Ex-medical resident twice fired over antisemitic posts requests hearing

A former medical resident at the Cleveland Clinic who lost her position after scores of antisemitic social media that she wrote were exposed, has requested a hearing before the State Medical Board of Ohio.

Dr Lara Kollab was informed last month that following an investigation, including a deposition in which she admitted to authoring the tweets, the medical board would discipline her, in punishments that could range from fines, permanent suspension or limiting her license, the Cleveland Jewish News reported. She is entitled to request a hearing to defend herself.

Kollab, who attended medical school at a college associated with the Jewish community, apologised in January when the antisemitic posts she wrote from 2011 to 2017 came to light.

She said she visited Israel and the Palestinian territories every year as an adolescent and “became incensed at the suffering of the Palestinians under the Israeli occupation.” The posts came because she had “difficulty constructively expressing my intense feelings about what I witnessed in my ancestral land.”

They resurfaced after being publicised by the controversial website Canary Mission, that hosts dossiers on pro-Palestinian student activists, professors and organisations, focusing primarily on North American universities. Among the posts that got the most attention was a tweet from 2012, when she was a medical student, which said: “hahha ewww.. ill purposely give all the yahood [Jews] the wrong meds….”

Kollab worked at the Cleveland Clinic as a first-year resident from July 2018 to September 2018, and was then fired over the post that threatened to harm her Jewish patients with the wrong medicine. She was fired in March 2019 from a second residency at Kern Medical Center in Bakersfield, California, for failure to disclose the posts.