Doctor fired from second medical residency program over anti-Semitic social media posts

(JTA) — Dr. Lara Kollab, who was fired from her residency at the Cleveland Clinic after old anti-Semitic tweets surfaced, was expelled from a second residency program in California.

Kern Medical Center in Bakersfield, California said in a statement dated Monday that it notified Kollab on March 15 that her position as a first-year internal medicine resident was withdrawn effective immediately.

“Dr. Kollab submitted information that was false, misleading, and incomplete to Kern Medical during the interview and match process,” the statement said.

The statement continued: “Kern Medical is dedicated to the health and wellbeing of our patients and expects the highest level of integrity and compassion from our staff.  We value that a key part of our mission is to teach and train our resident physicians to always provide exceptional care to all patients, regardless of race, religious background or social standing.”

Kollab wrote scores of anti-Semitic social media posts between 2011 to 2017. In an apology after they publicly resurfaced she said they were written because she had “difficulty constructively expressing my intense feelings about what I witnessed in my ancestral land,” following visits to Israel and the West Bank.

Among the posts that got the most attention was a tweet from 2012, when she was a medical student, which said: “hahha ewww.. [I’ll] purposely give all the yahood [Jews] the wrong meds….” Kollab graduated from the Touro College of Osteopathic Medicine in New York, which calls itself “the largest private university in the U.S. with Jewish roots.”

She worked for the Cleveland Clinic from July 2018 to September 2018. The Clinic said it fired her over the social media post that threatened Jewish patients.

The tweets resurfaced through the website Canary Mission, which publishes dossiers on pro-Palestinian student activists, professors and organizations, focusing on North American universities.