A doctor fired from his job as the director of NYU Langone Health's cancer center after posting anti-Hamas items on his social media accounts is suing the facility for wrongful termination, and says he is a victim of religious discrimination.
Cancer biologist Dr. Benjamin Neel, whose NYU Langone laboratory conducts research on ovarian and breast cancer, along with leukemia treatments, claims in his lawsuit that he was "offered up like a sacrificial lamb," reports The New York Times.
Neel's firing came after he reposted several anti-Hamas cartoons, including two with caricatures of Arab people, along with messages on social media platform X, that questioned the number of deaths in Gaza from Israel's bombings.
Laws that protect employees from being fired for their activities outside the office differ from state to state, and attorneys in New York say the law there isn't clear.
Neel is one of the two doctors fired from NYU Langone for online postings. The first was Dr. Zaki Masoud, a trainee at NYU Langone's hospital in Mineola, Long Island, who lost his job after being accused of posting a message on Instagram defending Hamas' Oct. 7 attack on Israel.
Nearly 90,000 people have signed an online petition calling for the hospital to reinstate Masoud.
Neel says in his lawsuit, filed last week in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, that NYU Langone feared a backlash after it fired Masoud, so decided to fire him, as well, as part of an "ill-considered plan to feign the appearance of even-handedness."
The lawsuit claims that an executive vice president told Neel that his online posts "were making it hard" to justify firing other people like Masoud.
He continues to be a tenured professor at Langone, but his pay was slashed by about two-thirds when he was fired from his position as director at the Perlmutter Cancer Center, according to his attorney, Milton Williams.
The lawsuit says Neel was told his social media posts were an "intentional breach" of NYU Langone's Code of Conduct and Social Media Policy and that he violated "the standards expected of a physician in a leadership role," hurting the hospital's reputation.
"Several times since last month, we reminded all employees of our high standards, as well as our Code of Conduct and Social Media Policy," the hospital said in a statement regarding the lawsuit. "Nonetheless, Dr. Ben Neel, as a leader at our institution, disregarded these standards in a series of public social media posts and later locked his Twitter/X account. NYU Langone stands by our decision and looks forward to defending it in court."
But Neel, in his lawsuit, says his support of Israel is part of his Jewish identity and the firing amounts to religious discrimination.
Several people, including multiple doctors, have lost jobs over their statements about the war, The Times noted.
Johns Hopkins Hospital put a pediatric cardiologist on leave after accusing him of calling Palestinians "bloodthirsty morally depraved animals" in online postings, according to a local news report.
The doctor wrote his colleagues a letter of apology for what he called his "regrettable, hurtful messages."
In another case, an emergency room doctor at Lenox Hill Hospital, located on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, was fired for posting after the Hamas attacks that the "Zionist settlers [were] getting a taste of their own medicine."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.