MESSAGE
| DATE | 2025-12-02 |
| FROM | Ruben Safir
|
| SUBJECT | Subject: [Hangout - NYLXS] Restricting Healthcare access for Jews
|
https://www.algemeiner.com/2025/12/01/antisemitism-in-healthcare-is-a-public-health-crisis-and-must-be-treated-as-one/
Antisemitism in Healthcare Is a Public Health Crisis — and Must Be
Treated as One
avatar
by Sara Colb and Miri Bar-Halpern
Opinion
Illustrative: Medical staff work at the coronavirus disease (COVID-19)
ward at Hadassah Ein Kerem Hospital, in Jerusalem January 31, 2022.
REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun
While healthcare providers pledge to “do no harm,” that oath is being
violated as antisemitism seeps into the very spaces meant to embody
compassion and healing. This was the warning issued by Dr. Jacqueline
Hart, who organized a medical conference on this issue, and emphasized
that antisemitism in medicine endangers both patients and practitioners.
At the conference, titled “Addressing Antisemitism in Healthcare,” a
Jewish medical student described classmates who erased her from social
media groups when they learned she was Jewish, and chalked the names of
Hamas “martyrs” (those who brutally murdered Jewish men, women, and
children) outside the school on the anniversary of October 7.
Other Jewish medical students were labeled “colonizers,” “oppressors,”
and “bloodthirsty Zionists” by their peers. A genetic counselor who
petitioned to stop her professional association from platforming a
speaker with a history of antisemitic rhetoric received death threats
from colleagues, and had to walk into work with a police escort. One
Jewish resident recalled a patient who sneered, “I don’t trust the Jew
to treat me,” while the supervising physician said nothing.
Jewish patients within the mental health sphere are experiencing what’s
known as traumatic invalidation — the denial or dismissal of one’s pain,
experience, and humanity. Research shows that when people are silenced,
minimized, or erased in this way, the psychological impact can be as
damaging as other recognized traumas, leaving deep scars of mistrust,
hypervigilance, and isolation.
And when bias permeates hospitals and clinics, everyone is at risk.
Patients hesitate to disclose important personal information,
practitioners experience significant harm, and the public’s faith in
medicine erodes.
For these reasons, antisemitism in healthcare must be treated as a
public-health crisis.
A National Call to Action
America’s great medical hubs — Boston, Chicago, New York, San Francisco,
Philadelphia, Seattle, Atlanta, and others — have long set the pace for
clinical innovation and high-quality care. Now they must lead again.
Public and private leaders within healthcare must mobilize around
confronting antisemitism head-on.
For example, longitudinal studies should be funded and conducted on the
impact of antisemitism on patient outcomes, workforce retention, and
mental health, and to develop antisemitism-reduction interventions —
just as we do for smoking cessation or infection control.
Policies and practices that illuminate and address the issue must be
implemented, including adding antisemitism metrics to existing
patient-safety and employee-climate surveys; requiring academic medical
centers and health systems to track and publicly report antisemitic
incidents; and posting a Patients’ Bill of Rights that explicitly
guarantees a care environment free from discrimination.
Healthcare facilities should review their dress codes and revise
policies to prohibit staff from wearing political attire that could
intimidate patients or colleagues. This will help to ensure that
treatment environments remain safe and welcoming for all.
Mandatory training and education are needed, including integrating
antisemitism education into cultural-competence curricula for students,
residents, and continuing medical education for practicing clinicians.
Facilities should create anonymous reporting hotlines — either
individually or collectively — where patients and workers can report
antisemitic or other bias-related incidents without fear of retaliation,
and facilities should also ensure there are penalties for retaliation.
Mental health services must be available for patients and health care
workers who experience discriminatory treatment. Further, regulations
should be reviewed and revised to guarantee that clinical environments
remain free from antisemitic bias and other forms of hate.
Finally, medical schools’ LCME accreditation and hospital Joint
Commission status should be made dependent on having an
antisemitism-prevention program or training requirement.
Medicine’s social contract is built on safety, dignity, and trust. When
Jewish clinicians who report antisemitism are told to “keep politics out
of the hospital,” or Jewish patients fear revealing their identity, that
contract is broken. The cure is neither complicated nor optional: study
the problem, implement interventions, train the workforce, and enforce
standards — just as we have done with other threats to public health.
What’s at stake is not only the well-being of Jewish patients and
professionals, but the integrity of our healthcare system itself.
Sara A. Colb is the Director of Advocacy for ADL’s National Affairs
division. Dr. Miri Bar-Halpern is the Director of Trauma Training and
Services at Parents for Peace and a Lecturer in Psychology at Harvard
Medical School, where she supervises psychology interns and psychiatry
residents.
--
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