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Embodying a story of trauma and liberation, Ukrainian Jews celebrate Passover amid a new normal
KYIV, Ukraine (JTA) — Yuliia Krainiakova fled her home in Kharkiv, Ukraine, after Russian troops invaded last year and made her way to Berlin, where she and her daughters settled for 10 months with the help of Jewish organizations.
After returning to Kharkiv several months ago, she hoped to experience some of the Jewish gatherings that had been a beacon during a time of turmoil — but her city, Ukraine’s second-largest, has continued to be shelled regularly, making safety a more pressing priority than Jewish communal life.
“Due to the war, it is difficult to find in Kharkiv,” she told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Tuesday. “So we decided to come to Kyiv for Passover seder, so we could have a Jewish experience here.”
Krainiakova, her husband and her two daughters were among dozens of Jews from Kharkiv who made the roughly six-hour train journey to Ukraine’s capital on Tuesday for a seder organized by Midreshet Schechter, which in partnership with Masorti Olami operates all the Conservative communities in Ukraine.
On Wednesday, they sat down at a large U-shaped table, festooned with all the trappings of the traditional seder, for a festive meal whose main concession to the war was that few attendees were in their home city.
Rabbi Irina Gritsevskaya directs Midreshet Schechter and has traveled to Ukraine multiple times over the last year from her home in Israel to support holiday celebrations there, while also teaching classes throughout the year online to students at Shaalvim Jewish Day School in Kharkiv. She said the Passover story, or maggid, was especially resonant for Ukrainian Jews who have endured more than a year of war.
“The maggid is going to be centered on going to trauma, because Pesach is actually a story of going through trauma, through the trauma of losing our Temple, our Beit Hamikdash,” Gritsevskaya said. “Now we are dealing with a different trauma, so the question is, how can we learn from the story that happened many, many years ago and connect it to today so we learn the lessons of hope and rehabilitation.”
Last year, Passover took place less than two months into the war, meaning that families were dispersed, supplies were hard to come by and any planning could easily be thrown into disarray as conditions changed. Still, between Chabad and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, or JDC, the country was home to multiple public seders, some held in hotels or earlier in the day to accommodate emergency curfews.
Yuliia Krainiakova, left, and Alla Gusak sit together at a Passover seder in Kyiv, Ukraine, April 5, 2023. (Marcel Gascon Barbera)
This year, life in Ukraine has settled into a new normal in which Ukrainians can reasonably plan for the future, despite continuous blackouts and ongoing shelling in some cities. Passover observances will take a more typical form, with Chabad, the main organizer of Jewish life in many Ukrainian cities, holding 90 community seders and distributing Passover supplies to 30,000 people.
Adding to the new normal is the fact that hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians who left in the frightening early days have returned home.
That includes some of the families at Kharkiv’s Shaalvim school, which remains online because of the ongoing threat of shelling. Their trip to the Conservative synagogue in Kyiv offers a rare opportunity to be together.
“The idea to meet and spend time with each other is very exciting for them after all this time staying at home,” their teacher Svetlana Maslova said shortly after the group arrived on Tuesday.
Besides forcing the kids to receive their education remotely and secluded at home, the 120 children enrolled in the Shaalvim school have been experiencing recurrent blackouts for months, caused by shelling or by Russian strikes on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure. “At some point we had two full days without power,” Maslova said.
Shaalvim has provided a source of stability during a year of upheaval, parents said. Alla Gusak, who traveled to Kyiv with her 11-year-old daughter, lived before the war in Chuhuiv, a town about 25 miles southeast of Kharkiv that was a prime target for Russian troops because it houses a Ukrainian air force base. Russia briefly occupied the city early in the war.
“We were bombed and survived and managed to get out by miracle,” said Gusak. She added that their family home was heavily damaged and said another property in the family, in Izium, was rendered unusable along with the local medical clinic and schools while the Russian army occupied that city. “We cannot even go there because there are mines everywhere.”
Gusak and her husband worked in agriculture, but now there are mines strewn across the fields they once sowed. So even with its classes online, the Shaalvim Jewish school is of great help for her daughter to go through the horrors of this war, she said.
“What Jewish school gives us is actually family,” said Natalya Kupin, whose 11-year-old daughter attends the school. “It unites our kids, it gives us tradition and that’s what other people and nations also need, a basic tradition, because that’s what gives us the ability to be together.”
In the room where preparations were underway for the seder Tuesday, a costume Pharoah headdress hung in a corner, ready for a festive meal with lots of flourishes. Gritsevskaya said she had discussed the seder in advance with her students, and they would have an opportunity to reflect on the meaning of liberation in their own lives. She also said that while the preparation for the journey and the seder had been extensive, she didn’t know everything that would happen.
“The kids also prepared a show, a spectacle, about Yetziat Mitzrayim [leaving Egypt], which I have not seen,” Gritsevskaya said. “That’s a surprise for me.”
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Features
Is Netflix’s new show the most Jewish cartoon ever?
Nearly every episode in ‘Long Story Short,’ from the creator of ‘BoJack Horseman,’ revolves around a very Jewish moment
By Mira Fox, PJ Grisar, Olivia Haynie and Nora Berman August 22, 2025
This story was originally published in the Forward. Click here to get the Forward’s free email newsletters delivered to your inbox.
The following contains light spoilers for the Netflix show Long Story Short.
The Schwooper family, the central figures in the new animated Netflix series Long Story Short, are diverse and unique — religious and atheist, gay and straight, farmers and businesswomen. Simultaneously, they are basically like every Jewish family you’ve ever met.
Naomi (Lisa Edelstein), the family’s domineering matriarch, is constantly nagging her kids to do better — her youngest son Yoshi (Max Greenfield) should be more professional; Shira (Abbi Jacobson), the middle child, should wear more dresses; her oldest, Avi (Ben Feldman) should be more observant. Her kids are constantly rolling their eyes and responding with sarcastic jabs. You’ve certainly seen this family. Maybe you’ve lived it.
The show, from animated hit BoJack Horseman’s creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg, isn’t linear; it jumps across the decades to show us snapshots of the young Schwoopers circa day school as well as their own parenting during the COVID pandemic and its aftermath. (Season 1 ends in 2022.)
Though the Schwoopers face crises that could befall any family — like Yoshi signing up for a multi-level marketing scheme involving spring-loaded mattresses — many of the show’s plotlines grapple deeply with Jewish identity.
Avi wonders if being Jewish simply means staying insular, eating fish that looks like a brain and being constantly afraid; Yoshi has a bar mitzvah crisis, struggling with what the rite means if you don’t believe in God; Shira is desperate to get her kids into day school, and is convinced it is only through making her mother’s knishes that she can win the administration’s approval.
The show takes a thoughtful, specific approach to Jewishness. But it also feels no pressure to explain itself, leaving plenty of Jewish moments that might not land, or even make sense, if they don’t reflect your experience.
Which left the Forward’s culture team with a lot to chew on. Who is Long Story Short for, and what is it saying? Read on for our discussion.
Jewish representation and Jewish clichés
Mira: I really liked that this show was not heavy-handed with its depictions of actual Jewish practice and identity. And I loved that we had a lot of really realistic different depictions. We have the oldest brother, Avi, who has sort of rejected Judaism, and resents it; he married a non-Jew and isn’t raising his daughter Jewish. Then there’s Shira, the middle child, who is gay — but even though her family looks different, she has pretty much stayed true to the Conservative Judaism she was raised with, and is sending her kids to Jewish day school. And then there’s Yoshi, the youngest, who ends up forging a totally different Judaism from his family, after a winding and experimental journey. I know lots of Yoshis and Avis and at least a few Shiras.
That being said, some characters’ sort of Jewy affect did rankle me a little. My mom and particularly my maternal grandmother absolutely do fit the show’s depiction of an overbearing Jewish mom. But as accurate as that feels to me, it also feels a little overdone; haven’t we told the jokes about the nagging Jewish mother enough times? It felt like a little bit of a cop-out because it’s such a trope. It’s an easy way to make a show feel really Jewish, but not an interesting one.
Nora: At first, I felt like the show was building up to be a deeper revelation about who Naomi was. There’s a really moving moment in an episode that flashes back to when she was a kid, and she cuts herself with a brooch to get her chaotic family’s attention. I thought, OK, we’re finally getting into it, this will be the episode where we learn who Naomi is. But it didn’t get explored.
Similarly, with Avi, I wanted to know what the roots of his Jewish disaffection were. He just comes off as a grump that Shira makes fun of for being a self-hating Jew. There were moments where I thought we’d get a deeper character study, and it didn’t fulfill that promise.
PJ: I think part of what it’s trying to do, with this fractured storytelling, is reflect the flow of when you’re with family and you’re remembering things. The conversation is discursive, it goes back and forth in time. We don’t talk about these things in a linear way.
The show feels like a blank check for Raphael Bob-Waksberg to make whatever he wanted after this huge success with BoJack Horseman, which was a weird and funky show, basically about Scott Baio as a horse (and a Democrat). What is interesting about Long Story Short was that it is living in this real place of specificity and isn’t afraid to do that.
Based on my conversation with Bob-Waksberg, he didn’t want to be boxed in. So it’s a Jewish show that’s not about antisemitism. And it doesn’t want to touch Israel because it’s just not interested in that. These people have rich Jewish lives and through these three siblings we have this dialectic with different ways to engage with being Jewish. I found it refreshing.
On the show’s approach to diversity
PJ: I want to talk more about the Nicole Byer character, Shira’s wife, Kendra. When we first meet her, it is clear she’s Jewish. And I think we were all hoping that it wouldn’t be explained, because why would we have to; Black Jews exist. But then it’s revealed that she’s a convert, and we have this moment with her in the Vidui prayer on Yom Kippur. And the story we’re given about how she ends up finding Judaism feels a little contrived.
Olivia: That’s something I thought a lot about. Black Jews are still treated as an anomaly, as something that needs explaining. When they meet at the grocery store while shopping for Rosh Hashanah dinner, the show seems to make fun of Shira for being so presumptuous when she tells Kendra that it’s nice she got invited to a Rosh Hashanah dinner. Kendra asks, “Why are you assuming, how do you know I’m not hosting?”
But then in the next episode, it sort of seems like she was right to assume that. We find out that Kendra became interested in Judaism as a way to explain a sudden absence from work without getting in trouble. It was very Black Cindy from Orange is the New Black — she’s converting to get something out of it. They turn it into a genuine moment, but why did she need to be swindling her way out of something?
I also think the show oversimplified how accepting Naomi would be of a Black daughter-in-law. She can’t stand Avi’s “shiksa” girlfriend, but Kendra is perfect? From what I know about interracial relationships, I wouldn’t say that is likely.
Mira: I think the smoothing of how diversity is received in general was interesting. Not just with Kendra’s conversion moment, but also with her and Shira being queer. It’s not really touched on if that would be an issue for them at all in the synagogue or day school or with any of the family, and I think it almost certainly would be, at some point.
The audience for the show
Mira: I wonder what the sell for this show is. I know that I am overwhelmed every time I open a streaming app by the sheer volume of new shows I’ve never heard of. And if there’s not some big monocultural show like Succession that everyone is watching, or nothing that I go in searching for, I have trouble choosing. While “cartoon about Jewish family” obviously will appeal to a certain set of Jewish families, who else is going to watch that? I’m sure some BoJack fans will watch, of course, but I wonder if they will stay.
Nora: What is Raphael Bob-Waksberg saying about Judaism? We think he got a blank check to make this show, and he does present this diversity of American Judaism. But I’m still curious about which parts he chooses to tease out more and which he doesn’t and why.
Olivia: It feels like the show is really for Jews. I really couldn’t imagine non-Jews watching this. I was thinking it will be a word-of-mouth show, like they read about it in the Forward or hear about it from their kids.
I think there’s things you just can’t understand if they’re not explained to you. Like when Naomi explains their observance level.
PJ: The way Naomi describes their practice is “progressive, Conservative, ritual over faith and blind practice. That’s literally the only way it makes sense.”
Olivia: That makes perfect sense to me because it’s like my grandparents. My grandmother would cook bacon, and they didn’t believe in God, but it was super important to them that their grandkids were raised Jewish in a synagogue. But when my mom stopped eating shellfish and pork, her parents never knew because they’d make fun of her — that’s too observant. Even though they were huge members of their congregation.
That said, I did think that some of the references that would have been inside jokes will make sense because of how much Jewish organizations have been in the news, like a bit about a bar mitzvah check that’s a donation to the ADL.
Mira: I agree that a lot of stuff is going to fly over some non-Jews’ heads, or even some Jews’ heads. But I also think that is what makes this show good, and not annoying or didactic. I’ve written so many reviews of Hallmark Hanukkah movies complaining about how they feel the need to put in these awkward, forced explanations. A character will say something like: “Hey, do you want to come spin the dreidel? It’s my favorite traditional Hanukkah game! Gee, I just love those chocolate gelt coins.”
If I don’t want a show to explain every little Jewish thing, I think it looks like Long Story Short. Maybe not everyone gets every joke. But that means it is going to be a richer text for Jews. Even in places where I maybe wanted more development, I didn’t need it. I know so many people who have, for example, converted or are in an interfaith relationship, so I have a depth of references that I extrapolate from to enhance or enrich my understanding of the characters.
What does the show say to Jews?
PJ: I think that it’s not meant to be prescriptive or say anything definitive. When I spoke to him, he said he had a lot of ideas and he didn’t feel the need to decide anything. He could just let the characters talk through things. Which I think is not a cop-out, actually, it’s a very Jewish approach.
Nora: It’s refreshing that it’s not about what it’s like to be a Jew after Oct. 7. It’s not that it doesn’t deal with deep themes, but it’s just a family of Jews existing, and we don’t need to explain anything about it. They deal with maybe internalized antisemitism, or grief, or wrestling with how they want to be Jewish in the world. But it’s not so angsty.
Mira: Because Abbi Jacobson from Broad City plays Shira, I was thinking a lot about Broad City while I watched, and where Long Story Short fits into the canon of Jewish media.
I felt like Broad City offered a new model of Judaism for our generation, where some of these old tropes about nagging Jewish mothers or Jewish American Princesses or Jewish guilt were present, but the characters didn’t feel weighed down by them. The show offered this very empowered version of Jewish femininity that wasn’t about competing against shiksas or being scolds. Abbi and Ilana got to be fun and irreverent in their Jewishness, like when they made a huge deal about fasting for Yom Kippur and then broke it with bacon, egg and cheese sandwiches and didn’t feel bad about it at all.
I think Long Story Short is very much about the younger generation trying to figure out their relationship with Judaism, but it doesn’t offer as clear of an idea of how they do so as Broad City did. But it’s clear that all the children feel some need to reinvent their Jewishness.
Olivia: Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is one of the shows that comes to mind for me, and the mother in that has so few redeeming qualities. There’s that whole song, “Remember How We Suffered,” that’s talking about how the only thing Jews do is talk about the Holocaust. There’s really no representation of Judaism outside of it being a chore. And Broad City was refreshing in that way — the mother in it was a stereotype, but she and her daughter have a great relationship.
I think Long Story Short was refreshing in the sense that Judaism isn’t only a burden, there’s a value and a richness to it.
PJ: I think this show is continuing in a longer tradition, maybe starting with Philip Roth and Portnoy’s Complaint, of Jews writing without their own institutional PR in mind. Not to make us look noble or good, but to present us as openly flawed. That continues on through the Coen brothers and A Serious Man, where it’s incredibly Jewish but not particularly flattering. Now we’re at this point where we don’t have to care so much about making a political statement or to dig so hard to critique our own community. It’s more tender, it’s coming from less of an angry place, but it still feels part of that tradition. We can approach with love but with an awareness that some stereotypes exist for a reason.
Like there’s this shyster-y lawyer character, the uncle, played by Danny Burstein. We go back and we see the family has a running joke about him. It is acknowledging that this uncle guy is a type of person who exists, but it’s also the type of person we make fun of — they’re a source of humor. We’re all in on the joke.
Nora: I kept thinking about the show Transparent; I think it is just sort of nice to see a family with a lot of tenderness going through these evolutions and challenges without having to justify it. It doesn’t shy away from stereotypes, but lovingly engages with them.
I also really appreciated the way it was talking about what it’s like to be marginalized as a Jew in America without it being didactic or political. I’m thinking of the episode where they go to school for a Christmas show, and the songs — one of them has the lyrics “Hanukkah, Ramadan, Kwanzaa too — we tolerate them all, but there’s nothing like Christmas!” That is exactly what it’s like to be a Jew in America at Christmas, where everyone is goading you to just participate because everyone loves Christmas. It’s just such a specific experience that I’d never seen represented.
Mira: Long Story Short might not give a lot of factual information about what it means to keep kosher or anything like that, but I think it does a good job at presenting Jews of all levels of observance as normal people who are also a relatable American family.
What do we want to see in the second season?
Mira: I’d love to see Shira’s coming out, and the first time she brought Kendra home, to know how her family came around to loving her wife so easily. I also want to see more of Yoshi’s Jewish journey, which is clearly winding; I feel like he definitely took a Buddhism pit stop at some point, maybe while he worked on the goat farm and smoked a lot of weed.
And I think I want to see the grandparents’ generation, and with it, more about how Naomi and Elliot — but particularly Naomi — grew up. I want to see a bit more of her tenderness; we get glimpses, but that’s it.
Nora: I want to see how Naomi and Elliot met. I also would love a bris episode for Shira’s kids, Walter and Benjamin — I think that would be hilarious. I also want to know what happened with Avi and his ex-wife’s marriage; I have the impression it has something to do with his relationship with Judaism.
Olivia: There’s a scene in the opening episode where Avi makes a joke in the car and it relieves some tension and he and Naomi make eye contact in the rearview mirror and smile. It shows they have this deep, sweet, special relationship that kind of falls apart by the time he’s an adult. I want to know more about him.
I’d be curious to know more about Kendra’s family; we get a bit of them in that one episode on her conversion, but I’d love to see where her family is now after she has converted. I’d like to know more about ָָAvi’s teenage daughter and how she sees her family. And maybe more about their lives outside the family, like with friends — I have no idea what Shira does for work.
PJ: I imagine Shira is an academic who wrote her dissertation on Walter Benjamin, and that’s why her two kids are named Walter and Benjamin.
Mira Fox is a reporter at the Forward. Get in touch at fox@forward.com or on Twitter @miraefox.
PJ Grisar is a Forward culture reporter. He can be reached at grisar@forward.com and @pjgrisar on Twitter.
Olivia Haynie is an editorial fellow at the Forward.
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How the Global Religious Landscape Changed from 2010 to 2020
Muslims grew fastest; Christians lagged behind global population increase
• Christians are the world’s largest religious group, at 28.8% of the global population. They are a majority everywhere except the Asia-Pacific and Middle East-North Africa regions. Sub-Saharan Africa has surpassed Europe in having the largest number of Christians. But Christians are shrinking as a share of the global population, as millions of Christians “switch” out of religion to become religiously unaffiliated.
• Muslims are the world’s second-largest religious group (25.6% of the world’s population) and the fastest-growing major religion, largely due to Muslims’ relatively young age structure and high fertility rate. They make up the vast majority of the population in the Middle East-North Africa region. In all other regions, Muslims are a religious minority, including in the Asia-Pacific region (which is home to the greatest number of Muslims).
• The religiously unaffiliated population is the world’s third-largest religious category (24.2% of the global population), after Christians and Muslims. Between 2010 and 2020, religiously unaffiliated people grew more than any group except Muslims, despite their demographic disadvantages of an older age structure and relatively low fertility. The unaffiliated made up a majority of the population in 10 countries and territories in 2020, up from seven a decade earlier.
• Hindus are the fourth-largest religious category (14.9% of the world’s population), after Christians, Muslims and religiously unaffiliated people. Most (99%) live in the Asia-Pacific region; 95% of all Hindus live in India alone. Between 2010 and 2020, Hindus remained a stable share of the world’s population because their fertility resembles the global average, and surveys indicate that switching out of or into Hinduism is rare.
• Buddhists (4.1% of the world’s population) are the only group in this report whose number declined worldwide between 2010 and 2020. This was due both to religious disaffiliation among Buddhists in East Asia and to a relatively low birth rate among Buddhists, who tend to live in countries with older populations. Most of the world’s Buddhists (98%) reside in the Asia-Pacific region, the birthplace of Buddhism.
• Jews, the smallest religious group analyzed separately in this report (0.2% of the world’s population), lagged behind global population growth between 2010 and 2020 – despite having fertility rates on par with the global average – due to their older age structure. Most Jews live either in North America (primarily in the United States) or in the Middle East-North Africa region (almost exclusively in Israel).
These are among the key findings of a Pew Research Center analysis of more than 2,700 censuses and surveys, including census data releases that were delayed due to the coronavirus pandemic. This report is part of the Pew-Templeton Global Religious Futures project, which analyzes global religious change and its impact on societies around the world. Funding for the Global Religious Futures project comes from The Pew Charitable Trusts and the John Templeton Foundation.
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Antisemitism in some unlikely places in America
By HENRY SREBRNIK Antisemitism flourishes in a place where few might expect to confront it – medical schools and among doctors. It affects Jews, I think, more emotionally than Judeophobia in other fields.
Medicine has long been a Jewish profession with a history going back centuries. We all know the jokes about “my son – now also my daughter – the doctor.” Physicians take the Hippocratic Oath to heal the sick, regardless of their ethnicity or religion. When we are ill doctors often become the people who save us from debilitating illness and even death. So this is all the more shocking.
Yes, in earlier periods there were medical schools with quotas and hospitals who refused or limited the number of Jews they allowed to be affiliated with them. It’s why we built Jewish hospitals and practices. And of course, we all shudder at the history of Nazi doctors and euthanasia in Germany and in the concentration camps of Europe. But all this – so we thought – was a thing of a dark past. Yet now it has made a comeback, along with many other horrors we assume might never reappear.
Since the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, there has been a resurgence of antisemitism, also noticeable in the world of healthcare. This is not just a Canadian issue. Two articles on the Jewish website Tablet, published Nov. 21, 2023, and May 18, 2025, spoke to this problem in American medicine as well, referencing a study by Ian Kingsbury and Jay P. Greene of Do No Harm, a health care advocacy group, based on data amassed by the organization Stop Antisemitism. They identified a wave of open Jew-hatred by medical professionals, medical schools, and professional associations, often driven by foreign-trained doctors importing the Jew-hatred of their native countries, suggesting “that a field entrusted with healing is becoming a licensed purveyor of hatred.”
Activists from Doctors Against Genocide, American Palestinian Women’s Association, and CODEPINK held a demonstration calling for an immediate cease-fire in Gaza at the Hart Senate Office Building in Washington, D.C., Nov. 16, 2023, almost as soon as the war began. A doctor in Tampa took to social media to post a Palestinian flag with the caption “about time!!!” The medical director of a cancer centre in Dearborn, Michigan, posted on social media: “What a beautiful morning. What a beautiful day.” Even in New York, a physician commented on Instagram that “Zionist settlers” got “a taste of their own medicine.” A Boston-based dentist was filmed ripping down posters of Israeli victims and a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine did the same. Almost three-quarters of American medical associations felt the need to speak out on the war in Ukraine but almost three-quarters had nothing to say about the war in Israel.
Antisemitism in academic medical centres is fostering noxious environments which deprive Jewish healthcare professionals of their civil right to work in spaces free from discrimination and hate, according to a study by the Data & Analytics Department of StandWithUs, an international, non-partisan education organization that supports Israel and fights antisemitism.
“Academia today is increasingly cultivating an environment which is hostile to Jews, as well as members of other religious and ethnic groups,” StandWithUs director of data and analytics, and study co-author, Alexandra Fishman, said on May 5 in a press release. “Academic institutions should be upholding the integrity of scholarship, prioritizing civil discourse, rather than allowing bias or personal agendas to guide academic culture.”
The study, “Antisemitism in American Healthcare: The Role of Workplace Environment,” included survey data showing that 62.8 per cent of Jewish healthcare professionals employed by campus-based medical centres reported experiencing antisemitism, a far higher rate than those working in private practice and community hospitals. Fueling the rise in hate, it added, were repeated failures of DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) initiatives to educate workers about antisemitism, increasing, the report said, the likelihood of antisemitic activity.
“When administrators and colleagues understand what antisemitism looks like, it clearly correlates with less antisemitism in the workplace,” co-author and Yeshiva University professor Dr. Charles Auerbach reported. “Recognition is a powerful tool — institutions that foster awareness create safer, more inclusive environments for everyone.”
Last December, the Data & Analytics Department also published a study which found that nearly 40 per cent of Jewish American health-care professionals have encountered antisemitism in the workplace, either as witnesses or victims. The study included a survey of 645 Jewish health workers, a substantial number of whom said they were subject to “social and professional isolation.” The problem left more than one quarter of the survey cohort, 26.4 per cent, “feeling unsafe or threatened.”
The official journal of the Alliance for Academic Internal Medicine concurs. According to “The Moral Imperative of Countering Antisemitism in US Medicine – A Way Forward,” by Hedy S. Wald and Steven Roth, published in the October 2024 issue of the American Journal of Medicine, increased antisemitism in the United States has created a hostile learning and practice environment in medical settings. This includes instances of antisemitic behaviour and the use of antisemitic symbols at medical school commencements.
Examples of its impact upon medicine include medical students’ social media postings claiming that Jews wield disproportionate power, antisemitic slogans at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) David Geffen School of Medicine, antisemitic graffiti at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) Cancer Centre, Jewish medical students’ exposure to demonization of Israel diatribes and rationalizing terrorism; and faculty, including a professor of medicine at UCSF, posting antisemitic tropes and derogatory comments about Jewish health care professionals. Jewish medical students’ fears of retribution, should they speak out, have been reported. “Our recent unpublished survey of Jewish physicians and trainees demonstrated a twofold increase from 40% to 88% for those who experienced antisemitism prior to vs after October 7,” they stated.
In some schools, Jewish faculty are speaking out. In February, the Jewish Faculty Resilience Group at UCLA accused the institution in an open letter of “ignoring” antisemitism at the School of Medicine, charging that its indifference to the matter “continues to encourage more antisemitism.” It added that discrimination at the medical school has caused demonstrable harm to Jewish students and faculty. Student clubs, it said, are denied recognition for arbitrary reasons; Jewish faculty whose ethnic backgrounds were previously unknown are purged from the payrolls upon being identified as Jews; and anyone who refuses to participate in anti-Zionist events is “intimidated” and pressured.
Given these findings, many American physicians are worried not only as Jewish doctors and professionals, but for Jewish patients who are more than ever concerned with whom they’re meeting. Can we really conceive of a future where you’re not sure if “the doctor will hate you now?”
Henry Srebrnik is a professor of political science at the University of Prince Edward Island.