Medical resident fired from 2 programs over anti-Semitic social media posts requests hearing

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

She 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, apologized in January when the anti-Semitic 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 publicized by the controversial website Canary Mission, that hosts dossiers on pro-Palestinian student activists, professors and organizations, 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.