Professional organizations in the mental health field are intended to serve as a home for seasoned practitioners, early-career professionals, and students alike—providing meaningful opportunities for education, networking, collective advocacy, and ethical guidance. In psychology, that home is the American Psychological Association (APA), which represents 190,000 members and positions itself as the leading psychological authority in the United States. The APA describes its mission as promoting “the advancement, communication, and application of psychological science and knowledge to benefit society and improve lives,” while priding itself on being an “authoritative voice” for the profession.

Such authority carries immense responsibility. Yet when a professional body charged with preventing harm and discrimination instead enables antisemitism and antizionism, Jewish professionals, students, and clients are targeted without consequence.

Antisemitism within the APA has been documented across multiple divisions, APA-affiliated Ethnic Minority Associations, and mental health scholarship, often expressed through patterns of blacklisting, professional exclusion, condemnation, traumatic invalidation, and the silencing of Jewish clinicians, trainees, and scholars. Rather than confronting these patterns, discriminatory conduct is frequently dismissed as “antizionism, not antisemitism”—a politically framed form of Jew-hatred that receives professional and institutional tolerance under the mistaken guise of opposition to oppression, colonialism, apartheid, or genocide.

Within professional mental health contexts, Zionism is commonly mischaracterized as an act of colonialism, portraying Zionists as “oppressors,” rather than being understood as the movement for Jewish self-determination in the ancestral Jewish homeland of Israel. This reframing allows antizionism to deliberately target the Jewish population for their Jewish identity and peoplehood in connection with Israel, rather than being recognized as a form of Jew-hatred rooted in defamation, denial, libel, and moral inversion.

While the use of libel and propaganda as weapons is not new in Jewish history, these tactics serve as a means of justifying and inciting violence against Jews—violence that is all too real and too often overlooked.

One such example occurred in Bondi Beach, Australia, when the local Jewish community gathered to celebrate the first night of Chanukah. Two gunmen armed with firearms and pipe bombs killed 15 people, including a ten-year-old child and an eighty-seven-year-old Holocaust survivor, injuring at least 40. Shortly after this massacre, the APA shared a generalized statement grouping the Sydney attack with a shooting at Brown University, noting, “News reports about shootings in communities around the world can cause stress and anxiety for people, leaving them with questions about the causes and ways to prevent gun violence.”

The APA’s failure to explicitly acknowledge Jews as the targeted group of this attack, coupled with subsequent messaging focused on hate crimes and “hate-motivated violence” rather than naming Jew-hatred, reflects a pattern that has become all too common within the organization. Notably, the following day, after an influx of comments on APA’s post across multiple social media platforms, the APA CEO released a response to the attack acknowledging that it was driven by “antisemitism and hate,” calling for an “urgency of addressing hate-motivated violence,” and adding that “there is no place for antisemitism in our society.”

While some applauded the APA for acknowledging the hate-based tragedy, the question remains why the organization has done so little to address pervasive antisemitism and antizionism across its ranks and many of its divisions. Where was the APA’s stated “urgency” to address hate-motivated violence when APA Conference attendees were permitted to wear keffiyehs and ribbons on their badges stating, “Stop the Genocide. Free Palestine?” Where was the APA when flyers throughout the convention center, including public bathrooms, equated silence from participants with complicity in “Israel’s genocidal acts in Gaza and the illegal occupation of Palestinian territories,” cited inaccurate casualty figures, and framed Jewish self-determination as an ongoing crime? Where was the APA when participants were encouraged to engage in “disentangling anti-Zionism/critique of Israel from antisemitism” and “pointing to the diversity of Jewish opinion on Zionism and Israel,” effectively placing the burden on Jewish professionals to justify their belonging?

There are significant consequences—both within professional mental health organizations and in society at large, when Jew-hatred is viewed solely through a narrow lens while other manifestations are dismissed or rebranded. This selective framing not only justifies but effectively welcomes additional forms of hatred to permeate professional spaces. It is how Jewish clinicians with so-called “Zionist affiliations” are openly blacklisted on social media; how a psychology professor and former APA Division President can teach that Zionism is a mental illness; and how a counseling center director and conference keynote speaker can present Zionism as part of a “colonized mind” alongside “war culture,” “fascism,” “genocidal tendencies,” and “rape culture.”

Antisemitism within the mental health field has been raised as a serious concern by leading advocates, psychologists, and professional organizations, with Psychologists Against Antisemitism at the forefront of these efforts under the founding leadership of Dr. Julie Ancis. Public officials, including Representative Ritchie Torres, have similarly condemned the APA for being “dismissive of the legitimate grievances of Jewish psychologists but also permissive of content that traffics in malicious falsehoods against Zionism, Israel and the Jewish community.”

In light of these concerns, it is unsurprising that, after years of the APA permitting and excusing anti-Jewish discrimination within its ranks, the Committee on Education and Workforce has launched an investigation into antisemitism within the APA. The launch of this investigation represents an important acknowledgment of a systemic problem that has subjected Jewish psychologists, students, and patients to serious harm through institutional neglect and inadequate professional protection, support, or accountability.

It is no longer sufficient for mental health organizations such as the APA to denounce antisemitism through generalized statements while simultaneously tolerating Jew-hatred presented as antizionism to persist and flourish without consequence. Such selective enforcement of ethical standards—condemning antisemitism in principle but tolerating other forms of anti-Jewish discrimination—normalizes hostility toward Jews and erodes the profession’s ethical obligations as well as its stated commitment to promoting Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI).

To uphold its authority, ethical responsibilities, and its application of “the best psychological science to benefit society and improve lives,” the APA must acknowledge anti-Jewish and anti-Israel discrimination as Jew-hatred and act decisively to enforce ethical accountability, prevent further harm, and safeguard Jewish colleagues, students, members, and patients from harassment, exclusion, and ideologically motivated targeting. Professional integrity and the sacredness of the field’s ethical commitment to those it serves are at stake. The APA cannot, in good faith, fulfill its mission without fully acknowledging and confronting pervasive anti-Jewish discrimination.

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The views expressed in this post are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Department of Veterans Affairs, the United States government, or the University of South Carolina School of Medicine.