Mount Sinai Hospital Fired Social Worker Over “Gaza Must Live” Postcard
Hospital employees say the termination is an example of the anti-Palestinian climate at the institution.
August 13, 2025
Mount Sinai Hospital in New York.
Last year, Claire Raizen, a social worker at Manhattan’s Mount Sinai Hospital who worked with bone marrow transplant patients, put up a small postcard at her desk bearing the words “Gaza Must Live.” Raizen said this affirmation of her values in her workplace was an attempt to manage the disconnect that arose from “knowing atrocities are happening” in Gaza while she went about her daily life. The postcard was in a space where only co-workers came and went, she said, and was out of view of patients.
At first, other employees at the top-ranked hospital who saw the postcard reacted positively, Raizen said. “I had co-workers that would come into my office and say, ‘it’s so amazing to know that this is a safe place to talk about Palestine.’” But in early July, someone lodged an anonymous complaint that the postcard made them uncomfortable, a fact Raizen’s supervisor raised with her at a regularly scheduled check-in. Over the ensuing three weeks, she had a series of meetings with superiors who repeatedly pressed her to take down the postcard. In a July 10th phone call that Raizen recorded and shared with Jewish Currents, Alison Snow, the director of oncology social work at Mount Sinai, told Raizen that “somebody has been [made] uncomfortable by” the postcard, that it needed to come down, and that if she did not obey, she would face disciplinary action due to her “willful insubordination and refusing the directive.” Snow also said there is a workplace policy against having anything “political in nature” in the workplace. In a similar phone call the following day, Sal LaVecchia, the vice president for human resources at Mount Sinai, told her “these signs or messages in the workplace” are “distracting from our mission,” and added: “It’s a very controversial topic, as you as you know, and some people are uncomfortable and are offended.” (Raizen asked LaVecchia for a copy of the policy she was supposedly violating, which she said she never received.) In an interview with Jewish Currents, Raizen said she refused to take the postcard down because “complying with this order felt like it was going to compromise my most core ethical values”—principles that Raizen said were formed in part by growing up in a family with ancestors killed in the Holocaust. On July 31st, she was fired from her job. Mount Sinai did not respond to requests for comment.
Raizen’s colleagues were angered and shocked over the firing. “My jaw hit the floor when I found out that she was being fired over this,” said one Mount Sinai employee, who requested anonymity to protect themselves from retaliation. “It’s stunning that they fired Claire, an exquisite social worker beloved by her team, over something so inconsequential to how she does her job.” Raizen and her colleagues say that her firing disrupted care for Raizen’s patients. “The active patient issues that I was addressing have all just been dropped with no opportunity to pass those off to a colleague,” said Raizen. She said that former patients have missed appointments because they couldn’t access her for transportation assistance, and that others experienced delays in the completion of paperwork for disability benefits or medical leave. “There is a clinical termination process that social workers are trained to do when relationships between patients and clients end,” Raizen said. “Disappearing from my patients without being able to do that makes me concerned about causing emotional distress to critically-ill patients who already have significant levels of depression and anxiety. I am very concerned about the impact on patients’ emotional well-being.”
Currently, a circulating petition protesting Raizen’s firing has been signed by over 350 colleagues, patients, and other health care workers. It states that the termination is an instance of “selective application of censorship for a nonviolent statement about a traumatic and ongoing event.” Mount Sinai employees say that other hospital workers routinely wear symbols or post signs that advance political positions, such as the transgender pride flag or yellow ribbons showing support for Israeli hostages in Gaza. “There’s never any repercussions for that,” said a second Mount Sinai employee. “We could have brought [complaints about those expressions] but we didn’t want to stoop that low, because everybody has a right to their opinion.”
Mount Sinai employees say that Raizen’s firing is a particularly brazen example of the anti-Palestinian climate at the hospital. A day after the October 7th attacks—and amid Israel’s immediate bombardment of Gaza, which killed scores of Palestinians—Mount Sinai leadership sent a message to its employees declaring that they “stand with Israel.” While they acknowledged that civilians on “both sides” had died, they nonetheless affirmed that they “support Israel’s right to fight in its self-defense.” The only other message on Israel and Gaza sent to employees was sent on October 12th, 2023. Titled “Events in Israel and Gaza,” the email laments the “images of human suffering and loss of life emerging from the Middle East in the wake of the terror attack by Hamas against Israel.” Last October, medical students invited Dr. Mark Perlmutter—a doctor who had volunteered in Gaza—to give a talk at Mount Sinai entitled “Healthcare in War Zones: What a Doctor Witnessed in Gaza,” but according to the second Mount Sinai employee, the talk was canceled at the behest of the medical school dean, Dennis Charney. (The talk was ultimately held off-campus.)
Raizen’s firing is one of the latest examples of how workplaces around the country have repressed activism and speech in solidarity with Gaza, even as experts and human rights organizations have increasingly warned that Israel is perpetuating a genocide. That Mount Sinai is “now firing someone for saying Gaza should be able to live is stunning, especially at a moment when respected health organizations are decrying Israel’s starvation of Gaza and genocide,” said the first Mount Sinai employee. Nurses, museum workers, tech employees, and professors, among others, have been fired for opposing Israel’s bombardment of Gaza at their jobs. Since 2023, the civil and constitutional rights group Palestine Legal received 286 reports of workers being fired in retaliation for pro-Palestine advocacy. Sabiya Ahamed, a staff attorney at Palestine Legal, said Raizen’s firing could chill the speech of others in her former workplace and beyond. “People who hear this story might start to wonder whether their employer thinks the same thing about the phrase ‘Gaza must live,’’” said Ahamed. “It prevents people from wanting to speak out.” Indeed, Raizen’s colleagues told Jewish Currents that they worried they could be next if they advocate for Palestinian human rights. “If they did that to her,” said the second Mount Sinai employee, “nobody is safe to speak up in this environment.”
Firings like Raizen’s also reflect a harsh reality for those who speak out for Palestinian rights inside their workplaces: Most workers can be fired for political speech—especially if you are not in a union. Under New York law, workers cannot be punished for political activity done outside of work hours, but the definition of such activity is limited to running for office or campaigning or fundraising for a political candidate. In any case, Raizen’s postcard was put up inside the workplace. “Such a posting is not protected under state law,” said Lee Adler, a labor lawyer and professor at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations. Indeed, Raizen said she spoke with a labor lawyer, who told her that “it is not a wrongful termination.” Raizen added: “The reality of being in a non-unionized position in a private workplace is your rights are extremely limited.”
