Antisemitism and the Trauma of Invalidation

Therapy is built on trust, safety, and the feeling of being truly seen, but for many Jewish therapists, that foundation has been shaken. Since October 7, we’ve realized the world we thought we lived in was not the one we actually inhabited. These four essays are our attempt to name that rupture and reflect on what it means for us and our clients.

The Stories We Carry

By Jennifer Kogan

People often describe Montreal as a little European city. To me, it’s home. The 1960s, when I was growing up there, was a tumultuous time. A group called the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ), a Quebec separatist terrorist group, was wreaking havoc in our city. Inspired by the work of Frantz Fanon, they believed violence was a necessary tool for political change.

The FLQ’s aim was to separate a French-speaking Quebec from the rest of Canada. Before they were ultimately arrested, they’d detonated bombs and kidnapped and killed many people. As kids, we mostly didn’t realize what was happening, but I can only imagine what it was like for the adults around me to live through this, on top of antisemitism and the additional stress over language. Having fled to Canada in earlier times, most Jews had learned English to acclimate to their new country. Now, being a minority in two ways (Jewish and English-speaking) felt dangerous. Many Jewish families left Montreal for Toronto but mine stayed.

My family had emigrated to Canada at different times of persecution. My mother’s side came during the pogroms, and my father’s side to escape the Holocaust. The stories I heard growing up were incomplete and spread over time, making it difficult to piece it all together. But as therapists, we know how violence and terror live on inside us, even in fragments.

There’s so much I want to know about entire branches of my family who’d either escaped or perished. It’s like watching an old film catch fire, the middle burning away, leaving only scattered shards behind. My great-grandmother put teaspoons on her windowsill as a kind of bespoke alarm system for when the Cossacks rode up on their horses. My great uncle and his family were shot in the town square, betrayed by their neighbors. My grandfather, who I’m named after, traveled to Canada by boat all by himself when he was just 10 years old.

When I was 10 years old, I found a book on a shelf called Anya. In the story, Anya, a Jewish woman in Poland during the Holocaust, trades a diamond ring for an egg so her daughter can have something to eat. I was much too young to be reading this book, but I just couldn’t stop. All at once, I was the daughter with nothing to eat, and I was her mother desperate to feed her.

As therapists, we’re keepers of precious stories; we’re privy to the inner world of those we’re trained to help. It’s a heady and heavy job, which is why support from our colleagues is so important. I think back to many happy years of peer supervision, study groups, and meeting colleagues for coffee during breaks between sessions.

Then October 7 happened. In the worst one-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, the world stopped for me. Every other Jewish person and therapist I knew was also in shock. Many of us couldn’t leave our houses for days. We were in mourning for our people. The pain was visceral, but colleagues I had felt such kinship with in the decades before spurned any attempt I made talking about this awful pain. Almost overnight, the 4,000-member therapist group I had tended to over the years was overrun with jarring political posts that frightened me. All of this in a listserv designed to refer clients for therapeutic care. It felt unsafe.

Like what happened to most of my Jewish friends and colleagues, decades-long friendships evaporated in a haze of animosity and antizionism. In a microcosm of what was going on in the world around us, therapists started to use the word Zionism as a slur. A word that is simply a description of Jewish self-determination in our ancestral land. Every Passover, Jews around the world recite “Next year in Jerusalem.” Zionism is part of our thousands of years of peoplehood.

Despite this fact, some therapists in Chicago created a list of “Zionist therapists,” identifying who to boycott, as if this was a perfectly okay thing to do. Many therapists also shortened the word to “Zio,’” a term coined by Neo-Nazi David Duke. A common refrain on therapists listservs is, “I have no problem with Jews; it’s the Nazi Zionists we hate.” Since the majority of Jewish people are Zionists, it’s not possible to say this and have it not be antisemitic.

Now, Jewish clients reach out to me because they know I’m “safe.” This is a word used by many Jews these days; is this or that person safe? Where I live, a woman was stabbed in the back at a local grocery store because she was wearing a Star of David necklace. It feels like none of us are safe.

My grandfather trained to become a doctor at McGill University in 1929 despite quotas regarding Jewish students. These quotas remained in place until the 1960s. His life of service was a big part of why I decided to become a social worker: I wanted to make a difference in someone’s life the way he did. But this new phenomenon that Jewish therapists are facing is systemic in nature. Antiracist, anti-oppressive, and decolonial frameworks either exclude the Jewish experience or accuse all Jews of being oppressors themselves.

It’s hard not to see the storied cyclical nature of antisemitism here, especially when you’re on the receiving end of it. Antisemitism is a shape-shifting animal that paints Jews as the ”other,” correlating to whatever has been deemed evil in society at that time in history.

I share my experiences with the hope that someone will do what we pledge to do for all of our clients: listen without judgment and hold what I say with safety and care. Because what your Jewish colleagues and clients are experiencing today is complicated and going unheard.

How Antisemitism Shaped Identity Before Conversion

By Dean McKay

As a cognitive-behavioral clinician and researcher, I appreciate that there are vast areas where science is lacking in how we address human emotional pain and suffering, how we establish our identity, how we develop perspective-taking, and what the consequences are to our identity when confronted with discrimination and racism. It’s awareness of these gaps that has also led me to appreciate how our personal histories inform our engagement with clients, the ways we think about therapy, and how we understand ourselves as a human variable in those therapeutic contexts.

My own history has significantly informed my reactions to our current sociopolitical moment, within the profession and in interactions with clients. In elementary school, I had close friendships with many of my Jewish classmates. As a result, at an early age, I believed I was Jewish and was corrected by my family. I was reminded of it frequently. Sometimes, as a family joke: “Remember when you were six and declared you were Jewish?” More often, the reminder was through derision. Often without explanation, if I had too many consecutive plans with Jewish friends, I’d be angrily asked if I was finally going to become one. Picture the question being asked, but with antisemitic slurs. My parents even sent me to a parochial Christian high school in order to separate me from my Jewish friends. It was shocking, but in an additional bit of defiance, I became friends with the one Jewish classmate in the school.

Eventually, I married someone who was Jewish by birth and whose father and paternal side of the family were all Holocaust survivors. I developed an extremely close connection with my father-in-law, a man whom I deeply admired. I converted to Judaism in the Reconstructionist movement. For over 25 years after converting, I was rarely concerned about antisemitism, as most of what I experienced growing up was far in my rearview.

I lived that way pretty much unfettered up until October 7, 2023. Late on that day, my wife, someone who has a keen eye for intuiting how events may unfold, predicted that it would lead to increased antisemitism. It’s been painful to see how right she was, and that much of this has been taking place within our profession.

There’s no doubt that our profession attracts truly caring professionals who perform a demanding job every day. And the contemporary movement in the mental health professions to decolonize therapy and address the systemic harms perpetrated on the historically oppressed is truly noble. In fact, social justice movements are aligned with Jewish values of tikkun olam (repair the world). So it’s tempting at times to feel frustration and anger at how the decolonial movement may have led to antisemitism that’s left-wing in nature, borne of inaccurate assumptions of what Zionism means.

Many mental health professionals I know who are also Jewish and Zionist don’t necessarily want to make Aliyah (move to Israel), but they do want Israel to exist as a Jewish state, and they’re disturbed by the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas. Our professions are facing a crisis. In aiming to raise awareness among practitioners of society’s history of systemic harms to marginalized groups, there’s an additional challenge to Jewish practitioners who retain their identity and are legitimately concerned with the welfare of the historically oppressed.

This is a plea to colleagues who are unquestionably caring to consider whether the pervasive anti-Zionist rhetoric is in keeping with the liberal pluralism of our profession. This exhortation is to ask our colleagues to consider the profound complexity of the world, return to the postmodernist roots that enable us to understand people as multifaceted, and recognize that binaries of identity can be unfair and harmful simplifications.

The decolonial movement has raised awareness in highly valuable ways, and my hope is that more practitioners can come to fully understand that their Jewish colleagues are also very sensitized to systemic discrimination. The divisions in our profession arising from assumptions about what Zionism is or is not have created harmful fissures among us.

The Wound Beneath the Wound

By Miri Bar-Halpern

I grew up in Israel during the Second Intifada, where missiles, a safe room at home, and a shelter built into the playscape felt ordinary. It was only after I immigrated to the U.S. that I realized the reality I grew up in wasn’t the norm for other children. Once, at a party with friends in Connecticut, the lights suddenly went on. My instinct was to quickly take cover, but when I looked around, my friends were just standing there, smiling. That moment shaped my path toward a future in trauma treatment and research.

But we all know fear isn’t a memory; it’s a cycle. On October 7, 2023, that cycle came roaring back. Everything my grandparents told me about as their memories of the Holocaust were happening in front of me. Watching the gruesome images of Jews being butchered, raped, and beheaded, led to nightmares about my family being kidnapped, my kids covered with blood, and my friends being raped and murdered. Not to mention my ongoing worries for my family still living in Israel under ongoing rocket attacks.

This personal trauma is part of a collective trauma and an intergenerational trauma. I could see the symptoms manifesting for me and could manage them—until I was hit with what felt like an even deeper wound, the traumatic invalidation of my experience. While I could name the grief, flashbacks, nightmares, and hypervigilance I experienced after October 7th, I was unprepared for the silence and denial that came from colleagues I trusted. People who’d always championed human rights for others suddenly had nothing to say to me. Women’s organizations that normally respond to sexual violence grew mute when Israeli women were raped. In consultation groups, classrooms, and even therapy spaces, Jewish pain was minimized, politicized, or erased.

It wasn’t just a theoretical concern. I coauthored a peer-reviewed article on traumatic invalidation in the Jewish community, and it was dismissed not on the basis of evidence or argument, but because I was Jewish. “Of course you’d write this,” I was told, as if my identity disqualified my scholarship. On a DBT listserv that linked to the paper someone commented, “What about the suffering in Gaza, and why are we publishing a political paper?” I was stunned. Therapists at the front line of dialectical thinking and validation, couldn’t validate the pain of Jewish clients and colleagues, turning it into a hierarchy of empathy.

One Jewish client attending an LGBTQ group described how the space had become saturated with political slogans and maps erasing Israel. When she said she no longer felt safe, the facilitator told her, “Sorry you feel that way. You can always leave.” An Israeli-American woman described trying to share her anguish with colleagues, only to be met immediately with, “How do you think Palestinians are feeling?” She told me later, “Would they say that to any other minority group? Of course I care about Palestinians. But am I not allowed to grieve too? My feelings are treated as if they’re irrelevant.” A long-time therapy client who shared fears about rising antisemitism was told dismissively, “I want to talk about your fear of another Holocaust,” leaving him feeling paranoid and ashamed.

I also heard from Jewish clinicians experiencing invalidation in their professional lives. A Mizrahi Jewish therapist whose family is from Morocco and Yemen was told in a DEI workshop to join the “white oppressor” group. When she tried to explain that her background did not fit that box, she was told, “You’re Jewish, so you must be white.” After sharing that she was having nightmares following October 7, she was placed on medical leave for being “too emotional.” Another therapist proposed running a support group for those experiencing antisemitism but was told she would need a non-Jewish co-leader because the topic was “too close to home.” The group was ultimately canceled because the practice didn’t want to “take sides.” I doubt clinicians from other minority groups would ever be told the same when proposing a group about racism or LGBTQ identity.

In professional spaces, Jewish therapists lost long-standing consultation groups because they were unwilling to denounce Israel. A colleague told me her queer community issued her the same ultimatum. “If anyone could hold complexity, I thought it would be therapists,” she said. Even trauma trainings weren’t immune. A trainer used an antiracism framework to justify Hamas’s atrocities on October 7, and a world-known trauma researcher compared Jews to Nazis.

These examples are painful, but they are also instructive. As therapists, we pride ourselves on cultural humility and nonjudgment, yet too many Jewish clients and Jewish clinicians have learned that these principles have limits. We would never tell a Black client grieving racial violence to think first about the feelings of police officers. We would never ask a survivor of sexual assault to separate their womanhood from their trauma. We would never dismiss a gay client’s fear of attack as paranoia. And yet these equivalents have been said, often word for word, to Jewish clients. Too many Jewish clients and clinicians have discovered that empathy is sometimes treated as conditional, and compassion measured out according to politics. A hierarchy of empathy is the beginning of the loss of our humanity.

The ethical imperative of psychotherapy is simple: do no harm. That requires validating trauma before analyzing it, recognizing when vigilance is adaptive rather than pathological, resisting the urge to collapse identities into categories of oppressor or oppressed, and refusing to impose litmus tests before offering empathy.

Trauma-informed care is built on the “Four Rs: realizing the widespread impact of trauma, recognizing its signs, responding with appropriate support, and resisting retraumatization. At its core, this model emphasizes creating physical and emotional safety so that healing can occur. Rising antisemitism, public erasure of grief, and the silencing of Jewish pain mean that safety can’t be assumed. When clinicians fail to acknowledge this reality, or worse, contribute to it, they deny Jewish clients the very foundation of trauma-informed care.

But if we can recommit to the fundamentals of our profession: humility, presence, validation, dignity, we can model the hope we have for all clients: that wounds do not define us, that pain can be transformed into meaning, and that even in the darkest nights, we can kindle light.

Healing in the Face of Harm

By Andrea Yudell

On October 7, my mouth was agape as I watched live feeds of brutality uploaded by Hamas. Israeli friends and family shared stories of murders and kidnappings, of endless funerals, of a community in agony. Thankfully, none of my own immediate loved ones were among them, but in a community as small as ours, every loss reverberates as though it were your own.

Based on years of friendship and collegiality, I expected solidarity and compassion from my professional circles. Instead, as early as October 8, what came was silence, minimization, and even shocking justifications.

Just weeks after the massacre, a social worker I’d long considered a friend said unprompted, “Do you really think Jews are as oppressed as Black and Brown people? People have moved on from October 7 because of what’s happening in Gaza.” From our conversations, it became clear that she saw professional and academic spaces as arenas to debate who is more oppressed. But her question gave me real pause: how could she offer a truly safe therapeutic space for clients wrestling with these very traumas? The invalidation she expressed was not just personal, it echoed what I was hearing from colleagues across the field. In that moment, I didn’t need an oppression contest; I needed her presence, her humanity. Sadly, my concerns proved prescient: two years later, this kind of minimizing rhetoric has seeped deep into our profession, inflicting real harm on both clients and colleagues.

I soon realized this void of compassion and nuance for the Jewish experience was the new norm. Calls to decolonize therapy—an approach rooted in good intentions to address systemic ills—have shifted into something more harmful: a lack of cultural humility that enables the erasure, mocking, and invalidation of Jews and Israelis by forcing them into rigid boxes. Instead of fostering a sense of curiosity about the complexity of our clients or encouraging therapists to first reflect on their own biases, in many cases it has politicized our professional and clinical spaces. Public health has a long history of well-meant approaches that ended up causing harm, and this is becoming another example.

Trauma informed care requires us to see the whole person and foster safety in the clinical and professional space. The moment we categorize clients, or one another, we fail at our charge to model integration. In a field that emphasizes awareness of power differentials, what does it mean when therapists bring dehumanizing rhetoric into our spaces meant for healing?

We must honor person-in-environment (PIE) and systemic issues without projecting assumptions onto clients. Flattening stories and identities into categories of oppressor and oppressed distorts rather than heals. Examining systems and how people are shaped by racism, antisemitism and other social ills, or personal histories is a core element of PIE and can be easily achieved without objectifying anyone.

Here are some recent instances in which antisemitism has crept into my life: A colleague who teaches social work posted public selfies from a protest, smiling beside someone holding a sign of a Star of David in a garbage can. A professor singled out Jewish students, calling them racists and white supremacists simply for identifying as Jewish. Within weeks of October 7, a close colleague excused another’s silence after I shared about loved ones in Israel, suggesting she probably hadn’t reached out because she “really feels for the oppressed.” A prominent social worker posted an instructional video related to immigration policy by a known antisemite.

Since October 8, I’ve watched colleagues be targeted simply for being Jewish. It’s painful. But beyond that, treating any group this way is unethical. Most disconcerting is when Jews and Israelis are blamed in professional or clinical spaces for government actions abroad, and find no protection from our highest professional organizations.

Please ask yourself: Do you draw litmus tests for Jews, requiring us to renounce Israel before you can empathize with our pain? Do you collapse individuals into rigid categories of oppressor or oppressed, ignoring the complexity of the human experience? Do you know Jews are just 0.2% of the world’s population, nearly half of whom live in Israel, and that Israelis aren’t a monolith: Arabs, Christians, Druze, and Jews who are Ashkenazi, Sephardic, Mizrahi, and Ethiopian Jews (Beta Israel)? Do you recognize that Jews, like others, can hold both privilege and vulnerability, rootedness and displacement, and that practicing cultural humility requires acknowledging this complexity rather than using privilege to justify discrimination? Do you ponder why so many organizations condemn every form of hate except antisemitism, which is often dismissed as merely “political” or too controversial to address without “buts” and “ands”?

These questions carry consequences for us all. If this trajectory continues unchecked, we risk abandoning our core professional commitments. Let us find hope in embracing the pluralistic foundations of our field. Without them, we risk sacrificing the very soul of social work and psychotherapy.