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Earlier this month, psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk, a pioneer in trauma research, sparked outrage as he led a workshop on trauma at the Omega Institute for Holistic Studies, a retreat center in Rhinebeck, N.Y., comparing Israelis to “Nazis” and disparaging orthodox Jewish patients for choosing their “tribe” over “truth.”
Weeks later, the fallout is still reverberating in the Jewish, healthcare and trauma communities, with the Omega Institute apologizing to participants for van der Kolk’s “inappropriate and antisemitic comments” and van der Kolk sharing with me emails he sent the Omega Institute after initially apologizing for his comments, now threatening to sue the retreat center for libel for calling his remarks antisemitic.
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This story would be just another unseemly saga of an academic falling from grace, but it is much more. It’s a cautionary tale of how even the most celebrated voices in the psychology and healing fields can become ideologically captured and carry blind spots so profound that they leave Jewish trauma invisible, mischaracterized or invalidated in moments of greatest vulnerability.
Known globally for writing The New York Times best-selling 2014 book, “The Body Keeps the Score,” and for his pioneering PTSD research with psychiatrist Judith Herman, van der Kolk has long been regarded as the authority on trauma studies, broadening our understanding of the impact of trauma beyond combat veterans to survivors of child abuse and domestic violence. I’ve known him personally for decades, taught his work to psychology students at Mount St. Mary’s University in Los Angeles, where I was a professor, and hosted him in Los Angeles, where he drafted parts of his bestselling book at my dining room table.
Van der Kolk should know how to parse the trauma that Jews carry. He grew up in Nazi-occupied Netherlands, where the Dutch establishment complied quickly with Nazi orders that sent 75% of Dutch Jews to their deaths, the highest in all of Western Europe.
Fast-forward to early August when van der Kolk and his wife, Licia Sky, led a workshop on “Trauma, Memory and the Restoration of Self,” at the Omega Institute.
According to an Aug. 7 social media post that went viral, “Traumatized by the trauma expert,” Alysa Portnoy, a trauma recovery coach and attendee at the workshop, said that van der Kolk compared Israelis to “Nazis,” saying, “What Israel is doing in Gaza is what the Nazis did.”
Ironically, in an op-ed published last year by BU Today, van der Kolk and psychologist Jessica Stern wrote that “both sides have called the other ‘Nazis,’” noting that it was “dehumanizing language.”
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Portnoy said van der Kolk also disparaged Orthodox Jews, saying they prioritized “their tribe’ over “truth.” She quoted him saying that, for Orthodox Jews, “it’s more important to be part of their tribe [than to] tell the truth about what goes on in the community.”
By Aug. 13, the post went viral, amplified by an Instagram account, Physicians Against Antisemitism, which published an apology by van der Kolk acknowledging that the comparison of Israelis to Nazis was a “gratuitous, offensive, inaccurate and completely unnecessary comment.”
The Omega Institute published an apology, saying it wouldn’t invite van der Kolk back to teach any of its workshops due to “inappropriate and antisemitic comments.”
A few days ago, I wrote to van der Kolk, and I was disappointed to learn that the spirit of his apology was short-lived. He shared emails his wife, Sky, and he had sent to an Omega Institute official, with a note to me: “Feel free to share.”
In the chain of three emails, revealed here for the first time, Sky sent Karen Horneffer-Ginter, senior director of programming at the Omega Institute, an email on Aug. 15, taking issue with the Omega Institute’s apology, calling it “slander.”
She closed with a threat: “This is tantamount to libel, and we will have to resort to legal action if this statement is not rectified.”
Minutes later, van der Kolk responded, saying, “Yes, indeed. This is slanderous & outrageous. What antisemitic statement are you referring to?”
He asked: “Shall we refer this to our lawyers or do you want to negotiate a corrective statement?”
After a little while, van der Kolk doubled-down on his non-apology and sent Horneffer-Ginter a new statement from him to publish, saying his “brief comment” about Israel was aligned with the statements of world leaders “who have strongly condemned Israeli actions.”
He asked, “Are all those people antisemites?”
I wish I were surprised by van der Kolk’s disparaging comments towards Israeli Jews, and by the way his defenses and his subsequent apology fell apart, but I’m not.
In late 2023, when I launched a nonprofit, the Israel Healing Initiative, to treat survivors of the brutal Oct. 7 Hamas massacre, I reached out to colleagues for support. Van der Kolk replied with a sarcastic note: “Happy to help. What are you doing for the families of the 27,000 people in Gaza who’ve been killed…?”
We have an antisemitism problem in the so-called healing community.
The message was clear: he wouldn’t support me and questioned the ethics of helping Israelis if I wasn’t simultaneously helping Palestinians. Ironically, I had been treating Palestinians for trauma long before Oct. 7, though never once crossing paths with van der Kolk.
We have an antisemitism problem in the so-called healing community. Earlier this year, 3,625 mental health professionals — under the banner Psychologists Against Antisemitism — sent an open letter to leaders of the American Psychological Association, or APA, demanding action against antisemitic posts, objectionable remarks from division heads and organizational silence about the Oct. 7 attacks and the record numbers of antisemitism that Jews face. Their call was not for special treatment, but for recognition that bias within trauma care undermines both ethical standards and the healing process itself. Rep. Ritchie Torres, D-N.Y., backed the open letter’s signatories, warning that the APA’s very legitimacy as a scientific institution was at stake.
Leading figures like Gabor Maté, a celebrity trauma doctor and best-selling author of five books, , have compounded this climate of antisemitism by denying the evidence of systematic sexual violence on Oct. 7 by Hamas terrorists, a dismissal he has never retracted. His claim was later refuted by the Dinah Project, an independent team of international lawyers and gender-violence experts who led the most comprehensive investigation to date into sexual violence in the Oct. 7 attacks and concluded the rapes were systematic and deliberate. In a promotional video for the AJ+ platform run by Qatar’s Al Jazeera TV channel, Maté said that accusations of antisemitism are often a “completely cynical use of Jewish trauma to justify Palestinian trauma,” a framing he has characterized as weaponizing Jewish trauma to silence criticism.
In Texas, about 700 therapists signed an open letter against antisemitism after Jewish colleagues reported bias in training programs and peer groups. In Chicago, therapists with Jewish-sounding names were blacklisted from referral lists under the presumption they must be Zionists, triggering a state ethics investigation.
Van der Kolk’s remarks highlight a deeper shift in the field: the politicization of trauma care. Increasingly, trauma is filtered through ideological lenses, with suffering weighed against political allegiance. Within this hierarchy, Jewish trauma is steadily devalued.
Imagine if van der Kolk had told Black patients that they abandoned therapy because it was “more important to be part of their tribe [than to] tell the truth about what goes on in the community.” Or if he had stood before Chinese students and declared, without nuance, that the Chinese are “Nazis.” The outcry would be immediate and overwhelming.
Yet, when the same logic is applied to Jews, it is tolerated — even in professional workshops where people seek healing. That failure to recognize the wound he inflicted is not a minor lapse. It exposes how ideological frameworks have seeped into trauma care, blinding even the most accomplished practitioners and deepening the very injuries they claim to treat.
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Van der Kolk’s remarks expose more than a personal bias. They reveal how even leaders in trauma care can absorb dehumanizing narratives that vilify Israelis and erase Jewish suffering. As a pioneering psychiatrist entrusted with teaching others how to treat trauma, his failure to recognize this distortion is more than disappointing. It undermines his credibility as a healer.
When ideology replaces clinical clarity, the very framework meant to validate and heal survivors becomes a tool of harm, leaving Jewish trauma from this same war unheard and unaddressed.
As Judy Leventhal, a psychotherapist and the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, recalled, after walking out of the traumatizing workshop that Van der Kolk had led on trauma: “My body kept the score.”
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