Shay Laps arrived at a prestigious Stanford University research laboratory from Israel in April 2024 with a mission to develop a type of insulin that could transform diabetes treatment. He had won the job after interviews more than six months earlier, and his credentials included a PhD, a groundbreaking method for protein synthesis, and the recommendation of a Nobel Prize winner.
By October 2024, however, Laps was gone from Stanford. He had been locked out of the lab, his research sabotaged and his reputation threatened, according to a lawsuit he filed Thursday in a federal court in California. The lawsuit alleges antisemitic discrimination, retaliation, and deliberate institutional indifference.
Why did everything go wrong? The lawsuit alleges that the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel “was a match to tinder at Stanford,” igniting pervasive antisemitism that targeted Laps from the moment he walked into the lab. During the hiring process, lab director Danny Hung-Chieh Chou had circulated Laps’s curriculum vitae, which made clear that he had served in the Israeli Defense Forces, and lab members also knew that he was Jewish and Israeli, according to the lawsuit.
“Stanford takes any allegation of antisemitism very seriously. In this instance and based on all the allegations that Dr. Laps reported directly to the institution, a thorough internal investigation found that they were unsubstantiated,” Stanford said. But Stanford acknowledged in a May 2024 report that there was a “widespread and pernicious” climate of antisemitism and anti-Israel bias on campus, particularly in its medical school and science labs like the one Laps joined. The report included examples of Jewish students being harassed, faculty members being accused of Zionism for wearing yarmulkes, and administrators dismissing concerns with statements such as “Antisemitism is institutional. There’s nothing I can do.”
