Shortly after October 7, 2023, an Arizona-based group called the Jewish Therapist Collective received a sharp increase in calls from Jewish therapists. The collective is an online community that offers support to Jewish therapists and helps Jewish patients find welcoming practitioners. Its director, Halina Brooke, learned that in the wake of Hamas’s attack on Israel, many Jewish therapists were being told by their colleagues that their very presence was ‘triggering to non-Jewish therapists.’”
A therapist in Chicago named Heba Ibrahim-Joudeh felt that patients, too, needed to be protected from Zionist therapists. In winter 2024, Ibrahim-Joudeh, a member of the Chicago Anti-Racist Therapists Facebook group, organized a “blacklist” of local Zionist therapists. “I’ve put together a list of therapists/practices with Zionist affiliations that we should avoid referring clients to,” she wrote to colleagues, who responded with thanks.
In 2025, a young Jewish woman had her first appointment with a psychotherapist in Washington, D.C. During the session, she mentioned a recent months-long stay in Israel. The therapist, who was part of a group practice, smiled and said, “It’s lucky you were assigned to me. None of my colleagues will treat a Zionist.”
The intolerance is not confined to isolated examples. It’s roiling the American Psychological Association (APA), the nation’s foremost accreditor for psychological training and continuing education programs. Tensions reached a new level last winter when more than 3,500 mental health professionals calling themselves Psychologists Against Antisemitism sent a letter to the APA’s president and board. The signers called upon the association to “address the serious and systemic problem of antisemitism/anti-Jewish hate.” The letter told of APA-hosted conferences for educational credits in which speakers made “official statements and presentations [including] rationalizations of violence against Jews and Israelis; antisemitic tropes; Holocaust distortion; minimization of Jewish victimization, fear, and grief.”
Singled out by name was the former president of the APA Society of Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychology from 2023 to 2025, Lara Sheehi. In addition to diagnosing Zionism as a “settler psychosis,” Sheehi had posted expletive-laced messages on social media, including one stating “destroy Zionism” and another describing Israelis as “genocidal f—ks.” Her sentiments infiltrated the annual meeting of the APA in Denver last summer, where, according to psychologist Dean McKay of Fordham University, professional Listserv postings urged attendees to wear keffiyehs at the convention and read a “land and genocide statement” before giving their presentations, some of which contained Hamas propaganda. McKay has also documented cases of therapists urging their clients to go to anti-Israel protests as part of what they see as their role in promoting activism.
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Psychologist David H. Rosmarin is a careful observer of these developments. An observant Jew and member of the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, he believes that “the most destabilizing realization for many of us psychologists has been that the institutions we trusted to protect minority wellbeing are no longer structurally able—or willing—to protect us.” As he told me, prior to October 7, “Jewish identity did not require explanation or justification; it was not read as a political position.” The yarmulke Rosmarin wears used to invite conversation, but now it prompts avoidance. What’s more, the stress of being ever-vigilant affects patient care. He observes, “Almost any clinician who must make a constant effort not to offend colleagues and patients expends the mental energy that narrows their empathy bandwidth and capacity for more flexible thinking.”
Last fall, New York magazine asked, “Does it Matter What Your Therapist Thinks About Israel?” The answer was yes. As Sasha, a Jewish psychotherapist in lower Manhattan, told journalist Julia Edelstein, her colleagues “hear patients say, ‘I’m a Zionist, and it’s been really hard for me. I’ve lost a lot of my friends and family.’ And the therapist just immediately shuts it down. They are sending letters [to their patients] saying their values do not align.”
Their values do not align? No rule stipulates that the therapist and the patient must agree on politics. In fact, a therapist who is critical of Israel and a supporter of Palestine should be able to conduct productive therapy with an observant Jewish patient who donates to Zionist causes—and vice versa.
But the culture of psychotherapy is changing. Before the murder of George Floyd, an identitarian approach to therapy had been simmering for at least a decade. Afterward, it burst upon the clinical scene. My colleague Val Thomas, a psychotherapist in the UK and editor of Cynical Therapies: Perspectives on the Antitherapeutic Nature of Critical Social Justice, calls it Critical Social Justice Therapy. Untested as a form of therapy, it views patients as either perpetrators or victims of oppression and understands this simple dynamic as the root of their problems.
Social justice therapists—who see themselves as activists first, healers second—usurp the goals of therapy. They override patients’ needs and preferences in favor of their own politicized aims, such as “dismantling racism.” To the extent that Zionism is, in some quarters, considered a form of racism or white supremacy, pro-Israel patients face an uncertain reception when they show up at therapists’ offices.
Against this background, one might be surprised to read the APA’s current Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct: “Psychologists establish and maintain knowledge and awareness of their professional and personal values, experiences, culture, and social contexts. They identify and limit biases that may detract from the well-being of those with whom they professionally interact.”
These tenets do not preclude therapists from making choices about whom they will treat. Such decisions, however, should spring from an individualized consideration of whether they can serve a patient well, not whether they morally disapprove of him. A therapist who lost a loved one on October 7, for example, might not want a patient who is a pro-Hamas activist. A therapist with relatives in Gaza could understandably pass up a potential patient who organizes pro-Israel marches.
Nor are therapists necessarily wrong to disclose personal information. The days of the austere, blank-slate therapist are largely gone, even among most psychoanalysts and psychodynamic therapists. Still, clinicians must assume the proper stance. Inspired by Freud’s notion of “evenly hovering attention,” their posture should be one of neutrality, openness, and curiosity. This is not to say that a therapist might not usefully tell a patient who is struggling with the care of an elderly parent that he or she, too, had been through a similar experience and affirm how emotionally complex it can be. It is absolutely critical, however, that such disclosure be intentional, carefully timed, and made solely because it serves the patient’s needs, not the therapist’s.
What of therapists revealing their political affinities? Under the precise, considered conditions just outlined, such a disclosure might be appropriate. The problem, however, is that too many therapists are doing so in a reckless across-the-board manner that erodes the border between their own ideological commitments and their professional duty to patients. The integrity of that partition is essential to a healthy therapeutic relationship. Yet now, regardless of the best interest of patients, the post–October 7 therapist seems to feel entitled to make his own comfort paramount, to quell his own anxiety. In the realm of responsible psychotherapy, this is a grave transgression.
Congress has taken notice. Last December, the House Committee on Education and Workforce sent a letter to Debra Kawahara, the president of the APA. “The Committee is gravely concerned about antisemitism at the APA, which represents more than 172,000 researchers, clinical professionals, professors, and students across the country in the field of psychology,” wrote Chairman Tim Walberg (R-Mich). Walberg cited as evidence the letter from Psychologists Against Antisemitism and a new report from the Anti-Defamation League on professional organizations that identified the APA as an entity about which it had “major concerns” requiring “substantial action.”
Walberg’s committee requested all APA documents, communications, publications, programming materials, complaints, and actions related to anti-Semitism since the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack. Upon review, it will then consider “whether potential legislative changes are needed.” The association’s millions in federal funding for training programs and contracts could be at risk.
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This moment is fraught with paradox. It was Jews who pioneered psychotherapy and psychoanalysis (once called “the Jewish science” by Nazi critics but later resurrected by some admirers and practitioners, including Freud’s daughter, Anna). All but one of the early members of Freud’s inner circle of 13 were Jewish. The anti-Semitism waged against Austrian physicians had constrained their professional opportunities but left open the unexplored territory of the mind, regarded as a marginal area at the time. The original psychotherapy patients were mostly Jewish, too, reflecting the value placed by Jews on introspection, intellectual life, and the ethic of repair.
Surely, there remain therapists who are emotionally mature—they may even represent the majority of seasoned professionals. Trust has nonetheless been resoundingly damaged on several fronts: among colleagues in the field, among colleagues and their professional organizations, and between patients and therapists. Today, Jewish and Zionist individuals who seek psychological care must search carefully for an experienced therapist who, no matter his or her politics, will regard the patient, foremost, as a fellow human who is suffering.
Photo: Getty Images
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