A Therapist’s View: Jewish Students on Campus

“I don’t feel safe on campus unless I pretend to be someone else.”

Yet another therapy client said it in session, usually followed by “But it’s fine,” or “I’ll get through it.” What troubles me most is the resignation beneath the words, a tone I now recognize across many Jewish students who walk into my office. (Details are composites and identifying information has been changed.)

They’re not dramatic or overly sensitive. They are adapting to something that should never feel normal. They minimize because naming the whole truth might break something open inside them.

Their minimization reminds me of survivors of relationship abuse who downplay early warning signs. Not because they don’t notice, but because the mind protects itself from what feels overwhelming. These students are doing the same thing. They are surviving.

Dana, a straight-A student, tells me she just needs more sleep. Her grades are slipping, along with her chances of getting into medical school. She describes a fog she cannot shake, and a mind that cannot stay focused long enough to get through a page of reading.

Many Jewish students refuse to call it trauma, and I understand why. No one wants to call attention to themselves. Rationale people do not want to be seen as a victim. No one wants to believe they’re being worn down by an environment that refuses to see them for who they are.

Antisemitism doesn’t only frighten people. It destabilizes identity. It creates an internal conflict between who you are and who the environment allows you to be. When that conflict becomes chronic, the nervous system adapts through minimizing, avoiding, numbing, or pretending. These are not overreactions. They are the psychological imprint of being told, directly or indirectly, that your identity is threatening, inferior, or unwelcome.

And then there is Sarah. She sits in front of her screen alert and upright, backpack zipped and held on her lap, as if she might need to leave at any moment. She jumps when someone closes a door in the hallway. She scans the room before she speaks, as if danger could appear from a corner that has never betrayed her, but could.

She tells me she’s “just on edge,” but her body says otherwise. She keeps her phone volume off, yet checks it every few minutes. She laughs at things that aren’t funny. She talks quickly. She says she can’t relax and wonders if something is wrong with her. She calls herself paranoid and silly.

I’ve held a lot of suffering in my office, and I’m not easily shaken. Still, these stories have been landing differently. I keep wondering why this particular moment feels heavier to me than the aftermath of 9/11 or the pandemic.

Therapists have a term for what happens when a client’s story lands in our own nervous system: countertransference. We are trained to notice it, make sense of it, and stay grounded enough to be useful.

But over the past two years, something inside me reacts each time I hear these stories. Not just clinically. In my heart. I find myself thinking about them outside of session, alone in the car, and saying a small prayer when I light my Shabbat candles.

They are not my children, but they are close enough in age that my Jewish mother instincts want to kick in. I feel the urge to intervene, to fix, to protect. But in the therapy room, protecting looks different. It is slower. It is helping them metabolize what they’ve been forced to absorb, without rushing past it.

The contrast between their experiences and my own is stark. I think back to who I was in the 90s and wonder how I would have responded if campus life had looked like this. Would I have been one of the brave ones speaking out publicly? Or would I have convinced myself that blending in was safer?

There is a memory I keep circling back to. I had a cousin who was a year ahead of me at the same university. We grew up close, and she was admittedly a lot “cooler” than me. One day she asked me not to tell anyone we were related because she didn’t want her sorority to know she was half Jewish.

At the time, I felt angry, hurt, rejected. It felt personal. But we grew up in what I now call the golden era of American Jewish life, when identity felt uncomplicated and safe. The fear back then was not external. It was internal. It was her insecurity, not her environment.

And that is what makes today different.

Today, the fear my clients carry is real. Their avoidance is not insecurity. It is protection. Their minimization is not vanity. It is survival. The stakes have changed, and so has the psychology.

What makes this moment even more painful is that many Jewish students barely had strong Jewish foundations to begin with. They often arrive on campus without a clear sense of self, and now the only messages they hear about being Jewish are negative.  Many will absorb shame, hostility, confusion, and fear at the precise stage of life when identity is supposed to expand.  Hearing Nazi references used as taunts or being asked to be a “good Jew” by renouncing their spiritual homeland, coupled with the constant invalidation and lack of meaningful support has a direct negative impact on developing a stable sense of self and belonging.

Emerging adulthood is when the questions “Who am I?” and “Where do I belong?” come alive. Identity is shaped through exploration, relationships, values, culture, and freedom. But instead of expanding, their self-perception are contracting.

Clinically, this shows up in ways most people don’t associate with trauma: difficulty concentrating, sleep disruption. Anxiety tucked beneath sarcasm. Avoidance disguised as “I’m just tired.” Emotional withdrawal. A shrinking of the self. Feeling foreign in their own bodies. And a quiet belief that their pain is not serious enough to matter.

We already know what happens when a generation’s trauma goes unaddressed. We saw it after the Holocaust, not because these moments are the same, but because we understand what unprocessed fear and shame do across generations. Today, we have more resources than ever if we are willing to use them wisely.

And this is the part I keep returning to as a therapist: the work is not only helping students endure. It is helping them stay intact. Helping them name what is happening without collapsing into it. Helping them remain connected to Jewish meaning and community, so their identity is shaped by who they are, not by who they are being told to be. There is so much wisdom and so many tools of resilience in our heritage. Judaism is not an accessory to recovery; it is a primary instrument of it.

This is why Jewish mental health cannot be an afterthought. Not now. Not in this moment.

In our tradition, caring for the next generation is not optional. We are obligated to guard their safety and their inner worlds, their identities, their sense of belonging, their connection to themselves, to each other, and to something larger.

If we want Jewish continuity, we must care for Jewish well-being. Jewish life is sustained l’dor v’dor, from generation to generation, but only when each generation is allowed to be whole.