Every week, Sari Kosdon lights Shabbat candles at her home in Los Angeles. It’s a ritual that Kosdon, a pediatric psychologist, has adopted only recently. “I’ve really made it a goal,” she said. “I felt like I needed to do it to cope because I’m so anxious.”

Kosdon credits much of that anxiety to the rising tide of antisemitism—in the world, on social media and within her therapeutic profession, especially since Hamas’s October terror attack in Israel and the ensuing war in Gaza.

“As an antidote, I turned to my Jewish community,” said Kosdon, whose 2021 doctoral dissertation, The Experience of Being Jewish: Living With Antisemitism, focused on the mental health impacts of antisemitism. “I honestly feel those are the only people who I’m safe around.”

Kosdon is among the many Jewish Americans for whom the surge in antisemitism has become a very real, very personal mental health issue. They include children being harassed in school hallways with chants of “Free Palestine”; college students navigating anti-Jewish bullying on campuses; 20- and 30-somethings hyperfocused on the anti-Israel vitriol on social media; and Jewish artists and writers now aware that including their heritage in their work can negatively impact their careers. This list also includes Jewish therapists, like Kosdon, confronting their own personal and professional concerns even as they find ways to help their patients.

For Jews of every age, according to mental health professionals and researchers, the global conflagration of anti-Jewish hate has been a triggering event, touching off the kind of unsettling thoughts that disrupt sleep and erode social and professional relationships. The relative sense of security that Jews have long felt in American society and the deep-seated reassurance of a well-protected homeland in Israel have been violently upended.

Indeed, recent reports from the Anti-Defamation League reveal that one in three Jewish Americans has had trouble sleeping after experiencing anti Jewish harassment, and multiple studies over the years have found higher rates of depression among Jews in particular.

But how many of those mental health issues are traceable to antisemitism, which has been on the rise in recent years?

According to experts, it’s significant, yet impossible to quantify.

“I like to use data, but we don’t have very good data on this because it hasn’t been studied properly yet,” said Zalman Abraham, director at the Wellness Institute, a New York-based youth mental health organization affiliated with the Chabad Lubavitch movement. “What we do know is mostly anecdotal.”

Launched in March 2020 to address the escalating youth mental health crisis in America that has also impacted the Jewish community, the institute says that it has trained nearly 30,000 North American teachers, clinicians and parents in coping skills. It has done so through partnerships with K-12 schools, synagogues and community organizations across the Jewish community.

Building self-esteem is a cornerstone of the institute’s approach, a bulwark against “the feedback young people are getting from the world around them, which can be super negative,” Abraham said. Confronted by widespread hate and distressing imagery from the Israel-Hamas war, he recommends thinking “only about things you can do something about—not things that are out of your control.”

Among the specific techniques Abraham has used is cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), which he said can help combat antisemitic triggering. “You receive a text message or see something on social media,” he offered by way of example. CBT “helps you decide how to react.”

At the Brandeis School of San Francisco, a private Jewish K-8 institution, Sivan Tarle, the director of its middle school, is piloting the Wellness Institute’s new CBT-based Cultivating Resilience curriculum. She hopes to roll it out more broadly next year. 

“We know that building a sense of resilience at this age is important,” Tarle said. She points out that even just addressing the issue has been helpful for 11- to 13-year-old students. “One of the best things you can do with children right now is normalize the fact that [antisemitism] is something challenging.”

BaMidbar, with locations in Colorado and Massachusetts, is another mental health organization that has a Jewish-informed curriculum and therapy program aimed at the young.

With the teenagers through 20-somethings who are BaMidbar’s target audience, “there’s also identity exploration,” said Gabriella Lupatkin, a social worker who directs the group’s Boston-based clinical services, including individual and group therapy. Negative messaging around Israel and Jews, Lupatkin explained, can undermine young Jews’ confidence as they question the political, social and group alignments they consider core to their sense of self.

A similar unease is prompting Jews of all ages to seek out therapists who are Jewish—even if they wouldn’t necessarily have in the past. “There’s a feeling,” Lupatkin said about a number of her patients, “that another Jew would understand the nuances of what I’m going through.”

The Jewish Therapist Collective, a 4-year-old online platform, has seen accelerating demand since October 7 for its some 4,500 member counselors. “Folks are saying, ‘The non-Jewish therapist whom I’ve trusted for so long suddenly feels like a stranger,’ ” said founder Halina Brooke, a Phoenix-based therapist.

Brooke has heard from college students who have felt “gaslighted” when they’ve shared fears about antisemitism on campus and from parents worried their children’s eating disorders will reappear because of anxieties around antisemitism. Many of those seeking referrals for varying mental health considerations—dealing with ADHD or grief, for example—now realize they need a therapist who also “gets their Jewish side,” Brooke said.

And it’s not only patients craving Jewish solidarity. Therapists are feeling it, too. The collective was born out of a troubling incident on an internet professional forum in 2020—around the time of heightened protests in the wake of the killing of George Floyd—when a therapist queried colleagues about culturally appropriate services and support for a Jewish client.

The response to the query was negative. “One person jumped in and said, ‘It is inappropriate to center Jews right now, because we shouldn’t be centering white people,’ ” Brooke recalled.

The first therapist then expressed contrition for even making the request. Brooke and other Jews on the forum were shocked by the antisemitism and by the callousness displayed toward a therapist and her patient. The Jewish practitioners started their own Facebook group, and it mushroomed into the collective, with mental health and wellness professionals in 15 countries, the majority in the United States.

In addition to matching clients and therapists, the collective coordinates training and retreats—including a planned December solidarity mission to Israel—and has waded into advocacy. They’ve lobbied to remove what they see as antisemitic content from a national therapy licensure exam, counseled Jewish graduate students on navigating campus tensions and even advised a Toronto Muslim community on establishing a similar therapists’ collective.

The sting of colleagues’ betrayal has eroded some Jewish counselors’ well-being, say those involved. “Jews are very aligned with social justice and supporting other marginalized communities,” Brooke observed. “But there’s been such intense vitriol and exclusion in our professional spaces, such lack of peer support, that therapists are anxious and fearful.”

Ronni Troodler, the program manager for Orthodox social services at the Jewish Family & Children’s Services of Greater Philadelphia, affirmed that impression. She also lamented that the widespread movement for diversity, equity and inclusion has often excluded Jews as a minority category. Such internecine tensions, Troodler said, “feel unprecedented in a profession built on human relationships.”

Since October 7, Troodler said, she has witnessed signs of heightened mental health distress among her Orthodox Jewish clients, many of whom are aware that they can be targeted because of their outwardly Jewish appearance, including hair coverings and clothing choices. The signs include increased hyperarousal, disordered eating and sleeping and loss of executive function.

Those clients, however, have one advantage, Troodler said. Their close-knit communal bonds provide support and refuge.

That was Kosdon’s own finding while pursuing her Ph.D. at the Wright Institute graduate school of psychology in Berkeley, Calif. “Research shows that the more you involve yourself in a Jewish community, the less likely you are to experience these negative impacts of anxiety and depression,” said the Los Angeles psychologist whose dissertation was on the mental health impacts of antisemitism. “It’s a protective factor.”

Her very thesis was controversial in progressive Berkeley, where complaints recently filed with the United States Department of Education against local public schools allege that the schools failed to stop teachers and students engaging in “severe and persistent” harassment and discrimination against Jewish children. The concerns about antisemitism,  and implicit Jewish victimization, at the core of Kosdon’s thesis ran counter to prevailing notions on her campus that as white people, Jews were too powerful to be victims. When she tried to talk about the dissertation with peers, “I was told, ‘Be careful about what you say. Try not to offend people,’ ” she recalled.

Her research—and subsequent experiences as a practitioner—has revealed the toll of that dynamic. “People hide their identities,” Kosdon said. “They figure out whether or not a person is safe or not to tell that they’re Jewish. All that is associated with anxiety and depression.”

After October 7, Ashley, a patient of Brooke’s, the founder of the Jewish Therapist Collective, was spending significant time defending Israel on the social media platform Reddit—and feeling her mental health deteriorate from the vitriol she encountered there.

Like many Jews in the United States, the 33-year-old Chicago native, who did not want to reveal her last name, has significant ties to Israel. She made aliyah at 16 but returned a year ago, moving to Phoenix to be with her family. Even though she was living in America, Ashley did not delete her Israeli emergency-alert app from her phone.

Listening to those alerts on October 7, “I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t get food down. I couldn’t sleep,” she recalled. The anxiety, depression and eating disorders she’d battled for years flared up, and from October through January, Ashley was in a deep depression, using pot and smoking cigarettes while watching news from Israel.

She praised her therapists, including Brooke, for getting her past that low by upping her antidepressant dose and urging her to impose a 30-minute daily limit on social media.

Affirming Kosdon’s findings, Ashley said she has been most helped by connecting with her local Jewish community. Indeed, while her secular family never understood her connection to Israel, which Ashley said came from her summers at Jewish camp, after October 7, she found solace volunteering at the local Jewish community center.

“I needed to be around other Jews,” she said, “people who understood and were going through the same emotions.”  

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Hilary Danailova writes about travel, culture, politics and lifestyle for numerous publications.