Mick Hartley

Sally Satel at Commentary on the antisemitic corrosion that’s eating away at psychotherapy in the US.

A therapist in Chicago named Heba Ibrahim-Joudeh felt that patients, too, needed to be protected from Zionist therapists. In winter 2024, Ibrahim-Joudeh, a member of the Chicago Anti-Racist Therapists Facebook group, organized a “blacklist” of local Zionist therapists. “I’ve put together a list of therapists/practices with Zionist affiliations that we should avoid referring clients to,” she wrote to colleagues, who responded with thanks.

In 2025, a young Jewish woman had her first appointment with a psychotherapist in Washington, D.C. During the session, she mentioned a recent months-long stay in Israel. The therapist, who was part of a group practice, smiled and said, “It’s lucky you were assigned to me. None of my colleagues will treat a Zionist.”  

The intolerance is not confined to isolated examples. It’s roiling the American Psychological Association (APA), the nation’s foremost accreditor for psychological training and continuing education programs. Tensions reached a new level last winter when more than 3,500 mental health professionals calling themselves Psychologists Against Antisemitism sent a letter to the APA’s president and board. The signers called upon the association to “address the serious and systemic problem of antisemitism/anti-Jewish hate.” The letter told of APA-hosted conferences for educational credits in which speakers made “official statements and presentations [including] rationalizations of violence against Jews and Israelis; antisemitic tropes; Holocaust distortion; minimization of Jewish victimization, fear, and grief.”

Singled out by name was the former president of the APA Society of Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychology from 2023 to 2025, Lara Sheehi. In addition to diagnosing Zionism as a “settler psychosis,”  Sheehi had posted expletive-laced messages on social media, including one stating “destroy Zionism” and another describing Israelis as “genocidal f—ks.” Her sentiments infiltrated the annual meeting of the APA in Denver last summer, where, according to psychologist Dean McKay of Fordham University, professional Listserv postings urged attendees to wear keffiyehs at the convention and read a “land and genocide statement” before giving their presentations, some of which contained Hamas propaganda. McKay has also documented cases of therapists urging their clients to go to anti-Israel protests as part of what they see as their role in promoting activism.

Lara Sheehi previously – and Cary Nelson at Fathom.

The new psychotherapy is all about social justice. Critical Social Justice Therapy, it’s been called.

Untested as a form of therapy, it views patients as either perpetrators or victims of oppression and understands this simple dynamic as the root of their problems.

Social justice therapists—who see themselves as activists first, healers second—usurp the goals of therapy. They override patients’ needs and preferences in favor of their own politicized aims, such as “dismantling racism.” 

It’s an echo of what’s happening in American universities, where the role of education is often secondary now to the activists’ aims of fighting what they see as social injustice. Which, in the current climate, regularly comes with a serving of antisemitism.