A growing number of medical professionals, teachers and local labor leaders are tolerating conduct that has made workplaces hostile for Jewish patients, students and employees. Documented cases, including discrimination and exclusion based on religion and ethnicity, have eroded trust in institutions meant to serve the public fairly and professionally. Leaders and professionals are exploiting their authority to advance ideological agendas, silence dissent and target Jewish colleagues and their allies.
After the Iranian-backed Hamas massacre of Israelis on Oct. 7, 2023, Jewish patients and health-care professionals began reporting a rise in hostile and exclusionary behavior, especially among psychologists.
Chicago therapist Heba Ibrahim-Joudeh created a blacklist of “Zionist” therapists to avoid. Zionist is often used as a code word for Jews. It is unclear how the therapist knew the health-care professionals were Zionists beyond their Jewish-sounding names. Ironically, she posted in a Facebook group named Chicago Anti-Racist Therapists: “I’ve put together a list of therapists/practices with Zionist affiliations that we should avoid referring clients to. Please feel free to contribute additional names as I’m certain there are more out there.” Her post received enthusiastic support.
These incidents align with growing concerns inside the American Psychological Association, the nation’s leading accreditor for psychological training. Last year, more than 3,500 mental-health professionals signed a letter warning APA leadership of “serious and systemic anti-Jewish hate,” citing official educational conference statements and programs that included:
- Rationalizations of violence against Jews and Israelis
- Antisemitic tropes
- Holocaust distortion
- Minimizing Jewish fear
- Calling the Jewish people’s connection to their indigenous homeland a pathology.
Former APA division president Lara Sheehi publicly described Zionism as a “settler psychosis” and posted messages calling to “destroy Zionism.” Nathalie Edmond, the director of the counseling center at Villanova University outside Philadelphia, portrayed Zionism as a form of psychological pathology, placing it on a “Colonized Mind” slide in a presentation, alongside fascism and treating Jewish identity as a condition to be corrected.
These concerns have reached federal authorities. The Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law led a recent meeting with the Office for Civil Rights director at the Health and Human Services Department.
The delegation included the American Jewish Medical Association, Hadassah, the Anti-Defamation League, Jewish Federations of North America and StandWithUs. ADL director Dan Granot reminded the attendees that “hospitals must remain places of healing, not hate.”
Recently, in the United Kingdom, government health-care workers marched in scrubs and chanted, “Kick the Zionists out,” while making a kicking motion with their feet. In Australia, two former nurses, Sarah Abu Lebdeh and Ahmad Rashad Nadir, pleaded not guilty in court to charges of harassment and violent threats. During an interview, Nadir boasted, “You have no idea how many Israeli s**t dogs have come to this hospital, and I sent them to hell,” and Abu Lebdeh also advocated violence: “I won’t treat them, I’ll kill them.”
Administrators and educators: Tolerating hatred in the classroom
The National Education Association is committed to “championing justice, maintaining the highest professional standards and providing equal opportunity to all students.” The results conflict with a recent StandWithUs survey showing that the largest U.S. labor union continues to ignore concerns from its Jewish educators:
- 62% of Jewish educators reported personally experiencing or witnessing antisemitism (anti-Jewish hate) in professional environments
- 46% were exposed to antisemitism from their own teachers’ unions
- Only 10% of required anti-bias trainings included content about antisemitism.
NEA Jewish Affairs Caucus interim chair Alyson Brauning said that “these findings, while disturbing, do not come as a shock. They reveal a serious disconnect between stated commitments to equity and the lived realities of Jewish educators. Overt and subtle antisemitism continue to shape workplace environments in ways that undermine safety, belonging and professional participation.”
NEA president Beckly Pringle was accused of ignoring Jewish concerns during a Holocaust-education event. During the webinar, which was hosted by the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, CEO Amy Spitalnick shared that Jewish NEA members “felt pain and fear at conventions where they were specifically targeted or ostracized simply for being Jewish.” Pringle did not respond.
The California Faculty Association circulated a questionnaire to political candidates in October, asking whether they had accepted funds or endorsements from several organizations, including the Jewish Public Affairs Committee of California, a nonpartisan coalition of community groups. The CFA stated that it would not support candidates who accept donations from groups that “harm working people,” though JPAC does not fund candidates. JPAC includes nonprofits, professional associations and several progressive groups.
A landmark U.N. educational survey released on Jan. 27, International Holocaust Remembrance Day, also reported troubling results: 78% of European Union teachers encountered at least one antisemitic incident among students, with 27% witnessing nine or more, and 42% of teachers witnessed anti-Jewish hatred from other teachers.
Labor unions: Importing campus activism into the workplace
Columbia University graduate student, instructor and anti-Zionist activist Johannah King-Slutzky was arrested during the 2024 campus encampment and takeover of Hamilton Hall. Now, she is helping lead a unionization effort at Israeli-owned Breads Bakery in New York City, despite never having worked for the company.
The union drive is moving beyond workplace conditions and into demands tied explicitly to Jewish communal life. Bakery workers who recently signed union authorization cards stated that their “struggle for fair pay, respect and safety is connected to struggles against genocide.” They called on the bakery to stop participating in the “Great Nosh,” an annual Jewish food festival in New York City, and they refused to make cookies with an image of the Israeli flag. The workers signed with a local United Auto Workers union.
The Association of Legal Aid Attorneys (ALAA), a member of a different UAW local, recently settled a discrimination lawsuit brought by Louis Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law on behalf of three members. Union members targeted the plaintiffs—two Jews and one non-Jew—as “Zionist ghouls” for opposing a one-sided anti-Israel resolution. The Legal Aid Society, the actual employer of the ALAA staff, had called the resolution “laden with coded antisemitic language and thinly veiled calls for the destruction of the State of Israel.”
Points to consider:
1. Hostile work environments become normalized when employers tolerate discrimination.
Workplace hostility rarely begins as policy; it becomes normalized through inaction. When leadership ignores discrimination or treats it as a secondary concern, employees learn that expressions of hateful bias carry no cost. Silence is a permission slip that enables bad actors to target, harass or harm workers, and get away with it. Left unchallenged, this corrodes professional standards, undermines trust and exposes institutions to legal, ethical and operational risk. Tolerating discrimination is not passive; it actively corrupts workplace culture.
2. Patients should not have to worry whether care is politically conditional.
Healthcare depends on trust, neutrality and professional ethics. When patients fear that their ethnic, religious or national identity may affect access to care, trust collapses. Clinical decisions must be guided by medical judgment and patient need, not ideological alignment. Allowing politics to intrude into health-care settings risks delayed treatment, compromised outcomes and avoidable patient harm. In medicine, discrimination is not just misconduct; it is a frightening patient-safety concern.
3. Professional neutrality matters in classrooms.
Parents expect teachers and administrators to foster critical thinking, not impose their personal politics. For generations, educators understood that political views were checked at the classroom door. When that norm breaks down, their power shifts from teaching students how to think to telling them what to think. This is a slippery slope. Once educators use their position to advance ideology, professionalism erodes and trust collapses in America’s education system.
4. Ideological litmus tests are replacing worker representation.
Labor unions are intended to advocate for better wages, benefits and working conditions across diverse workforces. When union leaders and members elevate political demands unrelated to the workplace, representation gives way to enforcement. Workers who dissent face pressure, exclusion or retaliation, regardless of job performance or seniority. This shift undermines the core purpose of collective bargaining and leaves unions vulnerable to legal challenge, internal fracture and loss of legitimacy among the workers they claim to represent.
