Healthcare is bound by a basic vow: Do no harm. Across America, some doctors, nurses and therapists are breaking their oath and the law when the patient is Jewish or Israeli. Several of the profession’s own associations have begun labeling Zionism as a sickness to be treated rather than an identity to be respected. Anti-Jewish hatred in America has entered the examination room, and the federal government now has said emphatically that this breaks the law.
A patient on an operating table is about as vulnerable as a person can be. In Britain, a man having skin cancer removed from his forehead was forced to listen to his dermatologist, who was holding a knife mid-incision, declare that “Jews shoot children in the head for fun.” The patient had already tucked his Star of David necklace out of sight.
In America, intentional medical negligence led to a Jewish child’s loss of life. Parents brought their 21-month-old son to an emergency room with a common, treatable respiratory virus. Doctors admitted him for breathing treatments and fluids. The father had a large Star of David tattoo, and the child’s religion was on the admission form.
As the child’s breathing worsened, the resident assigned to the boy refused the parents’ repeated requests that their son be reassessed and answered the father with remarks about Jews. The boy died overnight.
His parents found public social-media posts by the resident, including calls for God to curse the Jews and praise for Hamas. The family took the evidence to StandWithUs to fight for protections for future families. An SWU attorney and former civil-rights investigator at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services recounted this heartbreaking account at a recent American Jewish Medical Association webinar.
Driving Jewish doctors out
Mercy Health in Youngstown, Ohio, subjected one of its orthopedic surgeons to years of antisemitic harassment. The Jewish doctor had exceeded every productivity goal, and Mercy featured his accomplishments on its website.
After the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, the slurs grew into a barrage, blaming “the Jews” for the attack. The surgeon was excluded from scheduled meetings, and his surgery time was cut. Weeks later, Mercy fired him for “no reason.” His patients were transferred to non-Jewish physicians.
The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission recently filed suit against Mercy for violating Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 on the basis of the physician’s religion and race. The EEOC chair stated: “Antisemitism has no place in the American workplace.”
Unions turn on their own members
Hospitals are not the only ones pushing Jewish physicians out. The Committee of Interns and Residents, an SEIU union affiliate representing thousands of residents and fellows, endorsed the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement that only targets Israel. Its resolution declared Israel guilty of “genocide” and called for divestment, including “human capital” (Israeli doctors), while backing a physician who supported Iranian-backed Hezbollah.
A Philadelphia cardiology fellow told Congress in May that the union urged hospitals to stop employing his Israeli colleagues, even as it kept withdrawing dues from their paychecks. He asked: “Should patients and families have to be worried about speaking Hebrew in the hospital?”
An attorney with the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law testified at the same hearing: “The union that is supposed to represent them is also helping to create the hostile work environment they must endure.”
Punishing Jews who report discrimination
At George Washington University, two Jewish students in a doctoral psychology program complained about an allegedly antisemitic classroom session in 2022, more than a year before Oct. 7. The school placed them on remediation plans for complaining. A federal civil-rights settlement later forced the school to clear their disciplinary records.
At Boston Medical Center, an Israeli mental-health intern faced discriminatory retaliation after she reported anti-Israel and antisemitic displays that violated hospital policies in a shared clinical space. The intern was ostracized by colleagues, denied mentorship and professional development opportunities, and penalized with a negative final evaluation.
Punishing people who report antisemitism, denying or delaying care, or otherwise discriminating against Jewish or Israeli patients and providers is a federal civil-rights violation. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services recently issued guidance on combating antisemitic discrimination to every hospital and medical school that receives federal funding. It listed “adverse evaluations” and “removal from rotations or clinical teams” as examples of unlawful retaliation. The letter emphasized that Jewish and Israeli patients, students and clinicians are entitled to equal access, dignity and individualized treatment.
This guidance is the first of its kind to explicitly incorporate the Executive Order on Combating Antisemitism, signaling HHS’ commitment to using the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism.
Turning Zionism into a diagnosis
The American Psychological Association has promoted a treatment model that classifies a patient’s Jewish identity as the illness. In “decolonial therapy,” Zionism is identified as a mental illness, and Jewish patients are encouraged to reject it. HHS opened a federal civil-rights investigation of the APA following a complaint filed by the Brandeis Center alleging pervasive antisemitic discrimination and a hostile environment for Jewish and Israeli members. A U.S. Department of Education federal advisory panel recently recommended stripping federal recognition of the APA’s accrediting arm for a year.
A bipartisan group of 16 U.S. House members previously warned appropriators that the decolonizing therapy movement “distorts Jewish identity and fuels hostility toward Jewish clinicians and patients.” They concluded that “antisemitic hate and bigotry undermine the ethical foundations of medicine.”
Israeli healthcare disproves the ‘apartheid’ lie
The increasingly pervasive bias against Jews and Israelis in healthcare settings around the world operates in stark contrast to the practice of coexistence in the Israeli medical system.
The emergency room at Hadassah’s Mount Scopus campus in Jerusalem has been run since 2019 by Dr. Shaden Salameh, the first Arab woman to lead an Israeli hospital ER. This year, she co-authored a study in the Journal of Emergency Medicine on how Israeli emergency departments handled the mass casualties of Oct. 7.
About a quarter of Israel’s doctors, nurses and dentists—and nearly 50% of its pharmacists—are Arab, in a country where Arabs represent roughly 20% of the population. An apartheid state does not staff its hospitals this way. Neither would it assist Palestinians. Former chief of staff in the Obama administration, Rahm Emanuel, and his brothers recently donated $550,000 to train 47 Palestinian pediatricians and nurses at a Tel Aviv medical center to support a planned children’s hospital in the Palestinian Authority.
For Dr. Salameh, the principle of medicine is simple: “It’s an oath between me and God that I’m going to help anyone, with no bias, not race, gender or religion, just as a human.”
Points to consider:
1. Anti-Zionist political activism in medicine endangers lives.
Only six weeks after the Hamas-led massacre of 1,200 people on Oct. 7, anti-Israel activists blocked traffic on the San Francisco Bay Bridge. The blockade trapped three vehicles carrying organs for transplant at the University of California, San Francisco health system, delaying critical surgeries and putting patients at risk. Instead of condemning the protest, a course at UCSF’s medical school praised the activists. Political views should never lead to the loss of life.
2. Denying medical care may violate civil-rights laws.
When ideology outranks professional ethics “to do no harm,” the patient on the table pays for it. Treating Jewish and Israeli patients differently because of their identity, denying or delaying care, and harassing or discriminating against medical professionals and colleagues in health settings may also violate civil-rights laws.
3. Jews should not have to hide their identity to receive medical care.
Wearing a Star of David, speaking Hebrew or having a Jewish-sounding name should not change how a patient is treated. Jewish patients now weigh whether to request kosher food and avoid listing their national origin, or receive genetic screening, for fear of unequal treatment. Some doctors have stopped wearing name badges or have left public hospitals for private practice, where they think it is safer. History shows that negative consequences of targeting Jews inevitably impact society at large.
4. Israeli Arab leadership in healthcare proves the “apartheid” accusation is a lie.
Israeli Arabs were 46% of newly licensed physicians in 2022 and 70% of pharmacy students the following year; Arabs are about 20% of the population. At a Hadassah hospital in Jerusalem, one of Israel’s largest transplant units is led by a Palestinian surgeon born in the city. He has described the hospital as being like “a Noah’s Ark, because Arabs, Jews and Christians are seen here.” Muslim nurses in hijabs care for Jewish newborns, and Jewish doctors wearing kippahs treat Arab patients.
5. Jewish organizations demanded—and received—federal action on antisemitism in healthcare.
Leading Jewish groups pressed the federal government to address antisemitic discrimination in healthcare. A joint statement from the ADL, Brandeis Center, Hadassah, StandWithUs and other national organizations welcomed new HHS Office for Civil Rights guidance confirming that federal civil-rights protections cover discrimination based on Jewish ancestry and Israeli national origin. The groups called on “hospitals and healthcare institutions to explicitly recognize antisemitism in their nondiscrimination policies, establish accessible and trusted systems for reporting incidents, ensure complaints are taken seriously and investigated appropriately, and provide meaningful education about antisemitism and Jewish identity.”
