Julie Menin, the first Jewish speaker of the New York City Council, and several members of the council met with representatives of more than a dozen healthcare organizations from across the city last week to talk about Jew-hatred in medicine.
The closed-press roundtable discussion was a “first-of-its-kind” conversation, according to Omri Attar, chief impact officer at the American Jewish Medical Association, which organized the Sept. 9 event.
Attar told JNS that the council’s Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, co-chaired by council members Inna Vernikov and Eric Dinowitz, invited AJMA to organize the discussion a few months ago. (Vernikov, a Republican, and Dinowitz, a Democrat, are Jewish. Both took part in the meeting.)
“There was broad consensus among the City Council, healthcare organizations and Jewish groups that antisemitism in medicine must be addressed more aggressively,” Attar said. “In healthcare, as we know, the patient comes first—his safety, his health.”
“The discrimination from within the system is alarming, because it says we differentiate between different patients,” he told JNS. “The patient is not first anymore.”
Last month, scholars told JNS that there has been a “tsunami of hate” against Jews in medicine and hospitals.
“After Oct. 7, the landscape shifted in a seismic way, not that antisemitism was brand new, because we do have a history of quotas to limit Jewish enrollment in medicine and other examples of discrimination against Jewish doctors,” Hedy Wald, clinical professor of family medicine at Brown University’s Warren Alpert Medical School, told JNS last month.
The co-author of a recent study told JNS that “you had medical students and health professionals posting horrific things on social media, very antisemitic, very anti-Israel biased, and starting to see this appear in medical journals.”
The recent gathering in New York included the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, the city’s Health and Hospitals system, Northwell Health, Mount Sinai Health System, Columbia University Irving Medical Center and the Greater New York Hospital Association.
Attendees also came from the Jewish Board of Family and Children’s Services, American Jewish Committee, Anti-Defamation League, Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, National Jewish Advocacy Center, Simon Wiesenthal Center, UJA-Federation of New York and Jewish Community Relations Council of New York.
“This group of different institutions and organizations never convened before, especially not under the roof of the New York City Council or the endorsement of the speaker,” Attar, who is also vice president of Israel and external relations at AJMA, told JNS.
AJMA has worked with several research institutions, which have found that Jew-hatred in healthcare has “worsened” in recent months, according to Attar.
“People are going online, sometimes on social media, sometimes on other platforms, and saying, ‘I don’t want to work with this Jewish doctor,’ or ‘I’m not going to treat Jewish patients,’” he told JNS. “We definitely see it more and more.”
Many others, who fear being accused of Jew-hatred, are “doing it behind the scenes,” he said.
“The most alarming piece is the unrecognized ones—the ones that say, ‘Oh, there’s a schedule problem,’ and maybe because of, let’s say, a patient’s surname or a doctor’s surname, something a little bit more recognized with a Jewish face,” Attar told JNS. “We see it more and more.”
One of the main issues that Menin, the council speaker, addressed during the meeting, Attar said, was Zohran Mamdani’s decision on his first day as mayor of New York City to revoke the city’s adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of Jew-hatred.
“Allegedly, it wasn’t because of antisemitism,” he told JNS.
Menin discussed the difficulty of combating Jew-hatred without a clear definition adopted by the city, according to Attar.
“The lack of definition in New York City is extremely problematic, because if you want to create a task force and you want to fight against something without a clear definition adopted by New York City, it’s a problem,” he told JNS. “It’s a challenge.”
“Unfortunately, we heard from them that the lack of definition—and we know the origin of the lack of definition right now in New York City—is actually adding more challenges for them to fight it than to counter it,” he said.
Aside from that issue, Mamdani “was not the topic” of the meeting, according to Attar.
“This is not about the mayor at all and, if you ask me, I don’t think it even needs to be mentioned,” he told JNS.
No one from City Hall was invited to take part in the gathering, but Attar said that he saw a representative from the mayor’s office observing the meeting. That person “didn’t participate” and “just didn’t say anything at all,” he said.
“I think the notion and the atmosphere of the discussion was conveyed to him as well,” Attar told JNS.
The proposed merger between Maimonides Medical Center and Health and Hospitals—the city’s public hospital system that runs 11 hospitals, 29 medical clinics and five long-term care facilities across the Big Apple—also came up during the meeting, according to Attar.
The proposed deal has drawn concern from Orthodox Jewish leaders, who fear that the community could lose influence over a hospital that has long accommodated Jewish religious needs, including by maintaining a kosher kitchen.
Health and Hospitals sent two representatives to the meeting. Both were “highly involved” and “asked a lot of questions to the institutions and Jewish organizations,” according to Attar.
“The situation with Health and Hospitals, to my impression, I would say, is extremely positive towards really fighting the good fight and really fighting against discrimination and antisemitism,” he told JNS. “They were keen actually to understand it better, to better fight it and not on the other end.”
The meeting revealed that most participating groups had anti-discrimination policies in place but that there is “a problem of enforcement and holding these institutions accountable for a lack of action that they’re taking,” according to Attar.
Many complaints about Jew-hatred are also “coming anonymously, mostly from staffers or patients,” he said.
AJMA has begun working with members of the City Council to build what Attar said will be a “structured, ongoing mechanism to collectively report, track and address antisemitic incidents.”
“It will not go through another system or another organization,” he told JNS. “It can be just direct, and make sure we hold these institutions accountable when it’s needed—not in a year or in a long period of time that we need to wait.”
The meeting was “a kickoff,” and the council plans to hold another roundtable in about three months, he said.
“This is the first of its kind and very much needed, obviously, in the era we live in right now,” Attar told JNS. “A lot of organizations emphasized that this is crucial for them to speak up and to really voice their concerns with the relevant people. They weren’t able to do that until now.”
