Anti-Semitism is All in Your Head – Or Maybe Not

According to Yahoo News, the Miami Herald is reporting a story about the firing of a medical resident  at the Cleveland Clinic in  Ohio who once tweeted that she would give Jewish people the wrong medicine.

Lara Kollab admitted during an investigation last year that she posted numerous anti-Semitic posts on Twitter from 2011-2013 before entering medical school, according to Ohio State Medical Board records. This was before she went to the Touro Osteopathic Medical School which is located in New York City’s Harlem neighborhood. When she was accepted there, she deleted the tweets but they were subsequently retrieved and brought to the attention of medical authorities in the state of Ohio. The recovered tweets included items such as, “I’ll purposely give all the yahood (Jews) the wrong meds” and “Allah will take all the Jews,” according to the medical board.

The Ohio State Medical Board revoked her license. She was, of course, fired by the Cleveland Cinic, where she was employed at the time. After leaving Cleveland Clinic, Kollab accepted a residency position at Kern Medical in Bakersfield, California. The hospital revoked her position after learning she submitted “false, misleading and incomplete” information during the interview process, according to a statement. She told the hospital she resigned in Cleveland due to a death in the family, records show.

Dr. Kollab’s tribulations indicate just how badly a few ill-advised tweets can affect your life.  Once you post something on the internet, it is going to be there, somewhere, forever. Some people just don’t understand that. Ms. Kollab does, now.

Originally founded in 1970 to focus on providing higher education opportunities for the Jewish community, Touro College system now has 18,000 students and 35 different programs in as many disciplines in four different countries. The medical school itself was founded in 2007.  You don’t have to be Jewish to attend the school, which is named after the Touro Synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island, which is the oldest synagogue in the United States.

While it is not immediately clear why the founders of the Touro College system decided to locate their campus on 125th Street directly across the street from Harlem’s historic Apollo Theater., it should be remembered that Harlem was a Jewish neighborhood before it became the heart of the Black community in New York City. However, the school is well-known for having a strong commitment to a multi-ethnic, nonsectarian climate.

As far as Dr. Kollab’s career is concerned, no one seems to care whether she is a good physician. While her tweets were odious, she chose to attend a medical school with close ties to the Jewish community, which suggests that she might have learned a thing or two about tolerance during the intervening years, before her past statements caught up with her, resulting in the waste of an expensive medical education, and leaving behind an embittered former medical resident.

In other words, nobody wins here.