There’s a Conversion Problem in Therapy. It’s Not the One You Think. |
The Supreme Court just made it harder to regulate what therapists say to vulnerable patients. For Jews seeking mental health care in a field increasingly hostile to Jewish identity, the implications are urgent.
The Supreme Court’s 8-1 decision in Chiles v. Salazar has prompted immediate and understandable alarm.[1] By holding that Colorado’s ban on conversion therapy for minors is “presumptively unconstitutional” as applied to talk therapy, the Court has signaled that the First Amendment limits states’ ability to regulate what licensed therapists tell vulnerable patients. Over twenty states passed similar laws banning conversion therapy—debunked practices that claim to alter gender identity and sexual orientation; those bans will now face legal challenges as well.
The concern is justified. But the outrage over Chiles—driven by advocates who rightly see conversion therapy as weaponizing the clinical relationship against a patient’s identity—has obscured something that many in the Jewish community already know firsthand: conversion therapy is not the only ideology being imposed on patients from the therapist’s chair. It is merely the one that progressive institutions have chosen to oppose. For Jewish clients and therapists, there is another—and right now, almost nobody outside the Jewish world is talking about it.
Since October 7, many Jews have discovered that the therapist’s office—the one place where they should be able to process grief, fear, and trauma without judgment—has itself become hostile territory. A different form of ideological capture has taken hold across the mental health field.[2] Under the banner of “decolonizing therapy,” a movement now embedded in clinical training programs treats Zionism—and by extension, the connection to Israel that is central to mainstream Jewish identity—as a form of colonial pathology to be “treated.” In one widely circulated clinical diagram, Zionism appears alongside “rape culture” and “genocidal tendencies” as attributes of a “colonized mind.”[3] Jewish therapists have been blacklisted from referral networks based on presumed political affiliations.[4] Jewish patients who have walked into therapy seeking help processing the trauma of October 7, the hostage crisis, or rising antisemitism have found themselves sitting across from clinicians who treat their grief as complicity—who reframe their identity as part of the problem rather than something worthy of support.[5] The problem has become so widespread that the US House of Representatives Committee on Education and the Workforce has opened a formal investigation into antisemitism at the American Psychological Association........