A second Jewish American flight attendant is suing Delta Air Lines over allegations of antisemitic discrimination and retaliation at the hands of the Atlanta-based carrier, just weeks after another crew member said the airline had discriminated against him by serving him a ham sandwich.
In a 20-page complaint, Roey Segev from Sunny Isles Beach, Florida, claims Delta “has engaged in a pattern of intentionally discriminating and retaliating against ethically Jewish and Israeli employees based upon their race and ancestry.”
In particular, Segev claims Delta has jeopardized the safety and security of its Jewish employees by knowingly employing Hamas supporters and that four flight attendants who have publicly “exhibited their hatred and explicit animosity towards Israel” continue to be employed by the airline.
Segev has worked as a flight attendant for Delta since March 2019 and was employed as a bilingual Hebrew and English-speaking crew member. According to the lawsuit, which was filed in a New York district court earlier this week, Segev was happy in his job until January 2023.
It was during a flight from Tel Aviv to New York JFK on January 15, 2023, that Segev started to become unhappy when the purser was “demonstrably antisemitic” to him and other Jewish Israeli flight attendants, referring to passengers as “your people” and reprimanding him for speaking in Hebrew with customers.
Segev says he complained to Delta about this incident but never received any response from the airline about the concerns he raised.
Several months later, Segev was involved in a serious incident onboard a flight from Tel Aviv to New York JFK when a passenger became unruly. Segev says he and another Jewish Israeli flight attendant were left to deal with the “violent” passenger as the flight continued onto New York.
Segev claims Delta deviated from standard operating procedures by not diverting to have the passenger offloaded – he has never received an explanation for why Delta didn’t have the plane diverted.
Several weeks later, Segev complained on an internal messaging platform about an “unsafe cabin environment” on a flight from Las Vegas to Atlanta after the plane was left idling on the tarmac for over two hours in extreme heat that resulted in several passengers and crew members requiring medical treatment after fainting.
After vocalizing his concerns, Segev then became the subject of an internal investigation into his work performance on two flights dating back to January and February 2023 over claims that he had been using his personal cellphone and watching the inflight entertainment system on a flight.
Following the October 7, 2023, Hamas terror attack on Israel, Segev says several flight attendants displayed their “avid support” for Hamas on social media, which resulted in an internal investigation.
However, the lawsuit alleges that while displaying public support for a foreign terrorist organization should be in breach of Delta’s social media rules, the flight attendants at the center of the controversy are still working for the airline.
In response to a request for comment, a spokesperson for Delta told us: “While we haven’t been served with a complaint and wouldn’t comment directly on pending litigation, Delta has zero tolerance for discrimination or retaliation of any form in our workplace.”
In September, Sasi Sheva from Encino, California, accused Delta of refusing to give him time off to commemorate Yom Kippur, which is the holiest day of the year in Judaism, despite multiple requests to find an accommodation for his religious needs.
Sheva, who has worked as a flight attendant for Delta for the past two and a half years from its New York JFK base, also claims in a separate lawsuit that the airline discriminated against him when it served him a ham sandwich after bosses refused him to pick up vegetarian food from an airport outlet ahead of a flight.
The lawsuit claims that Delta is dealing with ‘multiple’ complaints of mistreatment of Jewish and Israeli staffers and that the carrier has already had to deal with similar lawsuits from disgruntled employees who have alleged discrimination at the hands of the airline.
In July, Delta found itself in the middle of another antisemitism row after a flight attendant was spotted wearing a Palestine flag pin on their uniform. Despite not breaking any rules at the time of the incident, Delta quickly adjusted its uniform and grooming policy to ban crew members from wearing Palestine flag pins.
The Association of Flight Attendants (AFA-CWA), which wants to represent Delta’s non-unionized flight attendants, slammed Delta’s decision to cave to public pressure on the issue.
