On October 7, 2023, more than 1,200 people were murdered in a single day in the Hamas-led terror attacks in southern Israel, and over 250 individuals were taken hostage. This was the deadliest antisemitic attack since the Holocaust. For many Jewish health care workers, it marked a devastating shift: Our hospitals and clinics were no longer safe, not because of external conflict, but simply because we are Jewish. We had to hide who we were to survive in the very systems designed to uphold health, ethics, and humanity. October 8, 2023 was a real awakening for many Jews. Bret Stephens of The New York Times stated it so clearly: “On October 8th Jews woke up to discover who our friends are not.”

Almost two years later, Jewish clinicians across the country continue to report silencing, isolation, and open hostility, not in Gaza or Jerusalem, but in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, and Boston. In a recent study, eighty-eight percent of Jewish health care professionals in the U.S. reported experiencing antisemitism since October 7, a staggering increase from forty percent before October 7, 2023. This is not a theoretical issue. It is personal, pervasive, and professionally devastating. Jewish nurses are removing their Star of David necklaces. Therapists are deleting “Jewish” from their Psychology Today profiles. Pediatricians are taking down family photos in their offices that include relatives in kippahs. Others cannot hide their obviously Jewish last names, and they should not have to.

Patients feel it, too. Jewish patients report overhearing antisemitic slogans such as “Intifada, Intifada”, “From the River to the Sea” and “By any means necessary” shouted in hospital hallways and waiting rooms, DEI trainings that exclude their trauma, and therapists labeling their grief as “political,” or worse, engaging in Holocaust inversion or so-called “decolonizing therapy,” a politicized, non-evidence-based approach that invalidates Jewish trauma and, in some cases, actively harms patients.

Jews represent just 2.4 percent of the U.S. population (less than 0.2 percent of the world’s population) yet have been the targets of almost seventy percent of all religious-based hate crimes in recent years. Even more alarming, violent attacks against Jews rose by twenty-one percent between 2023 and 2024. And yet, in DEI frameworks across medical institutions, Jews are often omitted entirely.

Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), expressed deep concern: “Since Hamas’s massacre in Israel on October 7, American Jews have not had a moment of peace. They have experienced antisemitism in schools, on campuses, in public spaces, at workplaces, and in Jewish institutions.”

As clinicians, we are trained to notice patterns. Here is one: a minority population reporting escalating trauma, widespread silencing, and systemic exclusion from institutional support structures. If this were any other group, we would be launching institutional initiatives, publishing guidelines, and updating DEI trainings. Instead, many of our institutions have gone quiet.

In 2025, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, a Jewish Hospital, originally founded by Jewish physicians in response to discriminatory hiring practices (1900’s-1950’s) that excluded Jews from other hospitals in Los Angeles, fired Dr. Murtaza Ahmed, a resident physician who praised Yahya Sinwar, Hamas leader and mastermind of the October 7 massacre, as a “legend” and shared images online celebrating the murder of Jewish civilians.

Zionism is the belief that the Jewish people have the right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland, a land they have lived in and remained spiritually connected to for over 3,000 years. Yet in recent years, the term has been twisted, stripped of its historical meaning, and weaponized as a slur. In many spaces, “Zionist” is used as a synonym for “Jew,” and anti-Zionism has become a socially accepted proxy for antisemitism. When Jewish clinicians are excluded from DEI spaces, labeled as “Zionist colonizers,” or asked to renounce Zionism to be considered safe or trustworthy, it is not political critique; it is identity-based discrimination. As the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) states, “Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination,” including through anti-Zionism, is a contemporary form of antisemitism.

At UCSF, Dr. Rupa Marya publicly questioned whether Jewish doctors could be trusted, referred to Zionism as a pathology, and amplified conspiracy theories that Israeli doctors were “poisoning Palestinian wells,” a direct echo of medieval blood libels. At D2 Counseling in Dallas, two Jewish therapists were terminated after trying to offer culturally competent support to a colleague treating a Jewish trauma survivor. Their offense? Acknowledging that Jewish patients may have unique needs post–October 7. A federal civil rights lawsuit is now underway. These are not isolated incidents. They are warning signs, and in medicine, ignoring warning signs is malpractice.

Jewish clinicians and patients are now navigating what trauma experts call trauma invalidation: the dismissal or silencing of legitimate psychological distress. Post–October 7, Jewish patients, particularly those with Holocaust-survivor ancestry, reported symptoms consistent with PTSD: hypervigilance, identity suppression, sleep disruption, and grief. But when they disclosed these experiences, many were told they were being “too political” or “overreacting.”

A seven-year-old boy in Los Angeles, terrified by a bomb threat to his Hebrew school, asked his therapist: “I am scared Hamas will come here and take me to a terror tunnel. Why do people hate Jews?”

This is not politics. It is psychiatry.

According to the DSM-5-TR, trauma can result not only from direct exposure, but also from “learning of events that occurred to close family members or community” or from “repeated exposure to aversive details of trauma.” These criteria describe exactly what many Jews experienced after October 7.

Throughout history, it has been the Jewish sense of community, rooted in collective memory, resilience, and mutual care, that has enabled Jewish people to survive more than 3,000 years of expulsions, pogroms, and genocide. The Jewish people are bound by a shared soul and a united heart, When harm befalls a single Jewish life, its echo resounds within all of us, across oceans, generations, and centuries.

October 7th broke something open in us. It altered our understanding of safety, of belonging, of what it means to raise Jewish children in this world. Our hearts ache as bomb threats shake our schools and antisemitism festers on college campuses, once sanctuaries of knowledge, now breeding grounds for hostility. We are left to wonder: what does the future hold, and how do we protect what we hold sacred?

In moments like this, where collective trauma is so palpable, to ignore its impact in not just therapy or psychiatry but in health care in general is not just incorrect; it is unethical. Trauma is not abstract. It is deeply shaped by how our identities are held, or denied, by the very systems meant to heal us. Jewish identity, in particular, is too often misunderstood, minimized, misrepresented, or entirely unrecognized, and at times, tokenized, in clinical settings.

I believe this is in part because of how Jews are racially coded. Historically, Jews were not seen as white. They were ghettoized, banned from institutions, and ultimately exterminated in Europe. But with postwar success, Jews were reclassified as “white,” a label that now erases vulnerability and recasts them as privileged. This reclassification is dangerous fiction. Jewish doctors were once excluded from hospitals and medical societies. Today, they are excluded from DEI programming, told they are too privileged to be protected. It is a new form of marginalization cloaked in progressive language.

Jews carry a form of intergenerational trauma that is both well-documented and deeply rooted in history. Research, including studies by Dr. Rachel Yehuda, has shown that Holocaust survivors and their descendants exhibit altered stress hormone regulation, increased vulnerability to PTSD, and patterns of complex grief and identity insecurity, even in the absence of direct trauma. These biological, psychological, and cultural imprints reveal how atrocities like the Holocaust can reverberate across generations, deepening the emotional toll of antisemitic violence.

The events of October 7 have reactivated those traumas. The Nova Music Festival massacre, in which 360 young people were killed, has already been linked to a surge in suicides and psychiatric hospitalization among survivors. Diaspora Jews, especially youth, report trauma symptoms simply from watching the footage or seeing hostage posters torn down in their cities. This is not anecdotal. It is consistent with psychiatric literature on vicarious trauma and collective grief.

Perhaps no failure was more symbolic than that of the International Red Cross, which has yet to visit a single Israeli hostage in Gaza. When families of the abducted tried to send life-saving medications, Red Cross staff refused. Meanwhile, Hamas filmed emaciated hostages being forced to dig their own graves. For Jewish patients, especially those with ancestral memory of the Holocaust, this is not a distant memory; it is re-traumatization. The message is clear: again, no one is coming to help.

Health care professionals are trained to care, to witness, and to advocate. Now we must extend that same duty to our Jewish colleagues and patients.

What’s needed: a framework for institutional responsibility

To truly address Jewish trauma and antisemitism in mental health and medical settings, systemic change is needed. This begins with naming antisemitism not only as a social issue, but as a source of psychological trauma. Institutions must no longer treat it as peripheral. Jewish patients, professionals, and communities deserve visibility, protection, and care grounded in reality, not avoidance. Here is what must be implemented:

• Adopt a clear, working definition of antisemitism, such as the IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance) definition, which includes contemporary and coded forms of anti-Jewish hate. This should be used as a standard in evaluating bias, policy, and training materials.
• Educate institutional staff, including therapists, clinicians, DEI professionals, and administrators, about the history, forms, and impact of antisemitism, both historical and contemporary.
• Include Jews in DEI frameworks not just as a religious group, but as an ethnoreligious identity with a long history of marginalization, displacement, and targeted violence. Jewish identity must not be excluded or minimized in equity efforts.
• Acknowledge antisemitism as a source of trauma, one that is collective, intergenerational, and compounded by erasure.
• Integrate Jewish trauma into clinical and DEI models, just as is done for other marginalized communities. This includes recognizing inherited trauma and the psychological impact of antisemitic violence.
• Protect Jewish clinicians and staff from workplace hostility, marginalization, and exclusion, particularly in DEI spaces where antisemitism is often dismissed or politicized.
• Train mental health and health care professionals to recognize antisemitic bias, both overt and unconscious, in diagnostic and therapeutic processes.
• Use the “Three D’s” framework (by Natan Sharansky) in educational settings:
  • Delegitimization of Israel
  • Demonization of Jews or Jewish identity
  • Double standards applied uniquely to Jews or Israel

This framework helps distinguish between legitimate political critique and antisemitism disguised as discourse.

This is not abstract for me. I am the daughter-in-law of Dr. Shlomo Friedman, z” l, a brilliant pediatric hematologist-oncologist who survived the Holocaust after five years in Siberian labor camps as a child (1939–1945), and who later sailed on the Exodus 1947 in search of a homeland. He rebuilt his life in Israel and then the United States, dedicating himself to healing children. That legacy of survival and healing lives in me, and in my calling as a nurse practitioner. What is happening in our profession today is not merely political. It is a betrayal of that legacy. Of everything medicine should stand for. And it is personal.

October 7 may have happened in Israel, but its psychological epicenter quickly expanded across the globe.

If a Muslim doctor faced such threats after a terror attack, would we question their grief? If an Asian therapist lost family in a mass shooting, would we tell them their trauma is “too political?” Then why do we do this to Jews?

As health care professionals, we took an oath, to do no harm. But silence is a form of harm. And dismissal is a form of trauma. “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” You do not have to be Jewish to understand this moment. You just have to be human. Jewish clinicians and patients are not asking for special treatment. They are asking to be seen, protected, and validated in the same way we extend that care to others. This is our moment to act. To speak. To bear witness. And to say clearly, in our hospitals and clinics: “Not here. Not again.”

Carrie Friedman is a dual board-certified psychiatric and family nurse practitioner and the founder of Brain Garden Psychiatry in California. She integrates evidence-based psychopharmacology with functional and integrative psychiatry, emphasizing root-cause approaches that connect neuro-nutrition and gut–brain science, metabolic psychiatry, immunology, endocrinology, and mind–body lifestyle medicine. Carrie’s clinical focus bridges conventional psychiatry with holistic strategies to support mental health through nutrition, physiology, and sustainable lifestyle interventions. Her professional writing explores topics such as functional medicine, autism, provider well-being, and medical ethics.