Ask Your Doctor if Jihad Is Right for You

Medicine has a serious antisemitism problem. It especially has a problem among doctors, and a lot of that problem is concentrated among doctors educated overseas.

We identified a set of over 700 people from all walks of life profiled by the organization StopAntisemitism for displaying flagrant hostility toward Jews and Israel. We found that health professionals were more than 2.5 times more likely to be found among antisemites than their share of the workforce. Doctors were almost 26 times overrepresented in the list of antisemites relative to their prevalence in the workforce. And half of those Jew-hating doctors received their medical degrees abroad.

The fact that Jew-hatred has found a perch among highly educated doctors and other health professionals runs counter to the conventional explanations for antisemitism. According to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and other legacy Jewish organizations, antisemitism is born of ignorance which must be fought through education. As ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt frames the issue, antisemitism intersects with “ignorance and conspiratorial thinking … Ultimately, any strategy for protecting the Jewish community must include education at its core—we can’t fight hate without changing hearts and minds.”

Both the past and present put the lie to Greenblatt’s hypothesis. Campus Hamasniks at Columbia and Harvard are radical and morally depraved, but they aren’t uneducated. Nor were the architects of the Holocaust, inheritors of a German cultural tradition that was arguably unmatched in its yearning for modernity.

Our own empirical work also calls the education-antisemitism intersection into question. Traditionally, the hypothesized link between education and antisemitism arises from the observation that individuals with lower levels of education are more likely to admit to harboring explicitly antisemitic attitudes. It was unclear, however, whether this meant that elites were in fact less antisemitic or whether they were more inclined to provide socially desirable responses. A study we published in 2021 indicates that it’s the latter. In an experiment designed to detect double standards, we drafted two versions of the same question that ask respondents about one principle but using a Jewish and non-Jewish example. Illustratively, one item asks whether “the U.S. military should be allowed to forbid” the wearing of religious headgear, with a Jewish yarmulke or Sikh turban offered as examples. Responses indicated that higher levels of education are associated with antisemitism since they are more likely to apply a double standard against Jews, such as allowing supporting Sikhs in the military who want to wear turbans but not Jews who want to wear yarmulkes.

Information gathered and published by StopAntisemitism provides additional insights. The antisemitic acts the organization collects include but are not limited to social media postings, tearing down posters of Israeli hostages, or harassing or intimidating Jews. Most profiles contain information about where the offending individual works and their job title. Searching through the StopAntisemitism X (formerly Twitter) account for the 18 months following the Oct. 7, 2023, attack, we identified all American residents for whom employment information could be found, numbering 702 in total.

For a few reasons, these 702 individuals are not a representative mosaic of antisemitism in America. For one, surveillance and scrutiny almost certainly vary with an individual’s celebrity. Members of Congress, for example, are always under a public microscope and are more likely to be profiled as antisemites if they say things hostile toward Jews. Second, while StopAntisemitism doesn’t discriminate according to social class (and indeed profiles include baristas, graphic designers, and retail workers), detection almost certainly varies by social class. Individuals might reasonably worry about the values held by their physician, attorney, or child’s teacher, but not their mechanic or landscaper. Finally, most individuals who harbor antisemitic attitudes know better than to share their opinions publicly. Ivy League administrators might want fewer Jewish students on campus, but they’re savvy enough to not say as much.

These limitations notwithstanding, the data yields interesting insights about who publicly espouses antisemitism. We observe that the representation of health care workers is highly disproportionate. While only 10.8% of American laborers are employed in health care, 190 of 702 (27%) individuals profiled by StopAntisemitism work in health care. Second, among health care workers, physicians are disproportionately represented, accounting for 91 of 190 (48%) health care workers and 13% of all profiled antisemites. Given that there are only 834,500 physicians and surgeons, doctors make up only 0.5% of the entire American workforce, so they are more than 26 times overrepresented among the antisemites identified by StopAntisemitism.

While increased surveillance might explain some of this overrepresentation, other indicators would suggest that there is indeed a higher incidence among health care workers and physicians in particular. Most notably, when it comes to other endeavors that would presumably garner public interest, no such disproportionality is observed. For example, among the 702 individuals in the dataset, only 45 (6%) are employed in K-12 education and only 13 (2%) are in the legal profession.

The criteria StopAntisemitism uses to identify antisemites can be found in the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition. Among other things, the IHRA definition labels as antisemitic tropes about Jewish power and control, allegations of dual loyalty to Israel, applying double standards to Israel, and comparing Israeli policy to that of Nazi Germany.

When examining the 91 doctors who were profiled on StopAntisemitism, four common themes emerge of the ways in which these doctors exhibit their antisemitism. Forty-seven of them engage in demonization of Israel that reaches the threshold of antisemitism. Holocaust inversion is particularly popular, with examples including a Facebook post by the director of bariatric surgery at UIH Chicago railing against Europe for “welcoming the perpetrators of the Holocaust in Palestine now,” and another by the medical director at Vituity Health in Santa Ana, California, stating that “Zionists are the Nazis of our day. Not Hamas.” Conspiracies about Jewish power and control are also common, with 23 of the doctors, including geriatric and family physicians, explicitly embracing ideas that Jews are all-powerful slave masters responsible for the firing of an NFL coach or that “Zionists” are “manipulators in chief” who both destabilize and “control the world.” Oct. 7 denialism is another popular theme, with 20 of the doctors invoking obvious falsehoods about the Hamas massacre, including denials of sexual violence and claims that the Bibas family was murdered by Israel. Perhaps most worryingly, 17 of the doctors endorse Palestinian terrorism with slogans like “glory to all resistance fighters” and “we call it (Oct. 7) liberation. Decolonization. Resistance. Revolution.”

Our findings should raise even greater doubt about the conventional wisdom that education is an antidote to antisemitism. Health care workers on average have received more education than the U.S. population generally. Physicians in particular are subjected to a highly rigorous admissions process that meaningfully screens for intellectual ability and they receive many years of postsecondary training to earn the right to practice medicine. If the ADL is right about the link between education and antisemitism, health care workers and doctors in particular should profile as one of the least antisemitic groups in the country.

Again, if history is any guide, the overrepresentation of health care workers and physicians in particular should not qualify as a surprise. As bioethicist Ashley Fernandes points out, physicians were early and enthusiastic Nazi Party members who were ultimately seven times as likely as other employed males to join the SS. Part of the draw was the “biocracy” that became central to Nazi mythology. “For Hitler and the Nazi physicians,” Fernandes notes, “the state was analogous to a living organism—a supreme political vitalism … The Jews are a disease; disease must be completely cut out (not merely suppressed), for it will otherwise poison and kill the body.” Nazi doctors didn’t imagine forced sterilization and mass slaughter as a dereliction of their oath, but the ultimate fulfillment of it.

Nazism itself, thankfully, is mostly confined to the ash heap of history. However, some of the imagined intergroup conflicts and collectivist sensibilities that allowed Nazi doctors to rationalize violence and hatred as a matter of professional obligation are easily detectible in fashionable currents in American medicine where sectarianism has taken hold. Consequently, individuals—both patients and medical professionals—are classified as members of identity groups according to categories of oppressor and oppressed. This practice, echoing the moral failures Fernandes chronicles in Nazi Germany, normalizes sacrificing the individual to a larger cause.

In understanding antisemitism in American medicine, another critical pattern can be gleaned from observing where doctors attended medical school. For all the physicians in the dataset we created, we were able to find internet records indicating where they received their medical training. Forty-seven of 91 (52%) physicians in the dataset obtained their medical degree in a country other than the United States compared to about 25% of the American physician workforce. Of those 47 who obtained their medical degrees abroad, 68% were trained in the Middle East (40%) or Pakistan (28%).

The challenge posed by foreign-trained doctors is that they arrive in the U.S. after having largely completed their moral formation, sometimes in political systems that explicitly promote antisemitism in their schools. The antisemitism they openly display in the U.S. may have been considered appropriate or even enlightened in their home countries. In fact, in the Middle East, higher levels of education are associated with an increased propensity for professing antisemitism. While education may not be protective against antisemitism, coming from cultures that openly embrace antisemitism enables it to publicly flourish even within polite society. Combine those attitudes with an American health care system that normalizes racial and ethnic tribalism with ideas like whiteness as a form of psychopathology, and the results are predictably disastrous.

This problem will only get worse as the rate of importing doctors from abroad is rising. In 1981, only 9% of doctors newly placed in residencies came from foreign medical schools. By 2024, 25% of residencies were filled with people trained abroad. Blame for the dramatic shift toward foreign-trained doctors is partly due to latent effects of supply constraints imposed by the gatekeepers of MD and DO granting schools. Until 2005, the American Medical Association and the Association of American Medical Colleges encouraged restrictions on medical school expansion due to their (erroneous) prediction of a looming glut of physicians in the United States. Those restrictions ultimately necessitated reliance on foreign-trained doctors.

Even after recognizing that there was a shortage rather than a glut of doctors, U.S. medical schools have failed to keep up with demand so that there are now 1.39 residency openings for every graduate of U.S. medical schools. A shortage in the domestic training of doctors now arises from a dearth in the availability of clinical training sites. The gap that this creates between the demand for new physicians and training of new physicians currently must be filled with foreign-trained doctors.

Our reliance on foreign-trained physicians increases the risks of importing antisemitism into the medical profession. To be clear, the average foreign doctor is not an antisemite. The problem is that in such large numbers, extremists among foreign doctors become more common. Moreover, the tribalized cultural milieu of American medicine gives them the impression that open group hostility is tolerated or expected.

As in our universities, antisemitism in the American medical profession is perhaps overwhelmingly an import from third world countries where it is a normative if pathological part of the dominant political and religious cultures. The more medical school students and professionals we import from these dysfunctional countries, the more overtly antisemitic our hospitals and doctor’s offices become. In this respect at least, doctors from countries like Pakistan turn out to be Pakistanis first and doctors second, with corresponding effects on American institutional life.

Removing the accreditor stranglehold on medical education would prevent cartel behavior that artificially limits the domestic training of new physicians. Moreover, effort and resources might need to be expended by health authorities to ensure a sufficient supply of clinical training sites. These efforts can be undertaken without sacrificing quality. After all, the acceptance rate for U.S. medical schools has fallen over time while the average MCAT scores and GPAs of those accepted have risen. There is more than enough high-quality domestic demand to become a doctor for medical schools to expand without diluting quality.

Unfortunately, even purging DEI ideology from medical training and limiting the importation of foreign doctors will only make a moderate and gradual difference in the antisemitism that has infected health care professionals. Cultural changes develop over long periods of time and are not easily reversed.

But every long journey begins with the first step. We must first recognize that, as the set of people profiled by StopAntisemitism demonstrates, there is an exceptional problem among health care professionals, in general, and doctors, in particular. Moreover, we have to recognize that a lot of the problem with antisemitism in medicine comes from abroad. Clearly understanding the nature of the problem will invite remedies beyond those imagined here and help rescue medicine from the moral abyss.