University College London Hospital. Photo: Tagishsimon via Wikimedia Commons

Imagine you are 34 weeks pregnant. Or you have just been told the scan found an abnormality. The treatment that might save your life begins on Monday.

In the car outside the hospital, you reach behind your neck and unclasp the small Star of David necklace you have worn since your bat mitzvah. Your grandmother gave it to you. You have worn it throughout your schooling and at weddings and funerals. Now you slip it into your coat pocket, feeling its weight as you pass through the sliding doors.

You are already frightened for your baby or for yourself. But now there is a second fear beneath the first: Will the nurse who takes your blood pressure treat you differently if she knows you are Jewish? Will the doctor who reads your chart see a patient or a position?

You cannot begin to know what anyone in that building is thinking. And that uncertainty is precisely the burden. At the moment you are most exposed – in a gown, on a table, with your body in someone else’s hands – you are conducting arithmetic: How much of myself is it safe to reveal?

For a growing number of Jewish patients, that calculation is no longer hypothetical.

In February 2025, two nurses at Bankstown Hospital in Sydney were filmed in a video chat boasting that they would refuse to treat Israeli patients and that they would kill them. Both were charged and are no longer employed in the New South Wales public health system. Police found no evidence that any patient was harmed, but the psychological damage to the Jewish community was done and hardly confined to Sydney.

In Britain, a trainee orthopedic surgeon, Dr. Rahmeh Aladwan, was suspended from practice for 15 months in late 2025 pending a General Medical Council investigation into social media posts alleged to include antisemitic conspiracy theories, misuse of Holocaust imagery, support for Hamas, and a description of London’s Royal Free Hospital as a “Jewish supremacy cesspit.” Her lawyer called the posts legitimate political speech. After the ruling, she posted, “Free Palestine and Britain from Jewish supremacy.” The UK’s Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, said the regulatory system was “completely failing to protect Jewish patients and NHS staff.”

Numerous incidents of a similar nature have been reported in the United States.

These are not anonymous internet trolls. They are licensed medical practitioners with access to deeply personal data, medication carts, surgical consent forms, and patients who cannot get up and leave. Most clinicians would never say such things in public, and many would be appalled. But a patient on a gurney has no way of knowing which type of clinician is treating them.

In healthcare, that fear is of paramount concern. Safe and effective treatment depends on patients being able to safely disclose personal information, describe symptoms, ask questions, express concerns, and trust the professionals caring for them at moments when they are compromised and have little control. Individuals who conceal aspects of their identity in fear of being targeted and mistreated enter the relationship carrying an additional burden. An individual who experiences identity-based animus from a clinician may face an especially difficult choice: whether to challenge it or remain silent while still depending on that clinician for care and compassion.

The concern is shared by clinicians. In a 2024 survey of 645 Jewish healthcare professionals, 39.2% reported experiencing antisemitism at work, and 26.4 percent said they had felt threatened or unsafe. One participant recalled a colleague saying that “Zionists” should be denied medical care. A follow-up analysis of the same respondents found that those working in academic medical centers, the institutions that train tomorrow’s doctors, had nearly five times the odds of experiencing antisemitism as those in community hospitals. But where respondents said their colleagues and administrators could recognize antisemitism, the odds of experiencing it were 44 percent lower. That last number matters most. It means this is not only about bad individuals. It is about culture: whether an institution can see antisemitism when it is standing in front of it.

It’s getting worse. A separate study analyzed social media posts from the accounts of 220,405 US healthcare professionals and found that posts about antisemitism rose more than fivefold, while posts promoting antisemitic stereotypes increased two to fourfold. In the researchers’ survey of members of Jewish medical associations, 75.4 percent of Jewish medical students and professionals reported exposure to antisemitism. Their conclusion: Antisemitism is escalating within the US healthcare community.  

Patient and staff experiences are indeed connected. A trainee who fears professional consequences for speaking up may remain silent. A colleague who sees a complaint dismissed learns what the institution will tolerate. Patients cannot be expected to trust an institution or system whose own Jewish staff are unsure whether it will protect them.

This is also a clinical reporting issue. A Jewish patient describing fear or anxiety after an antisemitic incident is best treated by a clinician who can hear and validate the experience as presented. The clinician can appropriately inquire about symptoms, assess safety, and explore the patient’s understanding of what transpired. Redirecting the conversation to a geopolitical argument substitutes the clinician’s politics for the patient’s needs. Validating a patient’s fear does not require endorsement of their interpretation of events. It requires fully attending to the fear so as to assess it competently and with due diligence.

The antidote does not require anyone to agree about the conflict in the Middle East. It requires hospitals, medical schools, and licensing boards to fulfill what they already promise every other group of patients:

• Name antisemitism explicitly in anti-discrimination and professional-conduct policies, and train staff to recognize it, including when it arrives dressed as the word “Zionist.”
• Give patients and staff a clear, safe way to report bias, and demonstrate that their reports are effective in combatting antisemitism.
• Hold licensed clinicians who publicly call for harm to Jews or refusal of care to the same standard regulators would apply to any other group.
• Make it visible, in intake forms, chaplaincy, and signage, that Jewish patients are welcome as their full selves.

A healthcare environment is supposed to be the one place where it does not matter who you are, only that you are vulnerable and in need of help. Every Jewish individual who takes off their necklace in a parking lot is showing us that a promise has been broken.

They should be able to pass through a hospital’s sliding doors wearing it. Until they can, our healthcare system is not safe for everyone. It is only safe for some.

Dr. Miri Bar-Halpern is a Lecturer in Psychology, Harvard Medical School and Director of Trauma Services and Training at Parents4Peace.

Dr. Joshua Simmons is a psychologist and psychoanalyst in San Francisco, CA.

Dr. Dean McKay is Professor of Psychology at Fordham University