Back in February, when my regular doctor was out, I had an appointment with her substitute, a young Jewish woman whose long skirt and headband read as observant to me, though they wouldn’t have been obvious to most. What was obvious was the “I support Israel” pin on her white coat.

I marveled at her courage. It was then four months into the Israel-Hamas war and public support for Israel was controversial anywhere, but particularly at that hospital, affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania, a campus inflamed by anti-Israel politics. In the doctor’s presence, I felt both at home and relieved. If she saw the note in my chart specifying my ethnicity as Ashkenazi Jewish, I knew she wouldn’t treat me any differently. 

She might well have felt the same. Just a few years ago, conflicts in the Middle East felt largely removed from the day-to-day world of medicine in the United States, where the standard for the profession’s core mission—helping people—was to transcend politics and identities. That changed significantly after October 7.

While both antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment had been rising in recent times, including within health care, the Hamas attacks on Israel accelerated the trend. Jewish students and professors on medical school campuses say they were taken aback by the outpouring of anti-Israel schadenfreude. Incidents have included direct harassment, such as when a student at Georgetown University Medical School direct messaged “Free Palestine” to Jewish peers during a Zoom class lecture, as well as official statements from student organizations. In one example, the American Medical Student Association—one of the oldest independent student health care groups in the country—issued a statement expressing solidarity with student protests across the country and demanding “immediate action to address the ongoing genocide in Gaza.”

Instead of the support they expected from peers, Jewish practitioners in hospitals, clinics and health care facilities have found themselves marginalized for perceived Zionist sympathies, attacked on social media and shunned in professional forums.

In response, Jewish health care workers and students in America are turning to—and, in some cases, forming—Jewish medical groups for support. In the past year, more than 3,000 physicians, dentists, nurses, chaplains and other health professionals as well as students in medical schools have found community and purpose in the nascent American Jewish Medical Association (AJMA).

In September, its representatives joined the Jewish Federations of North America on Capitol Hill to urge Congress to address the surge in antisemitism in health care.

Existing Jewish medical organizations and advocacy groups—including Hadassah, The Women’s Zionist Organization of America, the Orthodox Jewish Nurses Association and Maimonides societies (as Jewish medical students’ organizations are often called)—have stepped up efforts to combat harassment, counter misinformation and foster Jewish solidarity. Hadassah, with its long-standing involvement in medicine here and in Israel, has mobilized its Physicians Council and Nurses and Allied Health Professionals Council.

Also in September, Hadassah co-sponsored AJMA’s No Hate in Healthcare rally in New York City, where former Hadassah National President Ellen Hershkin was among the speakers. New York City plastic surgeon Dr. Ira Savetsky—husband of pro-Israel influencer Lizzy Savetsky—shared at the rally that he received threatening phone calls and messages at his home and office after offering to treat Israeli victims of October 7 for free.

Among the medical professionals and students interviewed for this article, there is a profound sense of disillusionment at the degree to which anti-Jewish hate, often couched in anti-Israel rhetoric, is flourishing in a healing profession traditionally seen as friendly to Jews—and in a society highly attuned to minority sensitivities. “We were asleep at the wheel,” said Dr. Yael Halaas, a Manhattan plastic surgeon who spearheaded the WhatsApp group of beleaguered health professionals that coalesced in the weeks after October 7 into the AJMA. “But doctors have a real collaborative sense of when there’s an emergency.”

The daughter of an Argentine Jewish mother and a Cuban father, Dr. Halaas grew up as a double minority—a Latin American Jew steeped in family tales of fleeing Havana’s communist revolution and Argentina’s fascist regime. That legacy informed her fight against the hate she saw on social media, including comments from medical students and even fellow physicians who celebrated October 7 and made references to “bloodthirsty Zionists,” she said.

Like many others, Dr. Halaas was also struck by the silence of medical and academic institutions following the massacre—a glaring contrast to the loud condemnations that followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Just 11 of approximately 42 major professional medical associations in the United States made a statement about the violent attack on Israelis, while 31 condemned Russia’s invasion, according to a November 2023 article in Tablet magazine.

“You realized how encased these institutions are in structural antisemitism,” said Dr. Halaas, who is also president of the board of Widows and Orphans of the Israel Defense Forces. “And it speaks to how poor a job the Jews have done at representing and defining ourselves.”

Indeed, prior to late 2023, there was no central organizing body for American Jewish medical professionals.

The AJMA “should have started 50 years ago,” observed Michelle Stravitz, its executive director, noting that medical societies have long existed for Palestinians as well as for other ethnic groups in America.

A Jewish nonprofit leader based outside Washington, D.C., Stravitz was recruited in January, around the time the AJMA received its nonprofit status in a rapid six weeks. “The entire organization has moved at warp speed, both out of necessity and the incredible passion and commitment of its members,” she said.

The AJMA has partnered with more than a dozen Jewish and civil liberties organizations, including the UJA-Federation of New York, the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League. It hosts in-person events, most in New York City, as well as frequent Zoom sessions, including a June webinar on the sexual violence of October 7 that featured Israeli obstetrician and gynecologist Dr. Dvora Bauman, director of Hadassah Medical Organization’s Bat Ami Center for Victims of Sexual Abuse.

AJMA has also launched chapters around the country and assembled a network of attorneys to assist members in fighting discrimination, including in employment matters.

A Jewish medical student who organized an AJMA chapter on a small Ohio campus—and spoke on the condition that her name and institution be withheld to avoid professional repercussions—said she was seeing “a rise in new student-to-student discriminatory behaviors,” including antisemitic flyers with hateful parodies of the ubiquitous “Kidnapped” posters featuring the hostages being held in Gaza. The student became involved in activism after complaints to administrators went nowhere: “They were like, ‘That’s not in our sphere.’ ”

Seasoned medical professionals are also responding to the current climate. Dr. Steven Roth, a Chicago anesthesiology professor, has brought his decades working in medical academia to AJMA’s journal committee, which counters anti-Jewish propaganda and misinformation in scholarly publications. Among Dr. Roth’s most recent articles is an October piece in The American Journal of Medicine, co-authored with Hedy Wald, clinical professor of family medicine at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University. In it, they set out concrete steps for medical schools to combat antisemitism, from adopting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism to ensuring that there are no double standards in the enforcement of school policies regarding hate speech.

Dr. Roth, who spent 30 years on the University of Chicago faculty prior to joining the University of Illinois a decade ago, credits the rise in antisemitic sentiment to a growing emphasis on social justice activism in medical schools and an historically uninformed focus on global health.

Students “are inevitably influenced by peer pressure,” he explained. “You’ve got the inability of most people to understand a geopolitical conflict that’s 8,000 miles away, the bias in the media toward Israel and toward Jewish people, and you have a very volatile mix.” 

Still, even physicians in progressive communities say they are shocked by both the degree of vitriol and the hypocrisy of institutions that have stridently policed hostile speech toward other minorities. “It boggles my mind,” said Dr. Gil Rabinovici, a professor of neurology and radiology and director of the Alzheimer Disease Research Center at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). “There’s a constant attempt to minimize and normalize, and it really is against any value that I’ve been taught at this university about allyship and microaggressions.”

The neurologist grew up in Jerusalem, where his grandfather, Dr. Nathan Rabinovici, was the founding chair of the surgery department at the HMO. Well integrated into the Bay Area medical community, Dr. Rabinovici had long avoided conversations about his birth country, which he said tend to devolve into harangues based on simplistic progressive talking points. Berkeley “is the least tolerant place I’ve ever lived,” he said.

After October 7—shocked by hearing chants of “intifada, intifada, long live intifada!” within earshot of patient rooms from pro-Palestinian encampments nearby and other demonstrations—Dr. Rabinovici felt compelled to speak up. With a group of campus Jews and Israelis who “found each other organically,” Dr. Rabinovici said, he led efforts to get officials to address the antisemitic hate speech at the medical school. The group’s fledgling effort also found support from the AJMA.

That solidarity emboldened the previously apolitical Dr. Rabinovici to take on a public advocacy role. Over the past year, he has been quoted in local and national media on issues like the ongoing controversy over Dr. Rupa Marya, a UCSF professor of internal medicine who has used X (formerly Twitter) to stoke anti-Israel sentiment.

She inflamed national debate with a September post that raised “concern” about a UCSF medical student from Israel; her posts cited supposed discomfort from the campus community about the presence of an Israeli who “participated in the genocide of Palestinians in the IDF before matriculating.”

UCSF Chancellor Dr. Sam Hawgood responded by condemning “the targeting of students on social media based on their national origins” and indicated he had “taken immediate action to address this situation.” Dr. Hawgood’s vague wording, which did not mention the Israeli student or Dr. Marya, prompted Dr. Rabinovici to offer his own condemnation in a September article in J. The Jewish News of Northern California of the USCF administration’s “failure to name anti-Israeli bias and anti-Jewish hate.”

According to a follow-up article in J. The Jewish News of Northern California, Dr. Marya was suspended from her position at UCSF about a month after her September post about the Israeli student.  

“Most of my colleagues, even those who are very passionate about this cause, are scared to be named in public because the environment is one of intimidation and bullying,” Dr. Rabinovici explained to Hadassah Magazine. “But I’m an Israeli. I’m not going to hide my beliefs or who I am.”

The collective efforts of physicians have yielded some victories. In July, an article in Main Line Health’s Diversity, Respect, Equity and Inclusion Committee’s internal newsletter, circulated at Lankenau Medical Center in the Philadelphia suburbs, contained inflammatory language about the Israel-Hamas war. The article called Israel “an occupying army” and accused the IDF of stripping health care workers “down to their underwear” and depriving civilians of food, water and medicine. The newsletter sparked outrage among Jewish employees and community members, leading Jack Lynch, CEO of Lankenau’s parent organization, Main Line Health, to issue an apology.

“We pride ourselves on fostering a culture of respect…. We failed in meeting this commitment,” he wrote in an email to Main Line staff, citing the newsletter’s “inaccurate and biased accounts related to the Israel Hamas war.”

Lynch also met with leaders from the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia, the ADL and community rabbis for feedback, and added anti-semitism education to Main Line’s required anti-bias and diversity training.

With its deep medical ties, Hadassah has galvanized other organizations to write a joint letter to the American Psychological Association urging action against antisemitism after news circulated in early 2023 of a “blacklist” of Chicago Jewish mental health practitioners. The incident also led to the formation of the Association of Jewish Psychologists in March 2023, spearheaded by Chicago psychologist Beth Rom-Rymer, now president of the 1,200-member global group.

Hadassah leaders, including National President Carol Ann Schwartz and representatives from the organization’s Physicians Council, also recently urged the American Academy of Pediatrics to include antisemitism in a proposed resolution supporting research on the health impacts of bias, and to incorporate the IHRA’s definition of antisemitism into its practices.

Hadassah has also confronted the International Federation of Medical Students’ Associations (IFMSA), an organization that represents 136 student medical associations worldwide, in a letter decrying what Hadassah calls “the dangerous and biased decision” of IFMSA to suspend its Israeli chapter in August, denying Israeli medical students access to cross-cultural collaborations and international fellowships. The IFMSA voted for a two-year suspension of the Federation of Israel Medical Students (FIMS) because of claims that the Israeli group lacks “morals and humanitarian values,” citing as evidence the Israelis’ disagreement with the IFMSA that their country’s actions in Gaza constitute genocide.

“Hadassah’s physician and health leaders are very engaged in fighting antisemitism in the health care arena, in all its forms, to ensure that health care providers and patients feel safe and supported,” said Dr. Laura Brandspiegel, co-chair of Hadassah’s Physicians Council.

Not every professional organization has been hostile to Jews. When masked protesters, shouting and waving signs about Gaza, interrupted an annual assembly of the American Nursing Association in June, Toby Bressler, the longtime president of the Orthodox Jewish Nurses Association, was comforted by the organization’s president. The latter saw that Bressler was in tears and sought her out.

“For me, as the descendant of Holocaust survivors, it brought up a whole lot of trauma,” said Bressler, an observant Jew who directs nursing at a large New York City academic medical center. She added that many at the assembly “demonstrated allyship, which I appreciated.” Afterward, the nursing association issued a statement that explicitly denounced antisemitism.

Bressler praises her own employer, which she is not at liberty to reference publicly, for issuing an immediate declaration of solidarity with its Jewish community after October 7 and including antisemitism in its diversity, equity and inclusion initiative (DEI). But she hears regularly about uncomfortable workplace interactions from her 2,400-strong membership, which includes more than a dozen chapters and represents Jews across the religious spectrum, including a growing number of men, many of whom have stopped wearing kippot to work.

“We’ve been mindful to hear from our constituents, asking what they need, what would be helpful,” Bressler said, including launching support groups, stepping up advocacy and urging the inclusion of Jewish voices in DEI.

For her part, Dr. Halaas, AJMA founder, is optimistic. “I can’t see why we can’t cure antisemitism, the same way we have cured small-pox and polio,” she said. “In medicine, there is an almost religious dedication to the betterment of mankind; that is literally all of our lives’ work. We have to unabashedly speak out and work with our colleagues to define how we want humanity to be.” 

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