue a Ceasefire statement by saying that a ceasefire would be a bad thing (read: let’s keep killing brown people in Gaza).”

That post drew a furious response four days later from UCSF. The school said on its official Twitter account that a “tired and familiar racist conspiracy theory” was circulating online stating that ‘Zionist’ doctors are a threat to Arab, Palestinian, South Asian, Muslim and Black patients, as well as the U.S. health system.” The university said this was a  “sweeping, baseless and racist generalization” that “must be condemned.”

The University also said Marya was using “Zionist” as a code word for Jews.

“Both Jewish and non-Jewish people see the use of the word ‘Zionist’ in this debunked narrative as an anti-Semitic attack. It is as morally reprehensible as it is intellectually bankrupt, nothing more than a repackaging of racist tropes that USCF renounces.”

The next big uproar occurred in September when she wrote a Twitter post targeting an Israeli student supposedly in her class. She wrote that “Med students at UCSF are concerned that a first year student from Israel is in their class. They’re asking if he participated in the genocide of Palestinians in the IDF before matriculating into medical school in CA. How do we address this in our professional ranks?”

This drew a sharp denunciation from Sen. Scott Wiener. He wrote on Twitter that “The same UCSF professor who promoted the ‘doctors’ plot’ — an age old antisemitic conspiracy theory that Jewish doctors are harming patients — is now targeting a 1st year med student for harassment b/c he’s Israeli. This professor is creating a toxic, hostile environment at UCSF.”

But now in a bizarre twist, Marya says says in her lawsuit that the Israeli student actually did not exist but students were right to complain about him.

“In August and September, several UCSF medical students approached Dr. Marya and shared that they were concerned for their safety around a new classmate who told them had just come from Israel,” the lawsuit says. “Because of the mandatory military service there and the fact that Israel allows non-citizens to serve in its military, the students were concerned that this person may have been directly involved in the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people. Remarkably, there is now no record of a first-year medical student who had just come from Israel, leaving those involved to wonder whether this entire contretemps had been manufactured.”

However, “although the student may have been fabricated, the fears about the student were objectively reasonable.”

Marya was suspended the day after she posted about the Israeli student.

The lawsuit describes Wiener’s criticism of her posts as part of   “a coordinated campaign of harassment” against her.

But Wiener shrugged off the lawsuit in comments to the San Francisco Examiner last week. He said that Marya “promoted an antisemitic conspiracy theory and encouraged people to harass a first year medical student from Israel. I called her out for her antisemitism, and I stand by my accurate and appropriate statements.”

Mark Kleiman, the lawyer for Marya, did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Kleiman said in a statement that, “Firing Dr. Marya doesn’t only violate her right to free speech, it threatens all of us.  We all need to urgently speak up against these kinds of attacks on our basic rights to advocate for justice, and we expect the Court will agree with us that Dr. Marya’s rights have been violated and must be remedied.”

But Stanley Goldfarb, MD, founder of Do No Harm, which fights wokeness in medicine, told the California Globe that Marya is an anti-Semitic “ignoramus” who deserved to be fired.

Goldfarb said that Marya”has decided to be as controversial as possible and she has no idea what she is talking about. Her comments are ahistorial prejudicial and misinformed and anti-Semitic. The school has a right to have a code of conduct. She has forfeited her right to be a professor. She has been [one of] the vilest human beings that is out there.”