Court dodges NY’s blogging question, ends case on ministerial exception
Jessie Sander alleged she was fired over an off-duty anti-Zionism blog post; on December 16, 2025, New York’s top court dismissed her case.
Sander v. Westchester Reform Temple opens with a familiar HR problem: what happens when an employee’s off-hours speech collides with an employer’s mission? Jessie Sander, the plaintiff, alleged she was terminated from her teaching job at Westchester Reform Temple after she co-authored a blog post critical of Israel and Zionism. She sued the Temple and its leadership under New York Labor Law § 201-d(2)(c), which prohibits an employer from taking adverse action against an employee based on legal “recreational activities.”
The Court of Appeals, in an opinion by Judge Halligan, did not decide the question at the center of Sander’s legal theory: whether section 201-d’s protection for “recreational activities” can reach blogging or, more broadly, “the public expression of one’s views.” The court noted it had not previously considered the scope of section 201-d on that point and observed that the Legislature enacted the statute in 1992, “well before the proliferation of various mechanisms for disseminating information online.” Still, the court said it would reserve that statutory-interpretation question “for another day.”
Instead, the case turned on a different doctrine that matters most for religious organizations and those who work with them: the ministerial exception,...
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