Watch out! Antisemitism is soaring in US medicine

A new report shows that only 11% of medical associations and 3% of medical schools have issued statements about the Hamas terrorist attack on Oct 7. Corbis via Getty Images

Antisemitism is now a full-blown crisis on the college campus, but it doesn’t end there: Similar hatred is increasingly widespread in the medical profession, where it’s even more dangerous.

Doctors, nurses and medical students who are supposed to heal are instead promoting hate — a fact that should terrify Jewish patients and anyone else who expects equal and excellent medical care.

In a new report, we’ve documented many of the antisemitic outbursts that have characterized much of medicine since Oct. 7.

Many doctors and medical students have torn down posters of kidnapped Israelis.

That includes a professor of medicine at the prestigious University of Pennsylvania.

Medical professionals have also tried to justify the murder of Jews.

One nurse publicly claimed that allegations of sexual violence committed by Hamas must be propaganda, since “ain’t no Muslim Palestinian resistant fighter touching your women.”

While some medical professionals have been fired for blatant antisemitism, including several in New York City, countless others haven’t, raising the specter of Jew-hatred running riot in hospitals and doctor’s offices.

Far from being individual acts, this antisemitic wave reflects medical institutions’ deeply engrained bias against Jews.

Our report documents this bias by comparing how medical schools and professional organizations have responded to two different atrocities: Hamas’s attack on Israel and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Both featured mass slaughter, rape and kidnapping, yet medical institutions were far more likely to condemn Russia’s murder of civilians than the Jew-killing terrorists.

All told, 71% of medical associations and 45% of medical schools issued statements on the war in Ukraine, essentially all of them condemning Russia.

By contrast, only 11% of medical associations and 3% of medical schools have issued statements about Oct 7.

What’s more, the few statements on Israel have a markedly different tone than those about Russia and Ukraine.

Where the latter typically featured heartfelt sympathy for those personally connected to Ukraine, the former rarely offer solidarity with Jews or Israelis, focusing far more on the need to prevent further civilian casualties.

Consider the American Medical Association, which is arguably the most important medical organization in the United States.

On Ukraine, it declared: “The AMA is outraged by the senseless injury and death the Russian army has inflicted on the Ukraine people. For those who survive these unprovoked attacks, the [effects] will be felt for years.”

The AMA statement on Israel adopted an agnostic posture, saying it had “heard from many of our physician and medical student members expressing heartbreak and outrage about the human toll afflicting Israelis, Palestinians and others.”

Rather than condemn Hamas’ slaughter of civilians, the AMA statement emphasized how Israel’s response needed to avoid interfering with medical care.

This double standard, which we found over and over, is an essential feature of antisemitism.

How did this evil become so engrained in the medical profession?

Antisemitism has been exacerbated by the near-universal adoption of racial identity politics within health care.

Groups like the AMA and essentially every professional association and medical school have embraced so-called “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” which classifies groups of people as oppressors or oppressed, each deserving of different treatment.

This worldview, which is now practiced by medical providers and taught in medical school, inevitably places Jews in the oppressor category.

There are many reasons for this hateful label.

One is the false belief that Jews are uniformly “white,” which makes them de facto oppressors and, and indeed, colonialists.

Another reason is Jews’ widespread success in the medical field, which under identity politics, is somehow proof of injustice.

According to this perverse logic, Jews ought to have their privilege stripped away, and don’t deserve sympathy when their fellow Jews are kidnapped, raped and slaughtered.

Hence the lack of statements from medical organizations — and the explosion of antisemitic hate from medical professionals and students.

Every Jewish patient has good reason to worry about the antisemitism that’s increasingly engrained in American health care.

And every patient should fear the identity politics that drive Jew-hatred.

This worldview ultimately threatens people of all beliefs and backgrounds by seeing them as members of favored or disfavored groups, with some deserving preferential treatment and others deserving punishment and even pain.

If medical institutions don’t rid themselves of this hateful bias, then policymakers must.

Medicine’s antisemitism problem is only going to get worse, and what’s started with silence toward the murder of Jews won’t stop there.

Ian Kingsbury is director of research at Do No Harm, where Jay Greene is senior fellow.