Sally Satel on "Recent Efforts to Silence 'Zionist'" Therapists

From Dr. Satel, a noted author (and occasional guest-blogger):

A week before her mother called, Zoe had seen a therapist for her first session. She told the new therapist that she’d just been in Israel and was now eager to focus on her personal problems. “Wow. It’s good you were assigned to me,” the therapist said. “No one else in this practice will treat a Zionist.” …

After October 7, 2023, the Jewish Therapist Collective received a sharp increase in calls from Jewish therapists saying, as shared by the collective’s director Halina Brooke, that they were “sidelined or fired from their mental health workplaces due to being Jewish.” Jewish therapy trainees, according to Brooke, were “told that their presence is triggering to non-Jewish therapists.”

Likewise, Chicago-based psychologist Allison Resnick wrote in Kesher, the journal of the Association of Jewish Psychologists, that she routinely reads about “therapists being told to conceal their Jewishness for fear of offending colleagues and clients.”

Last March, in Resnick’s backyard, a therapist with 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,” wrote Heba Ibrahim-Joudeh to her colleagues. “I’m certain there are more out there.” (The Illinois Department of Financial & Professional Regulation is currently investigating Ibrahim-Joudeh for engaging in “dishonorable, unethical, or unprofessional conduct.”)

Last, consider the incident involving the director of Villanova University’s Counseling Center, a frequent leader of “mindful anti-racism and trauma trainings.” In a keynote address at a professional meeting of psychologists in November 2024, Nathalie Edmond showed a slide presentation in which “Zionism and fascism” were grouped together at the far end of a spectrum labeled “window of acceptable discourse.” She also depicted Zionism as one of several elements of “The Colonized Mind,” alongside “rape culture,” “homophobia,” and “internalized racism.” …

Such anti-Zionist advocacy, or for that matter anti-Semitic advocacy, racist advocacy, and the like, is protected by the First Amendment. (When restrictions on psychotherapist-patient speech are permitted under the rubric of malpractice law and the like is a more complicated story, given the uncertain First Amendment status of professional-client speech more generally.) I also think that, while psychotherapists should try as much as they can to put their own ideological beliefs to the side with their patients, if they really think they can’t form an adequate bond with a patient because of the patient’s ideology (Zionist, Communist, pro-abortion, anti-abortion, or what have you), they should refer the patient to another therapist. Nonetheless, I think it’s important to be aware that the views that Dr. Satel describes are being held and spread, and for patients and others to know what therapists they would be wise to avoid.

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