Antisemitism is afflicting medicine.
T he Trump administration’s decision to terminate billions in federal funding for Harvard has prompted worries, among supporters and critics alike, about the possible harm to the fields of science and medicine, which are claimed to be disconnected from the antisemitism infecting academia.
Dr. Jeffrey Flier, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School (HMS) and its former dean, wrote that the university is being punished “for alleged flaws largely unrelated to HMS.” Others are asking what doctors and scientists have to do with the chaos in Harvard Yard.
Turns out, plenty. Harvard’s own recently released report from its presidential task force on antisemitism devotes considerable ink to “the particular challenges” at the Longwood Medical Area, the Boston medical campus where several Harvard-affiliated schools and teaching hospitals are located. Task force members write that they are “deeply concerned” that antisemitism and anti-Israel bias “are becoming increasingly normalized in academia, particularly within what seem to be highly politicized disciplines such as public health, medicine, and education.”
As one HMS graduate told the task force, that charged climate “left me ready to quit medicine.” Many Jewish students shared accounts with the task force of being shunned by peers for “their support or presumed support of Israel.” Such reports emerged from several Harvard schools that included HMS and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
In “one of the most troubling stories” the task force said it heard, both current and prospective enrollees “described the rhetoric and protests” at an HMS program for newly admitted students as “threatening,” with signs like “Stop the Genocide” and medical students “yelling ‘Free Palestine,’” among other similarly themed actions. A recently admitted student said they were “told by one of the students that ‘Zionists are not welcome at HMS.’”
Harvard’s health ecosystem is hardly an exception. Jewish medical students and residents training at hospitals throughout the U.S. are experiencing rampant antisemitism, from peers and superiors. The situation at these schools and hospitals reflects an alarming surge in Jew-hatred that engulfed the health-care field immediately following Hamas’s massacre in Israel on October 7, 2023, and remains unabated, according to Michelle Stravitz, CEO of the American Jewish Medical Association (AJMA).
“It is showing up in every relationship in health care — between colleagues, between medical students, between faculty and medical students, between providers and patients,” Stravitz told me. Esteemed physicians are spewing hate publicly under the guise of social activism. The offenders’ brazenness is particularly troubling, she adds, because that means their behavior is “normalized and accepted” and, for the most part, avoiding accountability.
One disturbing manifestation of Jew-hatred for those seeking care, Stravitz says, is that some therapists have declined to treat Jewish patients who express anxiety over antisemitism.
Hospital training today includes much time spent on recognizing different types of microaggressions so as to prevent people from feeling “uncomfortable” and “unsafe.” Yet, when Jewish medical students, residents, and professionals have themselves expressed feeling unsafe to their superiors, their concerns have been roundly dismissed. Some, including a respondent to a survey conducted by the nonprofit organization StandWithUs, were even told they were “misusing” the word “unsafe” and to be “more comfortable being uncomfortable” — a clear double standard.
Recent data on antisemitism in academic medical centers is especially worrisome, because that’s where both training and care take place, says Sheri Ross, a pediatrician and director of medical outreach for the Center for Combating Antisemitism (CCA), a division of StandWithUs. A study the organization conducted on antisemitism and workplace environments, published in the Journal of Religion and Health in April, found that nearly 63 percent of respondents experiencing antisemitism reported that their primary place of employment was in an academic medical center. By contrast, 25 percent of those experiencing antisemitism were in private practice and 7 percent in community hospitals.
That research builds on a prior study led by StandWithUs and published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine in December, which found that almost 40 percent of Jewish health-care workers reported direct exposure to antisemitism within their professional or academic environment and 26 percent felt unsafe or threatened “somewhat” or “to a great extent.” Notably, at least 30 percent of the organization’s legal caseload focused on workplace antisemitism over the last year involves medical professionals.
Among the hundreds of experiences that respondents recounted in an open-ended survey question included being added to a do-not-refer list of “Zionist professionals” by other health workers in their field; overhearing nurses commenting that “Zionists shouldn’t be treated here,” referring to a visibly Jewish patient; colleagues posting on social media that the October 7 massacre is “fake” while calling for the end of Israel; and patients demanding to not be treated by Jewish doctors.
A new generation of health-care professionals has been steeped since grade school in a particular worldview and the social-justice activism that goes with it. Marina Spitkovskaya, who until recently taught at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing, told me that students were quick to dismiss — even to try to shame — professors and hospital nurses for not having what the students considered “appropriate world views.” Now a nurse in Pennsylvania, Spitkovskaya observed an “astonishing” rise in Jew-hatred among health-care professionals at local protests and in social-media posts immediately after October 7. Among them were some of those same former students, who posted material dehumanizing Jews and justifying violence against Israelis and Jews worldwide. The group Physicians Against Antisemitism has been documenting such posts for almost two years.
A cancer patient herself, Spitkovskaya worries about what she views as an “exceedingly dangerous” trajectory. As she explains, nurses have much autonomy when juggling the many patients assigned to them and usually practice behind a curtain or closed door. “If you are a nurse who doesn’t believe in the humanity of certain groups of patients,” she says, “maybe you let those patients sit in their waste a few minutes longer, maybe you don’t answer the call light right away, maybe you don’t rush when they’re coding.”
The erosion of trust is prompting patients to withhold from providers that they are Jewish, Peggy Shapiro, the CCA’s executive director, tells me.
“If you put people in a situation where they have to hide their identity, you are already discriminating against them, because that information may be necessary to treat the patient,” says Shapiro, whose organization developed a training module for the health industry to diagnose and address antisemitism. Without knowing that patients are Ashkenazi Jews, for instance, practitioners might not consider a gene mutation that makes them significantly more susceptible than the general population to certain cancers.
The repercussions for care — and patient outcomes, an important benchmark in medicine — couldn’t be clearer. Antisemitism also is poised to alter the composition of doctors in the field. Some Jewish practitioners already have left their jobs because of prejudice they experienced. Among them is an East Coast interdisciplinary team leader who quit a medical specialty she considered her “calling” and that took decades to build, telling me, “It wasn’t safe for me.” Her complaints over repeated incidents of antisemitism from another team member were dismissed by a human-resources moderator, who told her to examine her “own implicit bias.”
There is the potential for even greater fallout. Medicine is “a well-respected field, and when the medical profession adopts an ideology, society follows,” notes the AJMA’s Stravitz.
The health-care industry has failed to mount an organized and aggressive campaign to root out antisemitism from the field. After nearly two years of an escalating crisis, it is time for sweeping and substantive corrective measures to ensure that all people can trust the medical profession to fulfill its caregiving role.