In February, the western world was shocked when a TikTok video exposed two Australian nurses, Ahmad “Rashad” Nadir and Sarah Abu Lebdeh, openly reviling Jews and Israelis, insinuating they would not only refuse to treat, but might actually kill — or have killed — an Israeli patient that presented at their hospital. The duo have rightfully been banned from practice anywhere in Australia, but that will not soothe Australian Jews’ fear that this loose-lipped pair are the tip of an iceberg constituted of less self-sabotaging, but equally hateful fellow travellers.
In a previous era, it was well understood in the healing professions that practitioners must never bring their personal biases to the workplace. That is no longer the case. Nobody in the medical community is encouraging nurses to kill Israeli patients, to be sure, but in professional mental-health circles dominated by far-left ideology, discrimination against Jewish students, practitioners and patients is well tolerated, and sometimes encouraged. In short, the domain of mental health, including social work, has become a psychological minefield for North American Jews.
For example, at a November psychology conference in Philadelphia, Villanova University Counseling Center director Nathalie Edmond gave a presentation on “dismantling oppression” featuring a slide show, including one titled “the colonized mind,” which positioned Zionism as equivalent to “internalized racism,” “homophobia” and “rape culture.” Social media pushback came fast and furious, but no heads rolled.
This anecdote captures the spirit of the movement to exclude therapists who identify as Zionists — that is, people who believe Israel has a right to self-determination as a nation-state — from the therapy community. In March 2024, the Facebook group Chicago Anti-Racist Therapists endorsed a blacklist of “therapists/practices with Zionist affiliations that we should avoid referring clients to,” justifying it as a strategy to preclude the promotion of “White supremacy via Zionism.” A responsive flashback to Nazi Germany is not an over-reaction. One “shocked and scared, but not surprised” blacklisted therapist, Michelle Magida, founded a private Jewish therapist Facebook page.
As psychiatrist Sally Satel notes in a Free Press article on the subject, two issues arise from the story. The first, trying to prevent clinicians who support the existence of Israel, or are simply Jewish, from treating patients “constitutes a grave breach of professional ethics.”
The second is the “alarming” trend in psychotherapy — she calls it “critical social justice therapy” — to insist on psychotherapy as “foremost, a political rather than a clinical enterprise.” Under this rubric, therapists with the “wrong” politics are not trustworthy with patients. As for patients with the same “wrong” convictions, correction of their error should be the focus of treatment.
This Sovietization of psychotherapy is a cross-border phenomenon, and so is a heavy antisemitic presence in therapy associations. The American Psychological Association (APA), the largest psychological association in the world, is considered a hotbed of antisemitism by many observers. A just-published Open Letter “demanding accountability” from APA, replete with evidence, signed by 3,556 “Psychologists against Antisemitism,” notes that “(w)hile APA has issued statements in solidarity with Ukraine and apologized to People of Color for perpetuating racism, it has remained inactive regarding the 500% spike in attacks against Jews, who represent only 2% of the population yet experience over half of all religion-based hate crimes according to FBI statistics.”
I spoke with Ottawa-based Jennifer Kogan, a Canadian social worker who practiced psychotherapy in Washington, D.C. for 30 years, and still works with patients there. Sixteen years ago, she founded and still directs D.C. Therapist Connect, offering its 3,200 members “a safe, nurturing space for all psychotherapists and mental health providers in all stages of their careers.” Kogan resigned last year from the Ontario Association of Social Work, because none of their “countless trainings and webinars” on marginalized groups included Jews or their experiences.
Kogan’s perception of her field as systemically disengaged from Jewish suffering was borne out at a recent talk sponsored by Tafsik, an organization devoted to combatting antisemitism in Canada and globally. The featured speaker was Israeli professor Ruth Halperin-Kaddari, a leading expert on family law and international women’s rights. She spoke to her audience of — despite unassailable evidence — “having to prove the rapes and violence” inflicted on women and children by Hamas on October 7.
According to Amir Epstein, Tafsik’s Executive Director, invitations to the event (plus a reminder follow-up call) were sent to all the directors of Toronto and area organizations dealing with rape and sexual violence, including: Women’s Support Centre, Hamilton Sexual Assault Centre, Toronto Rape Crisis Centre, YWCA, Canadian Centre to End Human Trafficking, the Elizabeth Fry Society, the Assaulted Women’s Helpline, and Women’s Crisis Services.
Apart from Gillian Freeman, Executive Director of Victim Services of York Region, who spoke at the event, “not a single one of them attended, or responded to our invitation.”
X: @BarbaraRKay