Relationships, work, childhood trauma, infidelity, abuse, friendships, career changes, money problems, addiction, jealousy, sex, eating disorders, infertility, marriage, self-esteem, divorce, death...But not Israel.

What Jewish New Yorkers Struggle to Talk About With Their Therapists

- Julia Edelstein.

CHARLOTTE, A young professional in her mid-30s who lives in Bushwick, started seeing her therapist following a serious mental-health crisis in 2021. (Like all the people referenced by first name in this story, Charlotte is using a pseudonym.) Although the therapist never revealed her politics, it became apparent over the years that she was a fairly observant Jew. At one point long before October 7, 2023, Charlotte told her therapist that she was pro-Palestine, and she said the information was accepted neutrally. But in the weeks after that cataclysmic day, Charlotte, who is also Jewish, felt deep in her bones that she couldn't tolerate hearing anything in her therapy session other than “Free Palestine” echoed back to her—and she assumed that her therapist wasn't up for that particular task. “I told her, ‘I don’t think that I can handle having a conversation where we don't see eye to eye,” Charlotte recalled. “And she said something like, ‘I understand why you feel the way you do, and I don’t think that we see fully eye to eye on this either. I respect that you have a lot of empathy and that you're very troubled by this. And if it’s important that we have a conversation of equal opinion, then that might not be a productive conversation for us.’ She was very empathetic and caring.”