Tag: Gaza

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Charlotte, a young professional in her mid-30s who lives in Bushwick, started seeing her therapist following a serious mental-health crisis in 2021. (Like all the people referenced by first name in this story, Charlotte is using a pseudonym.) Although the therapist never revealed her politics, it became apparent over the years that she was a fairly observant Jew. At one point long before October 7, 2023, Charlotte told her therapist that she was pro-Palestine, and she said the information was accepted neutrally. But in the weeks after that cataclysmic day, Charlotte, who is also Jewish, felt deep in her bones that she couldn’t tolerate hearing anything in her therapy session other than “Free Palestine” echoed back to her — and she assumed that her therapist wasn’t up for that particular task. “I told her, ‘I don’t think that I can handle having a conversation where we don’t see eye to eye,’” Charlotte recalled. “And she said something like, ‘I understand why you feel the way you do, and I don’t think that we see fully eye to eye on this either. I respect that you have a lot of empathy and that you’re very troubled by this. And if it’s important that we have a conversation of equal opinion, then that might not be a productive conversation for us.’ She was very empathetic and caring.”

They moved on to other topics, but soon after the session, over email, Charlotte ended the relationship. She now sees a non-Jewish anti-Zionist therapist who she said understands her rage and grief but doesn’t quite grasp what she calls the “existential dark despair” of being Jewish right now. She thinks about her former therapist sometimes but doesn’t regret the switch. “I don’t think that I could be in a therapeutic relationship with somebody supportive of the State of Israel at this point. I wouldn’t feel like they have the same baseline understanding of what constitutes care and empathy and a good world,” she said. “I would not trust them enough to provide psychological care to me or to anyone, really.”

Joshua, a 30-something writer in Brooklyn, was facing perhaps the most common New York Jewish dilemma of his generation: He felt constantly stressed, trapped between conservative Zionist older family members and progressive anti-Zionist friends. His therapist — elderly, Jewish — was unable to listen neutrally as Joshua discussed his friends’ beliefs; instead, she openly argued against their viewpoints. Soon, the two found themselves in full-on debates about the nature of therapy itself. “I would argue that she was showing her hand too much and that I needed her to accept that these ideas were a large part of my life. We both lost our composure several times,” he said. “I think I took a lot of my general frustration around the fissures within the Jewish community out on her.” One session became so heated that Joshua ended the Zoom call midway through. Soon after, Joshua paused the sessions entirely, refusing his therapist’s requests to meet again to repair their relationship and restart. “I’m not particularly proud of my handling of the therapy,” Joshua wrote to me. He hasn’t seen a therapist since.

It took less than five minutes for Aubrey’s relationship with their new therapist to fall apart. Over a handful of sessions, the 37-year-old discussed their journey to sobriety, their struggles with neurodivergence at work, their nonbinary gender identity, their Jewishness, and their feelings of social isolation and grief since October 7, when many of Aubrey’s friends had declared themselves hard-line anti-Zionists, some of them calling Hamas’ attack and kidnapping of Israelis justifiable. Aubrey, who supports Israel as a Jewish state and homeland, had been plunged into social isolation with no one to talk to about their wrenchingly complicated feelings. They lost friends, cut off contact with a sponsee in their 12-step program, and ceased attending queer- and trans-focused recovery meetings. Aubrey had sought out a Jewish therapist with the hope that a shared culture could make talking about their current situation easier. The therapist “seemed like a person who was validating my experiences and feelings,” Aubrey told me from their living room in Queens, where the AC was cranked up on an unusually stifling September afternoon. “I felt like I could trust her and had positive hopes for the relationship.”

But as their third session wound down, the therapist explained that she had people in her life who were Palestinian activists and that she herself had split from her Zionist family. She said she knew colleagues who were accepting Zionist clients and didn’t have “weird dual ties.” She wondered if Aubrey would feel more “heard” with one of them. Aubrey was stunned. “I’m not anti-Palestinian or anything, and I would never hold anything against somebody who believes in Palestinian self-determination, because I also do,” Aubrey told her therapist. “I don’t see being pro-Palestinian as being anti-Israel.” Though Aubrey would have stayed in her care, the therapist continued to push to refer Aubrey to someone else. After the session, the two never spoke again.

In the months since the breakup, Aubrey has reflected on it frequently. The rejection jolted them, and what the therapist assumed about Aubrey’s beliefs offended them. “I had been seeking therapy to deal with the trauma of losing inclusive spaces,” Aubrey told me. “It felt really ironic. And hurtful.”

In the two years since Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel and the beginning of the brutal war in Gaza, the American Jewish community has ruptured. Hostile factions have formed over support of Israel, leaving just about everyone, no matter where they stand, feeling judged and alienated and angry. Colleagues and friends are horribly estranged. Family members aren’t speaking to one another. Some observant anti-Zionist Jews cannot find a place to comfortably pray. Others are afraid to gather, seeing news of deadly hate crimes, including one this Yom Kippur at a synagogue in Manchester, England. In New York City, which has the largest population of Jews in the U.S., Jewish people across the political spectrum have told me they’ve developed a new and persistent insecurity, wondering what assumptions others might be making about them and their beliefs. The terms Zionism and anti-Zionism have become proxy labels for unambiguous moral positions, said Halina Brooke, a psychotherapist and founder of the Jewish Therapist Collective, an online community that helps patients find Jewish practitioners and offers support to Jewish therapists. “When people see you as a living caricature of the worst of humanity, it’s a lot.”

Fraught relationships, guilt, loneliness, anger, anguish, fear — those are precisely the types of messy feelings often best explored in the sanctuary and confidentiality of a therapist’s office. Yet when Israel or Gaza comes up, it doesn’t take much to shatter the trust between therapist and patient. Sometimes it comes down to a single loaded word. “I’ve seen people who said their therapist said genocide and they freaked out, and then I’ve had people who themselves said genocide and their therapist freaked out,” said Yael, a Jewish therapist who works with both Zionist and anti-Zionist patients in the city. “Therapists are dropping their Jewish patients basically because they’re coming in saying, ‘My husband is Israeli, and I’m suffering,’ or ‘My father is Israeli,’ or ‘I went to Israel last summer,’” said Sasha, a Jewish psychotherapist in lower Manhattan. “They hear patients say, ‘I’m a Zionist, and it’s been really hard for me. I’ve lost a lot of my friends and family.’ And the therapist just immediately shuts it down. They are sending letters saying their values do not align.”

The contentiousness has extended beyond the cozy offices up and down Manhattan lined with John Gottman books and white-noise machines. It has ripped apart the consultation listservs and referral groups that therapists rely on to treat their patients. It has also created controversy in and around therapists’ professional organizing bodies, including the American Psychological Association and the International Psychoanalytical Association, over which topics can be discussed at conferences or what kinds of official statements should be published. In an era of desperate Facebook and Reddit pleas for like-minded practitioners (“Finding a Jewish therapist who isn’t anti-Israel?”; “Is my therapist a Zionist extremist?”; “Any other Jewish therapists feeling really alone?”), many Jews are coming to the sinking realization that some subjects are too sensitive for the therapist’s office. Eyal Rozmarin, a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst in Tribeca who asked to be identified as from Israel-Palestine, said the tension Jews are feeling that has spilled into therapy is particularly intense, even as the rupture has shaken so many non-Jews, too. “We were the center of one terrible story 80 years ago that has influenced the whole world with international law, and now we’re back in the center but the other way. We find ourselves in a very tricky position.”

The Catholics have confession, and the Jews have therapy,” my husband, a Jewish psychiatrist, said to me the other night as I mentioned how therapy has become, for so many New York City Jews, an awkward or contentious space. The history of the profession, especially in New York, is intricately tied up with the Jewish Diaspora — imported or informed by European Jews including Sigmund Freud, Viktor Frankl, and Alfred Adler as well as others who spread the burgeoning craft as they fled persecution in the 1930s and ’40s. More recently, a survey from the early aughts estimated that almost one in three psychiatrists in the U.S. were Jewish — compared with 13 percent of medical doctors — a figure that is especially striking when you consider how only 2.4 percent of the American population is Jewish. “Psychotherapy is a very Jewish profession,” Leonard Saxe, a social psychologist and scholar of contemporary Jewish life at Brandeis University, told me. “Jews, whether they are observant or not, are part of a culture that is introspective, questioning, and that sees personal responsibility as key,” Saxe said. “These issues are central to psychotherapy.”

The field is now populated with all kinds of practitioners, and the types of therapy that are practiced can look very different from those of a hundred, or even 20, years ago. The trope of the neutral observer sitting by a couch asking, “And how did that make you feel?,” has somewhat faded as a variety of modalities have evolved and gained popularity. Personal disclosures on the part of the therapist — once completely taboo — can now be seen as a potentially useful part of some practitioners’ therapeutic practice, a means to help patients relate and dig deeper. To varying degrees, a therapist’s background and experience have now entered the office, and patients increasingly want to know who their therapist really is. This itself puts therapists on the spot.

Philip Herschenfeld, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who has been in practice on the Upper East Side for 55 years, said that he, like many therapists, would not talk about his politics with patients but that some seek confirmation of their suspicions. “They may ask, ‘Are you outraged by what Netanyahu is doing? Are you outraged by what Hamas did?’ That sort of thing,” he told me. He handles those questions “analytically” by trying to understand what’s behind them. He may respond, “Are you trying to find out if we’re on the same team?”

Lynn Bufka, a clinical psychologist and head of the American Psychological Association’s psychology practice, said the matter of disclosing one’s relationship to Zionism or anti-Zionism is a bit of a gray area, but so is any kind of personal disclosure. “As a clinician, you think very carefully about the question of What do I reveal about myself and what I might be experiencing to any patient? and do so only in what you believe to be the interest of the patient,” she said. “It’s not about an opportunity to self-discover or to be joined with another person.”

Every topic is complicated in some way. Bufka said she had a colleague whose partner died after suffering from Parkinson’s disease. “When she has a new patient who comes in who has a family member with Parkinson’s, she has to think about, What does she say? What does she not say? How does this impact that?” If the therapist offers too much information about their own struggle with the illness, it could alienate the patient. But helping the patient relate to another person who understands what they are going through may bolster that patient’s ability to face the pain of the situation.

Kevin Hershey, a psychotherapist and licensed master social worker who practices in the Financial District, said that, for many patients, a therapist’s Zionism orientation (pro- or anti-) has become as significant as their gender or sexual identity, adding that he is seeing “way more need for Zionist and anti-Zionist therapists” on the therapist listservs he browses. One in particular is regularly inundated with specific stipulations. “I even saw one posting that was like, ‘I need a therapist who is a liberal Zionist who believes in a two-state solution,’” he said.

Some therapists — mostly anti-Zionists — have made their stance an explicit part of their treatment. Alex, a licensed master social worker in Brooklyn, identifies as anti-Zionist on their web page. “I believe in offering it as an indication that I’m a safe space for certain conversations,” they told me. I asked Alex if they had ever treated a Zionist patient, and they declined to answer, in deference to patient confidentiality. I rephrased my question: “As a policy, are you open to treating Zionist clients?” “I don’t think it would be safe or comfortable for someone who identifies as a Zionist to work with me — for them,” they said. “There would be a level of dissonance that would get in the way of their healing.”

“There’s a genocide of the Palestinian people happening, and there is a lot of focus on Jewish needs, anxieties, and perceived antisemitism,” Alex continued. “If there’s anything I say that I’d want you to publish, it would be that we have to decenter Jewish feelings.” They later clarified that they also see decentering as an active practice, urging their clients to go to rallies or to volunteer.

Another licensed mental-health counselor who sees lots of Jewish clients told me about patients they knew — people who had been actively examining their politics — who were unnerved when the therapists they saw asserted their own perspectives. The clients felt hemmed in and eventually sought new care, feeling “their therapists’ value system imposing on their sessions,” the counselor said.

In his own practice, when Hershey senses a patient wants to gauge his Zionism status, he double-checks that he has intuited their desire correctly: “I’ll ask, ‘Do you want to know what I think about this?’ Some of them have said ‘yes.’” Hershey is not Jewish but feels a kinship with the Jewish community, having participated in a Jewish social-justice leadership program. He has many Jewish patients and considers himself anti-Zionist, though he doesn’t advertise himself as such. “I’ve been pretty involved with Jewish Voice for Peace,” he told me. “I’ve told that to a couple Jewish clients. One is probably further to the left than I am about it, and I think, for him, it just helps him feel like he doesn’t have to explain himself so much.”

He also told that to an Israeli client, a woman whose stance he described as against settlements and in favor of a cease-fire but also very much wanting her homeland to continue to exist. Disclosing some of his own experience to her led to an outcome that seems rare in therapy offices and even less likely in the real world: “We discovered we can trust each other and really like each other and not have 100 percent alignment on everything.” Zionist friends of the client had cut off communication with her, and she was worried her anti-Zionist friends might do the same. She told Hershey that, though she dislikes JVP, she still felt comfortable talking to him: “She said, ‘It’s a relief that you and I can tolerate this ambiguity.’”

In a few stories I heard, the conflict in the therapist’s office just sounded like bad therapy: A Jewish attorney in her 30s told me that after October 7, when she started having panic attacks during her solo morning runs, her therapist, who was not Jewish, mentioned she had “heard Hamas was treating the hostages well.” Another client, who isn’t Jewish but has a Jewish wife, left the care of an older Jewish therapist after he implied she should vote for Andrew Cuomo because Zohran Mamdani is pro-Palestinian.

But for the most part, the therapists I talked to emphasized that they prize the patient’s therapeutic experience above all else, in some cases being hypervigilant not just about what they disclose but how they respond to their patients in the moment as they feel their stomach drop because of an offensive or divisive statement. “The whole point of therapy is to help the patient learn more about their own mind,” said -Herschenfeld. In general, “if somebody leaves their therapy over a political issue, there’s been some error on the part of the therapist, either in revealing too much or in taking a stand of some sort.”

Some therapists and patients told me therapy had been helpful and productive when it came to grappling with their angst over Israel. A 48-year-old Jewish woman in Brooklyn shared that she has felt more comfortable speaking openly about the war with her longtime therapist than with her husband, who disagrees with her on aspects of the conflict — an issue that has led to marital tension. I also talked to a Modern Orthodox queer woman in Sheepshead Bay who said her non-Jewish Caribbean therapist has listened neutrally — and with a lot of empathy — as she talks about her Zionism. Still, in many cases, I realized acrimony can have a way of creeping in despite therapists’ best intentions and regardless of the therapeutic modality. Sometimes “the patient is looking for a fight. That’s not uncommon,” Herschenfeld said.

Therapy, like so much else, is not a perfect art. “As therapists, our self is the tool,” Rozmarin said. “That’s what I have to work with — my insight, my thinking, my feeling, my unconscious.”

When a therapist has a patient who falls outside their comfort zone, cultural competency, or personal boundaries, the first step, said Bufka, “is always to try to consult with colleagues and say, ‘Here’s the dilemma I’m struggling with.’” Especially for therapists in private practice, that’s where email listservs, Facebook groups, and, more recently, Discord groups and Slack channels come in. But many people I talked to said that during the past two years, these listservs have themselves exploded over the same issues tearing therapists and clients apart.

Discussions about patient referrals have gone off the rails. Some therapists said forums that used to be populated by mundane questions about office space or insurance reimbursement have been overtaken by heated altercations, some devolving into arguments about whether it’s even acceptable to devote time and space in these forums to questions about Jewish patients. Some Jewish therapists have left these forums entirely.

“If someone is looking for anything for a Jewish person who’s been through trauma — let’s say someone says, ‘I need a Russian-speaking therapist for a Jewish family whose house burned down,’ that was one of them — the comments will be full of ‘I wonder if maybe it’s good for them to know what it’s like in Gaza.’ And it’s, like, this is a family that has never lived in Israel. This is their house in Westchester,” said Brooke, the founder of the Jewish Therapist Collective.

In Chicago earlier this year, a member of an anti-racist therapists’ Facebook group was reprimanded by the Illinois professional licensing body for creating and distributing a blacklist of therapists with Zionist affiliations. Some on the list had not publicly identified themselves as Zionist; they told Jewish Insider their only unifying factor was being Jewish. (In a twist, some redditors began recommending the blacklist as a resource for Zionist patients.) In February 2025, a group called Psychologists Against Antisemitism sent an open letter to the APA calling for, among other things, decorum on its listservs, where they say members have openly cheered for Hamas. (In July, the Academic Council of Jewish Voice for Peace sent its own open letter to the APA endorsing a petition from Psychologists for Justice in Palestine that demands the APA change its definition of antisemitism to allow for open criticism of Israel and its supporters.)

Brooke told me she founded the Jewish Therapist Collective after an incident in a national therapists’ Facebook group in which a non-Jewish therapist asked if anyone could help with a Jewish patient feeling anxiety. A few Jewish therapists responded in the comments section to offer their guidance. “Then, all of a sudden, someone came in and went, ‘How dare you focus on Jews right now?’ Essentially as though one Facebook post would rob the space for another,” she said. “And the poor original poster apologized and turned off comments and said she was going to think about her transgressions.” (She said this Facebook group is no longer active.)

The fighting in the mental-health profession isn’t limited to online spaces or national organizations. A few months ago, the famed psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk was banned from teaching at the Omega Institute, a holistic education center upstate, after he went off-script from his talk about trauma therapy and compared Israelis to Nazis in front of an audience that included American Jews and Israelis as well as at least one descendant of Holocaust survivors. Van der Kolk later issued an apology, calling his comments “gratuitous, offensive, inaccurate and completely unnecessary.” In an email to New York Magazine, however, he wrote that he now regrets the “over the top” language in his apology and wished he had instead compared what is happening in Gaza “to what Andrew Jackson did to the Seminoles in their ‘trail of tears.’” He said in his Omega Institute talk he was speaking about how the “deep need to belong often leads to people applying completely different moral standards to their own communities.”

For Brooke, anecdotes like this underscore why many Jewish therapists have come to feel they need separate, insulated spaces for professional support. Her group now has thousands of members, many of whom, she said, use it as their primary place for referrals and advice. “The Jewish flight from greater therapy spaces to more insulated ones — we have a right to do it, and it’s important that we find care for ourselves,” Brooke said. “But my goodness, the therapists who’ve pushed us out — they have no idea the emptiness of insight that is left when the Jews leave.”

For those of us who believe in therapy at all, it’s as a place to unpack and process our heaviest issues so each of us can face the world with a deeper understanding of ourselves and a better ability to handle hardship and conflict. But when there is so much estrangement that even a longtime therapist can’t be trusted, who can be confided in? And if we can no longer use the therapist’s office as a place to explore the dark nuances of our own grief and confusion, where can we go instead?

When the first therapist I interviewed told me a therapeutic relationship could be wrecked by the mention of a Birthright Israel trip, I laughed. The idea seemed absurd. But over the hours I spent talking about it with therapists, I started to understand how quickly things could go sideways. Every so often, I felt it: the jolt of awkwardness and dislocation as I took in a comment that struck me as out of bounds — potentially even interview-ending if I’d failed to maintain a neutral demeanor. Patients and therapists, Zionist and anti-Zionist alike, blithely shared extreme viewpoints that I would have found disqualifying had they been uttered by my own therapist or that, I imagine, would have been hard to hear week after week if I were their therapist. One used the R-word to describe anti-Zionists. Another suggested there is beauty in the idea of the Jews being a placeless people. My mind flashed to my traumatized Jewish grandparents emerging from a forest in what is now Belarus, homeless and nationless, after narrowly escaping the fate of their own children, spouses, siblings, and parents. I struggled for a moment when someone referred to October 7 as “an infringement.” When another person suggested Jews shouldn’t draw attention to their anxiety, I felt sort of abandoned — like I was being told I wasn’t deserving of help.

More than a few times, I was also struck by the fact that the therapist across the Zoom screen was really wise. Gently, as they shared their therapeutic philosophies, I found my own thinking adjust. I momentarily regretted that I had now made myself ineligible to be their patient. With those practitioners, I wanted to disclose more.

Sometimes, when a therapist teared up sharing a story of discomfort or their own difficulty in dealing with this moment, I felt as if I were the therapist’s therapist. I could see how much this crisis pained them on so many levels. But the stories that really stuck with me were from Jewish patients who had been scared off from therapy entirely after alienating experiences or, somewhat more hauntingly, who love working with their therapist and find themselves unwilling to risk the breach that might occur if they shared how they feel or the hard things they grapple with about their Judaism. With so few like-minded Jews to talk to, they can’t afford to lose another important relationship and disrupt a peaceful rapport.

Eliza, who lives on the Upper West Side, was on maternity leave with her second daughter on October 7, 2023. Like many Jewish mothers I know, she struggled to turn away from the news and photos of slain and kidnapped Jewish children, seeing her own babies looking back at her. She became familiar with individual hostage stories and grieved the victims as if they were her own family members. She talked about this often with her therapist, who helped her feel less broken and abnormal for letting a tragedy that happened to strangers affect her so deeply. On one particularly rough news day, Eliza broke down in tears, and her therapist, perhaps no longer able to keep her guard up, or perhaps having intentionally opted to disclose her own emotions, began to weep too. At the time, the shared grief was healing — an emotional release for Eliza alongside the best therapist she’d ever had. But months later, Eliza has come to realize that knowing the depth of her therapist’s sadness and connection to Israel is also getting in the way of her own evolution.

As time passed and the hostages became less central to the news, Eliza told me she has been able to look at the situation as more of an uninvolved observer, and she has diversified her reading with books about the history of the land. In doing so, her support for Israel has begun to waver. The process has left her at loose ends: “I feel like I shouldn’t be wishy-washy. I’m confused, and I feel like I shouldn’t be confused, like I should be able to take a stance quickly. Why does my mind feel like cobwebs all the time — like I’m still trying to figure out what I’m thinking and what is real?” She told me she also carries shame that her parents are proud Zionists who lived on a kibbutz and that she herself feels attached to what they love about the country. She hasn’t told her therapist about any of this.

“My husband will be like, ‘Did you talk to her today?’ And I can’t — there’s a block. I don’t want her to be disappointed in me, and I don’t want to feel that way about her. But it’s fine,” Eliza told me, hurrying the interview to its conclusion. “Honestly, I’ve moved past it.”