When Familiar Echoes Reach the Most Sacred Places

“Jude.” “Parasite.” “Race defiler.” “Profiteer.” “Subhuman.” “Corrupter.”

It started with language. 

What began at the political fringes preceding the Holocaust, gradually entered mainstream institutions. Jewish businesses were boycotted, while newspapers, universities, academics, and political movements helped normalize exclusion and hate followed by acts of violence. 

These ideas were further reinforced through eugenics, a morally corrupt racist theory that justified anti-Semitism as a rational scientific approach. Psychiatry and academia both lent intellectual legitimacy to theories portraying Jews as a social problem to be managed and eliminated. These ideas ultimately paved the way for the mass murder of six million Jews. 

“Colonizer.” “Oppressor.” “Zionist.” “Baby killer.” “White supremacist.”

The words have changed, but the scapegoating, moral exclusion, and abject hatred are chillingly familiar. 

Once again, Jews are recast not as individuals but as a uniquely malevolent collective threat, blamed for the world’s injustices and stripped of humanity. 

We are living in frightening times again. The latest variant of anti-Semitism, “anti-Zionism,” is a hate movement and ideology aiming to eliminate the only Jewish nation, Israel. Anti-Zionism draws on the cycle of anti-Semitism seen throughout the ages, repackaging libels and conspiracy theories into modern political language. In this latest iteration, Jews and Israelis are marked as uniquely oppressive or dangerous. Decades of disinformation filtered into the West has normalized this inversion, pushing ideas once considered extreme into the mainstream. 

The current academy, the mental health field, and many other arenas reflect a remarkable similarity to pre-war Germany. Informed by Soviet and Islamic anti-Zionism, this newer Western embodiment characterizes Israel, Israelis, and the Jewish people as powerful evil-doers.  

This is happening despite the formal codes of ethics developed in the mid-twentieth century to protect individuals from the harms that emerge when ideology overtakes clinical judgment, truth, and humanity. They emerged in part from the moral reckoning that followed World War II, when the world confronted the extent to which physicians, psychiatrists, and academics had participated in or remained silent about Nazi medical crimes and eugenic programs.

Soviet psychiatry offers another warning. Political dissenters were at times diagnosed with fabricated disorders masking ideological disagreement as mental illness. When psychiatric authority merges with political ideology, diagnosis can become a tool of repression rather than care.

Conversion therapy also offers a cautionary example. For decades, some clinicians attempted to alter patients’ sexual orientation despite mounting evidence that the practice was psychologically harmful. Ethical standards eventually recognized that therapists must not impose ideological or moral frameworks onto clients under the guise of treatment.

In recent years, a new illustration of this phenomenon has emerged. Ethical language has increasingly been used and distorted to advance political frameworks that extend unrelated to clinical care. When professional ethics are used to legitimize ideological positions, the purpose and efficacy of those codes is lost. 

In social work, particularly with the 2021 revision to the NASW Code of Ethics emphasizing social justice as a core principle, a marked shift occurred, compelling therapists to integrate activist frameworks not only in community organizing contexts but also directly into the treatment room.

Now, training programs, supervision, and professional guidance increasingly emphasizes naming systems of power, privilege, and oppression as central to clinical formulation and intervention. Social work has always grounded attention to context in the concept of Person-in-Environment. Reflected in the bio-psychosocial model, this framework asks therapists to consider social forces such as culture, systems, racism, poverty, and community as influences on a client’s experience, not as determinants of identity or moral worth.

What was once intended as a contextual lens for understanding clients has become hardened into a rigid ideological framework. Ironically, practitioners are engaging in the very thing they warn against. To use their language, they are “colonizing” the treatment space with their own projected assumptions. In this era of anti-Zionism in mental health, these therapists feel emboldened to judge who is deserving of care. This is dehumanizing, unethical practice.

Politicized approaches like decolonizing therapy will welcome Jews as long as they adhere to anti-Zionist ideology. Since the majority of Jews are Zionists, this places Jewish clients in an extremely vulnerable position. They will only be accepted for treatment if they sever part of their identity. These litmus tests have emerged both in treatment and professional spaces in ways that would not be acceptable toward any other group of people. 

Consider a client seeking care for depression, anxiety, and/or relationship issues. A therapist who believes “therapy is political” may deliberately redirect the focus of treatment to a rigid binary, rather than honoring a client’s lived experience and their connection to identity, nation, and culture.

Like the pseudoscientific eugenics movement that once shaped psychiatric practice and the conversion ‘therapies’ of the past, politicized ideological therapies can pressure clients to adopt ideas that have little to do with why they sought care. The results can be harmful by fostering anger, confusion, or self-loathing rather than healing in clients.

Some therapists insist that questioning the integration of a therapist’s personal politics into the treatment room means you are “right-wing” or morally suspect. Others frame the critique as if we are advocating that therapists should sit with a “blank slate.” Both claims are misleading and false.

Ethical practice has never required the absence of self. It requires restraint, care, and what therapists often call the “use of self.” The issue is not neutrality; it is the unethical practice of imposing ideology onto clients.

Some therapists openly describe their approach as “de-colonial” and “anti-Zionist.” How might a Jewish or Israeli patient be treated in such a space? Would they even be accepted as a patient? This is harmful practice that colonizes the treatment room with ideology and ego rather than honoring the patient’s identity and right to self-determination.

In spaces meant for learning, some clinicians present propaganda as fact. In one example, a clinician and professor presented a diagram of “the colonized mind” at an international Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) conference. Within this image of a brain, Zionism is equated with mental illness, fascism, misogyny, homophobia, rape culture, colonialism, and the worst social pathologies of our time.

The individuals who spread this disinformation use a contrived distinction between Zionist and Jew as a kind of “cover.” Meanwhile, there is no empirical research that shows efficacy or positive outcomes of decolonial therapy. Despite that, it and other political therapy approaches have been embraced by the academic and mental health institutions writ large.

These politicized frameworks paint Jews as a hyper-white race who are oppressors themselves. Because Jews are not a race but an ancient ethnicity that predates the seventeenth century invention of race as a social construct, they do not fit neatly within contemporary anti-oppressive models. 

The founders of modern psychotherapy like Freud and others are portrayed by decolonizing therapists as Eurocentric white supremacists. One popular proponent of decolonizing therapy, a licensed psychologist, calls herself a “rage doctor” and accused two contemporary Jewish founders, Richard Schwartz (Internal Family Systems) and Francine Shapiro (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing), of misappropriation. The attempted erasure of Jewish contributions to mental health is well underway. 

Most social work graduate programs do not include the Jewish lived experience or Jewish history within their core curricula as is done with other groups. In some graduate programs, decolonizing and liberation-oriented approaches are included as required coursework. Texts and articles by extremist radical theorists that discuss or justify forms of violent resistance are sometimes assigned as legitimate course material, and anecdotally, it does not seem to be intended for critical analysis. In some cases, there appears to be theoretical endorsement of this kind of perspective as a valid form of social justice. 

Another reported incident took place when a social work professor took her graduate social work class to the Holocaust museum only to exclude Jews from their own history. The professor lectured her class on the horrors of the Shoah without naming the mass extermination of the Jewish people, instead focusing exclusively on other groups who were targeted and killed during this period, completely erasing Jewish victims. Experiences like this shape what students come to understand as ethical and historically accurate.

Relatedly, there have been incidents in some professional spaces, including listservs, of membership questions or informal expectations regarding political alignment on issues related to Israel. Disagreement with the dominant narratives in these spaces, in some cases, has led to mocking, exclusion, or professional ramifications. 

When two employees of the Israeli Embassy, Yaron Lishinsky and Sarah Milgram, were shot to death in a terror attack outside the Jewish Museum, Jewish social workers posted on the NASW listserv about shock and grief. They were met not with sympathy or empathy but with accusations of genocide, calls to “Free Palestine,” and other libelous rhetoric. Therapists have been kicked out of this and other collegial groups without rational discourse if they push back on anti-Zionist narratives. 

Similarly, on another occasion, a benign acknowledgement of Jewish Heritage Month on NASW’s Facebook and LinkedIn pages were immediately plastered with Nazi inversion, abuse, and objectifying statements about Jews and Israelis. This scenario has been common. 

In practice, many Jewish students and clients have reported feeling marginalized and highly distressed in many mental health spaces. There is a growing body of literature that examines and documents concerns related to anti-Semitism, identity-based exclusion, and reported harms experienced by Jewish professionals, students and clients alike.

The Jewish Social Work Consortium (JSWC) was founded in response to concerns regarding the dehumanizing rhetoric, identity-based harm, traumatic invalidation directed at Jewish social workers and clients, and lack of institutional responsiveness within the profession. Some of the most disappointing revelations was discovering that even our governing bodies, who would presumedly speak to the breach of core ethics, would collude with their silence. 

Over a two and a half year period, our professional organization, National Association of Social Work (NASW), leadership has not responded to our countless individual letters, organizational missives, petitions, and more. These communiques were written as pleas regarding NASWs Jewish members who, as stated earlier, had been subjected to threats, insults, and mockery on their own listserv and in other public social work institutions and spaces.

In February 2026, NASW issued a public statement against the proposed expulsion of the Israeli Union of Social Workers from the International Federation of Social Workers. The vote was set in motion by the Ireland, Hellenic, and Spanish social work unions who clearly had other reasons for excluding the Israeli union. The proposed vote for expulsion was not grounded in any documented ethical violation; rather, it effectively singled out an Israeli institution. 

NASW’s public statement followed our petition that garnered over 13,000 signatures, along with media coverage and Jewish legacy organizational support and pressure. While NASW rightly finally spoke up against the potential vote of exclusion, subsequent requests for follow-up dialogue and meetings remain unanswered. Something foundational in our field has become cruelly inverted, and it’s increasingly reflected in social work academia, language, and professional attitudes.

Anti-Zionism has become increasingly normalized. There have been “Zionist lists,” which include the names of Jewish therapists projected as “Zionists,” often added because of a Jewish sounding surname. The message: Do not refer prospective clients to “The Zionists” (read: Jews).

Current anti-Zionist mental health frameworks replace older anti-Semitic libels with white-coding, portraying Jews as hyper-white oppressors. In this inversion, “Zionists” become the “bad Jews,” recast as the new Nazis. This is what former United States Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism Deborah Lipstadt describes in her horseshoe theory: political extremes that appear opposite yet ultimately meet in the same place, each relying on libels and conspiracy theories to spread Jew hatred.

While liberation psychology and decolonizing therapy may have been born with good intentions, these approaches have increasingly been co-opted into rigid frameworks that categorize entire groups, such as Jews or Israelis, a “the other.” Some liberation psychologists argue that it is ethical, or even required, under professional codes to confront clients who they might deem “fascist” complicit in injustice.

Anti-Zionist bias in many mental health professional and clinical spaces can drive this practice. Therapists may see themselves as morally obligated to “correct” or “comfort,” echoing earlier historical movements such as eugenics that presumed moral or scientific authority to enforce ideological visions.

Ethical therapy requires therapists to sit with curiosity. Listening deeply to clients’ lived experiences and exploring the interplay of culture, nationhood, race, and personal history. In social work this is called practicing cultural humility. Ethical practice resists ideological imposition and instead fosters space for clients to articulate their experiences and make meaning of their identities.

The therapeutic relationship depends on trust, openness, curiosity, and cultural humility. Clients should not have to wonder whether they must adopt a therapist’s ideological framework in order to be understood or supported. Ethical practice requires therapists to examine their own biases without projecting them onto clients, creating space for people to articulate and make meaning of their own experiences rather than being subjected to political enforcement.

When ideological conformity begins to replace curiosity and human complexity, history doesn’t feel so distant anymore. Indeed, as one walks through the halls of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum it’s difficult not to feel alarmed. While we are not in the Holocaust, one can’t help but feel a chill of recognition at what unfolded during those years prior to the mass extermination of Jews and others: the dehumanizing language, the moral exclusion, the socially accepted hostility toward Jews, the groupthink. 

We know from history that hatred rarely begins with violence. It begins with rhetoric, mockery, collective blame, and most dangerously, the normalization of treating a targeted group as undeserving of empathy.

What we are seeing now feels like an echo of those earlier years. Jews and Israelis are facing harassment, intimidation, assaults, the targeting of synagogues and businesses, and deadly acts of violence. The language may have shifted from “the Jew” to “the Zionist,” but the dynamics are recognizable. In fields meant to center healing, reflection, and care, the normalization of abandoning our most basic ethical commitments and respect for human dignity reveals the danger of this moment. 

If mental health, social work, and psychology are truly committed to these principles, our institutions must take heed from the halls of history and recalibrate before further damage is done.