The Media Line: Do Jews Still Have Safe Spaces for Healing?

Do Jews Still Have Safe Spaces for Healing?

StandWithUs posted on Instagram: “Jewish psychologists report feeling pressured to hide their identities, stay silent about October 7, 2023, or distance themselves from Israel simply to be accepted by their professional peers.”

By Maayan Hoffman / The Media Line

Shortly after October 7, 2023, an Israeli-American graduate student at Columbia University went to see her therapist after friends threatened to end their friendship unless she denounced Israel and her Israeli identity. According to the student, the therapist responded: “Well, you can understand why they might feel that way given everything that’s happened.”

The student felt she could no longer continue therapy with that clinician. Eventually, she began searching for a new therapist and found Jessica Zmood, co-founder of Gesher Community Care. But according to Zmood’s partner at Gesher, Shelly Steinwurtzel, before the student would open up, she first asked whether Zmood was comfortable discussing the Middle East. Only when the therapist showed her the Jewish star necklace she was wearing did the student begin to relax.

“The girl just started crying. It was such a wave of relief that she could feel safe,” Steinwurtzel said.

According to Steinwurtzel, the student’s experience is far from isolated. Many Jewish and Israeli patients have felt ostracized by their clinicians, she said. At the same time, therapists across the country have been afraid to talk about their own connections to Israel or the challenges they face, both professionally and personally, because of their affiliation or connection with Israel and Judaism.

“There’s sort of a silencing and self-censoring that so many people are doing now,” Steinwurtzel said.

However, earlier this month, a group of more than 4,000 individuals and more than 80 organizations sent a letter to the American Psychological Association (APA) calling on it to do more to safeguard Jewish and Israeli psychologists. The letter, written in collaboration with the Center for Combating Antisemitism, part of the NGO StandWithUs, was drafted just ahead of the APA’s annual convention after a group of psychologists urged attendees to “send a clear message to APA and our fellow psychologists: Psychologists do, and must, care about justice, liberation, and the lives of Palestinians.”

An email written on July 31 by Psychologists for Justice in Palestine and shared on an APA listserv asked participants to consider wearing keffiyehs and Palestinian colors at the event, which took place in early August, a move that Jewish and Israeli psychologists said could make them feel intimidated or unwelcome.

The email called on participants to recite a scripted “Land and Genocide Acknowledgment” before professional presentations. According to an Instagram post published by StandWithUs three weeks ago, “The ‘Land and Genocide Acknowledgment’ presents deeply contested claims as established fact, denies the Jewish people’s ancestral connection to Israel, and makes no mention of the October 7, 2023 Hamas massacre, the hostages, or the ongoing trauma experienced by Jews worldwide.”

The email, Steinwurtzel explained, promoted the concept of “decolonizing therapy.” The concept of decolonizing therapy comes from a book by Black feminist author Dr. Jennifer Mullan, also known as “The Rage Doctor,” which calls on therapists to “politicize their practice through an emotional decolonial lens.”

According to the book’s description on Amazon, therapy has always been “inherently political,” and to understand mental health oppression better, “we must become familiar with the root of disembodiment from our histories, homelands, and healing practices.” The author argues that “ignoring collective global trauma makes delivering effective therapy impossible; not knowing how to interrogate privilege … makes healing elusive; and shying away from understanding how we as professionals may be participating in oppression is irresponsible.”

But according to Steinwurtzel, the framework can become explicitly anti-Zionist when Zionism itself is treated as part of a colonized mindset and associated with genocide and oppressive culture.

“It’s presented at conferences; the social justice framework and the oppressor narrative are all part of this decolonizing therapy perspective, and it was widely discussed at the APA conference,” Steinwurtzel said. “We’ve seen things on listservs and posts where therapists are talking about sitting with a Zionist patient who is not coming to them for decolonization, but if they could just let go of their Zionism, they would feel so much better. They would have so much less anxiety. It’s very disturbing as a Zionist, as a Jew, and as a thinking person who believes that differences are meant to be respected.”

StandWithUs added in its own Instagram post: “Jewish psychologists report feeling pressured to hide their identities, stay silent about October 7, 2023, or distance themselves from Israel simply to be accepted by their professional peers.”

The open letter led by Gesher was widely publicized ahead of the event, but there was little coverage afterward of significant incidents involving Jewish or Israeli participants at the APA conference. Still, the letter reflected the extent of the concerns leading up to the gathering. It called on the APA to “act immediately to ensure that Jewish and Israeli psychologists can participate safely and fully in the 2026 Annual Convention,” noting that many were reconsidering whether they should attend following the email from Psychologists for Justice in Palestine.

“When members fear speaking, identifying themselves openly, or attending their profession’s largest gathering, psychological safety has already been compromised,” the letter said. “No psychologist should have to conceal a connection to Israel, minimize an important part of Jewish identity, or remain silent about Jewish trauma to participate fully in the profession.”

The letter accused those pushing for decolonizing therapy of claiming to oppose silencing while “demanding conformity to a single narrative. It invokes historical trauma while omitting Jewish historical trauma. It promotes inclusion while signaling that Jews with a meaningful connection to Israel may belong only if they conceal that connection.”

It continued: “Criticism of Israeli policy is not inherently antisemitic. However, rhetoric must be scrutinized when it assigns collective guilt to Jews, erases Jewish history and peoplehood, imposes ideological tests on Jewish participation, or dismisses Jewish reports of discrimination.”

The letter called on the APA to uphold its commitments to scientific integrity, inclusion, nondiscrimination, professional responsibility, and respect for human dignity.

Steinwurtzel said the current situation can create a sense of unease for patients who seek therapy for something completely unrelated to their faith or Zionism but do not know whether their provider views them as complicit in genocide or as a “baby killer” because of their connection to Israel.

“I think it’s very scary and it’s very unfair, and it really works against our basic ethics codes,” she said, noting that she and Zmood founded Gesher Community Care because they were encountering such situations far too often.

“We created Gesher to provide a safe space for Jewish clients in the United States,” Steinwurtzel said.

Concerns about the treatment of Israeli and Jewish professionals are not confined to psychology. Shortly after Gesher’s letter and the APA conference, leaders of Hadassah publicly challenged another campaign, this time targeting Israeli doctors and their place within the international medical community.

Carol Ann Schwartz, national president of Hadassah, The Women’s Zionist Organization of America, and Prof. Yoram Weiss, director general of its Jerusalem-based Hadassah Medical Organization, wrote a letter published in The Lancet in response to a petition seeking to expel the Israeli Medical Association (IMA) from the World Medical Association (WMA), of which the IMA is a founding member. The petition began circulating in June ahead of a WMA conference scheduled to take place in early October.

Health journalist Udani Samarasekera reported in The Lancet that organizations are calling for a boycott of the IMA over alleged “violations of medical ethics and international humanitarian law in the war in Gaza.” The petition is being led by the People’s Health Movement, Artsen voor Gaza (Doctors for Gaza), and the Health Advisory Council of Jewish Voice for Peace. The groups argue that the IMA has not done enough in response to the destruction of healthcare infrastructure and the alleged torture and killing of healthcare workers in Gaza.

In response to the petition, the IMA stressed that “its members have made it clear on numerous occasions that they uphold universal medical ethics,” Samarasekera reported. The Lancet article noted that the IMA has issued statements calling for respect for medical neutrality and international humanitarian law, the safe delivery of humanitarian aid to civilians in Gaza, and humane treatment of prisoners and detainees in hospitals. It also expressed “deep concern” in August over an attack on Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis.

The petition has more than 1,150 signatories from health professionals and organizations, who hope to have the IMA’s expulsion placed on the agenda for the WMA’s October meeting.

In their letter, Schwartz and Weiss denounced the “continued effort to isolate Israeli medical professionals.” They urged the WMA to reject the petition and exclude it, along with any related resolutions, from the agenda of the organization’s upcoming General Assembly.

“Hate has no place in medicine,” the letter is titled in The Lancet.

“We are deeply troubled by the petition,” the pair wrote. “The petition targets Israeli medical professionals based solely on their nationality and the actions of their government. The accusations lodged against the IMA, including the failure to condemn its government’s conduct, create a double standard for Israeli healthcare professionals and contribute to the rise in antisemitism experienced by 40% of Jewish practitioners. Attempts to politicize medicine derail potentially lifesaving collaboration among healthcare professionals, compromise global health and, ultimately, harm countless patients.”

The letter continued by stating that “the continued effort to isolate Israeli medical professionals is a thinly disguised attempt to normalize anti-Zionism and antisemitism.”

For Steinwurtzel, the controversies within psychology and medicine point to the same broader concern: whether Jewish and Israeli patients and professionals can enter healthcare spaces without feeling that their identity or connection to Israel will be held against them. She said she hopes the APA, WMA, and other professional bodies act quickly to address the problem.

“If we’re going to call ourselves a science, we need to go back to science,” Steinwurtzel said. “We need to give people safe spaces so that they can heal from the things that are actually bothering them. Jews, like everybody else, deserve safe healthcare providers and spaces for healing.”

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