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Growing Antisemitism in the Therapy Profession: An interview with Halina Brooke, LPC

As part of a double episode release, Curt and Katie interview Halina Brooke, LPC, founder of the Jewish Therapist Collective, about experiences of antisemitism in our profession. We explore the foundations of antisemitism throughout the development and innovation in psychotherapy. We also talk about lived experiences of Jewish therapists of increasing antisemitism since the attacks in Israel on October 7, 2023.

Transcript

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An Interview with Halina Brooke, LPC

Photo ID: a photo of Halina BrookeHalina Brooke, Licensed Professional Counselor, owns Recourse Counseling in Arizona. It’s her mission in life to support misfits, oddballs, highly sensitives, creatives… and really anyone else with big passions and under-represented perspectives as they build rewarding, meaningful lives. She brings a variety of Postmodern and Experiential therapies to her work with clients. She deeply believes in the value of the wisdom they’ve already amassed on this journey of life. When not supporting clients in living their best lives, she can be found traveling, advancing important causes, and indulging her curiosity in the world around her.

Her conference presentations span subjects including counselor professional identity development, trends in the applications of East Asian counseling modalities in the West, chronic illness experiences of healthcare workers, themes of diversity and resilience in some of the counseling profession’s key figures through a lens of career development theory. Prior to joining the counseling profession, Halina worked in written communications and higher education, most recently teaching psychology lab to new undergraduate learners.  As a counselor and advocate, she has a passion for supporting clients and clinicians alike in moving past relational ruptures and distressing experiences in clinical contexts. Her current projects include advocacy and training development for mental health clinicians to move toward self-compassion and growth-mindedness. You can find more information about her advocacy at the legislature and in the public square at sensibletherapypractices.com and her clinical approach at recoursecounseling.com.

In this podcast episode, we look at the growing antisemitism in the therapist community

In a recent article from Jewish Insider, there are stories about increasing antisemitism in the therapy profession, including in online therapist Facebook groups. We decided to reach out to Jewish Therapist Collective founder, Halina Brooke, LPC, to talk us through what has been happening throughout her time as a therapist as well as the escalation of antisemitism in the past year.

Experiences of Antisemitism in the Therapy Profession

“We’ve literally had interns in our community told that, that their very presence as a Jew is triggering to members of other populations, and alarmingly, populations that aren’t necessarily Muslim, Palestinian or otherwise Middle Eastern, just… random white non Muslim therapists who think that being around a Jew is too triggering for them.” – Halina Brooke, LPC, Jewish Therapist Collective

  • The Jewish Therapist Collective has received an increase in calls from clients who are seeking Jewish therapists after October 7, 2023 due to cultural incompetence from non-Jewish therapists
  • Jewish therapists have reported being sidelined or fired from their mental health workplaces due to being Jewish
  • Jewish therapy students report being told that their presence is triggering to non-Jewish therapists
  • Jewish therapists and counselor have reported losses of peer groups due to antisemitism, including affinity groups for intersectional identities

Antisemitic Incidents Within Therapist Facebook Groups

  • Posts targeting “Zionist” therapists have been used to identify Jewish therapists
  • There are lists of “Zionist Therapists” that include only Jewish therapists, potentially ones who have not made political statements about Zionism, that “antiracist” groups are suggesting should not receive any referrals due to their status as “Zionists”
  • These lists appear to solely be lists of Jewish therapists, without including Christian Zionists or others with Zionist beliefs

What do therapists need to know about Jewish Culture and Identity?

“We were so bereft of those working knowledges that when Jewish clients came through with the pain and the shock and everything that showed up for them after October 7, we had a professional body that couldn’t hold it.” – Halina Brooke, LPC, Jewish Therapist Collective

  • Multicultural education on Jewish identity in graduate school is insufficient
  • There is as much diversity within the Jewish community as there is between the Jewish and other communities
  • Halina discusses the historical context of Jewish identity and how often they are not seen as part of the dominant majority
  • It is important to seek consultation from Jewish colleagues due to the many nuances and differences
  • Even though many of the founders of psychotherapy are Jewish, there is a lack of inclusion of Jewish identity in multicultural courses

What support is available for Jewish Therapists?

  • The Jewish Therapist Collective provides community and training
  • Halina described the steps that she has taken to hide her Jewishness as well as to find support within the community

Resources for Modern Therapists mentioned in this Podcast Episode:

We’ve pulled together resources mentioned in this episode and put together some handy-dandy links. Please note that some of the links below may be affiliate links, so if you purchase after clicking below, we may get a little bit of cash in our pockets. We thank you in advance!

Jewish Insider Article: ‘Opposite of inclusive’: A look inside the increasingly hostile environment for Jewish therapists

Halina’s websites:

HalinaBrooke.com

JewishTherapists.org

RecourseCounseling.com

SensibleTherapyPractices.com

A Call for Critical Examination of Discourse Around the Jewish Founders of Our Field by Halina Brooke

 

Relevant Episodes of MTSG Podcast:

Vulnerability, The News, and You: An Interview with Dr. Abigail Weissman

Is This My Stuff? How therapists can sort through countertransference: An Interview with Dr. Amy Meyers, LCSW

Invisible and Scrutinized, An Interview with Dr. Sheila Modir

How Can Therapists Help Politically Divided Families? : An interview with Angela Caldwell, LMFT

Am I Honoring My Personal Values OR Am I Discriminating? An exploration of ethics for modern therapists

Antiracist Practices in the Room: An Interview with Dr. Allen Lipscomb

Stay in Touch with Curt, Katie, and the whole Therapy Reimagined #TherapyMovement:
Our Linktree: https://linktr.ee/therapyreimagined

Modern Therapist’s Survival Guide Creative Credits:
Voice Over by DW McCann https://www.facebook.com/McCannDW/
Music by Crystal Grooms Mangano https://groomsymusic.com/

 

Who we are:

Picture of Curt Widhalm, LMFT, co-host of the Modern Therapist's Survival Guide podcast; a nice young man with a glorious beard.Curt Widhalm, LMFT

Curt Widhalm is in private practice in the Los Angeles area. He is the cofounder of the Therapy Reimagined conference, an Adjunct Professor at Pepperdine University and CSUN, a former Subject Matter Expert for the California Board of Behavioral Sciences, former CFO of the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists, and a loving husband and father. He is 1/2 great person, 1/2 provocateur, and 1/2 geek, in that order. He dabbles in the dark art of making “dad jokes” and usually has a half-empty cup of coffee somewhere nearby. Learn more at: http://www.curtwidhalm.com

Picture of Katie Vernoy, LMFT, co-host of the Modern Therapist's Survival Guide podcastKatie Vernoy, LMFT

Katie Vernoy is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, coach, and consultant supporting leaders, visionaries, executives, and helping professionals to create sustainable careers. Katie, with Curt, has developed workshops and a conference, Therapy Reimagined, to support therapists navigating through the modern challenges of this profession. Katie is also a former President of the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists. In her spare time, Katie is secretly siphoning off Curt’s youthful energy, so that she can take over the world. Learn more at: http://www.katievernoy.com

A Quick Note:

Our opinions are our own. We are only speaking for ourselves – except when we speak for each other, or over each other. We’re working on it.

Our guests are also only speaking for themselves and have their own opinions. We aren’t trying to take their voice, and no one speaks for us either. Mostly because they don’t want to, but hey.

Stay in Touch with Curt, Katie, and the whole Therapy Reimagined #TherapyMovement:

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Connect with the Modern Therapist Community:

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Modern Therapist’s Survival Guide Creative Credits:

Voice Over by DW McCann https://www.facebook.com/McCannDW/

Music by Crystal Grooms Mangano https://groomsymusic.com/

Transcript for this episode of the Modern Therapist’s Survival Guide podcast (Autogenerated):

Transcripts do not include advertisements just a reference to the advertising break (as such timing does not account for advertisements).

… 0:00
(Opening Advertisement)

Announcer 0:00
You’re listening to the Modern Therapist’s Survival Guide, where therapists live, breathe and practice as human beings. To support you as a whole person and a therapist, here are your hosts, Curt Widhalm and Katie Vernoy.

Curt Widhalm 0:12
Welcome back, modern therapists. This is the Modern Therapist’s Survival Guide. I’m Curt Widhalm with Katie Vernoy, and this is the podcast for therapists about the things going on in our field, the things going on in our world that affect our field. And we’re dropping a couple of episodes together to take on a little bit of a human interest kind of perspective around how the Israel Hamas conflict is affecting those in our community, and so we encourage you to listen to both of these episodes together to create some space. And in this particular episode, we are joined by Alina Brooke LPC to talk about some of the Jewish therapist experience that has been going on. And this conversation is about half an hour long. We are not going to get to everything in this, nor do we have necessarily an agenda for how this is going to arrive and what people should do, other than listen and have some nuance to a lot of the conversations that we’re having, and in our counterpart episode, we have pretty much the same intentions. So, joining us on and helping us to learn through this, and helping us to see what has been happening, especially over the last 12 months, when it comes to Jewish therapists, anti-semitism as it comes up in our field. Thank you so much for spending some time and helping us to have this conversation.

Curt Widhalm 0:12
Thank you so much, Curt, and I have to say, with the episodes that I’ve listened to in the past, it’s an it’s an honor to be participating and joining the ranks of your past guests.

Katie Vernoy 1:57
Well, I’m glad to hear it, and we’re glad to have you here. Thank you so much for for making the time for us today. We’re going to start with the question we ask all our guests, which is, who are you and what are you putting out into the world?

Halina Brooke 2:10
Yeah, it’s a big question, because I’ve got my hand in a lot of projects, but I pretty much split my time evenly between my private practice recourse counseling in Phoenix, Arizona, where I kind of work with oddball misfits and people who feel like they just don’t quite belong. Work on self advocacy and career planning and family relational stuff with them. I spend third my time with state level advocacy, getting bills through helping counselors and Marriage and Family Therapists social workers understand how our legislation works here in Arizona to better advocate. And then, of course, a third of my time running an organization that I started about little over half a decade ago called The Jewish Therapist Collective, which is a community and advocacy space for Jewish clinicians, grad students and allies.

Curt Widhalm 2:58
Most of our listeners are accustomed to us asking the question, what do therapists get wrong about this? We’re not gonna start the episode with that today, because it’s half an hour and we’ve got some some other things that we’re finding kind of important in this discussion here. So, I also know that there’s a lot of times in our podcast that we point to, like, the shortcomings of our multicultural classes that we take during grad school. I’m also just going to throw that one out the window and say, Yeah, the one or two pages about Jewish clients and Jewish culture is very insufficient when it comes to this. So, now that I’ve told you two things that we’re not doing, there’s a lot of discussion in the therapist community now, and part of why we reached out to you is an article that I had come across in the Jewish Insider, where it was talking about some of the experiences of anti semitism in our profession, in particular, over the last 12 months, as ongoings between Israel and Hamas have led to lots of very strong feelings, I’m going to ask, can you talk about your experiences as part of this conversation?

Halina Brooke 4:18
I should just name first that I sit in a position of access and privilege because I’m my own boss. I don’t have to deal with as much as some of my colleagues who have worked in group practices or are still adjuncting or things like that, where the power that’s tethered to their salary and their dignity is held by someone else who might not get it. But the things that I’ve come across, I know that my peer consult groups have shifted quite a bit. One felt a little bit uncomfortable, so I stopped attending that. But examples of colleagues who are in those positions where others hold the power, I’ll just list a few. Finding out that the adjunct classes that they were going to be teaching in their social work or counseling program, all of a sudden were re gifted to someone else who’s not Jewish, getting slow rolled toward firing so not getting any new clients for a prolonged period of time at their group practice or community mental health, being relegated to quote, unquote, the bad office, or being relieved of in office time at all, in order to sort of induce them to leave without, like, sort of passive aggressive firing, finding out that you know other things are going on. And then, of course, for students and interns, we’ve literally had interns in our community told that, that their very presence as a Jew is triggering to members of other populations, and alarmingly, populations that aren’t necessarily Muslim, Palestinian or otherwise Middle Eastern, just like people who, random, white, non-Muslim therapists who think that being around a Jew is too triggering for them. It’s been absolutely astounding the amount of job loss and and internship re reshuffling, and then you add to it, the fact that especially for social workers, and especially for Jewish therapists who happen to be LGBTQ or neurodivergent or of color, we have members of our community who’ve been sitting with the unfortunate reality that they’re becoming bereft of their entire peer groups, their entire social circles, and it’s it’s been a catastrophic loss for many many people.

Katie Vernoy 6:45
What does that look like, as far as the communication especially you talked about therapists of color, LGBTQ plus neurodiverse therapists, or neurodivergent therapists, what does that look like?

Halina Brooke 6:57
So we run trainings in the Jewish Therapists Collective. We found that there was a need to offer affinity spaces for Jewish clinicians who wanted to learn together. And so in recent trainings, we’ve had members of the cohort say, for example, that when they walk across their campus where they work on campus as a counselor to university, that they’re having, you know, constant sense of activation, and we’re dreading going back to work this fall. We’ve had another member of a cohort talking about how she’s been without friends or months, except for through our virtual support groups. You guys know how it is when you when you don’t have that interpersonal contact, that ability to lean on people, co regulate with them and know that you’re part of something, you know, it kind of knocks your feet out from under you.

Katie Vernoy 7:47
For sure. And I know in the the Jewish insider article, there was also conversations around what’s been happening in therapist Facebook groups. So, do you want to talk a lot about that a little bit?

Halina Brooke 7:57
Yeah, well, and I should mention so you’re probably referencing the Chicago list. Our Chicago chapter is one of, one of the largest, actually, I think the largest chapter, aside from our social work Council, within our organization, there was a situation where someone, we believe it was a gotcha question, where you ask for referrals when there really isn’t a client that you’re looking for, you’re just kind of looking for people who identify with a certain layer of their intersections happen to include acts, right? So someone had posted that they were looking for a Zionist therapist, and a bunch of people got named on this list, including people who don’t have public political affiliations. They they work, you know, they work their jobs, right? And unfortunately, this list got taken into a group called, I think it was like, like, anti racist Chicago therapists or something like that. And someone made a list of what they called, like the the Zionist therapist list that no one should refer to. And none of these people had anything political on their websites. They didn’t have anything about identity like that. And it was a situation where while Jewish Zionism, it’s just about recognizing and holding space for ties to our ancestral homeland, and the idea that Jewish people should be able to live in their ancestral home, and not at the expense of anyone else, by the way, but the majority of American Zionists happen to be Christian Zionists, right? The entire list was Jews. And so if you were writing a list that were specifically targeting people for their politics, you would think it would be representative of society on whole. But really it was a list of Jews. And the fact is that I don’t think anyone on that list had made any kind of public political declarations. And so that kind of thing, we saw it in Nazi Germany. We’ve seen it in other situations. It leaves people tremendously unsafe. It left people looking for more security at their offices, reaching out to government officials to figure out what to do. And by the way, that was the only one that we know of that got so big on Facebook that there was a paper record of it for the news to pick up. There are those lists in Berkeley, in Pittsburgh, all over the country, there are people who will no longer refer to Jews. And I’m just to be clear, I’m not conflating Jewish with Zionists. Like, if you look at the DNC conference that they had, like this past week, there’s footage of protesters going after people just because they were wearing Jewish accessories, yarmulkes, the little skull caps or fringes coming out of their church things that Orthodox Jews might wear. They weren’t making any proclamations about about Israel one way or another. They were being attacked for simply looking Jewish. So you know, if people don’t want to conflate the two, then they shouldn’t harass people in ways that conflate the two.

… 10:59
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Katie Vernoy 10:59
Yeah, yeah, I know that one of the things that you had wanted to talk about maybe a little bit, because I think there’s a lot of conflating one thing with another. There’s a lot of confusion. Can we maybe ask what therapists need to know about Judaism and Jewish culture to understand this conversation as well as Jewish therapists and clients?

Halina Brooke 11:20
Yeah, so, I mean, I guess the big thing is that therapists need to know that, that it more likely than not you were not given an accurate piece of multicultural education, like Curt said earlier about Jewish folks, right? Grad students do not get accurate or appropriate multicultural competence about Jewish identity. It’s shocking to me how little people actually know, to the point where, I mean, especially in today’s society. I think what’s really difficult is that the Jewish family tree, you know, because we’re an ethno religion, right? So many of us don’t necessarily, you know, it’s not like Christianity or Islam, where the religion might have spread beyond various tribes, or various communities, where the religion kind of had movement whereas the community did not. Judaism is a lot more tethered to migrations and to specific communities. I don’t need to go all the way back, but you know the shorthand is that Jewish communities that lived in diaspora in Eastern Europe, Southern Europe, around the Mediterranean, Morocco, India, China, Ethiopia, Nigeria. Like we’re we’re all related. And it might sound strange in in a modern time when, you know, it’s so odd to me that you know, we finally have accepted that gender as a spectrum, but we’re dead set on seeing race as a binary. And here you’ve got this group called Jews, where our skin complexion ranges from the palest pale to the darkest dark, and you know, all sorts of eye color, facial features, geographical heritage that happened after leaving our ancestral homeland. And so at quick glance, you might think you can code us as, Oh, this one’s of color, this one’s not or something like that. But there’s a lot more that ties us together than things like that. And so it’s really, really important to know that. I think the other piece is that Jewish people around the world were very rarely, if at all, seen as part of the communities that that they most recently lived in. So, for example, passports from places like like Poland, the USSR, it was, I think it said Hebrew on the passport. It didn’t say the nationality of the location. So we it’s very, very new for for Jewish people with with lighter skin to be identified as part of the dominant majority. I guess there’s just so many places to go with this. Suffice it to say that the most important thing is to yield to the Jewish person in front of you as far as what, what to know about them. Instead of making assumptions.

Katie Vernoy 13:59
In researching for this interview I read your blog article about the Jewish founders of psychotherapy, and you mentioned some of the same things about this recent association of Jewish people with whiteness, and I don’t know that we have time to go into it here. I just want to comment on it, and I’ll link to I’ll put a link to that in our show notes over at mtsgpodcast com. But in creating the Jewish therapists collective, it wasn’t in this last year, this was more than half a decade ago, is what you had said earlier, what led to your decision to create that community, and what does antiSemitism look like within our profession, historically?

Halina Brooke 14:35
Yeah, so I guess there’s a few questions there. I guess for me, personally, I grew up in kind of an interesting situation where both of my parents kind of come from the research side of the psychology field. My mom worked in special ed and school psych while I was growing up, but her background is in cog psych. My dad’s background was in cog psych, and so I grew up hearing stories about, you know, what the New School for Social Research was like in New York in the 70s, and being in classes with, you know, really incredible Jewish professors, but also having to cross picket lines on the way in that were virulently anti semitic. So this has been happening for a long, long time. And sitting in a field where, you know, and I went into a different a different side of the field, the clinical, you know, the really clinical side. I’ve got some different perspectives, but it’s always been tethered to an organic interest in the field, but also a pride in the fact that, like our culture’s legacy, brought a lot of this up. The discord that you feel between you know, sitting in a society that kind of accepts your left foot, not your right foot, and that is how Freud and Maslow and many of the fields founders experienced life. And you have to feel kind of inside and apart in order to sort of grasp a lot of the things about the psyche that sort of founded Western psychology. And you also kind of have to embrace the bravery that comes with being from a population that has been seen as different long enough that there were, and I guess are, again, quotas about whether you know how many of us can come to various universities. And so when I’ve seen those very same figures in our field who, yes, also had problematic views, whitewashed into the sort of archetype of power and dominance, as though they were silver spoon fed white people in their time, they weren’t seen that way. And I think in order to honor with integrity, many of the founders of our field, you know, not only do we need to hold what you know, the issues with their thinking, but we also need to hold their whole career arc and sort of their station in society and what all brought together who they were and what drove them to think about human, emotional pain and things like that.

Curt Widhalm 17:05
How has this come up, or particularly been highlighted or brought to the forefront even more since the events of October 7 and the subsequent Israel Hamas war?

Halina Brooke 17:18
What we’ve seen, I think, is a consequence of it not being managed for decades. In in a move to try and expand psychotherapy to the many you know, beautiful, incredible branches of indigenous wisdom around the world, and elevating voices that have been underrepresented in psychotherapy. Jewish voices have kind of been shot on, right and so like, unfortunately, because we haven’t done a good job of holding the full picture of our field’s legacy and some of the big folks, and because we haven’t done a good job of speaking objectively about that, and we haven’t done a good job of keeping Jewish inclusion in multicultural courses. Unfortunately, we we were so bereft of those working knowledges that whenJewish clients came through with like the pain and the shock and everything that that showed up for them after October 7, we had a professional body that couldn’t hold it. And I say this because, as the leader of the largest international non denominational advocacy focused Jewish therapist group in the world, you know, our email address was getting flooded. People were constantly requesting referrals because they’d been moving along in therapy, right? And then all of a sudden they hit a wall with cultural competence, whether it was therapists who tried to educate them about who they are and it’s like, well, no, you need to let the client take the lead here, or therapists who just, you know, all of a sudden their tone changed to the client, and they seem to see less of the client’s humanity. Whatever happened, we had this huge schism, and there were hundreds of clients who were all of a sudden bereft of a safe space in the clinical setting. So we failed. Our profession failed, and we need to pick it up. And I think there’s enough space to do it without marginalizing the other population that’s also being deeply impacted, right?

Katie Vernoy 19:24
What do therapists need to know to support these clients?

Halina Brooke 19:27
I think the biggest thing is just dial the arrogance down. I’m going to be comfortable enough, right? Just like with other populations that you might not have gotten exposure to, you need to lean into the client, but you also have to have the responsibility to ask questions and try to seek wisdom, and not just from the Jews that people are holding out as tokens. Because, you know, it’s called a token for a reason, like, you know, I’m not going to, you know, jump on anybody else’s views, but if you’re only listening to a Jewish person who’s perspective represents maybe 5% of the rest of the Jewish population. You’re probably not going to get the information you need for the Jew in front of you, right? Maybe you will. But there are ways to access consultation with with Jewish colleagues. One great way, if you go to the Jewish therapists Collective website, JewishTherapists.org with an S, we have a free weekly consult group where it’s it’s called Ask a Jewish therapist, where confidentially, non Jewish therapists can come and ask questions to Jewish therapists to try and understand things. And that’s good for Jewish therapists too, who might need some more, more layers of perspective. Really important to get consultation, really important to check your biases. If you start making assumptions about a client, or you notice that your sense of empathy for them has decreased because you found out they were Jewish, probably something to take to consultation, probably something that you really need to sit with to decide whether you can continue seeing the client. But if you have to dismiss someone because you need to work with your biases, don’t blame the client for it, you know, because we don’t want someone to think that there’s something wrong with them that they’re, you know, just to bring up some tropes about Jews, dirty, greedy, you know, dishonest, etc, you don’t want to take a client who might have experienced being seen through the lens of those tropes and make them feel like you see them that way too. But yeah, consultation, and also it’s really important that if you’re going to start using words like like Zionism or Israel or Gaza or Palestinian, you need to get a breadth of education on it so that you know, you at least know what you don’t know. And and I see this a lot. I think the word Zionism itself has caused so much strife because there are some populations that think it just means that you’re like a rabid foaming at the mouth Nazi, which, you know, I would argue, isn’t true. And then others like like myself, heard that word the ancestral indigenous definition is, is just, you know, about, about self determinism in our ancestral homeland. And so if people start throwing out words, the best thing a therapist can do is say, hey, like, this isn’t really my area of expertise. How would you define that word? Just so that we’re sharing a working knowledge in this space, and whatever your client defines it as, like, just go with that. You know, you don’t need to step in and educate somebody, but just make sure that if your client is using language, that you know, that you actually know what they’re defining it as.

… 22:26
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Katie Vernoy 22:26
I think that’s so important, especially about the word Zionism. In preparation I read a lot about Zionism to try to make sure I understood. And there’s within the Jewish community, without the without outside of the community, Jewish community, there’s so many different definitions of Zionism. There’s political and and social, and, you know, so many different types. And so I think just acknowledging that it’s not one single word, there’s so many different definitions, is really critical to understanding that. You got to look at the person in front of you.

Halina Brooke 22:56
And, you know what, Katie, I think that brings up a great point too, like one of the hallmarks of Jewish culture. And I think Jewish people of all political persuasions would agree with this. We have this saying, and it’s two Jews, three opinions and two, you know, Jewish people have a culture of arguing things to death, and just like looking at things with a really, really fine point and zooming in on details. And I think a lot of that’s because in many of our diaspora populations, we weren’t allowed to do things like own land or like, have bakeries and stuff, and so, like, we couldn’t work with our hands. We kind of amped up the working with our minds thing. Sometimes there are more opinions within a demographic than than between us and the outside. So it’s also important too, like you need cultural competence, but every Jewish person who walks into your office might see things slightly or dramatically different from each other, too.

Curt Widhalm 23:51
I want to go back to when you were talking about biases, and I think that there’s a well meaning, you know, self recognition, that we hope that every therapist has. And I’m sitting here in disbelief that there is still the strong opinions that of the examples that you gave, as far as the stereotypes of Jews, assuming that some people listening to this podcast may have more refined views of Jews, but still carrying biases. What are some of the other things that you might want people to consider that might be showing up to their Jewish clients?

Halina Brooke 24:27
Some stereotypes are the idea that we have some kind of dual loyalty to Israel. Most Jews in America do not have dual citizenship with Israel, right? We might have connections. Many of us have family there. But the idea of that, the idea that we have some kind of financial advantages in the world, or things like that that’s been going around, and even just the idea that having a felt connection with our ancestral homeland means anything negative about Palestinians. I mean that was the most shocking thing for many of us during this particular situation, after the the massacre and the kidnappings and those those hostages, some of those hostages are still still sitting there in Gaza. But after that, all of a sudden there was this schism where, you know, the popular discourse made no space for you to both be fervently advocating for the dignity and freedom of Palestinian people and the continued existence of Israel. And most people in Israel and most Jews in America do feel that way. And I think what’s what’s hardest about all of this is like as a Jew walking into a therapy office, many of us have a legacy of an orientation toward social justice, or in Hebrew, tikkun olam to heal the world, and we fight for communities, mostly not our own, but including our own, to to make the world a better place, and to know that the therapist in front of us might just assume that because we’re Jewish, we don’t have empathy or compassion, or we have, you know, we think that we should just, you know, have Gaza or something. No, like, that’s not It’s not accurate. And that’s one of the biggest fears that a lot of us have walking into the therapy space, both with colleagues or with potential clinicians.

Katie Vernoy 26:24
What I’m really taking away from you and from you know, the rabbit hole I went down researching before we got on this call, is that there’s so many different perspectives on this, and we’re conflating a lot of things that don’t go together. Pro Zionism isn’t pro Israeli government. There’s so many different definitions of Zionism. There’s so many different things that are going on in the world. And so in order to really get down to the nuance of it, we actually have to talk to people and not paint them with a particular brush.

Halina Brooke 26:55
Yes, yes.

Katie Vernoy 26:58
But I want to go back to kind of the personal here. How are you navigating this? How are you taking care of yourself? And we talked ahead of time that maybe you have some suggestions for other therapists and students, and both Jewish and non Jewish, who are facing these types of global tragedies, like, what are some strategies to try to cope with this time in our history?

Halina Brooke 27:17
Yeah, well, personally, the massacre on October 7 happened when I was less than a month out from giving birth. So I was waddling around knowing that I was about to become a mom, and I immediately called the hospital registrar and pulled Jewish off of my identifiers. And evidently rightfully so, because there are physicians on Tiktok who talk about not wanting to treat Jewish patients. So a lot of it is hiding my Jewishness in my personal life. My daughter’s preschool does not know that we’re Jewish, and they won’t know that we’re Jewish unless someone tells them, you know. But it’s also about being in community as much as possible, and in some ways, that’s why I’ve kind of gone into overdrive in terms of all of the free and low cost support groups that the Jewish Therapists Collective offers, and making sure to connect with other Jewish therapists when we’re traveling, and just trying to stay tethered to folks who get it from a personal standpoint as much as possible. So that’s my big advice, like, don’t be afraid to scaffold the amount of advocacy you do, and if you need to do things to keep safe in certain situations like that’s okay.

Curt Widhalm 28:26
I want to express gratitude for you being a voice on our podcast and helping us along on this project and helping to educate us and and I also want to give you the space to be able to share with our audience, where people can find you in the wonderful offerings that you’re putting out to the world.

Halina Brooke 28:46
JewishTherapists.org so that’s therapists with an S and we are available for consultation for non Jewish therapists and the media. We do a lot of stuff for Jewish therapists, specifically mentoring support, especially for grad students who might be facing anti semitism at school or internship, and, of course, for clients who might need layers of competency in the struggle they’re going through, plus someone who understands being Jewish. And we’ve also got some events coming up. We’re taking a cohort of therapists to Israel to witness the trauma and sort of learn from what’s been going on. And we’re also taking a cohort of therapists to Seattle next summer, hopefully some other places down the line. And it’s all about community. So don’t hesitate to reach out, even if you don’t know what you’re asking for and you just want to say, Hey, I wanted to connect to you. We’re okay with that. Connect at Jewish therapists.org.

Curt Widhalm 29:47
And we will include links to those in our show notes over at mtsgpodcast com. Follow us on our social media. Join our Facebook group, the Modern Therapist Group, to continue on with these conversation, and until next time I’m Curt Widhalm with Katie Vernoy and Halina Brooke.

… 30:05
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