They Called Zionism a Disease. The Feds Just Called It Discrimination

I spent the spring arguing that after Chiles, it was civil-rights law — not licensing boards — that still had teeth for Jews in the mental health field. Last week, the federal government reached for it.

Picture the chair.

Not a metaphor — an actual chair, in an actual office, the kind with a tissue box angled toward you and a white-noise machine humming outside the door. A Jewish woman sits down in it because something is wrong and she can’t carry it alone anymore. Maybe it’s grief. Maybe it’s the friends who went quiet after October 7. Maybe it’s just the low static of dread she can’t quite name.

She came to the one room in American life that is supposed to be on her side. No questions asked.

And the person across from her — licensed, credentialed, trained on the best evidence the field has — listens to her describe her fear, her family, her attachment to the only country on earth a Jew can reliably flee to, and hears a symptom. A colonized mind. A pathology to be treated.

She walked in a patient. She walked out a diagnosis.

I’ve been writing about that chair for months. Last week, for the first time, the federal government walked into the room.

This spring I wrote a piece for these pages making a prediction I badly hoped I was wrong about: There’s a Conversion Problem in Therapy. It’s Not the One You Think. The argument was simple, and bleak. The Supreme Court, in Chiles v. Salazar, had just made it harder for states to police what a licensed therapist says to a vulnerable patient — and that was about to matter for Jews in a way almost no one outside the Jewish world was discussing.

The regulatory path, I argued, was closing. The civil-rights path was the one with a future.

Last week the federal government proved the point. On June 17, the Department of Health and Human Services opened a civil-rights investigation into the American Psychological Association — the largest professional body in American mental health, and the federally recognized accreditor that decides which training programs get to call themselves legitimate.

I did not expect to be writing the sequel quite this fast.

What the Feds Are Actually Investigating

The investigation grew out of a sweeping complaint the Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law filed last August — the group’s first complaint against a healthcare organization to trigger a federal probe. The allegations track, almost line for line, what Jewish clinicians have been describing to me since October 7: that the APA promoted, or declined to discipline, anti-Israel activism inside its affinity groups; that it encouraged “decolonizing therapy” frameworks treating Zionism as a pathology — “essentially a pathologizing of Zionism and Jewish identity,” in the complainant’s words — and that it threw up roadblocks to a Jewish affinity group forming while excusing inflammatory anti-Zionism from its Arab, Muslim, Middle Eastern and North African affinity group.

Here is the part worth slowing down for, because it is the whole ballgame.

HHS did not open a file because the APA holds bad opinions. It opened it under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act — the provision that extends Title VI’s ban on race and national-origin discrimination to any health program that takes federal money. The APA takes federal money. That is the hook, and it is a sturdy one.

It’s also a more interesting hook than the headlines let on. Title VI doesn’t cover religious discrimination — so if antisemitism were only a matter of religion, the APA would have a real argument that the statute can’t reach it. It isn’t, and it can’t. The Supreme Court settled this almost forty years ago, in Shaare Tefila Congregation v. Cobb and its companion case Saint Francis College v. Al-Khazraji, holding that Jews are protected against “racial” discrimination under the civil-rights laws because the Congress that wrote them understood Jews as a distinct people, not merely a faith. That is what lets HHS open this as a race-and-national-origin case at all. The doctrine was already sitting there. The complaint simply walked through the door.

The APA, for its part, says it has heard the concerns of its Jewish members and takes them seriously. An opened investigation is not a verdict, and I’m not going to pretend it is. But a federal agency looked at a complaint about the pathologizing of Jewish identity in the clinical setting and decided it cleared the bar to investigate. That, by itself, is the development.

This Is the Tool I Meant

Here is why this is the sequel and not the rerun.

Chiles shut a specific door. It held that states cannot use their licensing power to control the viewpoints a therapist shares with a patient — which is why conversion-therapy bans are suddenly on shaky ground, and why a state board will now have an even harder time disciplining a clinician who tells a Jewish client that her love of Israel is a colonial wound in need of healing. That door is the regulatory one. It is closing.

But Chiles was a First Amendment case about the state as regulator — the government wielding its police power to license and punish. It said nothing about the government as funder. And that distinction is not a technicality; it’s two different constitutional universes. When HHS conditions federal health dollars on not discriminating, it is acting under the Spending Clause — the authority the Supreme Court blessed in South Dakota v. Dole — which lets Congress attach strings to its money that it could never impose by raw regulation. Chiles narrowed what a licensing board may forbid a therapist from saying. It did nothing — could do nothing — to the government’s right to decline to bankroll discrimination. The funding lever sits entirely outside the door Chiles closed.

And it runs alongside the other route I pointed to in the spring: Section 1981 of the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the Reconstruction-era statute guaranteeing every person the same right to make and enforce contracts “as is enjoyed by white citizens.” It reaches private employers, clinics, and the professional organizations themselves — anywhere a contract lives, whether it’s a job, a membership, or an hour of care. And it hands the power to the people actually in the room: a therapist frozen out of a practice or a referral network, and a patient denied the care she paid for, can each enforce it herself, in her own name, without waiting on anyone’s permission.

Here is the connection the discourse keeps missing. Title VI and Section 1981 are separated by ninety-eight years, but they stand on the same foundation — the same 1987 cases that recognized Jews as a protected people. One reaches institutions that take federal money; the other reaches private contracts and employment, no federal funding required. Together they answer the objection antisemites reach for first: but they’re not a race — they’re a religion, or a political position you can opt out of by renouncing Israel. The law closed that escape hatch almost four decades ago. Jewish identity is covered. Which is also why the favorite move — call your target a “Zionist” and pretend the discrimination just turned political — doesn’t work the way its users think it does.

The Substitution Test, on Letterhead

Regular readers know the question I always come back to: would the same conduct survive if you swapped out the group it targeted?

This complaint hands you the cleanest version I’ve seen. A profession that bans conversion therapy — correctly — because it weaponizes the clinical relationship against a patient’s core identity has, by these allegations, built the mirror image of it against Jews and called the result progressive. An organization that reportedly couldn’t find room for a Jewish affinity group — while a coalition inside the field argued Jews don’t qualify because they “identify as white” — somehow found plenty of room to leave anti-Zionist incitement from another caucus undisturbed.

Now run the swap.

A professional body that blocked a Black affinity group from forming while waving through slurs from a different caucus would not be at the “opening an investigation” stage. It would be the story. Every front page. For a week. The standard isn’t neutral. It only looks reasonable when the identity in the chair is the Jewish one.

The APA’s Own Words, Turned Around

There is an irony here sharp enough to cut yourself on.

When Chiles was before the Supreme Court, the APA filed an amicus brief arguing the opposite of what its defenders now need to be true. It told the Justices that therapy is not “mere speech” or “conversation” but evidence-based professional conduct — regulable, accountable, bound by standards of care. The Court disagreed and handed therapists more First Amendment protection, not less. The APA lost.

But you cannot have it both ways. If the APA was right in Chiles — if what happens in that chair is professional conduct and not protected opinion — then “decolonizing therapy” that pathologizes a patient’s Jewish identity is not some sacred expression the First Amendment shields. It is conduct. And conduct that singles out a protected group is the precise thing civil-rights law exists to reach.

The APA spent its credibility arguing that the chair is a place of regulated professional duty. On that, it was right. So let’s hold it to the standard it asked the Supreme Court to adopt.

No Swastikas Required

I’ve written before that the most common antisemitism in professional life shows up without a single swastika. This is that — in its most credentialed form.

It looks like a webinar on decolonizing trauma. It looks like a widely shared clinical infographic that lists Zionism beside “rape culture” and “genocidal tendencies” as features of a “colonized mind.” It looks like Bessel van der Kolk — the trauma expert whose work half the field was trained on — disciplined after Jewish attendees flagged his remarks, and a former division leader whose incendiary comments about Zionism drew a letter from more than 3,500 mental-health professionals and, for a long time, little else.

None of it announces itself as prejudice. That’s the whole trick. Antisemitism has never needed a costume to do its work; it does the most damage precisely when it’s wearing a lanyard and citing the literature. Which is also why it took a federal complaint, rather than the profession’s own conscience, to force the question.

The Part I Have to Say Out Loud

And now the harder paragraph — because I’d rather write it than have it written at me.

I think the civil-rights framework is the right one. I argued for it before this administration reached for it, and I’ll keep arguing for it after this administration is gone. But it matters enormously — enormously — whether it gets built as durable, evenhanded law or wielded as a political instrument the next administration can simply aim somewhere else.

This is where the legal architecture, not just the politics, should give us both pause and a plan. An HHS investigation lives or dies by who runs HHS. Title VI funding enforcement is discretionary, which means one administration can open a file and the next can quietly close it. That is the weakness of leaning on the spigot.

It is also why the older statute matters far more than the headlines suggest. Section 1981 carries a private right of action — the power to walk into federal court yourself, without any agency’s blessing, under a statute no president can repeal by memo. A precedent won under it wouldn’t depend on who holds the lever at HHS. It would belong to every Jewish clinician and every Jewish client in the country, regardless of the election calendar.

A protection that only protects Jews when a particular party controls HHS is not a protection. It’s a loan.

The work — the slow, unglamorous, statutory work — is turning this moment into something that outlasts the people currently holding the lever.

The Chair Is Still the Chair

The principle hasn’t changed since the spring, and it was never complicated. A therapist should not use the authority of the clinical relationship to tell a patient that her core identity is the disorder. It shouldn’t matter which identity. It shouldn’t matter which ideology is doing the telling. A clinician who tells a gay teenager his orientation is sinful and a clinician who tells a Jewish woman her peoplehood is a colonial pathology are committing the same professional violation. The politics differ. The harm is identical.

So here is the message for the Jewish clients and the Jewish clinicians reading this — the same one I closed with in the spring, except now there’s a federal investigation standing behind it. If a clinic, a supervisor, or a professional institution treats your identity as suspect, that is not merely a bad therapeutic experience. It may be actionable discrimination. You don’t have to absorb it. You don’t have to wonder whether you imagined it. You didn’t.

The regulatory path is weaker. The civil-rights path is open — and last week, for the first time, the federal government walked onto it.

An investigation can be closed. A statute is forever. She walked in a patient and walked out a diagnosis — let’s make sure the next one walks out with a case.