The personal belongings of festival-goers are seen at the site of an attack on the Nova Festival by Hamas terrorists from Gaza, near Israel’s border with the Gaza Strip, in southern Israel, Oct. 12, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun

The shock so many of us Jewish therapists experienced on Oct. 7, 2023, and in the days that followed cut deep. First there was the horror of the attacks themselves, and then the vitriol that began almost immediately coming from some of our own colleagues. We at once understood that we had left our before behind.

Living in the after, we began to ask questions we never expected to ask in once familiar professional spaces. Can I speak openly here? Will my grief be understood? How much of myself do I have to explain, or hide, to belong?

We are seven Jewish women, psychologists and social workers: Andrea Yudell, Dana Cohen, Jen Kogan, Jessica Zmood, Miri Bar-Halpern, Shelly Steinwurtzel, and Susie Hess. We have spent our careers listening to others, building relationships, and helping people feel less alone.

After Oct. 7, each of us found ourselves confronting the same troubling contradiction: How could professions built on empathy and ethical care have no room for Jewish suffering?

As Shelly says, “The nature of our work hadn’t changed, but the nature of our professions changed while we were working.”

When Our Professional Worlds Changed

For Dana, the exclusion was very public. Her business was doxxed, and she was placed on a “Do Not Refer” list for therapists labeled “Zionist.” An Instagram account she created only a day earlier became a platform for speaking about antisemitism, anti-Zionism, Jewish identity, and mental health. 

For Miri, an Israeli and granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, her professional work and personal identity became deeply intertwined. Right away, she jumped in to support people directly impacted by the attacks, while also confronting the painful experience of having her own grief and fear questioned by colleagues.

This became central to her research on traumatic invalidation, the additional harm that can occur when suffering is denied or minimized.  As Miri puts it, “People should not have to erase who they are to heal.”

Susie encountered a similar contradiction. Colleagues who supported her advocacy for antiracism told her she was “too strong” when she spoke about antisemitism. When her organization, Trauma Informed Learning Alliance, expanded its work to include the Jewish community, some board members and student interns quit.

In 2008, Jen founded DCTherapistConnect, a professional community that grew to nearly 4,000 therapists in the Washington, DC, area. It was a place to exchange referrals, share resources, and support colleagues. Immediately after Oct. 7, she found herself having to create guidelines to address antisemitic and anti-Zionist posts. When she set this boundary, she was called a racist.

Andrea felt a profound rupture between the values she thought she shared with colleagues and their responses to Jewish suffering. After witnessing the horrifying footage of Oct. 7 and hearing from loved ones in Israel, she encountered silence from colleagues or appeals to think of “the oppressed,” rather than acknowledgment of Israelis who had been murdered or taken hostage.

The divide was not between Jews and non-Jews; her non-Jewish husband and friends continued to show compassion. Instead, it was the painful realization that colleagues she had trusted seemed unable to extend to Jews the same ethical commitments they upheld for others.

Different experiences, yet we were all asking the same question: Why isn’t the care and compassion we spent our careers extending to others being extended to us?

Finding One Another

None of us set out to create The Village. We were each responding to what we were experiencing in real time. We wrote articles, spoke publicly, created resources and organizations, and advocated for Jewish clients and mental health professionals.

Along the way, we found one another. Someone would read an article, reach out after a presentation, or introduce two people who seemed to be doing similar work. Some of us became close friends before ever meeting in person. As our connections grew, we started a group chat.

Dana, who has a habit of naming her chats so she can keep track of them, called this one “The Village.” As she says, “We needed a village, so we became one.”

More Than Colleagues

The Village is a place where we share resources, brainstorm ideas, consult with one another, and celebrate each other’s work. One connection began between a bomb shelter in Israel and a café in Madrid.

Jessica and Susie planned to join the same trauma mission in Israel, but the war with Iran diverted Susie’s flight to Spain. Jessica’s plane landed hours before the missiles struck. Through constant texts, they offered each other grounding and companionship across borders and fear.

At a conference, Miri learned that she had missed her daughter losing her first tooth. Later, at dinner with Jessica and Shelly, she began to cry. They both got up and hugged her.

There was nothing to analyze or solve. She was a mother who had missed an important moment in her child’s life, and her friends were there for her.

As therapists, we spend much of our lives making room for other people’s pain. In The Village, there is room for ours, too.

What We Are Building Together

We are united by a commitment to the ethical principles that brought us into the mental health profession in the first place.  

After Oct. 7, each of us found different ways to put those principles into action, often at considerable professional cost.

Speaking out takes courage. But continuing to do so when the consequences become personal is hard to do alone.

We don’t always agree, and we don’t always have the same capacity to fight. We support one another when someone needs to step back, encourage each other when we’re ready to move forward, and celebrate each other’s accomplishments. There’s no competition, no judgment, and no need to explain why something hurts.

We also know that not everyone who needs a village has found one yet. We hope our story encourages others to find or create their own, and to consider what they can do to confront Jew hatred.

One day, we’ll look back on this time, and perhaps the antisemitism, anti-Zionism, and exclusion we witnessed within the mental health field will be more widely acknowledged. We will remember that we spoke out when it wasn’t easy, that we refused to look away, and that along the way, we found each other. 

Andrea Yudell, LICSW, LCSW-C, is a writer, therapist, and advocate with over 25 years of clinical experience. Andrea works with clients in a variety of ways, offering deep exploration and the development of practical strategies. In addition to her clinical career, she is co-founder of the Jewish Social Work Consortium and Ethically Grounded. 

Dana Cohen, LCSW is a therapist, advocate and speaker based in the Chicago suburbs. She is the founder of Cohen Counseling LLC, co-founder of the Levari Initiative, and co-founder of Chicagoland Jewish Therapists. Her work integrates clinical expertise with Jewish identity, community resilience, and nervous system informed care.

Jennifer Kogan, LICSW, is a writer, editor and advocate with over 30 years of experience in mental health. She co-founded the Jewish Social Work Consortium, Ethically Grounded, and the Levari Initiative. Her work centers on professional ethics and advancing dignity, fairness, and belonging for all across clinical, institutional, and community spaces.

Jessica Zmood, PsyD is a licensed clinical psychologist & Co-Founder and Director of Gesher Community Care, a nonprofit organization that connects members of the Jewish community with safe, affordable, culturally responsive mental health care. Her work focuses on trauma, identity, and the psychological impacts of antisemitism.

Miri Bar-Halpern, PsyD is a lecturer in psychology at Harvard Medical School and Director of Trauma Training and Services at Parents for Peace. An international expert in trauma, extremism, and identity-based violence, she is a leading scholar on traumatic invalidation and developer of the SHALEM Method™ for healing and post-traumatic growth.

Shelly Steinwurtzel, PsyD is a licensed clinical psychologist & Co-Founder and Director of Gesher Community Care, a nonprofit organization that connects members of the Jewish community with safe, affordable, culturally responsive mental health care. Her work outside the Jewish world focuses on medical trauma, reproductive mental health, and parenting.

Susie Hess, LCSW is an associate professor at the USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work and an international speaker on trauma-informed education. She co-founded the Trauma Informed Learning Alliance, hosts the “Our Stories Matter” podcast, and directs the Kalaniyot Chapter at USC. Her work focuses on resilience and healing in communities impacted by violence, incarceration, and conflict.