Antisemitism Watch: Inside the Campaign to Blacklist “Zionist” Therapists 

A therapist on a professional listserv in Chicago posted a request for a therapist who was a Zionist because the potential patient was dealing with feelings about the “current geopolitical climate.” Apparently, this is a common practice – not only to use these professional platforms to make and accept referrals for patients, but also to indicate a preference for a therapist of a particular ethnicity, gender, religion, etc.

One member of the group responded by saying, “I’ve put together a list of therapists/practices with Zionist affiliations that we should avoid referring clients to.” She added: “Please feel free to contribute additional names as I’m certain there are more out there.”

And the situation escalated from there.

As psychiatrist Sally Satel writes in The Free Press:

There are two stories here. The first, no less troubling for being obvious, is that trying to prevent clinicians who support the existence of Israel – or are Jewish, or have Jewish-sounding names – from treating patients constitutes a grave breach of professional ethics.  Interfering with the work of colleagues for political reasons is unconscionable.

But the blacklist is also part of a larger drama unfolding within the world of psychotherapy as more and more clinicians insist that psychotherapy is, foremost, a political rather than a clinical enterprise. It is a trend that I, a psychiatrist, find alarming.

Read more here.